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In Malaysia, it was the season for durian. As we drove up the west coast away from Kuala Lumpur and into the countryside, the rich, rotten reek of South East Asia's most prized fruit scented the air from the roadside stalls where great piles of the massive spiky green ovals lay in tumbled heaps. When we stopped for petrol, the boy filling the tank asked where we were headed. "To Perak," we answered." "Ah, then you are going to eat durians," he said.

The Malaysians, like most South East Asians, love durian which is regarded as a great delicacy. "Durian smell like hell, taste like heaven," a Thai friend used to say. But recently the New Straits Times reported that the Regent of Perak had called for research agencies to "come up with an odourless durian without affecting the quality and taste of the fruit if they wanted to penetrate the foreign market." Foreign tourists, he said, were put off by the fruit because of its strong aroma.

In Lumut, a tiny one-horse town on the coast in Perak where the Malaysian navy has its base, I sat next to a Chinese doctor at a dinner given to mark the retirement of two teachers from the local high school. The conversation turned again to durian as the doctor told me how to select a good one.

"First, choose a fruit that is light rather than heavy, then smell it for ripeness. Shake it to make sure the seed rattles because then it is not water-logged. Examine the spikes and see if there are any holes or insect marks because if there are, it could be rotten. Study the pattern of the spikes: they must not be close together. This will determine the number of pods inside. Check whether it is coming apart and make sure it is not blackened. If all these things are all right, then you can be certain that you have chosen well."

KL, as Kuala Lumpur (literally 'muddy estuary'), Malaysia's pretty verdant capital, is always called, was founded by a group of tin prospectors in the 1860s. It is a charming, if slightly dull, place where business takes pride of place and yuppies chatter into their mobile phones on street corners, just like they do in Hong Kong. There are plenty of beautiful tall modern buildings, many of them comfortable five-star hotels, others shopping malls or office blocks, all flanked by banks of tropical trees and flowers. There are some old houses left, more than in Singapore, but you have to hunt for them in among the skyscrapers. One building that does stick out, not like a sore thumb but more like a rose among thorns is, further to mix metaphors, the jewel in KL's colonial crown - the railway station.

Built by the British in 1911, the station is a splendid gleaming white fantasy of spires, minarets, arches and cupolas. Imagine the Taj Mahal crossed with Grand Central Station and you'll begin to get the idea. Once you have got over your jet-lag, it is from this magnificent folly that you should take a train to the Cameron Highlands - or anywhere else that takes your fancy, if only for the thrill of pulling out of one of the world's great railway stations.

The history on offer in the Cameron Highlands is of a very different order. You could argue that it is not really history at all but rather kitsch nostalgia. There are a number of hill-stations in Malaysia - as there are in any former European colony where the colonial masters couldn't take the heat in the summer months - but, from an atmospheric point of view, the Cameron Highlands is the largest and probably gives best value for money. It was from here that Jim Thompson, founder of the modern Thai silk industry and a former OSS officer, vanished in utterly mysterious circumstances whilst out walking one afternoon in the spring of 1967. No trace of him was ever found and his disappearance is even more puzzling than that of Lord Lucan who, at least, had a reason to wipe himself off the face of the earth.

The Cameron Highlands were liberally dotted with incongruous cottages and small houses with equally incongruous names like 'High Chaparel' and 'Dunroamin'. The British have a talent for this: in the village in Oxfordshire where I lived until recently, there was a house named, with similar inappositeness, 'Panther's Hill'. The jungle, where once tigers roamed, had been pushed back to make room for the manicured precision of a vast golf course. One morning I made a pilgrimage - if that is the word - to the house where Thompson was staying when he melted into thin air. 'Moonlight Cottage' now sported no less than six signs destined to deter the curious including one of a fierce dog and one that read "This house is a private residence. It is not a holiday home. It is not for renting or looking at." Of Thompson, predictably, there was no trace.

However, the relative cool, the jungle walks and Thompson apart, the main attraction of the Cameron Highlands is the rare opportunity to wallow in imperial nostalgia. Undoubtedly the best place for that perhaps largely British pleasure is Ye Olde Smokehouse. Graham Greene, who spent three months in Malaya (as the country was known until 1963) in 1951 during the Emergency, wrote of "the hideous architecture of nostalgia" and I doubt that he would have had much time for Ye Olde Smokehouse. A half-timbered mock-Tudor edifice of no great architectural merit, it was built in 1937 by a homesick Brit. It is now owned by a Mr. Lee who, if a black-and-white photograph hanging in the bar is to be believed, is enough of an Anglophile to have sent his son to prep school in England. In among the little fair-haired, blue-eyed boys making up the Rugby 1st XV at Oakley Hall stands young R. C-F. Lee, set firmly apart by his black-hair, his brown-eyes and his unmistakably oriental features. Culture shock bites hardest here. On trips back to the old country, Mr. Lee or one of his predecessors have harvested, along with old copies of Country Life and The Field, all manner of kitsch memorabilia ranging from polished horse brasses and strings of plastic onions to subway signs bearing the names of such resolutely British landmarks as Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square and Oxford Circus. On the menu such staples of British cuisine as Beef Wellington, steak & kidney pie and oxtail stew make their appearance. It is all ridiculous yet somehow comforting. No sane person could feel at home here and yet it is homely.

From the Cameron Highlands to Penang via Taiping is a drive of some four hours (it is faster coming down from the Highlands) costing MS$140. An elderly Malay taxi driver in a big comfortable brown Mercedes of similar vintage drove me first to Taiping, a misty little town near the border of Perak and Kedah whose main claims to fame are its beautiful lake gardens and excellent ethnographic museum which houses the skull of an elephant who, as the story goes, tried to protect his herd by attacking an oncoming train. Taiping, the 'town of everlasting peace', is not on any recognised tourist route and therefore rarely visited but I liked the sound of it. Mr. Hashim drove slowly and confidently, tapping his hand on the steering wheel to the soothing beat of songs like "Tell Laura I Love Her" and "Sealed With A Kiss". We cruised through a ramshackle landscape of broken-down old cars - ancient Ford Poplars, Morris Minors, Hillman Imps and Austin Healeys from the 1950s, the golden age of British motoring - and unbridled vegetation; past Chinese cemetries with their sprawling elaborate gravestones, past Hindu temples and mosques festooned with Muslim prayer flags, past the advertisements for Kickapoo Joy Juice and Guinness Stout Is Good For You and past plantations - endless plantations of rubber, tapioca, sago, oil palm, coconut. Almost everything you eat in Malaysia comes from a palm of some kind or another. Pale pink Morning Glory blooms twined through the dark-green foliage. The bloated corpse of a dog lay by the roadside. A snake swam alongside in a muddy ditch, his head clearing the surface. Every hundred yards or so a sign would warn of the dangers of dangerous driving - a skull at the wheel - or drugs - a skull and cross-bones. Outside the prison in Taiping, a lively little sketch depicted a guard with a rifle pointed at a man, his hands flung in the air, his feet dancing under him as if on hot coals. The driver translated the words above: they meant 'Forbidden Area - Keep Out'.

The museum, which looked rather like a Rhinish castle, was worth the visit. Along with the elephant, its exhibits included a huge skeleton of a tapir and the skeleton of a tiger and also a 1915 crocodile measuring 24 foot and eight inches. The lake gardens, nourished by the highest annual rainfall in Peninsular Malaysia, were hazy and immaculate. We pushed on to Penang.

Penang, where the British first established a base in Malaya in 1786, is my favorite place in the country. Were I to get to know Kuching or Tioman as well, I might learn to love them equally but, in the meantime, my heart belongs to Penang.

If possible arrive by car or train, rather than plane, so as to enjoy the crossing from the mainland to the island proper. If you go by ferry (which tends to be slow on account of queues to board the ferry), you can admire from a distance the graceful silhouette of the Penang Bridge, the longest bridge in Asia and apparently the third longest in the world. But being on the bridge itself is rather thrilling and rather faster. Either way the approach to Georgetown, Penang's seedy charming little capital, is to be recommended. I was startled one year to hear loud bangs and see puffs of smoke as we drew near. It was the fifteenth day after Chinese New Year and the occasion for the setting off of many firecrackers.

Though Georgetown is one of the most appealing towns in Asia, I rarely stay there, preferring to base myself out at Batu Ferringhi, meaning 'Foreigner's Rock', a strip of coast on the northern end of the island. This is the resort part of the island and not particularly attractive (Penang's beaches do not begin to compare to those in the Caribbean or even those on the east coast of Malaysia) but I have a long-standing attachment to the Lone Pine hotel, the oldest and simplest of the hotels there. I once recommended the Lone Pine in an article and subsequently received a long dull letter of complaint so I am not going to make that mistake again. People must make up their own minds. I love it: it is supremely peaceful, the rooms are huge, the staff congenial and the sunsets superb.

There seems little point in staying in one of these enormous high-rise developments. For that money, you should book into the E. & O. in Georgetown, sister to Raffles in Singapore and once one of the great hotels of the East, now a little run-down and gloomy but with a beautiful terrace adorned with cannons and an aviary and a good view across the North Channel and enough old-world charm to redeem it. Now closed for renovation.

There are almost too many 'tourist attractions' in Penang and it is usually too hot to traipse around checking them out. You should not, however, miss the beautiful Khoo Kongsi, the 'clan' or meeting house for members of the Khoo clan. Just as the cream-and-ochre E. & O. represents the best in colonial architecture in Georgetown, this is the finest traditional structure on the island. Also worth a visit is the early nineteenth-century Anglican church of St. George, a graceful white building in the classical style set in beautiful grounds, and the Penang Buddhist Association which has a pagoda like a frosted tiered cake in the forecourt.

However, I would be perfectly happy if I never again saw the Temple of the Azure Cloud or 'snake temple' (doped vipers draped over incense burners and then your shoulders for photo opportunities) or the Kek Lok Si Temple (the Buddhist Monastery of Supreme Bliss where Buddhism meets Disneyworld with unfortunate results). I have never succeeded in taking the funicular up Penang Hill - the queues were always prohibitively long - but, if you don't mind waiting, I imagine that it is pleasant enough.

But, as in Malacca, most of Penang's pleasures are unexpected or at least unplanned. I love the streets of Georgetown with their rows of Chinese 'shophouses'; the antique shops where once I found a beautiful rose-gold Bulova watch in working order; the second-hand bookshops; the stationers who will pack up your purchases for posting; the shoe menders where you can get your sandals fixed in fifteen minutes for as many cents and the batik salesmen. I love particularly the old houses and the not so-old ones: the Thirties extravaganzas of the Cathay Hotel on Lebuh Leith and other marvellous buildings now given new - and inferior lives - as Kentucky Fried Chicken or used car emporiums. Another has been reincarnated as the Penang 1st Singles Club and yet another as Dr. Woo's Specialist and Maternity Clinic.

Opposite the Cathay stands a splendid and somewhat disturbing building whose faded violet facade I have often admired. This time, thanks to the good offices of my friend, David Ling, the most efficient PR man in KL, I was able to see inside. Known either as the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion or Thio Thiaw Siat (the latter is the name of the man who built the house), it is now slowly being restored but, even in its present dilapidated state, it is possible to get an idea of the way in which a rich man lived at the time of its construction over a century ago. According to Lynn Pan, author of Sons of the Yellow Emperor, the story of the overseas Chinese, it was "a mansion large enough ... to house nine generations of future descendants". The outside was misleading as to its size. Inside, it seemed to go on and on through rooms and stairways and courtyards. In one enormous dusty salon, five rickshaws stood at one end of the room, their shafts, which would once have been pulled by men rather than beasts or the bicycles of more recent years, drooping to the ground

It was in Penang, where a colonial mentality still lingers on and middle-aged women have World War II names like Enid and Mabel, that I first tasted durian. In Kuching, I had met a man, a Eurasian whose father was a policeman in Penang, and he - the father - invited me to a durian party. Opinions do differ about durian. Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, after whom the famous hotel was named, said the taste resembled "eating strawberries in a smelly public lavatory". But the writer, Anthony Burgess, whose trilogy The Long Day Wanes is perhaps the best novel - or novels, though they are now published in one volume - ever written about Malaya, used apparently to claim that a liking for the soft creamy flesh of the durian was the test by which a true orientalist stood or fell and Colonel F. Spencer Chapman, a British officer who spent three years in the Malay jungle fighting a guerilla war against the Japanese during the 1940s, wrote "They are simply delicious, by far the best food I have eaten anywhere: a quintessence of strawberries, bananas, pineapple, cream, and custard with the texture of batter - and yet with a savoury tang of onion and Stilton cheese and a faint suggestion of drains."

I disliked durian on first smell, never mind mouthful, but the party was something else. It was held in one of the huge ornate old houses along Jalan Raya Northam. Colonial baroque, turreted, castellated, half of them gone romantically to seed, the rest owned and done up to the nines by rich Chinese businessmen, these survive magnificently, a testament to a time when things were very different. Inside things were perhaps not quite so different. There was still a fleet of vintage cars in the garage and a gold-plated 1950s Rolls Royce still waited under the front porch. Dinner had umpteen courses washed down with neat Scotch from the bottles of Black & White sitting on the table. The house was vast, the party uproarious and the hostess amiably drunk and telling louche jokes. It was an astonishing sight and not really typical of Malaysia - though perhaps of certain aspects of Penang. I find instead that, when I punch my tape of cheap pop music into the car stereo, it is the sun-washed streets of Malacca that come back to haunt me.

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