Of times passed

I just spent a pleasant 3 days in Penang, Malaysia.

I’ve been there only once before. Some time during the 1960’s the P&O passenger liner in which I was serving, called there. It might have been the ‘Strathmore’ around about the same time we visited (a very undeveloped) Bali.

I’m not sure how we made the contact but a few of us had been ashore to sample the local nightlife and met up with the Matron of the Military Hospital. This was a middle-aged British lady, a spinster, who had (it seemed to us) totally embraced an expatriate lifestyle with no intention of ever returning to Britain.

Three or four of us ended up in her house somewhere in the hills above the town (it wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a city then).

We sat on her veranda and she plied us with Gin and Tonic in return for which we had to update her on all that was happening back home in the UK. Remember, there was no CNN, no BBC World, no TV period. A letter sent by airmail would take up to 3 weeks to be delivered. People in her position around the world were starved of information about what was happening back in Britain.

At some moment in the early hours of the morning, having sucked us dry of anything we could tell her about ‘home’, she threw us out because she had to be on duty at the hospital at some ungodly hour.

In nearly 50 years I have never forgotten that evening and as my Air Asia 737 dropped into Penang International Airport it all came back to me.

Sadly, Penang today is just another Asian city paying lip-service to the tourist trade. That trade is mainly back-packers – a concept totally alien to me when I trolled around the world in the 1960’s.

It didn’t matter. I was quite happy to submerge myself in memories just as I have done in recent years when re-visiting Singapore and Hong Kong, Bali and Brunei, the Philippines and Japan.

But I did spend some time wondering whose memories were the more meaningful – mine or the present-day backpacker.  The average back-packer sees only what the visiting country arranges for them to see.  In Singapore an antiseptic, air-conditioned Change Alley, In Sydney a cleaned up Kings Cross and Bangkok’s Kowsan Road is no different to Chulia Street in Penang.

I think I’ll stick with my 50 year old memories thank you.