Taiping & Sabak Bernam

As you may have noticed, Taiping is my favourite town in Malaysia, so you will not be surprised that I am a member of the Taiping Heritage Society. They are not (yet) very active, so when they announced their AGM with a talk and a dinner, I wanted to attend. But the same weekend Aric’s mother was celebrating her birthday! The solution was to make a combination trip.

In Taiping we stayed in the Furama hotel, as usual. Close to the Lake Gardens, beautiful and fascinating any time of the day. The famous Raintrees were flowering with pink flowers.

Rain treeRain tree flower

When you go to Wikipedia for the Taiping Lake Gardens you will read there about the “golden rain trees (Malay angsana) (Pterocarpus indicus)” Golden? They must be wrong. And they are. Yes,  the angsana is also called raintree and has yellow flowers. And there are beautiful angsana in Taiping.  But the trees along the Lake Gardens are NOT angsana but Albizia saman! Same family, but different species. Pink flowers. Click here for a detailed explanation.

The THS meeting was hold in the Flemington hotel. The talk, about Bukit Larut, was given by two speakers, Dr Chan Ah Lak and Ooi Beng Yean, both dedicated birders and nature lovers. They are contributing pictures to my Birding in Malaysia website, so it was a good opportunity to have our picture taken together.

Meeting THS With Chan Ah Lak and OBY

The next day, on our way back to Sabak Bernam, I showed Aric a waterfall near Beruas, which I had visited with CNY. It is a nice curtain fall, easily accessible.

Here is Aric, enjoying a shower

Aric taking a shower

In Sabak Bernam we celebrated the birthday of Aric’s mother. As usual some of his uncles were playing mahjong and although I can not play the game myself, I was of course willing for the picture to behave like a real Chinese Malaysian, and join them…:-)

IMG_5mahjong782

Of course there was the traditional birthday cake and a delicious seafood dinner.

birthday cakeBirthday dinner

 

2 thoughts on “Taiping & Sabak Bernam

  1. He brother,
    you cannot play Mahjong? Did you never play it at home when you were young? Or do they play it different in Malaysia? I played it often.

  2. True, I know the rules and yes, we played it often in our family. Chow, Pong, Kong, basically the rules are the same in Malaysia. But we were not really interested in winning, each player was looking for a “beautiful” game, with only tiles of the same kind, and preferably with many wind and dragon tiles. Here winning is all-important, because the winner gets money from the other players. It does not matter if you get mahjong with an “ugly” mix of bamboos, characters and circles, some chow, some pong.

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