I went to Bukit Tinggi but immediately hate the place. It is the same old and uninspiring fake old French town. That shall be my next rant. Tired of looking at people posing with the fake facade, or eat at any of their overpriced but lousy looking foods, plus super expensive drinks (a can of Yeo’s drink cost RM6! even from their mini-markets), I decided to Google for Bentong foods. I know we are very near Bentong.
We drove to Bentong around 4 pm after I was done researching what Bentong has to offer. And I was so glad I visited the place. Bentong has been in my childhood memories because one of my cousin (who is very, very much older than me) was in the army and based in Bentong. He used to tell my brothers stories of his days in Bentong when communism was around.
I didn’t bring my DSLR with me but I managed to grab some photos with my Nokia N97. The town has some very old buildings and it is sort of nostalgic to walk down the pekan streets lined with pasar malam foods. They have yu char koay stalls, dessert stalls, pau, char koay teow and some very yummy looking chicken rice stalls.
Our first destination is this Kow Po icecream place. A lot of people and including celebrities stopped by Kow Po for homemade local flavour ice-creams. It is near the bus-stop when you enter Bentong town.
Though I am not an ice-cream person, I enjoyed the various flavours available. I ordered peanut butter and coconut flavour. My son had vanilla and banana flavour. Surprisingly, the icecream is nothing like our local ais cream potong or sorbet kind of flavour but very smooth and creamy.
They also serve ais kacang and cendol. Hubby had cendol with a scoop of pandan flavour ice-cream. I think pandan makes brilliant flavour in ice cream. Wonder why we don’t make this ice cream more often?
After we had our ice-cream, we went to the biggest shopping mall in Bentong and bought all the drinks, juices and instant cup mee we need to get our revenge over RM6/can Yeo’s drink. Well, it is sort of ‘feel good’ that we could buy RM1.05/can so that Vincent Tan doesn’t earn our RM6. (in the end, we carted back the drinks to Penang dohhh)
By then, it was evening and we took a drive around the Chinese village. I actually felt so amused to see so many apeks selling Rocket News (DAP publication) along the roadside and one even went from table to table just to sell Rocket.
Bentong is famous for its wantan mee and curry wild boar. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the place though it is on my GPS. However, we saw a few Chinese chu-char shops which are packed with locals. So, we stopped at one and had this delicious steam fei-chou-yee (african fish) for only RM20. Hmm…the day before, we had at Cheras and I bet it costs 4x more. There are other dishes as well but I have totally forgotten the shop’s name.
Overall, we had an enjoyable evening in Bentong before we drove up to Bukit Tinggi again. I think it is only about 30-40 minutes drive between the two places. I drank my beer and said to myself, “Go fly kite, Vincent, beer is cheaper than your miserable RM6/can Yeo’s.” Sigh…I know I am over obsessive with Vincent blood sucking venture but really, there is absolutely nothing interesting in Bukit Tinggi. If you are going to go that far, go donate to Lim Goh Tong better.