Steamy in Penang

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This was published 15 years ago

Steamy in Penang

Geoff Strong returns to one of the best preserved cities in South-East Asia.

ON MY first night in Penang I slept in a brothel. I didn't know it was a brothel when I arrived late one rainy evening in 1980 but I quickly discovered the truth when an old Chinese man took me upstairs to my room only to hear a woman's voice scream from within when he tried the key.

He gestured to sit and wait. A few minutes later, a young, dark man sporting a wispy beard and motorcycle helmet sprinted from the room, rushing downstairs and adjusting his trousers. Then emerged a young woman, straightening her hair.

"Sorry," she said, smiling at me. "No finish."

They changed the sheets and I fell asleep, the mattress still warm.

I stayed at the Tong Lock Hotel in one of the quieter areas of old Georgetown for 10 days during the incense-fumed Chinese Hungry Ghosts Festival. Then I returned after a week in Sumatra and became quite friendly with the girls. They used to challenge me for a game of pinball, always defeating me so I'd have to pay.

The hotel had been converted from a Chinese merchant's house by adding wooden partitions for rooms. It was the sort of place some of Somerset Maugham's seedier characters might have chosen to flop but I enjoyed the warm, steamy afternoons under the slow hypnosis of the ceiling fans as the monsoon rains sloshed off the roof onto the garden outside.

I have visited Penang five times since - it is one of my favourite places on earth - but I haven't stayed in such a hotel for about 15 years.

The Tong Lock appeared to have been demolished when I returned recently, while its sister hotel the New China was still intact but abandoned. Across the road from it was the Cathay Hotel, where my wife Jill and I stayed in 1989 and 1990.

The Cathay, which is in an area of Georgetown that has now been discovered for its heritage value, appears to be very much in business, including the "health club" around the back that keeps surprisingly late hours. When we stayed there, we blundered into the club and noticed a lot of young women sitting around smoking and looking bored. When we foolishly asked about the prospect of exercise, the manager laughed: "We only got one kind of exercise here - pumping pumping. Ha! Ha!"

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Two important things have happened to Penang recently. The Asian tsunami hit on Boxing Day in 2004, killing 79 people but doing minor physical damage. The other event, which has been much slower arriving, has been a gradual awakening about the beauty of old Georgetown, which began life as a Chinese city that developed around the first British trading post in the region.

It is starting to dawn on many locals that, spared from the wrecker's ball that wiped out the interesting bits of old Singapore and turned Malaysia's capital Kuala Lumpur into a tomorowland theme park, Penang has survived to become one of the best-preserved old cities in South-East Asia.

There is even a move to have Georgetown's historic zone declared a world heritage area.

It is an easy, friendly sort of place where Malaysia's three main ethnic groups - Malay, Chinese and Indian - seem to get on pretty well. It was not uncommon when we went out to dinner to see mixed-race parties dining and laughing together. They could teach much of the rest of the world how to get on.

We were there for Chinese New Year, something all races seem to celebrate, just like they do for the end of the Muslims' Ramadan, the Indian Hindus' Deepavali and even the Christians' Christmas.

And, of course, the food brings together the three Asian traditions with an added dash of Western influence to make it an adventurous gastronomic paradise. As well as some quite posh places, there is a good selection of middle-level restaurants, food courts, hawker stalls and markets.

My last visit had been when I came with my daughter Chloe in 1998 to take advantage of cheap prices following the currency crisis. We stayed in a five-star resort called the Bayview, around on the beach strip of Batu Ferringhi. They were offering deals of $16 a night per person for an ocean-view room. When I inquired this time, they quoted prices starting at about $150 a night

This time, we brought Chloe and her boyfriend Jason on his first overseas trip. We chose Malaysia because it really is Asia for beginners - a great place to get a taste for the continent with virtually no hassles. We stayed at Tanjung Bungah Hotel on a beach between Georgetown and the Ferringhi strip. The beach-view rooms were costing us less than $50 a night.

Chloe, who had been to Asia several times, was happy to lie by the pool and go shopping in Georgetown or the night market in Batu Ferringhi.

However, Jason's curiosity got the better of him. From a life in suburban Melbourne, he had never seen anything like the temples and he wanted a closer look.

I hired a motorbike and we first rode to the giant reclining Buddha, quite near our hotel in a complex of Thai and Burmese Buddhist shrines. Jason was impressed by the atmosphere and incense.

Then to the hillside suburb of Air Itam and the Buddhist-Taoist temple Kek Lok Si, or the temple of Supreme Bliss, the largest of its kind in South-East Asia. Visitors and locals come to marvel at the statue of the Goddess of Mercy and the 30-metre-high pagoda, which Jason climbed enthusiastically while I sat in the cool garden below.

I needed the cool to prepare for the suffocatingly hot ride to the Snake Temple down the bottom of the island at Bayan Lepas. Although it was founded in 1805 in memory of a Chinese monk, this temple gained a reputation and a lot of tourists from the swarms of poisonous pit vipers that slithered in from the surrounding jungle. Today, the jungle has given way to housing estates and the snakes are scarce but this has not stopped the busloads of sometimes disappointed tourists. Jason was one of them.

To make it worse, I badly burned my leg on the exhaust of the bike parked next to mine.

Later, Jill and I discovered some of the restored areas of central Georgetown. We started talking to the owner of the Edelweiss cafe in Armenia Street, Teresa Pereira Capol. She is an avowed enthusiast for restoring the classic, 19th century Chinese shophouse and has done so with the one she has converted to her splendid cafe.

There are quite a few restored houses open to the public, with examples in a range of styles but the town's restoration masterpiece is the vast, indigo blue Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion.

It is named after the Chinese mandarin who rose from extreme poverty to extreme wealth and built this house in the 1880s to accommodate one of his favourite wives.

Diagonally opposite the Cathay Hotel, when we first stayed it was decrepit but still occupied by the descendants of the original owner. They lived in less than genteel poverty, renting out rooms as a kind of dosshouse. In the past decade it has been taken over by heritage enthusiasts, who have done a wonderful restoration, turning it into a stylish hotel that is open for tours.

Georgetown also has ancient mosques, ornate Chinese clan houses, Indian temples and remnants of the British time, including the opulent Eastern and Oriental Hotel - all within easy walking distance or at least a cheap fare on one of the frequent buses.

But whenever I am in Penang, my mind goes back to that first rainy evening and the question I forgot to ask the girl who emerged from my room. Did her customer ever remove his helmet?

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