Please click the photo above to play the daily videoA good night’s sleep. The rare, unbroken kind, where you close your eyes and open them again and the night has simply been folded up and put away without fuss.
I woke early. It had rained all night, and was still at it, steady and unbothered.
First order of business: charging the car. In the rain. There’s no graceful way to do this. You stand there with the cable, hood up, collar damp, feeling vaguely like a man refuelling a spaceship in a monsoon. The car, of course, stayed perfectly dry throughout. I did not.
Breakfast restored a certain dignity.
Then we drove to Kepala Batas.
I chose the first Penang Bridge this time. The older crossing. It seemed right, somehow, for where we were going. Then off the highway and onto the old Butterworth road, through the kampong, the way we used to come before there were quicker ways to come.
A lot has changed.
That’s the polite way of putting it. New houses where there were fields. Shops where there were none. Roads widened, corners straightened. And yet, every so often, something unchanged would appear: a particular bend, a stretch of paddy, a row of trees standing where they always stood. Like a familiar face in a crowd of strangers.
Then Permatang Bertam.
The house where I was born. Where I grew up.
I won’t try to describe what that feels like. Partly because it’s private, and partly because I’m not sure I could. Houses are smaller than you remember. Everyone says that, and it’s true. But it’s also larger, in ways that have nothing to do with size. We stood there a while. Didn’t say much. Didn’t need to.
Then on, because the day does go on.
A stop in town for biscuits. There’s always a shop, isn’t there. The one you’ve been going to since before you could see over the counter. Some purchases are less about the biscuits than about continuing a sentence that started decades ago.
Lunch with Teh in Sungai Petani. Good food, better company, the easy kind of catching up where nobody has to explain who anyone is.
On the way back, Seberang Jaya for jeruk. Penang’s pickled fruits, sharp and sweet and slightly alarming in colour. You can’t leave the north without them. It isn’t permitted.
A quick rest at the hotel. Brief, but necessary.
Then out again, over to Balik Pulau for dinner, the island’s quieter side, all hills and dusk and winding roads. Laksa at Fara Idlan Cafe, again, because when something is right, you return to it without apology. Sour, fishy, fragrant, deeply unreasonable in the best way. Then goreng pisang to finish. Hot, crisp, a little greasy. A full stop with a flourish.
It had been a long day. Long in miles. Longer in other ways.
An early night, then.
Tomorrow, the drive back to KL. The road south, the city waiting at the end of it.
But today, for a few hours, I went home.