The long awaited Asian holiday has finally arrived!
Yesterday was a full day in transit... 9 hour flight from Syd to KL, 4 hours in Kuala Lumpur's LCCT airport (where we spent a few hours chilling out at Starbucks with Mel and Mike), then a 50 minute flight to Penang. We finally arrived in MP's family home town of Bukit Metarjam at around midnight... and it was straight to bed as I had already turned into a walking zombie.
MP described Bukit Mertarjam (BM) as a town similar to Taree of Sydney. Small town with houses sprawled all over the place. But that's where the similarities stop. Driving around BM, you do witness life in a third world country. All the run down vacant shops, the stray animals on the sides of the streets, the piles of rubbish at the front of people's houses... Iots for the mind to take in.
We spent today driving around BM in search of the best Malaysian grub. MP's "Ah Yee" (I.e. auntie) and his cousin Pete, took us to all these local haunts known for serving "the best" of everything. For brunch, we drove to a place which specialized in "the best" taro rice with pig stomach soup. I ate the taro rice and took a nibble of the pig stomach, but ended up devouring a bowl of Asian meatball soup instead, which Ah Yee kindly ordered for me in anticipation of my sensitive Aussie stomach. After brunch, we drove around in search of seasonal fruits. It is the start of the Summer fruits season in Malaysia, which means a tropical feast of durian, rambutan, mangosteens and lychees. In BM, you don't venture into a supermarket for fruit. Rather, locals set up stalls lining the side of the road, showcasing their harvest. Ah Yee has a keen eye for good fruit and she scoured stall after stall, finally walking away with a Durian and bags of lychees and mangosteens. It was fruit heaven.
For afternoon tea, Ah Yee drove us to a renowned local vendor who made "the best" "mung jung kueh", a kind of sticky cake with has a thin layer of crisp on the outside, and crushed peanuts, butter and sugar on the inside. We ate it hot as it was fresh from the pan and it was absolutely sublime. Afterwards, we drove to a little shop which served "the best" Cendol in BM. Ah Yee told me that they made their coconut milk fresh (i.e. it does not come from a can). Boy does that make a difference! The Cendol was a perfect balance of shaved ice, coconut milk and gula, with thin green Cendol jelly and perfectly cooked red kidney beans. At this shop, we also found these trianglular, banana leaf parcels which MP had always told me about. This was traditional Nasi Lamek (Coconut rice). Because we were quite full, we bought one to share between the two of us and It only cost us a dollar twenty ringgit! (I.e. forty cents AUD). We picked one which had anchovies and egg... honestly, that little parcel of rice was better than any Nasi Lamek you could buy in Sydney for $10-$15 . MP and I scraped up every last rice grain and thought about buying another. But Ah Yee told us that we should save our stomachs for dinner...
For dinner, Ah Yee and Ah Tiew (MP's uncle) took us to a secluded restaurant in a small village, an hours drive away. The Asian alfresco style restaurant situated next to a farm, is renowned for it's amazing fried pork knuckle. So we ordered that as well as steamed snapper, fried squid, prawn noodles and stir fry potato leaves. The food was unbelievable. The steamed snapper was topped in this delicious chilli, soy bean and shallots sauce. The moorish fried squid had a hint of curry powder in it's crunchy coating, and the pork knuckle had perfect crackling covering a layer of soft chewy fat. It was an amazing meal and the perfect end to our first food filled day in BM.
The whole day has been unbelievable. It was on the car ride home from dinner, as I reflected on my day, that I realized how lucky I am to have married into a great family with a cultural background so different to my own. Today just would not have been possible if I was a tourist. I am the luckiest.
Photos to come.
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