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I had forgotten how green Penang was. I had forgotten, in the ten years I hadn’t been there, the way that the island always seemed drenched in greenness, in vegetation, which sprang recklessly from every nook and cranny. There is an air of careless abundance about Penang that no amount of construction can dampen. And that’s saying something. In Penang, a lot of building goes on, much of it needless and embarked on by greedy developers. Tower blocks stand empty, waiting for an undreamt of number of timeshares (Penang already has ample accommodation for its 1.2million population). And, all the while, towering above the coastline where most of the development goes on, there rises a great mound of seemingly impenetrable rain forest.

My love affair with Penang dates back to 1986. I had gone to Malaysia to teach a seminar on travel writing to Malaysian journalists and had invited Christopher Hitchens, the political columnist, to help me. We taught our seminar, some of it in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, some of it in Lumut where the Malaysian navy has a base, and then decided it was time for some r’n’r. Jon Swain, the celebrated Sunday Times journalist, who had reported on the Vietnam War, had long rhapsodised about Penang where he and others used to go to get away, and I was keen to go there. In particular, Jon would rave about a hotel called the Lone Pine which was right on the beach out at Batu Ferringhi (‘Foreigner’s Rock’ – is related to the Thai word for foreigner, farang. In Malay it actually means Portuguese). The Lone Pine - its name alone was enough to entice me.

Hitchens and I were in squashed in the back of a cab in KL (as Kuala Lumpur is always known) with Simon Winchester, now an incredibly famous and very successful author, then a lowly hack. We were discussing where we would stay in Penang. I was all for the Lone Pine. Winchester said, “No, the E. & O. [the legendary Eastern & Oriental hotel] is the only place.” Hitchens, whose first trip it was to Southeast Asia, had no views. When the two men got out the cab, the driver turned to me and said, “Excuse me, madam. I could not help overhearing. You must go to the Lone Pine.” So we did.

The reason for this lengthy preamble is that my love for Penang is inextricably linked to my passion for the Lone Pine. When I first saw the Lone Pine, I fell in love with it and with Penang. While not at all luxurious (even now, though it has been bought by the group which owns the E. & O.), it is supremely peaceful, the rooms are huge, the staff congenial and the sunsets superb. The name, however, is misleading: there is no lone pine, just a row of casuarina trees. Of course, like almost everything else in Penang, it has undergone some changes (the charming, old, single-storey building, where one used to take ones meals during those sudden tropical rainstorms or sit and read in a wicker armchair on the terrace, is now a conference centre – worst luck – and has been replaced by a jazzy, new, two-storey structure named, again misleadingly, the Bungalow), but I still cherish it. Hotels are the opposite of people: people grow old, but you still love them or you try to. Hotels get refurbished (often a more ruthless process even than a facelift), but you still love them or try to. Sometimes, of course, they are ruined out of all recognition and then you just have to be brave and recognise that it is time to move on.

The charm of Penang, where the British first established a base in Malaya, as it was then, in 1786, still has a lot to do with the whiff of colonial nostalgia that lingers in the air (and which the Lone Pine, established in 1948 and the first hotel on Batu Ferringhi, catered and still caters to). True, many of the street names in Georgetown (named after George III) have been changed to Malay names, but certainly the E. & O., now lavishly refurbished, continues to trade heavily on its colonial past. Under the Sarkie brothers, who also founded Raffles in Singapore and the Strand in Rangoon, it became the focus of local social life and a frequent setting for marriages between colonial civil servants and their English brides. It is still used for weddings. Indeed the hotel specialises in “signature” weddings, but these tend now to be flamboyant affairs between wealthy Malaysians vying to outdo one another. This trip, on my first day at the E. & O, at dusk a photo shoot was taking place by the pool. The model had been got up to look rather like a mermaid in transparent cream lace trousers, which ceased to be see-through round her upper thighs and bottom, a matching cream lace top, again part transparent, part solid, and a long, transparent veil. In the golden light of early evening, she draped herself languidly by the side of the pool, looking, frankly, somewhat ridiculous.

“Seen from the air, Penang floats like a small turtle – a total of 280 square kilometres – off the edge of Peninsular Malaysia, at the northern end of the Straits of Malacca” (from Old Penang, by Sarnia Hayes Hoyt). The island takes its name from the “pinang” or areca nut palm tree. This tree, commonly known as the betel-nut palm, still grows there. I don’t recall ever having seen Penang from the air, though, over the years, I must have arrived on the island by every means possible (except on foot). If you take the train, from KL’s majestic station or from Thailand, you arrive at Butterworth, from which you must cross to Penang itself either by ferry or across the Penang Bridge, the longest bridge in Asia and apparently the third longest in the world. 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. But being on the bridge itself is rather thrilling and rather faster. Either way the approach to Georgetown 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.

This time Georgetown seemed initially to bear little resemblance to the sleepy, raffish little town that I remembered. Where trishaws were once the norm for short trips round town, now you had to hunt for them (in Saigon, too, there are few cyclos left). Everyone takes cabs instead. There are now many tall buildings and shopping malls, some of them more gruesome than others. At all costs, avoid the dingy KOMTAR complex, which has hundreds of boutiques and restaurants and also two department stores and an amusement arcade. None the less, it seems the kind of place where you might be mugged and where rats scurry in the dark corners and seize any opportunity going. Another change is that evangelists appear to have established a sizeable foothold in Penang: on the drive in from the airport alone, we passed the Latter Rain Church (I had never heard of this before and later I looked it up on the web – according to its home page, “The Latter Rain is God's great end-time ministry. The Latter Rain is the Restoration of the Church and the Harvest of souls, the gathering together of His people to finally enter God's Kingdom on earth.” It emits a lively burst of music as you read on); the Island Glades Gospel Centre; the Moral Uplifting Society and presumably others whose names I missed. I’m sure they weren’t there before.

But I have often observed a goody-two-shoes atmosphere in Malaysia exemplified by signs such as “Cleanliness is Our Collective Responsibility” or posters demanding that you

“PREVENT AIDS LOVE YOUR FAMILY”

On the left were a loving couple looking as if they had stepped right out of middle-America in the 1950s over the words “Be Faithful To Your Partner”, and, on the right, a pair of Neanderthal teenagers shooting up over “Say No To Drugs.” (Although AIDS is not as common in Malaysia as some other Southeast Asians, the government is understandably anxious to curb the spread of the disease and drug trafficking is punishable by death. Penang, in the old days, had a fairly rackety reputation, but today only a complete idiot would think of ignoring the country’s anti-drug laws.)

Even the more traditional churches seemed to have gone in for a change of style: the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption sported a huge white banner which read “Welcome Home, Xavierians, 150 years of Touching Hearts.” And the Khoo Kongsi, the beautiful 'clan', or meeting, house for members of the Khoo clan, had been garishly restored in 2000 at a cost of 4.2million ringgit (1 ringgit is just under £1), and had added a Khoo Kongsi Multimedia Museum. Just to visit the temple now cost five ringgit.

But the streets, which make up the main Chinese quarter – Lebuh Pantai (formerly Beach Street), Lebuh Light, Jalan Kapitan Kling (formerly Lebuh Pitt) and Lebuh Chulia – also still form the main thoroughfare of modern Georgetown. They didn’t seem to have altered much. Still the same Chinese 'shophouses'; still the same torture at the Leow Foot Reflexology Center (“Menstruation or Pregnancy is Not Allowed To Massage”), but only twenty ringgit for the pain, which leaves you feeling strangely relaxed (or perhaps it’s just relief that the torture has stopped); still the same antique shops where once I found a 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. Still the same smells: durian (of which more later); frangipani; rotting vegetation; dried fish: curry; the mouth-watering odour of meat grilling in the open air; drains (there are still open drains running along the streets of Georgetown). The smells of the East are always the same: a unique blend of the delectable and the disgusting.

Sadly, fewer and fewer of the huge ornate old mansions along Jalan Raya Northam are still standing. These wonderful houses, colonial baroque, turreted, castellated, most of them gone romantically to seed, were a testament to a time when things were very different. Now the remaining few which are intact have been re-incarnated variously as Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, used car emporiums, the Penang 1st Singles Club and Dr. Woo's Specialist and Maternity Clinic. A few others are now owned and have been done up to the nines by rich Chinese businessmen.

I saw the inside of one of these houses when I was invited to a durian party. In Kuching, I had met a man, a Eurasian whose father was a policeman in Penang, and he - the father - invited me. Opinions 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 (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 guerrilla 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."

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 some years ago the daily 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. It is forbidden on airplanes and in most hotels. Both the Lone Pine and the luxurious Mutiara refused to allow it on the premises, with signs at the security gate saying, “Durian not allowed beyond this point.”

I disliked durian on first smell, never mind mouthful, but the party was something else. 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 our hostess, a Eurasian woman named Mabel, was amiably drunk and telling louche jokes.

An altogether different kind of old house is the indigo-blue Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, which was built by Thio Thiaw Siat, a Cantonese businessman, in the late nineteenth century and which won the UNESCO Conservation Award in 2000. It is now a state monument, but I first saw it before it was restored. Even then, in its dilapidated state, it was 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, that would once have been pulled by men rather than beasts or the bicycles of more recent years, drooping to the ground. It now also functions as an upmarket guesthouse with sixteen exquisite rooms complete with air conditioning, ensuite bathroom and a personal valet.

Bahasa Malaysia is the official language of Malaysia, but, thanks to the country’s ethnic diversity, English has become, faute de mieux, its lingua franca. Chinese, Malays and Tamils all communicate in English; the different kinds of Chinese (Foochow, Hakka, Teochiu, Fukien - or Hokkien - and Cantonese) use English to talk to each other as their dialects are mutually incomprehensible, and there are daily English-language newspapers. The New Straits Times runs regular columns designed to improve standards of fluency and command of popular idiom. For many Malaysians, English is as much their language as ours and, as such, has developed. To the British or American ear, Malaysian English may sometimes sound quaint, even kitsch. Phrases such as “the wee hours” frequently show up in the newspapers, often incongruously applied to accounts of unambiguously oriental events such as the letting off of violently noisy firecrackers to celebrate Chinese New Year, but Malaysian English has a vigour and life of its own that is appealing.

One afternoon, coming back to Batu Ferringhi from Georgetown, I made a list of the shops/restaurants/bars on the way. There was Slippery Senoritas; New Get Wave Hair Salon; Escargot Passion for Dinner; Craven Café; November Dogworld; Houseproud Asia; Buonofresh; Last Stop for Searching Finest Music; Private Passion Hairdressing Academy; Take Dat Photo; Blue Star Karaoke Lounge; Follow Me Green Tea, and – perhaps my all-time favourite – Deep Sea Seafood “CAN DO BLOODY GOOD FOOD AT A DINKY DI PRICE.” There is also a down-to-earth quality about every day life that is quite comforting: I was amused to read my horoscope in the New Straits Times: “Any articles of clothing taken to a dry cleaner today should not be left unless you can pick them up late afternoon. You will lose them otherwise.”

Penang is, if you like, in many ways, less Malay (and certainly less Islamic) than the rest of the country. Georgetown is still mainly Chinese, except for the older part of town to the west of Weld Quay, in the shadow of Kapitan Kling Mosque, which is predominantly Hindu. Its distance from KL, the fact that it was the first British settlement, the fact that many British soldiers who served in Malaya during the Emergency in the Fifties still return (at the Happy Garden Chinese restaurant, I met an elderly British man from Manchester who came every winter for ten weeks – he had been stationed in Penang in the late 1950s), its raffish past and recent past, which make it attractive to foreigners, all these combine to create an atmosphere that is both laid-back and laisser-faire.

This year the Malaysian Tourist Board’s slogan is “Malaysia Truly Asia”, but I often think that any journey in Asia is a search for reality, for what is truly Asia. In Penang, there are so many different layers and facets to the place that it is hard to work what it is really about. The night market at Batu Ferringhi, the main resort strip (and where the Lone Pine, just two storeys high, cowers between the other hotels, sky-scrapers all of them) sells endless designer rip-offs, just like along Bangkok’s Silom Road. As you fight your way through the punters looking for Prada, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Pierre Cardin, Addidas and Nike copies, it is hard to believe that you are in Asia. Or perhaps this is what Asia has become. It is difficult to decide which is more depressing: an entire continent devoted to producing brand-name rip-offs or the tourists plodding like sheep in search of such goods.

But, on the whole, gloomy thoughts are rare in Penang. On my last evening I went to have dinner at the Eden Seafood Village, perhaps the fanciest restaurant along the strip. It was as big as an airport hangar, but rather more garishly decorated. I walking past tanks the size of swimming pools (or, at least, the size of the pool at the Lone Pine before it came under its present management, who built a proper one) filled with live fish and crustaceans. A noisy folkloric show was taking place. I took a table as far away from it as possible, to avoid the noise and the possibility of being coerced into joining in. People were duly invited to join in, but only Chinese members of the audience accepted. The folkloric show was followed by Chinese pop music, energetically performed by two lithe women wearing tight clothes and too much make-up. It was difficult to decide which was preferable, the folkloric or the contemporary. Silence would have been golden.

As I sat there eating a very expensive dinner, I remembered the last time I had been in this restaurant: in 1990 with an English girlfriend who had left behind her husband and children to come to Malaysia. We had sat outside at a table as near as we could get to the sea (impossible this evening as it was raining hard). A cat had been playing on the beach, pouncing and diving and chasing some small almost invisible creature near the waves. It was a picture of self-contained contentment and it has stayed in my mind all these years. I love that about cats: the way they are so self-sufficient. Most cats in Southeast Asia have crooked tails as if they have been broken. I once asked a local vet about it. He said that it was genetic and recounted a Malaysian legend, which purported to explain the phenomenon. A Malaysian princess hadn’t wanted to wear her ring while swimming so she had put it on the cat’s tail and then tied a knot in the tail to prevent it sliding off.

But this cat, the perfect lone cat, had a straight tail and it waved and whipped in the night air.

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