Luckily a taxi came and stopped. I had to pay a bit of course but not much. The main thing is I reached Tangkak before dusk...
This means I have enough time and light to catch fairly good pictures with the cheap digital camera I got. The interesting (and rather strange for me!) thing about Tangkak is the amount of textile it got...
A look towards Gunung Ledang...
Otherwise, what features are the textile shops...
One after another...
More and more...
So what's the deal with Tangkak being a textile town? Frankly I have no idea... I remember the times I went past the town to get to Gunung Ledang just after my school days more than 20 years ago and it was not like this... I remember plying the same route a few times after graduating from London and returned to Malaysia in 1995 and I'm sure I don't notice any development related to textiles.
Perhaps I missed the fact as often my eyes are set on just the beautiful peaks of Gunung Ledang whenever around. All I know is, I was already working as a journalist with The New Straits Times ( I started in 1996) when I came across newspaper articles saying Tangkak is the TEXTILE CAPITAL OF MALAYSIA! And when I mentioned this to some friends, they were already hatching plans on making a day trip to Tangkak for some shopping. Apparently they've known about this for some time...
What? How did this came around? What did I miss? Furthermore, how did Tangkak turned out like that? As far as I'm concerned, except for it's vicinity to Gunung Ledang, Tangkak is in the middle of nowhere.... There's no ports around, no textile factories, so how did it become the main textile retail centre in the whole of Malaysia? How did it manage to sell textiles from as far as China and India, even Europe at an unbeatably cheap price? How?
I tried to google old articles on the matter. Apparently there's many kept and refered to (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, refered or referred as both have millions of listings when googled...) by some Websites but too bad, they're incomplete because the full articles are lost within the eletronic archives of the newspapers, accesible perhaps only to its staff. The only bits I could find repeat the same gist: "The town of Tangkak is known as the ‘Textile Town’ of Malaysia, offering prices that are substantially lower than those in other cities. The range of fabrics and upholstery are endless, with some being produced locally while others being imported from Asian countries and Europe." I guess that should speak volumes by itself.
Whatever, I decided to spend the night in Tangkak. This is a picture of Gunung Ledang (again?) from the reasonably cheap hotel I stayed at...
I checked out at noon and walked around. A look at the police station...
The main road leading to Muar, aptly known as Jalan Muar, of course...
The older parts of Tangkak. I always find such wooden shops alluring...
Who says wooden shop don't have style... I like this shop selling religious books and such...
And finally, a look along the five-foot walk of the wooden shoprow.
Soon enough, I walked out towards the bus station and immediately got a bus to Melaka which was on its way out. I guess this ends the Johor stories. A reflection on what happened from Segamat to Muar and including a thought or two on the trips to Gunung Ledang and Tangkak will be made later in blogspot CATATAN SI MERAH SILU . Go enjoy life... Cheers!
p/s: This should be my 155th posting in this blogspot.... Yeay!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment