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Travel to Melaka

DEWAN HANG TUAH TO BE REDEVELOPED



In March 2016, Chief Minister of Melaka announced plans to redevelop the current Dewan Hang a Tuah into a new multi storey Dewan Hang Tuah.

The current 2 storey building has reached her age of about 40 years or more. Time has come to turn the area into multi purpose building. The library that used to be there can be turned into Melaka Dewan Hang Tuah Library. Office tower block, hotel and convention centre can be planned.

The strategic location is a good marketing point as it overlooks Melaka river and it is near to Jonker walk, Panggung Melaka and Heeren Street as well.

Categories
Tourism Malaysia

Popular Steam Fish (????) at Hin Hock Bak Kut Teh Restaurant (??) at Tampoi, Johor Bahru.

The Restaurant Hin Hock Bak Kut Teh (N1.49716 E103.70261) is located along Jalan Dato Toh Ah Boon, Tampoi. The street is just beside the Cycle Carriage Johor Bahru and it’s simple to locate. Many peoples thought that the Bak Kit Teh should be the signature dish but the true is their Fresh Steam Fish is the Popular and Famous dish in Tampoi area.

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The Hin Hock Bak Kut Teh Restaurant is operating in an old wooden shop, and the place usually humid, hot and poor ventilation during day time…unless it’s rain just like the good timing we had on our visit. Their speciality is the Steam Fish, wiht the different cooking method compare with others…they prepare the fresh fish in the hot boiling water, Not exactly steam it…unitl the fish is ready to serve. Interesting!

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We chose the outdoor area for better ventilation even on the raining day…

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The cooking and foods preparation area is situated outside the restaurant, I felt they make more transperant to their customers is a good idea.

Their service was fast and good, and they only have few common dishes to serve which made the order process much more easier.

Our order :-

*  Steam Tiplapia (fish)
*  Minced pork oyster sauce bean curd (tou-fu)
*  Claypot braised vinegar pork knuckle
*  Minced pork bean sprout

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The fish was fresh and nice! They boiled and served the fish on the perfect timing, and I like my every bite with the chopped spring onions and fried garlic very much! And don’t forget with the onion and garlic sauce that served together with the fish…
I can’t really tell the different between their cooking method and common steaming method, anyway…it taste Good!

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 The bean curd was soft and went well with the oysterf sauce and minced pork, the portion was big!

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The pork was tender and flavorful, the vinegar level was just nice which made the dish more tasty!

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The way the prepared it was special to me, hardly can see so much of topping of minced pork on the juicy bean sprout. Not bad!

They started the business since 20 years ago and become one of the ‘Must Try’ food if you visit Tampoi area. It’s advise to visit the restaurant during the non-peak hour, that’s why we stepped in about 11am…just to avoid the lunch hour crowd.

The photo I took of the outlook was the old shop, they had swifted to the new location on the same street about 200 meter away, just notice their signage for easy locate.


The Damage for the above dishes included drinks was RM71.00 for 4 adults. I will visit it again whenever I pass by, but…only during raining day…:)

Categories
All Malaysia Info

Rare insight into Syed Mokhtar

Listed as the seventh richest Malaysian with a net worth of US$3.3 billion, not much is known from the media-shy Syed Mokhtar.

Syed Mokhtar Albukhary

Syed Mokhtar Albukhary : A Biography

Syed Mokhtar Albukhary, A Biography
Author: Premilla Mohanlall
Publisher: PVM Communications

MY first meeting with tycoon Tan Sri Syed Mokhtar Albukhary went off in a rather unusual way. The year was 2004 and he had wanted to meet someone from The Star to make known his views over his fight with another tycoon, the late Tan Sri Nasimuddin SM Amin, over DRB-Hicom.

Syed Mokhtar felt the media favoured the Naza Group boss over him and he wanted to give his side of the story.

Both were battling over a strategic 15.8% block of shares in DRB-Hicom held by three parties, including the estate of the late Tan Sri Yahaya Ahmad, and the rivalry was billed as the “Fight of The Big Boys.”

The series of newspaper headlines had forced the reclusive Syed Mokhtar to come out and talk to this writer to put the record straight.

Our meeting at the business centre of a five-star hotel at Jalan Sultan Ismail was fixed at 9pm but he only turned up near midnight. Although he was dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt, I noticed that he only wore sandals. He was over two hours late.

His aides had warned me that he would probably be “waylaid” on the way there by businessmen and politicians, most of whom would ask for business deals or favours.

To avoid such disruptions, he shuttles between his house at affluent Bukit Tunku – which he bought since he became a millionaire bachelor – and the hotel to meet his associates and contacts. The other meeting point is the Islamic Arts Museum near the National Mosque.

The other rather unusual meeting spot is an Indian restaurant at Jalan Pahang. To this day, he carries with him a tumbler of tea, made by a particular waiter, from the eatery.

“If (the late Tan Sri) Loh Boon Siew can meet his friends at a coffeeshop every morning, I see no reason why I cannot enjoy my teh tarik at the shop, saya pun tong san mali, like him,” he told me, referring to Boon Siew’s ancestral roots from China. Syed Mokktar’s ancestral roots, on the other hand, can be traced to Central Asia.

By the time we finished our conversations, it was close to 2am. As I put down my pen and was about to close my note book, he suddenly told me that our discussions were entirely off the record and he was not to be quoted.

The publicity-shy businessman has never been at ease with journalists but I wasn’t going to allow Syed Mokhtar to have his way. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that if that were so, I would have wasted my entire evening with him, and whether he liked it or not, I was going to put him on record.

I must have made an impression on him because as we got to know each other better, he was prepared to share his private thoughts with me regularly – but still never on record.

But the media is still biting on Syed Mokhtar and, in some ways, he is to be blamed as he has never made himself available to journalists, preferring to let his aides do the talking. In fact, bankers also complain that he never meets them!

Interestingly enough, a whole chapter is devoted to his dealings with the media in his biography that has just hit the bookstores written by Premilla Mohanlall, a writer and a public relations practitioner.

“I wonder why I get bad press when others who have abused the system for personal gains have not been subjected to such media scrutiny. Perhaps it is time to come out and defend myself,” he said in the book.

The 180-page book is very readable, starting with his childhood days in a village attap house with no piped water and electricity, where the toilet was a pit latrine. It traces Syed Mokhtar’s first experience of doing business under his cattle trader father in Alor Star. His father migrated to Kedah from the Afghan region of Central Asia via India and Thailand.

The book gives a rare peek into his family life and how the family’s financial constraints forced Syed Mokhtar to stop schooling after Form Five, while his siblings were able to continue. There was also his early growing-up years with a soldier uncle in Johor Baru.

He takes pride calling himself a businessman with no diplomas, and his ability to speak the layman’s language is obvious in the book. Much space is dedicated to his early days as a travelling salesman, when he had to sleep in the lorries and on bug-infested beds in cheap hotels.

The point that Syed Mokhtar seems to want to tell his readers is that he did not get his wealth on a silver platter. While the affirmative action of the New Economic Policy had helped him, he worked hard and fought hard. He was not the type who cashed out after getting the pink forms.

In short, he went through the good and bad times, like many well-tested businessmen. The 1997 financial crisis saw his assets shrank from RM3bil to RM600mil.

“Eighty per cent of my market capitalisation was wiped out. There was a lot of pain and hardship. Many people thought I would pack up and leave. I am a fighter, with a strong will to survive.

“I lost countless nights of sleep, I lost hair, but I did not lose sight of one thing: my responsibility to safeguard strategic bumiputra assets and to protect the interests of my staff.”

Today, he has 110,000 staff under his payroll and indirectly about 250,000 other Malaysians, particularly vendors, since he acquired Proton this year.

Syed Mokhtar’s close ties with Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is well documented but in this book, Syed Mokhtar spoke vividly, if not humorously, of their first encounter.

It was Thursday, Jan 16, 1997 and the time was 2.30pm – Syed Mokhtar entered the office of the former Prime Minister.

“I greeted him with a salam and he stood before me, with his hands folded across the chest. He did not wave for me to take a seat when he sat down. I was sweating, and decided to sit down to present the documents I had prepared to explain all my businesses in Kedah, Kuala Lumpur and Johor.

“It included building plans for a new project in Alor Star, a sprawling development with a mosque and a health and welfare facilities for the poor as well as an international university for disadvantaged communities around the world.

“The Prime Minister listened carefully, without saying a word. By the time I was done, it was an hour and ten minutes. Still, not a word. I left the documents on his desk and took leave.”

Not long later, Syed Mokthar, who was still asleep, received a call from Dr Mahathir himself with a simple message: “Your matter in Kedah is settled.” That is of course vintage Dr Mahathir, the man who has no time for small talk and offered few words.

Apart from his numerous business ventures, Syed Mokhtar also writes in detail of his numerous charitable works.

Almost every year, his Albukhary Foundation hosts two iftar or fast-breaking dinners for over 3,000 needy people. The foundation currently has a few flagship projects, including the Islamic Arts Museum built in 1998.

In 2001, the foundation launched the Albukhry Tuition Programme to help the underachieving rural school children pass their final high school examination. At the end of the programme, nine years later, about 80,000 students from 500 schools had benefited from these remedial classes.

His foundation has also extended help to survivors of earthquakes in China, Pakistan and Iran, and the tsunami in Indonesia. It has also built an AIDS hospital in Uganda and a girls’ school in Nepal as well as helped support the Sarajevo Science and Technology centre.

An interesting chapter is on his role as a family man. Syed Mokhtar has never touched on his private life in any interview, which has been rare, in any case.

The father of seven children, between the ages of two and 18, revealed how his typical meetings start at 10pm and finish at 3am “and is held seven days a week and has been a routine for more than 20 years.”

“Fortunately, my wife comes from a business family and understands this. Initially, I had to explain the arrangement to her, and she accepted it. Except for family holidays, in our 20 years of marriage, I don’t think I have spent many evenings at home after 10pm,” he wrote.

Syed Mokhtar married in 1992 at the age of 41 to then 24-year-old Sharifah Zarah. There are also rare pictures of his family in the book.

Although the book is, no doubt, a public relations exercise, the right questions have been posed by the writer, including the public’s perception of his many acquisitions and the common criticism that he has more than he can chew.

He also answered the issue of the shareholding structure of his companies that could not be traced to him, acknowledging “it is an old habit that has to change.”

Syed Mokhtar hasn’t changed much. He is rarely seen in public functions. He is still more at ease in short-sleeved shirts and sandals. The billionaire now travels on a private jet but in town, he still drives around in his old Proton Perdana. By WONG CHUN WAI

Chinese Opera

Hotshots [PIC]

Dr Mahathir

Dr M: Politician to the core

Categories
All Malaysia Info

Mother nature’s water theme park

A ‘cave’ created by an ancient avalanche of rocks upon a stream is one of Malaysia’s most unique ‘water theme parks’.

Want to walk, crawl and float through it?

“Wanna go to Gua Batu Maloi this weekend?” asked Ahli a.k.a. Lee Kok Chung, the hiking buddy I have known since 1999.

The answer to that question was a resounding “Yes!”

The bucolic welcome arch to Gua Batu Maloi, Negeri Sembilan

Gua Batu Maloi is not a conventional cave but more like a huge pile of giant granite boulders that tumbled down from the mountains over a stream. The result is a kind of water theme park inside a cave!

Ahli, an experienced nature guide and birder who runs Endemic Guides, was bringing a group into the cave that weekend. This was my sixth trip with him to the cave in Negeri Sembilan’s Gunung Tampin Forest Reserve.

After getting to Tampin town via the North-South Highway, we headed towards Kuala Pilah through a beautiful forested road past the tail end of the Titiwangsa mountain range before arriving at Pekan Air Mawang. We then turned left and drove through kampung roads covered with “landmines” (cow droppings!) before finally arriving at Gua Batu Maloi.

Everyone was in high spirits as we started our 15-minute walk through the jungle towards the cave entrance.

A lazy stream flowed alongside the trail – the same one that flows through the cave. To get to the cave, we had to cross the vertical face of a huge boulder by stepping on some thick roots, while holding on to a rope so we wouldn’t fall off.

Beautiful ferns and moss grew on the gigantic boulders at the cave entrance. Huge roots from the trees above grew downwards and clung majestically to the rocks. The rays of the morning sun streaming between the trees made the place look magical.

Before we entered the cave, Ahli gave a short briefing on the cave, and on the safety aspects.

“Are any of you afraid of dark and tight spaces? Are any of you claustrophobic?” he asked. Anyone who suffers from claustrophobia may panic, and hence it was important for Ahli to check before we entered the cave.

He also advised everyone to always stay in front of our “sweeper” guide, Aki, 20, who was from the nearby kampung and had been exploring the cave since he was four. The group this time was relatively small, and this meant shorter queues in the cave.

Batu Maloi is not a conventional cave but more like a huge pile of giant granite boulders that have tumbled upon a stream.

We soon disappeared one by one into the cracks between the huge boulders and plunged into the cold water from the stream in the cave. The smell of guano permeated the air. We continued, wading and crawling through holes so small that it seemed impossible that anyone could actually go through them.

Some parts of the cave had only inches of space between the surface of the water and the top of the cave! We had to lie on our backs and push ourselves through those small gaps, with our noses just barely above the water, to get to the other side. It was indeed thrilling!

Some members of the group even had to be assisted out of these tunnels by having their legs pulled by the others. Hilarious. Halfway through the cave, Ahli asked the group if they preferred to continue using an easy or more challenging route. We chose the latter, of course.

We soon came to a part of the cave that was really narrow, where we had to crawl on our hands and knees. Soon, we encountered a huge submerged rock. There was no way across, except to crawl on our bellies!

It was rather tricky having to manoeuvre my body, and I found myself perched on the rock like a walrus! I had to figure out how to get off the rock and move forward without plunging head first into the water where the rock ended. With a little space to turn my body around just before sliding off the rock, I managed to land safely in the water.

While waiting for the others, I switched off my headlight and was plunged into total darkness. It was strangely relaxing, sitting on a rock in the dark cave, listening to the gurgling stream as the water flowed swiftly below my feet.

We then came across another narrow but sandy part of the cave where we had to literally dig our way through like giant nesting turtles! Who needs a spa when you can get sandy body “scrubs”, “aromatherapy” (thanks to the “wonderful” bat guano scent) and even natural “Jacuzzis” in Gua Batu Maloi?

We were in the part of Batu Maloi called Gua Kelawar (Bat Cave – home to many swirling bats rather than Batman’s lair!). This area was dry, with “sandy” areas all around, which we soon found out were actually hardened bat poo! We were really happy to plunge into the water when we saw the stream again.

The writer at one of the many little “jacuzzis” inside the cave.

We even got to do some canyoneering as we climbed and crawled through the many waterfalls inside the cave. There were many hydro-massage opportunities, too, as bubbles formed from the cascades, creating wonderful little “Jacuzzis”, even though it was rather cold.

It was like a water theme park, but this natural version was much more fun and exciting.

After a few hours of climbing, crawling and stretching over many waterfalls and tunnels, we emerged into the outside world. What a workout! We had used every part of our body to get through the cave.

On our way back, we came upon a gigantic boulder the size of a double-storey house. This was the actual Batu Maloi, after which the cave was named.

According to local legend, Maloi is the name of the guardian spirit of that area, which Aki told me he had seen a few times before in the guise of an old man. Being a silat (Malay martial arts) practitioner, Aki is more sensitive and attuned to the “other realm”.

We trekked back to our cars and changed into dry clothes, before going to Tampin for drinks, toast and half-boiled eggs at a packed old coffee shop. Food never tasted better.

Ah, what a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. – Anne Cheong


Map: Gua Batu Maloi, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia

Categories
Tourism Malaysia

Travel: Merlion Park, Singapore

The Merlion and the Cub were originally located by the
Esplanade Bridge, just 120 metres from their present location. It’s current
home is adjacent to One Fullerton, on a newly constructed 2,500 square metre
park.