Visit to Terengganu

Two things distinguish Terengganu from the other 13 states of Malaysia: batik and fish sausage.

Above: Terengganu silk batik. 4 meters. Below: Closeup of same.

Terengganu (trehng GAH noo) lies on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia, toward the north but not reaching the Thai border. Scuba divers go there, especially to a couple of islands. The long, quiet mainland beaches remain unspoiled. The state as a whole is rural and mostly undeveloped. Malaysians tell foreigners to visit Terengganu and the neighboring state Kelantan to see the Malay kampung (village) way of life.

Four of my colleagues planned this trip as a shopping excursion. One of them will be married in December and wanted to buy songket for her husband-to-be. Songket is a traditional Malay weaving art in which gold threads are woven by hand into a very tightly woven silk to create geometric designs. The stitches are like tiny grains of rice. We were lucky enough to be invited into the back room of one of the fabric shops, where a woman showed us the most incredible examples of songket, kept there in a locked cabinet.

The bride-to-be eventually found a beautiful white-and-silver songket for 250 ringgit; everyone agreed that the same one would cost 500 ringgit in Kuala Lumpur. In comparison, the songket in the back room cost 2,000 to 5,000 ringgit. We were shown one priced at 20,000 ringgit (about US$5,000). Its curving vines and flowers differed remarkably from the typical songket design, which is a grid or plaid.

Most Malay men wear songket at their wedding, wrapped around their waist like the short (above-the-knee) sarong they wear with baju melayu (a silky pajama-like suit of long pants and long-sleeved shirt, buttoned to the throat). For normal wear, the men's sarong is cotton plaid rather than songket. Women sometimes wear sarong made from songket, but as it is quite expensive and the top half of a woman's sarong is hidden by her baju (shirt or blouse), this is not very common.

So one of our missions was to make sure Zaliffah bought her songket. Our first priority after arrival, however, turned out to be the acquisition of fish sausage.

Fish Sausage

Keropok lekor comes in two forms: a cracker or chip that is thin and deep fried, and a chewy hot dog that is boiled. Either one can be dipped in a very tasty red-brown sauce (a little like a bottled hickory-smoke barbecue sauce in the U.S.), but the sauce (tamarind, chili, sugar, vinegar) is definitely required for the sausage. Both the chip and the sausage have an unappetizing dark gray color, like fish scales. "Keropok" means "cracker," and many varieties are available all over Malaysia. Some are very mild and some are expremely fishy in flavor. The color can be white, orangey, or brown. I have not been able to find a definition for "lekor."

Our guide to the keropok lekor stall was Nora, who vacations in Marang twice a year with her husband and their four children at the same resort where we stayed on this trip (more about that later). She turned off the main street in Kuala Terengganu and drove down a two-lane road in Kampung Losong lined with stalls, all selling keropok lekor. The one where we stopped had a patchwork roof of sheets of corrugated steel held up by poles; there were no walls. The roof covered an area maybe 30 feet deep and 20 feet wide, in which five women constituted a sausage factory.

Keropok lekor consists of fish paste and sago flour. The type of fish used varies, and the great appeal of the Terengganu keropok lekor is its extra-fishy flavor. With wrinkled nose and pursed lips, any Malay will tell you that the inferior keropok lekor sold in Kuala Lumpur is mostly flour, not much fish. A native of Kelantan recently told me than Terengganu keropok lekor is the best, Kelantan's is second best, and the worst is found in Kuala Lumpur.

Sago flour comes from the inside of the sago palm trunk.

Under the metal roof, two women worked rolling the sausage on a thick wooden board. Each woman had a wide, shallow bowl of mixed flour and fish paste. With well floured hands, they clenched a fistful of the keropok lekor mixture and rolled it against the board until they produced a rope about eight to ten inches long and an inch thick, which they then rolled off the edge, making a heap on the table. When the heap became almost as tall as the rolling board, a third woman came around with a large basket and scooped up the raw sausages. She took them to a fourth woman who controlled a huge wok of boiling water with a long-handled wooden paddle. When she had dipped a quantity of finished sausages out of the water, the third women tipped a fresh batch into the wok.

A fifth woman handled sales at the front counter. Numerous cars and motorbikes stopped in front of the stall, and customers came and went in a continuous stream. The third woman helped with the packaging -- fresh sausages were piled onto a waxy plastic sheet, wrapped securely, then bundled up in newspaper and stuffed into 5- and 10-gallon plastic bags. The chili sauce was sold both in plastic baggies fastened with a rubber band and in glass bottles.

Halimah didn't buy any keropok lekor for herself, but Nora and Zaliffah bought tremendous quantities, and Noraini also bought enough for a crowd. When we packed it into my spare travel bag the night before they left Terengganu (I stayed an extra day), we estimated the weight at 40 to 50 kilos. And that was without the bottles of sauce!

With most of the bags of keropok lekor safely stashed with our luggage in the trunk of our rented car, we set out to Marang, where we would stay at the Angullia Beach House Resort. Someone had brought a bag into the car, and the whole way to the resort, we ate warm keropok lekor. I was in the front seat beside Zaliffah, the driver. A hand from the back would poke between the two front seats, offering Zaliffah or me a fresh sausage. Then another hand would poke through, cupping the open baggie full of sauce for us to dunk into.

Without the sauce, the sausage would be rather boring, in my opinion. The flavor was distinctly fishy but not overly strong. The texture resembles a processed sandwich meat, like something you might encounter on an hors d'oeurvre tray, next to the cheese cubes.

Shopping for Batik

The consensus among women in the Faculty of Mass Comm. at UiTM is that Terengganu is the best place to go for batik fabric, largely because of price but also because you will find the best designs there. One of the saleswomen at the Pasar Payang (Central Market) asserted that the silk in Terengganu is all Malaysian silk, but if you go to Kelantan, the silk there will be imported from Thailand. Her attitude indicated that we should be quite pleased to have a guarantee of locally produced silk.

Malaysian batik designs can be on cotton, silk, or a silk-cotton blend. The silk is usually fine and diaphanous. The cotton can be thick and buttery to touch, thin and somewhat stiff, or thin and soft. The designs can be hand-painted (with brushes and small wooden tools), hand-printed (with a wooden or metal stamp the size of person's foot), or machine printed. The fabric commonly comes in a two-meter length (for a sarong or shirt only) or four meters (for a complete neck-to-ankle woman's outfit). It is rarely seen in bolts or longer lengths.

Above: Terengganu silk batik. 2 meters. Below: Closeup of same.

I visited the Terengganu State Museum has one of the best exhibits I have seen on Malay fabric traditions (the Islamic Arts Museum in KL also has a good exhibit), with examples of unfinished cloth on hand looms and also finished traditional clothing modeled by dummies, accompanied by excellent large black-and-white photos of people wearing the same type of attire. The clothing was particularly nice in that you see how people unabashedly mixed colors and patterns in ways that excite the eye, while at the same time modestly covering the body from neck to ankles.

Today's Malays mostly dress in much less exotic patterns. The women stick with patterns heavy in flowers, and batik is relatively expensive, so most of these are machine printed. Men wear mostly Western clothes, except on special occasions. Woven-pattern fabrics are seldom worn today, except the plaid sarongs (by both men and women).

We spent most of our shopping time in the somewhat labyrinthine Pasar Payang, a multi-storied un-air-conditioned building with a huge adjacent parking garage that was filled to capacity on Saturday morning. Unlike most of the rest of Malaysia, Terengganu keeps Friday as the holy day, and most businesses are closed. Saturday is the prime shopping day, and with seemingly acres of food and fresh fish and keropok stalls on the ground floor, the market is the prime shopping place. Noraini bought bags of tamarind fruit and shared them with us. The husks are brittle; like pale dry leaves, they crumble at your touch. You pull off the sticky dark-brown paste that clings to the stem inside the seed, long and bulging like a fat man's finger. Spit out the pits as your tongue finds them. The sour-sweet taste made my mouth water.

At breakfast (on the top floor), we unexpectedly met a former student of Zaliffah's, and her family took us around to some of the best places for songket. Nora already knew which stalls to visit for batik, and the local family gave us advice on that as well. I know my senses would have been exhausted in an hour or two by the floor-to-ceiling shelves of folded fabric in every shop, but since my four companions had different agendas (as well as different tastes), often I could just perch on a plastic stool and watch as they interacted with the saleswomen. That gave me plenty of chances to see things I really liked, as the bundles of fabric were unfurled and draped enticingly over the arms of the saleswomen. I wasn't sure whether I would buy anything, but of course, I did.

Above: Terengganu cotton batik (sarong). 2 meters. Below: Closeup of same.

Now the trick is to get someone to take me to a good tailor and help me explain what I want done with all this fabric! I do want to have a baju kabaya made for me from one of the silks I bought in Kuala Terengganu.

Marang

Marang is a village a little south of Kuala Terengganu, the state capital. I think you could drive straight through Marang and not realize there is a town there. The main businesses are fishing and ferries going to Pulau Kapas, a small island with several resorts. A short distance off the main road, a winding single lane leads to the Angullia Beach House Resort, a Malay-run compound of solid little wooden chalets with verandas facing the sea.

Photos are here.

This is the kind of place you would never see on a package tour. The rooms are quite plain and small but scrupulously clean. There's air conditioning. Nothing but a short stretch of sand and a line of palm trees separates your verandah from the tiny waves, reduced by the location of Pulau Kapas. The bathroom is all ceramic tile and wood, with a good shower and a Western toilet. We didn't try the resort restaurant, but a sign printed in English inside the door of our two-room chalet informed us that we could have anything available cooked to order if we would only give the cooks one to two hours notice.

In the larger chalet next to ours, a big multi-generation Malay family was cooking and eating on their verandah almost continuously. On Saturday evening they prayed there, and my companions went over to join them after washing and dressing. Afterward, we went out to a local restaurant for dinner, then had a look at the "floating mosque," which was very pretty, lighted in the darkness and reflcting itself in the surrounding lake.

My four friends left before dawn on Sunday to catch the early plane back to KL. I had booked a room at a hotel in town for Sunday night. I got up around 8 a.m. and walked on the beach, meeting not a single other human in an hour. I sat under a palm tree and meditated while looking east, toward the island. Then I set off in search of breakfast. The resort family said they could make me some eggs, or I could try the food stalls on the main road, near the mosque (not the floating mosque but a local one). I walked past a lot of local houses and a munching pair of water buffalo to the stalls, where I had a plate of nasi lemak and two glasses of teh ais (iced local tea with sweet condensed milk).

All the other diners were men. Most of them were eating keropok lekor, which you could serve yourself from a large crockpot filled with hot water. Everyone used the sauce liberally.

One of the resort family brothers drove me to my hotel in KT. On the way he told me about their many international visitors -- from Italy, Denmark, England, Australia. Overhearing a conversation once between two European men, the resort owner realized that one of the men owned an international chain of hotels. He did not seem to be bragging as he told me this but rather to be marveling still that someone like that comes to stay at his family's place. Of course, I complimented him on the resort -- I said it seems very Malaysian, not Western, and that is really special. There is no swimming pool and no gift shop, just a few dozen chalets facing the ocean, a tidy garden of local shrubs, and coconut palms. Our room didn't have a TV.

Other Highlights

The Terengganu State Museum has the best keris exhibit I've seen so far. The keris (also spelled kris or kriss) was a significant personal weapon in the past, a long dagger with a specialized sheath worn tucked into the sarong around a man's waist. The local martial art, silat, includes forms for handling the keris. Its function is stabbing, not slashing or cutting.

The exhibit in the Terengganu museum includes information about the hilt (hulu), which normally has a turned bulge at the end. One of the five or six traditional designs is the tilted baby chick head, and some of these are quite beautifully carved. Two very good illustrations showed me how the keris should be held (a little like a pistol grip). Another part of the exhibit focused on the the ring that connects the shaft to the hilt; this is often a gorgeously intricate cap of silver or bronze. What I still don't know is why there's a little curlicue at one corner of the top of the blade, but I imagine it might be like a signature of the forger of the blade.

A disappointment in many museum exhibits here is the sparseness of explanatory text. Even in Bahasa, often there is no more than a label. The Terengganu museum had a lot of text in English (as well as Bahasa), but for beautiful exhibits such as the keris and the traditional textiles, it would be nice if there were enough text to really explain what the visitor is looking at. There's also a tendency to displays paragraphs of small text printed on small cards fixed to the back wall of a glass case. I don't know how many people can read text that small at such a distance, but I certainly can't. The museums here remind me of U.S. museums I visited as a child 30 to 40 years ago. I would guess that as Malaysia's development continues, museum curators will be trained in the new styles and the exhibits will be updated.

In a park on the museum grounds stand five traditional houses, quite nice to look at, but only one is open to entry. There is no text at all about the houses, so you don't know what you're looking at, except in the case of the Rumah Tele, which is open, but it is really a hodgepodge inside. They could have a small version of Sarawak's excellent Cultural Village here, but perhaps they have no funding for staff. The tiny gift kiosk was closed the day I visited.

Another nice thing to see at the museum was the Terengganu Stone, which I had read about. The inscription is Malay written in the Arabic script (Jawi) and confirms that the people of this land practice Islam. The date of the carving is 1303 CE.

On Monday I took a half-day tour with a local tour outfit. With four other Westerners and three Malays (two boatmen and our guide), I rode in a motorboat up the Sungai Marang, hoping to see some wildlife. We saw three or four swimming iguanas, a pack of monkeys that fled noisily as we got close, and several magnificent eagles flying overhead. We docked at a small kampung where we should have seen the palm roof-making industry in action, but all the roof-makers were out on the river gathering new branches, which they lash together to form giant shingles. We saw their finished work stacked up like decks of large leafy cards. We met a woman who sat patiently with two small children outside a small hut, inside of which she was boiling palm sugar for future sale.

We walked down a dirt track to a house in the jungle where an old couple live with three or four guard dogs and two tame monkeys, both of them chained to separate trees. One of the monkeys was unchained, re-attached to an extremely long rope leash, and sent up a tall palm to knock down a young coconut for us. The old man who managed the monkey wore a striped collar T-shirt, plaid sarong, and yellow rubber boots. Our tour guy borrowed an impressively curved parang and hacked into the coconut. Glasses were brought out from the home, and we all swigged a glass of the juice. A second coconut was brought down, but only the Malays and I drank a second glass.

Kuala Terengganu

Walking around in Kuala Terengganu later that day, I considered how little I know about Malaysia -- in spite of how much I have learned. The city is small and not terribly modern. One main road winds from the east side up around the north side, where the Sungai Terengganu ("sungai" mean "river"; "kuala" means the place where two rivers meet) enters the South China Sea, and on down to the west and the airport (which has only two gates). It's a four-lane road, not too difficult to cross at any point (unlike the busy highways that cover Kuala Lumpur, which one would not dare to cross). There is, as the Lonely Planet guidebook points out, no nightlife in this state capital. I saw only two fast-food restaurants, a Pizza Hut and a KFC, side by side near one end of the very small Chinatown. I think it's the first city in Malaysia where I have not seen a 7-Eleven.

I don't mean to use Western chain businesses as a measure of success or modernization per se, and in many ways, I think maybe Kuala Terengganu today is not so different from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (another state capital) as it was 30 years ago. Malaysia got its independence from Britain less than 50 years ago, and before that, there was only one university in the whole country. People didn't have electricity or running water. Today kids wear Bata rubber sandals; then they went barefoot. Today, there are far more motorbikes in KT than cars; then people walked. The roads today, which are mostly smooth and reliable, did not exist even 20 years ago in many places.

I realize I know almost nothing about how it feels to be a part of this culture, with one foot still in the kampung of 50 years ago, and the full weight of the body shifting forward to the other foot, the foot that is planted firmly in the future, with no going back.