Going outstation to old towns off the beaten track

 

I left KL one recent weekend and drove up north with some friends in four-wheel drive vehicles. We drove in a convoy, talked to each other via radio and followed a leader who decided to get off the highway and explore the byways instead.

The old trunk road, a term not used much nowadays, is officially called Federal Route 1. It passes through a number of old towns that loomed large years ago due to their importance in the economy of the day as centres of tin mining, rubber or timber.

Tapah, Kampar and Gopeng were important stops along the road in southern Perak. They were relatively substantial towns then, with their district officers, magistrates and officers in charge of police districts, or OCPDs.

Some even had the exotic positions of Inspectors of Mines, as well as JKR (for Jabatan Kerja Raya, or its old name Public Works Department) depots with the-then familiar lorries with yellow cabs.

These towns’ names used to flow off our tongues easily, but less so nowadays, as other names and terms (Influencers! CEOs! Entertainers! Entrepreneurs! Celebrities!) have become more common, and I do mean common in all senses of the word.

Many had as the focal point of much of their civil activities in those days the town padang, the equivalent of the village green of England. It clearly must have been an English thing – all the town padangs have football pitches, with some of the bigger ones having fields large enough for cricket too.

I saw people playing football in some of the padangs we passed by. Usually, these padangs would also have vendors selling local foods, of which cendol seemed to be the most popular. I didn’t stop to find out though, and I doubt there’d be any.

In the old days, names like Tumpat, Kuala Lipis, Teluk Intan etc fascinated me. I went to school with some who came from such exotic places, and thought of how lucky they were. They had the Thai border! Pahang and Perak rivers! Right up their neighbourhood. But being from Penang, that name must have been exotic to them, too.

Some of these places aren’t thriving any more. The economic activities that made them prosperous have largely gone away. I doubt we still mine tin, there or anywhere else in Malaysia. Rubber has certainly fallen in the ranks of economic contributors, and logging, the legal ones anyway, is much reduced.

Travelling on the trunk roads in the old days was an adventure in itself. It was not something taken for granted. You actually would get your car serviced before any such “outstation” trips, such as Penang to Ipoh, and even then, many trips were memorably interrupted by breakdowns – and by accidents too.

The roads then were often terrorised by a particular breed of monsters: lori balak, or timber lorries. With the “tin cans” we drove in those days, going up against fully-laden timber trucks with drivers paid on piece-rates wasn’t a winning proposition. We all knew of many who had unfortunate run-ins with them, and of those who didn’t make it.

Today, lori balaks are puny compared to the 22-wheeler container haulers. But these tend to be driven quite responsibly (well, mostly), and with the reduced number of lori balaks, the task of terrorising the roads nowadays falls on a much smaller vehicle: the Perodua Myvis.

There’s plenty of Myvis on the road everywhere. One of them followed me so closely, flashing its headlights repeatedly for me to move aside, and when I finally did so the car sped ahead and gave me a few honks along the way that I was sure weren’t thank yous.

The driver must certainly have seen my huge 4×4 with tires almost as tall as his roof and big chunky pieces of metal hanging off the front and back, but did he care? Given the way he was trying to bully me, I doubt it.

Unfortunately, these old towns have also become traffic chokepoints. The roads through them can’t really be widened without knocking down blocks of old pre-war shophouses, even if many of them are crumbling. You could easily spend half an hour in the traffic crawl to get into town, pass through a few traffic lights, and exit the few blocks of shophouses still standing. And that’s for each town. That kind of ordeal is too much for many of us nowadays.

That’s a shame. We should stop at these places and wander around the old streets and shops and try out the local food, which is fast disappearing as many choose not to take this hard way of earning a living any more, while others take their skills to earn a lot more money in big cities.

These towns also seem to have many schools with exotic names; the most common is Anglo-Chinese School (though no Anglo-Indian or Anglo-Malay schools!) These also have more interesting architecture compared to the cookie-cutter buildings of today.

Some of the towns even have social clubs, likely set up by the British “tuans” of those days, whether from the government or business sectors, and the hub of the local social life then. Some remain, but they clearly have seen better days.

You can feel the tempo slow down in these towns. Most of the inhabitants seem either very old or very young, with the ones in the middle having left for the big cities and now more likely to be found cooped up in sky-high apartments and finding that preferable to being stuck in places where time stands still.

My family and I are such urban migrants, as many of you are likely to be, too. We happily take part in the famous Malaysian tradition of “balik kampung” during festivals and holidays, creating legendary jams on the roads. We enjoy being back in our old hometowns, but we also can’t wait to return to the cities.

I doubt even the work-anywhere style of today’s nomadic corporate warriors will change that. These towns are slowly becoming preserved museum pieces for us to gawk at from our hermetically-sealed cars as we pass through.

These towns used to prosper from natural resources – mining, farming, fishing, logging – which have now been overtaken by more man-made and city-based businesses such as manufacturing and services and finance. Many are also hurt by the expressways that pass them by, taking away a lot of traffic, and hence income too.

A few have managed to survive, even prosper, taking advantage of the spillage from larger cities by offering land and resources which have been exhausted elsewhere. But often this comes at the cost of losing their character and charm, which is a pity.

TO BE CONTINUED

 - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.