By Sheridan Mahavera
IPOH, April 10 — When the last tin mine dried up, Ipoh started to crumble.
If it had not been for its position as a state capital, a major stopover for the North-South railway line and an important cultural fount for the Malaysian Chinese community, the decline would have been faster.
This slightly Kinta Valley-centric view is shared by its businesses and residents. They say you can see the creeping bleakness in how more and more pre-Second World War shops in the charming old town centre are closing their shutters for good every day.
Unlike Kuala Lumpur, Penang or Johor Baru, Ipoh just never found a replacement for the tin mining industry that could have brought in high-paying jobs and a young population of professionals to start families and help it grow.
What this has left, says restaurateur Teow Hee Min, is a “retirement” town. Where the food is tasty, cheap and where you don’t have to fight for parking.
It seems that it has no prospects for anyone between 21 to 56, and looking to make their mark in the world.
Another “Ipoh boy”, a bank officer who wants to be known only as Faisal, puts it another way. It is as if the flow of money that used to go into Ipoh is now by-passing it for places like Manjung.
But for a bunch of successful new entrepreneurs on the outskirts of the old city, there is optimism.
And this “hope” involves throwing out the old ways of doing business, even if they helped make “this town that tin built” into a “city of millionaires.”
After the rush
[The rustic wooden shops of Ipoh’s old town have seen better days as many have closed their shutters after the tin rush died out. — Pictures by Choo Choy May]
The rustic wooden shops of Ipoh’s old town have seen better days as many have closed their shutters after the tin rush died out. — Pictures by Choo Choy May
Ipoh did not start out as a “Chinese town”. It was actually a Malay settlement founded by a Sumatran lord on the banks of the Kinta river sometime in the early 1800s.
But it grew into a predominantly Chinese town, thanks to the lucrative tin rush that attracted a flood of migrants from China and elsewhere during the early 1900s. Its importance was boosted when the Japanese occupation administration made it the state capital in 1942.
Though its boom years started to end when tin prices declined in the 1970s, Ipoh remained an important population centre on the West Coast. In fact, it is still Malaysia’s fourth-largest city.
Yet, much of the money that comes into Ipoh these days is made outside of it, via the generations of youths who have gone to work in the Klang Valley and Singapore, and who send back money and return to choke its streets during the holidays.
“Ten years ago, we still had lots of people who dropped in to Ipoh for lunch and leave by dinner. But it’s not like that anymore,” says Teow, who inherited and runs the city’s first steam-boat restaurant.
Money from tin nurtured a vibrant hospitality sector seen in the storied Chinese kopitiams and restaurants in downtown Ipoh, which till today receives scores of non-local customers.
Others, such as Faisal the bank officer, feel that things have gone stagnant.
He grew up in Ipoh but finds that nothing is “happening” in his hometown — another way of saying that there is no growth catalyst in the form of a lynchpin industry after tin mining died out.
The state government is trying to fill that vacuum by courting everyone, from those involved in computer animation to heavy industries, to come and set up shop in Perak.
The biggest of these ventures, so far, is an iron ore distribution centre being built by a multinational company in Teluk Rubiah, in far-away Manjung district.
Not everyone is tepid about Ipoh’s future. In the middle- to upper-class enclaves of Ipoh Garden and beyond towards Tambun, developers such as Sunway City Berhad are re-injecting life back into the Kinta Valley.
More than that, they are leveraging on Perak’s most renowned attraction — its adorable limestone hills — and showing that there is a better way to make money from this natural resource than simply blasting them for building materials.
[Instead of building something alien from its landscape, the Lost World integrates with it and shows how preserved nature can be a huge draw.]
Instead of building something alien from its landscape, the Lost World integrates with it and shows how preserved nature can be a huge draw.
A renewable resource
It is hard to believe how the temperature changes as you walk through the Lost World of Tambun. At the man-made waterfall beach garden near the entrance, it is just as hot as the weather outside the theme park.
Walk towards the petting zoo and the limestone hills at the heart of the park, and your skin gets tickled by the cooler air.
“It’s nature’s own cooling system,” declares the park’s general manager Calvin Ho, his arm pointing up at one of the limestone hills that tower over the park.
The Lost World is not just rides, wave pools and games to win stuffed toys.
It is also a place to introduce Nature to urbanites and youths, to get them to form a connection, says Ho.
Its petting zoo, for example, is one of the most interactive. Most of the reptiles, primates, monkeys, rabbits, goats and birds are un-tethered but they do not run away. It feels like you are walking through their natural environment rather than peering at captive displays in a cage.
The design philosophy was not to “build” the park into the environment, but to integrate it into the small valley that was formed by the hills.
“As much as possible, we did not cut down trees during construction. If we did, we transplanted them somewhere else in the park. In fact, we’ve added more trees and vegetation,” says Ho.
It does not sound like much compared to its southern cousin, Sunway Lagoon Theme park, but the Lost World’s ability to recreate that sublime connection with nature keeps it drawing visitors — even during the recession.
Ho says it expects to get about 650,000 visitors this year, compared to the 600,000 in 2009.
“Forty per cent of our visitors come here because of word-of-mouth from past visitors and about 50 per cent of them are Perakians,” Ho says.
“By protecting the natural environment, instead of just mining it, we ensure that it perpetually creates money for others.
“And when we prosper, the contractors in Ipoh, the hotels, the restaurants, the material suppliers, also make money,”
The promise
[Feeding time at the Lost World’s petting zoo is a chance for children to get up close with animals such as this Macaw, which they usually only see on television.]
Feeding time at the Lost World’s petting zoo is a chance for children to get up close with animals such as this Macaw, which they usually only see on television.
A short way through the jungles behind Lost World is the new Banjaran Hotspring Spa and Resort, whose operators claim is Malaysia’s first “wellness retreat.”
Dotted around a natural amphitheatre surrounded by gentle hills are 25 villas and facilities that are not meant to “pamper” its guests. They are meant to sequester them from the everyday and purge them of its toxins, stress and troubles.
“It’s a very new concept to Malaysia. The first person you meet when you check in is a ‘natural-path’. They advise you on treatments and they tailor your diet to suit your therapies,” explains Sunway International Hotels and Resorts chief executive officer, Hanley Chew.
And like the Lost World, Banjaran has taken what is an untapped natural resource, Tambun’s limestone hills, its caves and hot springs, and built a facility around them.
The designers took pains to minimise the retreat’s impact on the natural features, says Chew. For instance, in its “meditation cave”, builders only constructed simple platforms to allow guests to walk in easily.
“The food we serve is from plants grown using organic pesticides in the retreat itself.”
But Banjaran and the Lost World are only components of a bigger plan. One that involves transforming the wasteland around Tambun and bringing life back to this forgotten part of Ipoh.
“Sunway City Ipoh was abandoned during the 1997 financial crisis. When Sunway Group founder Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah wanted to start it up again, everyone thought it was a waste of time and money,” says Sunway Management group public affairs senior manager, Bernard Paul Netto.
“Of course, he proved everyone wrong, especially with Banjaran.”
The story among Sunway executives is that Cheah, who hails from Pusing, about 40 minutes away from Ipoh, had promised several years ago that he would bring development to Ipoh and had even said he would build something “five-star.”
A semblance of that integrated township called Sunway City Ipoh can already be seen in its high-end bungalows, the Giant hypermarket and a Sunway College campus. Soon it will have its own McDonald’s outlet — a conventional signifier of an area’s rising wealth.
[Ipoh Garden on a weekend bursts with trendy nightclubs and high paying customers.]
Ipoh Garden on a weekend bursts with trendy nightclubs and high paying customers.
Beyond kopitiams
And the wealth is starting to be seen in a row of clubs and bars dubbed “little Bangsar” — after the famous Kuala Lumpur night spot — in Ipoh Gardens.
On a weekend night, the roads around this block of shop-houses and restaurants behind the Kinta Valley mall are clogged with sashaying guys and girls, and the music is so loud it pours out onto the streets.
The scene is typical if you are from KL or Penang, but according to locals, these pubs and discos are only about two years old at the most.
“It used to be dingy, dank joints where people picked their noses, threw kuaci on the floor and the beer was warm,” says Kennedy George, proprietor of “Barbeza” and who is credited with starting the first “refined” pub and restaurant in the area.
Now there are about 20 of them who have taken George’s cue and established upscale joints with cover charges, dress codes and cocktails.
George’s new experiment is “Sugar”, a bar that features “live” music but where bands are radical by Ipoh’s standards. With radical meaning the bands excel on the strength of their music rather than the aesthetic qualities of the typically female lead singers.
“The ‘live’ music scene in Ipoh is generally like that. Low-paying male customers who will buy two Cokes to share among six while they sit and ogle the lead singer, who has to be a girl,” says local musician Gunabalan.
What Sugar and Barbeza have done is show that there is a market in Ipoh for upscale entertainment and dining. Both places are standing-room-only on weekends and the crowd comprises high-paying professionals.
It is not just about providing jobs. For Ipoh to move up in terms of being a place where young professionals go to work, play and start a family, says George, it has to offer those good restaurants and bars which attract them.
“It just can’t be dirty coffee shops and plastic chairs. To attract high-income residents then you have to go up in class,” says George.
It is a fitting metaphor and one that Banjaran and the Lost World are following in terms of how they are “exploiting” their natural resources by preserving them.
Just as Barbeza has up-ended Ipoh’s seedy entertainment scene, the Lost World and Banjaran have shown that limestone hills can be worth more if you do not mine them.
“The limestone is the Kinta valley’s foremost attraction,” the Lost World’s Ho, emphatically states.
And by using them wisely in tourism, he adds, the wealth they create is perpetual.
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