Penang: George Town, Mopeds, and the Ongoing Question of Eric’s Whereabouts

We hired mopeds and spent a day circumnavigating the island, which is both the best and most revealing way to move through a place where the geography includes dense urban coastline, highland interior, fishing villages on the southern tip, and the kind of road that exists between established destinations and which guidebooks tend to describe as scenic because they have no other word for it and which turns out to be the most interesting part of the journey.

Eric, the eighteen-year-old Vietnamese-American medical school aspirant whose whereabouts had become the group’s defining collective concern since Bangkok, was assigned to the middle of our convoy. This was a precautionary arrangement. He rode a moped in a style that suggested physical confidence and a somewhat abstract relationship with the lane markings, and he had mentioned a moped accident some weeks prior in a way that he clearly intended to be reassuring and which had not, in fact, reassured anyone. He disappeared approximately forty minutes into the island tour, at a point where the road divided near some roadworks, and could not be found for the subsequent hour and a half. We searched the likely wrong turns. We waited at the fishing village that was the stated destination. He was at none of these places. He eventually appeared at the mall we had retreated to for food, having somehow navigated his own version of the route, entirely untroubled, wondering what the fuss was about.

The fruit farm was Naomi’s idea. Naomi was Australian, excellent company, and had a specific enthusiasm for fruit farms that the rest of the group met with patience and then, as the tour progressed, with diminishing patience. The farm was comprehensive in its coverage of Malaysian tropical fruit. It was not particularly interesting in any other respect. Naomi, to her credit, was also the first to conclude that it was not particularly interesting, which she did about twenty minutes before the tour allowed us to leave.

The karaoke bar was Jen’s idea, at eleven at night, after a day of considerable activity and several hours of excellent beer by the waterfront. The argument for going was that we would probably never be in this specific bar again, which is true of almost every bar you visit while travelling and which, as a justification for doing things, contains a logic that is difficult to refute without also undermining most of what travel is for. We went. The bar was local and not designed for tourists. The reception was warm in the way that local bars in Malaysia tend to be warm when strangers appear, which is to say genuinely rather than commercially. We sang things. I cannot account for all of them. The hangover in the morning was proportionate.

Penang is worth more time than the Bangkok to Bali itinerary allowed. George Town’s heritage district, the clan jetties where Chinese fishing communities built houses on stilts extending into the harbour and which have been continuously inhabited for over a century, the hawker centres where the food represents the full range of what the island’s mixed cultural history produced in the kitchen: all of these deserve the kind of attention that a single day of moped-based exploration doesn’t fully provide. I will go back. Probably not on a moped.