Despite our late night last night, we woke up at 7:00am somehow feeling well rested and ready to take on the day. Today we are making our way to Ipoh, which is at the base of the Cameron Highlands area on the main peninsula. We were told to arrive to the bus station by 10:15 and that the bus to Ipoh will pick us up in front of the shop we got the ticket from and not the depot itself. We finished our packing with the goal to be where the bus will pick us up by 10:00. We got done well ahead of time and took a grab to the shop (otherwise it would have been a 20-25 min walk with our bags, David’s weighing 30.8# and Caitlyn’s coming in at a whopping 41.8#). When we arrived, we were a little confused how to know which bus would be ours and how to know when to get on. The employee of the shop we purchased the ticket from left temporarily, making it even more difficult to sort things out. Eventually a man from another shop tried to help is, but with no such luck, we went back into the shop and she had returned, thankfully. We didn’t know it but we actually had to check in with her and get a separate ticket, so we were very glad we went back in. We wanted some drinks and maybe some snacks for the bus, so David found a shop while Caitlyn watched the bags. David grabbed a sprite and we swapped places. Caitlyn went to the store and picked out a drink and a bag of chips. While the drinks had no price listed, the bag of chips showed “2.5”. The cashier looked at the two items and mumbled “7 ringgit”. She was already in the process of handing him a 10, when she stopped and asked how much the drink was (since her mental math was saying it was coming out to 4.5 ringgit which is very very expensive since the chips were only 2.5). The man states that the drinks were 3.5 ringgit. Caitlyn replied to him that the total should only be 6 ringgit instead of 7. The man said “no no no, chips 3.5 ringgit”. The chips were directly next to the cashier, and Caitlyn pointed to the price stating that they were 2.5 ringgit. The man replied with “price changed”. Caitlyn then pointed to all of the chips that were individually labeled with 2.5 ringgit saying “these all show 2.5 ringgit”. The man insisted that ALL the prices had changed as of “recently”. Knowing that he was actively scamming her (especially because he didn’t actually ring up the two items and just stated a price) her ego was frustrated but ultimately decided it was not worth further argument, as she had to get back to the bus soon and the extra ringgit was not worth the hassle. She went back and explained the exchange to David, to which he said that his total only amounted to 2.5 ringgit for his drink. Caitlyn was even more annoyed that she would double scammed on the price, but reminded herself this was only a $0.42 USD loss. Eventually our bus arrives and we confirm with the driver that it is the correct bus.
We put our bags in the cargo bay and hopped on. We started to get worried as it would be 10-15 minutes of us sitting on the bus in a fairly busy street with our bags essentially up for grabs by the open cargo bay door. David went outside once to check but eventually we just sucked it up as we had to be on the bus before it left and most of our valuables were with us inside.
The bus ended up leaving at 10:25 so we were very thankful that we showed up early, as some people expecting a 10:30 departure certainly could have been left behind. We didn’t know how long it would take as we heard many different numbers from 2.5-4 hours. The bus ride was beautiful, especially as we got further from the city. We drove across the Penang Bridge that crossed over the Penang Strait, separating Penang from Penang Island, through the countryside, seeing tons of large cattle (they look very different from American cows), some tiny villages, beautiful mountains and rivers, and David even thinks he saw some Gaur (a giant wild cow-like animal). They were enormous and looked like they had big horns on the sides of their head, but it could have just been cattle. (He has been known to think he sees mountain lions on the side of the highway, when it really is just deer…)
We made quite a few stops but eventually arrived at the Ipoh bus terminal at 1:30pm! We order a grab which takes us the 20 minutes to our hotel.
We get out and realize we’re at what seems a little bit like a strip mall. We were a bit confused in finding our hotel, but eventually we found it attached to a Japanese restaurant with a similar name. The lobby was super clean with a beautiful, modern design. We tried to check in but we were an hour early, so they held our bags for us. We decided to go get some lunch in the meantime, finding a Chinese place just 5 or 6 doors down.
It had a pretty limited menu, but it all looked good. We got a steamed chicken quarter and a curry mee (noodle). It came out super fast, which made sense with so few items. The curry was amazing and the chicken was really nice and reminiscent of hainese chicken rice. The whole meal, alongside a bottle of water and a tea, only came out to around $6 USD.
We must have been hungry as it only took us around 15 minutes to get in, eat, and pay. We went back to the hotel and decided to have some beer at the restaurant to kill the rest of the time before checking in. They were running a midday special on buckets of beer, and while we knew we couldn’t drink 4, they said that we could take unopened beers to our room. We decided to go with it!
Eventually we checked in and headed to the room. It was fairly small, but looked really clean and had lots of storage as well as a fridge. It also had a really nice beautiful bathroom, but the only problem….the bathroom didn’t have a door. We looked online and eventually found many reviews complaining that the standard rooms didn’t come with bathroom doors, but these were difficult to find and we had to search “(hotel name) bathroom door” to even find these reviews. We discussed the game plan for using the bathroom and then headed out to go see the city.
David threw together a heritage tour of the older buildings in the city from a few guides online, so he was today’s tour guide.
Our first stop was concubine lane:”So, why concubine out of all words? According to the local folks, there was a Chinese mining tycoon who rebuilt the entire area right after the town was caught in a fire back in the late 19th century. After restoring the place, he then gave these three streets to his three wives and even gave them the rights to collect the rental payments from the residents.Some people even said that these streets were where rich folks hid their mistress, hence the name Concubine Lane! However, those days are long gone.”
While concubine lane is a stop on the heritage trail, we are coming here first so we can go to Platform 9 1/2, a Harry Potter themed cafe (well, as much as possible without getting sued!). Concubine lane is a very small alleyway with tons of small cafés, restaurants, souvenier shops, and tea shops. We struggled at first to find the HP café among the dozens of colorful shops, but eventually Caitlyn found it (she must have casted a spell). Caitlyn was super excited, and it did not disappoint.
It isn’t a huge cafe, but they really did everything they could to get as close to Harry Potter as possible. We went up to the counter to look at the drink options. David got a crispy caramel frappe, and Caitlyn got some type of a cold brew.
We went upstairs, past the trolley (aka small shopping cart) with a white owl, and up to a nice view overlooking their courtyard. We drank our drinks and Caitlyn decided she also had to try their “butter soda”, so David went back down to grab her one of those. It did taste like butterbeer, but a little more licorice and topped with like a more-whipped light ice cream.
We went downstairs to the courtyard to see other cool props and themed elements and grab some pictures.
We next headed back out to concubine lane to look at more shops before finally getting to the end. David checked his map and found a good way to start from here and see all of the stops, even though his map and notes had us starting at the train station. We walked all around, searching for as many of the heritage sites as possible. We quickly learned that they each have a plaque, so we tried to snap a picture of each place and each plaque. Most of these stops were old buildings at least 100 years old, but some of them had either an interesting significance to Ipoh or a historical significance as well, like the building that had a grenade thrown in it due to being an anti-communist newspaper building at the time during communism.
We started east, then went west to the train station, which is one of the most beautiful sites on the heritage tour.
While over here, we decided to get our train ticket to Kuala Lumpur. We then went north from the train station to see a few more sites before heading back south a little, subsequently doing another road with many sites going from west to east.
We continued on with our heritage tour!
One stop was the oldest restaurant and bar in Malaysia, the Durbar at FMS. We decided it looked nice so we stopped inside.
We wanted to grab a cocktail, but we were also tempted by the very cheap peranikan food on the menu. We ordered the inchi(or enche depending on spelling) kabin, the same fried chicken dish we had gotten in Penang. It came out and was a massive portion, way more than the snack we had thought we would get as it was listed as an appetizer. It sadly was not great. It really was not crispy and had little flavor compared to the other. We didn’t eat but half of it and decided we didn’t want to fill up on food that wasn’t great.
We kept walking until the sun set and we finally finished up the heritage sites in David’s list that were within a reasonable walking area. To celebrate we went to a place called “Above gastrobar”. This is a rooftop bar that seemed to be rated nicely. We went in the building, up a shaky elevator, and entered the restaurant. There weren’t many customers, so we had our choice of seat. It was still warm so we elected to sit inside right near a window so we could still enjoy the view. Caitlyn wanted some wine, so she asked what they had. Every single wine they offered was only by bottle aside from 2 typrs of wine. She went ahead and got the red. David wanted a beer, so he ordered a tiger. The server responded that THEY HAD NO BEER. This seems pretty strange for a “gastrobar”. David decided to first taste Caitlyn’s wine and decide f he wanted a glass or to just skip out. The server comes back a few minutes later with the most pathetic glass of wine, hardly even a half pour. This was even more depressing as it was pretty expensive for Malaysia standards. We weren’t very happy with this visit so we drank the few sips of wine we had and headed out. We tried to find a speakeasy that chef samuel had recommended, but we really struggled. We went into the google reviews to find that it turns out they moved locations and even if we headed to the new spot, it has refocused and is mostly just a restaurant now with few drinks. We wanted to scratch the speakeasy itch so we headed to Caina bank hidden lounge and bar.
It wasn’t super hidden but was very nice inside. Themed like a bank or bank vault, there were stacks of fake money everywhere. We were the only people here aside the sole bartender. We each got one cocktail and decided to head back towards the hotel so we could do laundry and maybe grab a few bites from the Japanese restaurant to finish up our dinner.
We walked the 15 mins back to the hotel and Caitlyn grabbed a table while David headed up to do laundry. The laundry room seemed to have 2 washers and 2 dryers, and only one dryer was in use. David decided to split the laundry into two loads, putting half in each washer. It wasn’t until after loading detergent and trying to get the settings right that he realized one wasn’t even plugged in and not operable. David moved the loads into the one washer and started the load as well as a timer on his phone. He headed back down and met up with Caitlyn at the restaurant.
They had some skewers on the menu, so we ordered a dew and an order of fin eihire (dried stingray!).
We finished up and it was just about time to put the clothes in the dryer. Back in the laundry room, the same dried clothes were still sitting in the dryer. David was pretty sure it was the cleaning people, as all of the clothes seemed to be white cloths. He went downstairs to ask them what we can do as they have been done in the dryer for hours now, and they called the maintenance guy to go check. David got back upstairs and the man had already collected the finished rags into a dryer basket. It was getting late and we were pretty tired, but laundry had to be done. David started a load and went back to the hotel room to watch some TV with Caitlyn.
We actually settled on watching “Saw” so we started the movie before Caitlyn got tired and went to sleep. David dried the clothes again for 30 minutes after the timer stopped, and eventually decided to split the load and increase the heat. Finally after 4 times, the clothes finished up and David got to go to bed.
David’s thoughts of the day: We enjoyed Penang, but we LOVE Ipoh so far. It is much smaller, but there is a lot to see and has so much charm.
Caitlyn’s thoughts of the day: I have been absolutely LOVING all of the street art that I have seen throughout Malaysia so far. While I don’t consider myself much of an art person, the creativity and rustic aspects of the street art through Penang and Ipoh has absolutely blown me away.
Steps walked: 17,208
Miles walked: 8.39
Bluming Travelers 