Gluttony and regrets

THE holidays are supposed to be fun and relaxing. But why do we always end up feeling we need another holiday just to recover from the first one? This is exactly how I am feeling right now after spending four days in my hometown in Penang.

I have done nothing except sleep since coming back. Even the cat is angry with me. I was so exhausted that I ignored all his meows for attention. To show his displeasure, he is ignoring me in return when I called out for him.

This holiday is an annual pilgrimage my wife and I make. We go more for the food than the sights. We simply love the hawker food there. For four days, we went all over the island savouring some of our favourites. We have been doing this for the past ten years since I started driving.

Driving around Penang required vigilance. Narrow roads, the sheer number of motorcycles and aggressive drivers made it a nerve-wracking experience. My wife noted that she was stressed out by the disorderly ways the vehicles weaved in and out around us although she was not driving.

One mistake we never learn from all those years is squeezing too much into each day. We always overestimated the amount of food we could eat, the time and effort needed to move from one place to another and our fitness.

We could not help it. There were simply too many choices and too little time to savour all of them. I made a three-page itinerary before we started. They were places of food with tastes and flavours we could not get anywhere else. In the end, we did not even complete half of the list in the first page.

At the same time, I took the opportunity to practise my Hokkien with the hawkers when ordering food. The dialect in Penang is markedly different from those spoken elsewhere. Mine has become rusty due to the lack of practice with Cantonese being the dominant dialect in the Klang Valley.

The weather was another factor. The humidity and tropical heat wore us down in a jiffy particularly when we had to alternate frequently between the cool comfort of the car air-conditioning and stinging rays of the sun.

I have to use a toilet every three hours and most of the places do not have one I could use. My time out was limited by the volume the diaper could hold. Because of that, I cut down on fluids and suffered dehydration as a result.

The exhaustion, hectic itinerary and crazy traffic aside, we had fun while we were in Penang. Our hotel was just across the road from the seafront along the picturesque Gurney Drive. I took a few deep breaths each time I stepped out. The balmy sea breeze was surprisingly invigorating.

This was probably the last time I saw this place as how I remembered it from my childhood. Reclamation works have started along the entire stretch of the foreshore for a massive mixed development project that would change the landscape forever.

I have many fond memories of Gurney Drive. My earliest memories were enjoying ice cream cones under the shade of the towering casuarina trees with my father and digging for ‘siput remis’ at the beach with my mother which she would than take home and stir fry with soy sauce and red chillies.

In the later years, my parents took early morning walks from one end of the seafront to the other. After the walks, we would adjourn to a coffee shop nearby for a hearty meal of bak kut teh or dim sum which defeated the purpose of the exercise in the first place.

When I was in secondary school, my friends and I used to hang out here in the evenings. Our favourite spot was by a food truck selling hotdogs and burgers. Amidst the aroma of sizzling burgers and salty smell of the sea, we talked about girls, schools and our plans for the future.

While waiting for the exam results after Form 5, we whiled away our nights laying supine on a waste water outlet that jutted out to the sea and looked up at the night sky. In between taking drags off a cigarette, we contemplated about life. That landmark too will be gone when the reclamation project is completed.

I guess the scenery will be drastically different when we go there for our holiday again next year. In time, all the places along this road that make up my memories will be swallowed up by development. The paradise I used to call home is fast turning into a concrete jungle. Good or bad, progress inevitably destroys some of the things we hold dear.

I wished I had made an effort to explore the entire stretch of Gurney Drive for one last time when I was there. If nothing else, it is just to soak in what is left of the familiar spots for one last time and take some shots for posterity. If only I had not been so gluttonous and wore myself out by chasing after food from one place to another.