Up the east coast road, to the heartland of PAS

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I left the very pleasant Tanjung Sutera resort and set out north. By three-thirty I was checked in at the Hyatt Kuantan, and slept for the next eighteen hours.

Once I’d been up a couple of hours on Friday I felt vaguely better, and caught up with a few things, had a buffet breakfast, and then addressed my laptop which had been giving me problems the past couple of days by just turning itself off or refusing to boot up again. It worked for ten minutes this morning and then died again, so I called Acer in Singapore who gave me a Kuantan service centre address which I found without too much trouble aided by a hotel map of the town. The very helpful and pleasant staff spent about an hour with me and we ultimately concluded it was a faulty AC Adapter causing the problem, so I purchased a new one at an exorbitant price and all was subsequently okay.

I took it easy for the rest of the day - sorting out photos, cleaning camera and lenses, and taking a short walk on the beach before sunset.

Having woken early and had some juice and coffee, I decided I felt a whole lot better after my rest day, and started off north at eight-thirty. The new highway from Kuantan to Kuala Terengganu is apparently nowhere near finished, so I took the old coast road that I had driven once or twice (actually, as far north as Cherating on many occasions). It passes the bulk of Malaysia’s on-shore facilities for its South China Sea oil resources, and they sprawl along parts of the road like space-age meccano sets. The old, quiet kampongs that I recall are mostly gone; well, not gone exactly, but the beautiful old stilted, wooden Kampong houses are now largely replaced by run-of-the-mill breezeblock bungalows. The population has also expanded dramatically, the result, I suppose, of all those kids the villagers were having in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The road is pretty slow going, so I took it easy and got to Kuala Terengganu around noon. Having never gone into the town before, I spent about an hour driving around and pottering about in the central market and at the riverbank. The town has a pleasant, vibrant feel to it, but architecturally there is not much to write home about.

Further north I entered Kelantan and the roads were even slower. Stopping only for a sandwich and a five-minute nap (boy can that make a difference) it took me three and a half hours to cover the 175km to Kota Bharu. There, I chose the Grand Riverview Hotel in the heart of the city (a more than adequate four-star place with very large, comfortable rooms), and went for a short walk before sunset, checking out the main historic buildings (a couple of palaces, one of which - built in 1878 - is quite exquisite), the padang and the city’s main mosque. It all felt reasonably affluent and there were more Chinese businesses, and Chinese on the street, than I would have anticipated given that Kelantan is 95% ethnic Malay; I suppose the Chinese are very much concentrated in the State capital. Kelantan is also the heart of PAS (Islamic Party of Malaysia) and of what many see as Islamic fundamentalism in the country. However, politics aside, it is no different from many other parts of Malaysia that have a predominantly Malay population. In fact, perhaps because of less quantitative competition from the Chinese, I got the impression of a more prosperous Malay business community in Kota Bharu compared to the other large cities.

It is very interesting to see the ubiquitous flocks of fast-moving swiftlets everywhere in the city, gathering around their nesting places in the upper stories of the shop houses. Many of these have been converted into nesting “hotels” (as they are apparently called) - obviously the farming of the birds’ saliva is more lucrative than rental income from humans.

Back at the hotel, I decided to book a room for Sunday night at the Belum Rainforest Resort the other side of the northern east-west highway, in a relatively new natural reserve known as Belum-Temenggor. As it is particularly known for its abundance of hornbills, I was looking forward to an interesting day.

I woke up very early Sunday, so spent an hour doing emails and checking some information on the net, and then left on foot about seven-thirty for another walk around the city centre. It was a stunning morning, and the huge market was very much alive by eight o’clock. It was interesting to watch the dynamics up here in Kelantan - it reminded me in some ways of Central Java. One gets the feeling that it may be quite a matriarchal society - certainly women play a central role in the economy. People who think that Islam condemns women to a life of subservience behind closed doors are mixing up culture with religion. Societies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Afghanistan (hard to think of others, actually), have a cultural history of segregating their women, but this is just not the case in the vast majority of Muslim populations - certainly not in Indonesia, Malaysia, urban Pakistan and India - and these account for about 80%!o(MISSING)f the world’s Islamic population I would think. Next ➤ ➤

Howard's Malaysia Trip Galleries at PBase

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