May 23, 2026 — Ipoh Part 2

The Hills Take Us

“First’ breakfast at AC Hotel

Morning came slow and forgiving, the way it should in a town that no longer needs to hurry. Breakfast was the hotel’s — included, which is to say complimentary in that hollow hotel sense — and meant, in theory, only coffee and a little fruit. But a man’s resolve dissolves at a breakfast buffet, and somehow a portion of noodles found its way onto my plate, and then a little nasi lemak beside it, and by a quarter past ten we were fortified and ready for the day.

Concubine Lane, Ipoh

Kong Fu Kopitiam, Ioph

We went again to Concubine Lane. It is a narrow seam between the shophouses of the old town — Lorong Panglima, to give it its proper name, though everyone uses the other, with its faint whiff of the tin-tycoons and their kept women — and the colonial century still clings to the brickwork there, in the shuttered upper storeys and the five-foot ways and the slow erosion of the painted signs. I lingered longest at a shop selling games: whole decks of them, card games built on psychology and bluff, whose rules I will very likely never master, but whose designs I wanted to study, because I am trying, lately, to make cards of my own. Paulyn bought a pack too. We passed Ho Yan Hor, the old herbal-tea house, and booked ourselves a visit for the following morning. And I marked a coffee-shop, the Kong Fu Kopitiam, as the kind of place where one might one day hold a workshop in sketching — the mind running ahead, as it does, planning returns to a place one has not yet finished arriving in.

The Banjaran, Ipoh

Then the hills took us. The Banjaran lies in a fold of jungle where hot springs rise out of the rock, the same volcanic patience that raised the limestone now warming the water that seeps through it. There is a cave of steam, dim and dripping and primordial, and beside it a pool so cold that lowering myself into it sent through my whole body a sudden, almost frightening clarity — every nerve waking at once, the mind scoured suddenly clean of everything that was not now. I lasted perhaps ten seconds. Then out, gasping and absurdly alive, more present in my own skin than I had been in months. We drank tea afterwards among the pomelo trees, and said little, which is the surest sign of contentment.

Sauna and Ice Dip

The evening had been arranged behind my back. Desmond, it was said, had found “a chill place” for us to gather before dinner — and so we drifted there, unsuspecting, only for Paulyn to spring upon us the thing she had been quietly building all along: a celebration. For Yit Peng and I were to mark, the next day, our twenty-ninth year together.

29 years anniversary

Twenty-nine years. One says the number lightly, as though it were merely arithmetic, a sum that any couple might tot up given time. But I have come to think it nearer to grace than to addition — that we should still be here, the two of us, undivided and unembittered, owes more to God’s patience than to any merit of our own. The British, I am told, do not speak of such things; we let the weather stand in for feeling, and call it good manners. So I will say it just once, plainly, and then withdraw again into my proper reticence: I love her more now than I did at the beginning, when I knew nothing at all, and the knowing of her across these years has only deepened it. There. It is said.

Celebrating with friends…

I popped the champagne. There was karaoke, in which Philip, hitherto a quiet man, revealed an unsuspected genius for scat and carried the night entire. And then dinner — and what a dinner. We had booked Jeff’s Cellar, which a plaque on the wall declares one of the hundred best restaurants in the world, a claim I went in ready to disbelieve and came out unable to. It is set inside a cave, the rock arching close overhead, the walls ranked with bottles receding into the dark; one inner chamber, Jeff’s own, is said to hold three million ringgit of wine. The pre-dinner drink, the ambience, the cave, the food — all of it of a single high order. A Nepali waiter, whose name I am ashamed to have already lost, served us with a quiet courtliness that lifted the evening into something we will keep; he handled the camera as deftly as the wine, and the photographs he took of us are, every one, well made. He even showed us Jeff’s private cellar, that small dim hoard of treasure. We came back to the hotel late and full and happy, and crashed once more, as we were learning to do here, without resistance.