KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 26 - Our guide, Ping Ping, loves her food. We know because she talks about it ceaselessly, and while we walk along the riverside in Malacca, she stays behind to snack on bird's nest pudding.
When we return, she hustles us into an air-conditioned restaurant to sit on wooden chairs and taste this delicacy - harvested at great risk, we're told - while Ping Ping has a second helping. It's then, as the sweetly
gelatinous substance slips between our teeth, that we realise, queasily, what we are eating: it's not the home of cave swifts at all (nests had seemed bad enough) but, worse, their dribble.
Malaysia is a bit like Ping Ping: food is paramount. But it's also a little like bird's nest soup, too: nothing is as it at first appears. There is always more to discover.
This year Unesco added two Malaysian cities to its World Heritage List as Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca, joining just 24 others already on the list.
George Town, the capital of the island state of Penang, established in 1786 and named for Britain's King George III, was Britain's first colony on the Malay peninsula. It's hundreds of kilometres north of Malacca and at first glance there seem few similarities, although both are located on the Straits of Malacca, which separate peninsular Malaysia from the island of Sumatra. However, the World Heritage Committee found that the two cities have much in common, each meeting three major Unesco cultural criteria.
During the past 500 years each city has evolved into a multicultural cameo of its own history. Rather than interacting with each other - or even their own country - influences drawn from their trading partners in Asia
and Europe and from successive colonisers have seeped into every aspect of their culture.
Architecture, language, traditions and cuisine have all been indelibly affected. Their personalities, as Unesco puts it, have been "forged from the mercantile and cultural exchanges of Malay, Chinese and Indian cultures and three successive European colonial powers for almost 500 years".
The two cities reflect different eras. Malacca, Malaysia's oldest city, still bears its origins as a 15th-century Malay sultanate and the early 16th-century Portuguese and Dutch periods. George Town echoes the late
18th-century British era. They are distinctive in Malaysia in that they each have complete surviving historic centres.
Despite that, Malacca, less than a two-hour drive south from Kuala Lumpur, is bursting with 21st-century vibrancy. For all the time we spend driving around (and around and around) the city, it's a wonder we don't know it better. With a population exceeding 200,000, Malacca sprawls, having grown enormously since my last visit 20 years ago, with multistorey developments sprouting on expanses of reclaimed land and former mangrove swamps.
Trishaws clog the main square outside the rose red Christ Church, built by the Dutch in 1753. They are heaving with decoration, in a blatant effort to attract attention and snare a fare. Flowers, a chieftain's face
complete with feather headdress, flashing lights and baubles - anything that might tip the scales in favour of one trishaw over the next, even more titivated machine - nothing is too much.
Between jobs the drivers stroll around, chatting with each other, touting for fares from tourists. Suddenly, there's a loud bang. It's a balloon bursting - one of a cluster floating over a trishaw as an additional
entrepreneurial effort.
To one side of the square stands the Dutch-built 17th-century Stadthuys, or town hall, and higher still is the crumbling ruins of A Famosa, built even earlier by the Portuguese, and which boasts an interesting connection with Penang.
On acquiring Malacca from the Dutch in 1795, the British decided to dismantle the fort to avoid future sieges and transfer the locals to the newer colony of Penang. Much backbreaking work was carried out as an
attempt was made to destroy the massive stone walls, some of them 3 metres thick. Just as they were about to light the gunpowder to blow the place up, a 27-year-old British civil servant on sick leave arrived and
persuaded the officers to allow the Santo Domingo Gate to remain. Malacca's evacuation was suspended.
The civil servant's name was Thomas Stamford Raffles, later to found Singapore and play a role in Penang's development as well.
You could call Raffles an overachiever, or maybe he knew his time was short. Knighted at 36, he founded Singapore at 38 and died a day short of his 45th birthday. He was just 24 in 1805, when the East India Company decided to install a regular presidency in the embryonic colony of Penang. Appointed assistant secretary, he began to study Malay on the journey from England and had mastered its grammar before his arrival.
Another thing common to both George Town and Malacca is the nyonya, a term used for the descendants of the early Chinese immigrants to the British Straits Settlements of Malaya. Today that culture is most apparent in its food.
Ping Ping takes us to the airy and opulent Restoran Peranakan, where we feast on ayam rendang (chicken curry) and prawns in pineapple juice. In George Town it's the bright and noisy Nyonya Breeze where we chow down on sweeter and spicier food laced with tamarind and nutmeg, raisins and unidentifiable local herbs.
Penang is bursting with development, too, and has its detractors because of it. Some say it's the Silicon Valley of Malaysia, that it is virtually supporting the rest of the country. Others decry the surge of buildings.
Although the central old town is now Unesco-protected, the rest of the city of 220,000 and much of the eastern side of the island is punching upwards with forests of high-rise apartments and shopping centres.
Yet the look reflects prosperity rather than developers' greed. The tall buildings are not crowded, and from many apartments you feel there would be glistening glimpses of the strait that separates the island from the
mainland. In fact, George Town's heritage status has recently come under threat as Unesco investigates breaches of height restrictions by four towering hotels. The breaches show the constant pressure from developers on the city's historic quarters.
However, in the heart of George Town, it is as if nothing has changed for a hundred years or more. The streets are still jammed with pedestrians, bikes, trishaws and lorries left over from the days of British rule.
A helpful food trail map directs us through the shopping streets, lined with colonial-era shop houses with names as colourful as their wares - Kedai Hang On, Dilly Deli, Mee Fatt Too. It was on those streets in the
19th century that the Chinese set up their stalls and markets, and even today most of George Town's population is Chinese.
The tea shops are still there. There's a cake shop known for its pepper biscuits and another for chicken rice. Further along, one dispenses barbecued pork sandwiches, and we pass a stall where a woman on a scooter waits, the motor revving, for her takeaway serving of "barbecue internal organs".
That night we visit the massive New World undercover hawker area for dinner. The food is good, laughably inexpensive, and clean, but we are craving the colour and action, the smoke and fumes, the feel of the
outdoor stalls of previous trips. We find it at Lorong Baru's brightly lit hawker stalls and joyously jostle our way through queues for Penang laksa and bee hoon, tangling with others waiting for traditional cendol desert and wonton mee soup.
I ask Ping Ping, who grew up in the city, what's so good about it.
"People in Penang are more relaxed," she says instantly. "It's easier to get places, everything is so close and it's easier to shop." She goes on to extol the good transport, the beaches, the places to go at the weekend.
Yet she returns with us to her adopted home of Kuala Lumpur. Back in the capital, I ask her what she misses most about George Town.
"Come on! I miss the food," she answers. - South China Morning Post
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