Hidden Gems and Local Secrets in Ipoh

Part of the Ipoh travel guide — see every topic in All Ipoh Guides.

Ipoh's visitors do a short circuit: the old town, the murals, the coffee, one cave temple. Perak beyond it is one of the least-visited states in Malaysia, and it holds a royal town, a colonial garden city, the country's least-developed hill station, thousands of flooded mining pools now farmed for prawns, and a Chinese village that survives from the Emergency-era resettlement programme. Almost none of it appears on an itinerary.

Bukit Larut

Above Taiping, an hour north-west, Malaysia's oldest and least-developed hill station: no shops, no theme park, no tea plantations, just a single-track road climbing to around 1,000 metres past colonial bungalows in cloud forest. Private cars are not allowed; you go up in a government-operated Land Rover on a fixed schedule, or you walk the road, which takes three to four hours. At the top there is cool air, gardens, a handful of rest houses and essentially nothing else, which is the entire point.

Taiping and Kuala Kangsar

Taiping was the state capital and the first town in Malaya to have many things — a railway, a museum in 1883, a public library, a zoo. Its Lake Gardens, laid out in 1880 on exhausted mining land, are the oldest in the country and genuinely beautiful, with rain trees arching over the water. Kuala Kangsar is the royal town: the golden-domed Ubudiah Mosque, the Istana Kenangan built in 1926 without nails, and the first rubber tree planted in Malaya, still standing.

The mining landscape

Tanjung Tualang, half an hour south, has TT5 — a preserved bucket-chain dredge, an enormous floating machine on a pond, open as a museum — and a row of restaurants serving the giant freshwater prawns raised in the old mining pools, which is a genuine Perak food pilgrimage. Papan and Pusing are former mining towns with intact shophouse rows and almost no visitors. And the thousands of flooded pools across the valley, visible from every road, are the industry's most permanent monument.

In the city

Funny Mountain, a shop that has sold soya beancurd and nothing else since 1950 and closes when it sells out in the afternoon, generating a queue every day. The Concubine Lane back alleys, quieter than the restored front. Kek Lok Tong's garden behind the cave, which most visitors to the cave temples skip. The night market at Memory Lane on Sundays, a large flea market of genuine junk and occasional finds. And the old Chinese coffee shops that open at six, where the white coffee is best and the tables are full of people who have come every day for thirty years.

Hidden Gems and Local Secrets at a glance

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