A Whistle-Stop Trip

So much time has passed since that "whistle-stop" trip to Malaysia, but the memory is still vivid: the collective minibus that carried the 18 of us packed in where 11 should have sat!! A desperate escape through the rear window to catch a bit of air, and the night-time arrival in Georgetown. Penang is also called "the island of a thousand temples". It may not be such an exorbitant number, but a believer of any religion, seized by a sudden mystical rapture, here is spoiled for choice. A mosque, a Chinese temple, a Baptist or Lutheran church, a Hindu or Buddhist temple, you find them on every corner. There's practically no street where you don't breathe a whiff of the sacred, where the scent and curls of incense don't mingle with the more profane, earthy smells of cooking rising from the stalls and the hundreds of little restaurants scattered in every corner of the island.

But Penang shouldn't be thought of as a boring island devoted only to matters of the spirit. If here, in the Seventies, one of Asia's largest hippy communities flourished, there's a reason. Penang is fun, alive, a spirited island, a beguiling hymn to shopping with its modern shopping centres and the hundreds of stalls and small markets offering the most varied goods. Penang boasts a refined colonial past and an elite tourist future; it's the black-and-white photo of an ancient Malaysia, of many years ago, and it's also a concentration of modern Asia in just a few square kilometres, where almost everything is truly cheap.