My job had required me to drive across the peninsular of Malaysia recently, from my adopted hometown Kuala Lumpur all the way to Kuantan on the east coast. The town of Kuantan is very significant to me personally since it was in this town that I became independent and away from my family for the first time at the very young age of 16.
It would be my very first visit after my last goodbye to this town about 17 years ago so I was both excited and nervous and I had mixed feelings about how I was going to react over all the things that bear so much memory to me.
Arriving in Kuantan at a quarter past mid-night, I promptly checked myself in at the very first hotel that I bumped into so that I could quickly put myself to sleep and be fresh to do what I was there to do the next morning.
When I woke up the next morning, I thought everything was going to be familiar. How wrong I was. I think I had underestimated how things could change within a span of 17 years.
Kuantan was almost beyond recognition that for a moment I thought that may be the 2 years of staying there was merely a dream in the past or something. The roads were wider and there were much more buildings than I remembered it was.
I tried to look for something to prove that I was really there back in the 90’s but I couldn’t find any. That was before I saw the beautiful mosque in the middle of town. Thanks God they never changed its color so I had a little bit of assurance that it really was the mosque that awed me when I first arrived in Kuantan back then.
My colleague with whom I was assigned to do the job in Kuantan drove me to a beautiful seaside village called Tanjung Sepat. I don’t remember having been there back then so I was jumping in excitement when I first took a glimpse of the beautiful village with a long sandy beach that stretched out for as long as my eyes could see. It was without doubt one of the most beautiful seaside villages that I’ve ever seen in my life.
The village like most seaside villages on the East coast was heavy with ever-swaying coconut trees and I was instantly blown away by its rusticity as I stepped out and walked further and further away from the car to explore more of its kampong charm.
What made the village so different from other seaside villages that I’ve been to before but the fact that it was so well-maintained and the grasses were well-trimmed and landscape so well-tended. Of course as usual, I promised to come back some other time when I had all the time in the world to explore it on my own.
While towns like Ipoh and Penang on the West coast are known for their oriental foods like Kueh teow and chicken rice, Kuantan and other major towns on the East are known more for their diversity in Malay cuisine. If you’ve been staying on the West coast your entire life, you might be surprised to find so many unfamiliar (if not strange and a bit unhealthy. Heh) foods on this other side of the land.
I mean, I was gob-smacked when my friend took me to a roadside stall which was then full of customers mostly drinking coffee over deep-fried fishes and prawns and even squids! Can you believe it?! They eat squids like they do to pisang goreng!
I didn’t know which ones to pick so I took a little bit of everything until the plate was full. I managed to finish everything there was although it was quite a struggle on the last few bites. Just when I thought the whole combination would cost me a bomb, I had to ask the person to repeat saying the amount just to make sure I heard it right.
The whole plate wouldn’t even cost me an iced blended cappuccino at a Starbucks back in KL. Then I remembered I was on the east coast of the Malaysian Peninsular where there are more fishing villages than any other part of the country.
It was at this place that I was introduced to sata – a traditional food made from fresh fish, coconut, ginger, red onion and probably many more others which is then wrapped in banana leaf and grilled. It tasted so good I actually cursed everybody on facebook for their failure in telling me about it. Chehh. LOL!
I actually took my time exploring the town of Kuantan on foot just as I’d do whenever I travel to a place for the first time. Kuantan really has changed a lot. Back in those days it only had one shopping mall called Teruntum. Teruntum is like the meeting point of everybody in Kuantan so each of its floors would be flooded with people every weekend.
Coming to Teruntum again after so many years, I was surprised to find out how small it was to me now. It was almost deserted and most of the lots had been split into smaller units so the grandeur of the whole place had gone almost entirely.
Of course there were many other shopping malls with much bigger sizes all over the town of Kuantan now but coming from KL myself, I didn’t go there to see shopping malls.
The riverside that I used to go to back then was still there but it had changed quite so much now. The walkway has been covered with better pavement and the guardrail had been changed to something more decorative.
The iconic ship with a restaurant on its top deck was no longer there, leaving only the platform from which visitors would disembark to get on board of it. I remember how badly I wanted to have dinner on top of the ship but I simply couldn’t afford it because of the steep prices (I was just a secondary school student anyway). Now that I could probably afford to have at least the cheapest dish that they had on board, the ship was no longer there so I was a little bit disappointed.
The row of tepi jalan stalls that sold durians at very cheap prices was no longer there. I remember how durians were sold at 50 cent each back then, sometimes down to 30 cents when I was in the mood to negotiate. It was the story that I’d happily bring back to Sabah where durians were highly unaffordable back in those days.
Of all the places that I had visited throughout my visit to Kuantan, there was one place that I was truly nervous of coming to again. It was of course my old school, a school that for me had literally shaped me into how I’d later become. But of course it’d spare it for another post. 😉
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