We planned to stay at the Majestic Station Hotel with its beautiful Moorish architecture but were dismayed to read in the papers just before our trip that it was closing down. Such a pity! We then opted for the Excelsior Hotel which is located in the heart of Ipoh town.
On our arrival, we rang up cousin O.K. who took us to dinner that night. We had Ipoh’s famous bean sprout chicken and it was delicious! But we had to wait nearly an hour before we got our food! The stall there is very popular and there’s always a long queue every night.
The next morning, we had a Dim Sum breakfast with O.K. and his wife. He told us this restaurant (whose name I can’t remember and which incidentally is just behind our hotel), is the best for Dim Sum and a trip to Ipoh would not be complete without savouring some of its goodies. The place was packed as O.K. said it would be and we had to stand around and wait for some time before we could get a table. I believe the crowd was also due to the school holidays. The restaurant does have a wide variety of Dim Sum but I would say that our Penang Dim Sum is just as good. When we left, more people were still coming – it looks like the restaurant does make good money every day (Incidentally, opposite this restaurant is another Dim Sum restaurant, a keen competitor which is also drawing crowds everyday!).
Next, O.K. took us to buy Ipoh’s famous “heong peah” – flaky biscuits with a sweet filling. The biscuits are homemade at a place called Gunung Rapat and it still amazes me that they use charcoal kilns instead of something electrical to bake them. The dough is shaped into small round pieces and placed on the inside wall of the kiln where they are baked by the hot glowing charcoal below. You can see how it is done from the pictures I have taken.
The chaircoal kilns
The biscuits are then packed into plastic bags and there you have them – “heong peah” (I believe that’s Cantonese for “fragrant biscuits”). The shop also sells Honey Shat Kek Mah, another famous Ipoh titbit, chicken biscuits, mooncake biscuits and coconut candy to name a few.
During our two-day stay, we had the opportunity to sample some Ipoh food through the kindness of our relatives. The claypot chicken rice at Ipoh Garden was good and came in a big claypot; we couldn’t finish it and had to “tar pow” it back! We forgot all about Ipoh’s famous White Coffee, mainly because we don’t drink coffee! It would have been nice to try a cup or two as I’m told it has a special flavour. Not surprisingly, Ipoh White Coffee was adopted as one of the official drinks in the Malaysia Pavilion at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China.
We were also able to visit several other relatives during our visit including two “long lost” cousins – our visit took them quite by surprise. There was a lot to catch up on but due to time constraint, we could not dawdle about too long in one place.
An enjoyable trip all round, I would say. It brought back memories of my younger days when my late father, who hailed from Ipoh, took us there almost every other weekend. This time, we didn’t get to do all we wanted to do like re-visiting the Sam Poh Tong Temple and Kellie’s Castle. I would also have liked to take a close view of Rockhaven, a 280 million year old rock in Tambun, which happens to be one of only four such formations in the world.
But Ipoh is not that far away. There will be another opportunity to visit again – and soon, I hope!
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