Three days in Ipoh: Malaysia's best breakfast, in the town everyone else drives past
Two nights in the old town, with the tin-boom streets on foot and the cave temples and a ruined castle a short drive out.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Ipoh
- Places
- 7 across 3 days
Ipoh got rich on tin. The Kinta Valley held one of the largest alluvial deposits anywhere, the Chinese and British companies who dug it out built themselves a town of banks and clubs and a railway station like a small palace, and then the international tin market collapsed in the mid-1980s and the whole thing stopped.
For twenty years the old town was half empty. What brought it back was not tourism but food: Ipoh has a reputation among Malaysians for dim sum, bean sprout chicken and a coffee roasted in margarine that exists nowhere else, and people drive two hours from Kuala Lumpur on a Saturday to eat it.
The other reason to come is geological. The town sits in a bowl of limestone karst, the same rock that makes Guilin and Krabi look the way they do, and the caves inside those hills have been Chinese temples for over a century. Two nights covers the town and the hills without hurrying.
Highlights
- White coffee at a shop that has been arguing with its rival across the street since the 1930s
- The Hakka miners' club, a private gambling and opium house restored room by room
- Kek Lok Tong, a cave temple that opens onto a garden of limestone spires at the back
- Kellie's Castle, a Scottish planter's mansion abandoned unfinished when he died in Lisbon
- Dim sum at seven in the morning, ordered from trolleys, in a hall that is already full
Where to stay
Ipoh, two nights
Stay in the Old Town, west of the Kinta river, in one of the converted shophouses around Jalan Sultan Yussuf and Concubine Lane. Everything colonial is within four hundred metres, the coffee shops are around the corner, and the railway station is a ten minute walk.
New Town, on the east bank, is where the murals and a lot of the newer restaurants are, and it is five minutes over the bridge. The malls and hotels further out have nothing to recommend them unless you are driving.
Day by day
Day 1 in Ipoh
The tin town, from the station to the miners' club
The train sets the tone. Ipoh's station was finished in 1917 by the same British architect who did Kuala Lumpur's, all white arches and domes, and it has a hotel on the upper floor that has been running since it opened. Walk out of the front door and the neoclassical town hall faces you across the road.
Then go and see what the tin actually paid for. The Hakka miners who did the digging had a club of their own on Jalan Bijeh Timah, four floors of gambling, opium and a hidden staircase, and it has been restored so precisely that the mahjong tables are laid out mid-game. It runs by pre-booked tour only, free, and slots go a week ahead.
- 15:00
Ipoh Railway Station
ArchitectureWhite, domed and far too grand for the traffic it now handles, which is a handful of ETS trains a day. Walk through the colonnade at the front and look up at the hotel windows.
- 15:45
Birch Memorial Clocktower
VisitA clock tower for J.W.W. Birch, the first British Resident of Perak, who was killed in 1875 after eleven months in the job. The panels around the base are a Victorian mural of human progress, and one figure was painted out in the 1950s.
- 16:45
Han Chin Pet Soo
CultureThe Hakka tin miners' private club, founded 1893 and closed to outsiders for its entire working life. Book the tour online before you arrive; it lasts an hour and it is the best hour in Ipoh.
- 18:15
Nam Heong Coffee Shop
EatOne of the two shops that claim to have invented white coffee, directly across the street from the other one. Order it iced, take an egg tart, and pick a side.
- 19:00
Dinner in Old Town
EatBean sprout chicken is the dish and the two long-established places for it are on the same street, both busy from six. Rice, chicken, a plate of sprouts, and nothing else on the table.
With more time: Concubine Lane and the two alleys beside it are two minutes away and full at night. The Kinta Riverfront Walk is the quieter option, lit up along the water, and takes twenty minutes end to end.
Day 2 in Ipoh
Cave temples in the limestone, and a castle nobody finished
The hills around Ipoh are what is left when a limestone plain dissolves, and every one of them is full of holes. Chinese communities have been putting shrines in those holes since the 1890s, and the results are the strangest religious buildings in Malaysia: painted Buddhas under stalactites, staircases cut into rock, and daylight arriving through a hole in the roof.
Two of the best sit on opposite sides of the same hill south of the city, twenty minutes away. Do them in the heat of the day, because inside a cave the heat is somebody else's problem.
Before that, drive half an hour further south to a ruin with a better story than most castles. A Scottish rubber planter began building it in 1915, imported the craftsmen and the tiles from Madras, and died of pneumonia in Lisbon in 1926 while buying the lift. His family sold up and went home and it has stood roofless ever since.
- 09:00
Kellie's Castle
OtherHalf an hour south at Batu Gajah. Unfinished, unroofed, and reputedly haunted, which is a large part of the local appeal. The Hindu temple the planter built for his workers stands in the next field.
- 12:00
Lunch back in Gunung Rapat
EatThe kampung at the foot of the cave hills has a row of Chinese coffee shops doing noodles and yong tau foo. Cheap, unglamorous and exactly right before a temple.
- 13:30
Kek Lok Tong
VisitThe newer and calmer of the two, with a long cavern of Buddhas that opens at the far end onto a landscaped garden ringed by limestone cliffs. Free, and usually almost empty on a weekday.
- 15:30
Sam Poh Tong
ReligiousThe older cluster on the other side of the hill, three temples in a row, thick with joss smoke and known for its tortoise pond. The reclining Buddha in the first chamber is the one people photograph.
With more time: Perak Tong, six kilometres north of the city, is the third of the great cave temples: forty-odd statues, wall paintings by Chinese artists, and 450 steps through the rock to a viewpoint over the valley. Add it if you have a driver for the day.
Day 3 in Ipoh
Dim sum, murals, and the train south
Get up for the dim sum. Ipoh's halls open around six and run on trolleys rather than order slips, which means you point at what goes past and stop when the table is full. By nine the best steamers are gone and by eleven the places are closing.
Then cross the river into New Town for the murals. They were painted in 2014 by the Lithuanian artist who did Penang's, and the Ipoh set is better: a hummingbird on a plain wall, an old man drinking coffee, a paper plane, all sized to the shophouses they are on.
- 07:00
Dim sum at seven
EatTrolleys, small plates, no menu. Char siu bao, siu mai, chee cheong fun, and stop the tea trolley twice. Around 25 ringgit for two people, thoroughly full.
- 09:00
Mural Art’s Lane
VisitA lane of murals on the back walls of the old New Town shophouses, put together by a local art teacher. Twenty minutes to walk, and the smaller ones scattered around Old Town are worth hunting on the way back.
- 11:00
Restoran Li Heng Fatt
EatHor hee, a clear soup of springy fishballs and fish cake with your choice of noodles, plus a chilli dip. The last thing to eat before the station and about six ringgit.
- 12:30
ETS out
TravelTrains south to Kuala Lumpur run about every two hours and north to Butterworth rather less often. The platform is a five minute walk from Old Town, so leave twenty minutes.
With more time: With a later train, the Darul Ridzuan Museum in a tin tycoon's mansion covers the whole boom and bust in an hour, and Gua Tempurung, the biggest cave in peninsular Malaysia, is 40 minutes south and does wet caving trips through an underground river.
Before you go
Getting there and around
The ETS train is the way in. Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh takes about two and a half hours, Butterworth for Penang about two, and both arrive in the middle of town at a station worth arriving at. Book a few days ahead; the ETS sells out at weekends.
The old town is walkable and everything else needs a Grab, which costs three or four ringgit a hop and ten to fifteen for the cave temples. If you plan to do the caves and Kellie's Castle in one day, hiring a car with a driver for four hours is cheaper than five separate rides.
Eating, and the timing of it
Ipoh is a breakfast town. Dim sum halls open at six and are picked over by nine; the famous coffee shops are busiest between seven and ten and some shut in the early afternoon. Plan to eat properly first thing and lightly later.
The dishes that belong to Ipoh are nga choy kai, poached chicken with the local fat bean sprouts, said to grow that way because of the limestone water; hor hee, a fishball noodle soup; and white coffee, where the beans are roasted in palm-oil margarine and served over condensed milk. Caramel custard, a leftover from the British, is on every dessert list.
The cave temples
They are working temples, free to enter, with donation boxes. Shoes stay on except in the inner shrines, shoulders and knees covered is polite, and photographs of the altars are fine but not of people praying.
The caves are 20 degrees cooler inside than out, which makes the middle of the day the best time to be in them. That is the opposite of the usual advice in Malaysia and it works.
Ipoh is the sort of place that rewards low expectations. There is no single monument here, no view everybody photographs, and the town does not particularly care whether you come.
What it has is a limestone hill with a temple inside it, a miners' club preserved down to the mahjong tiles, and a bowl of noodles at seven in the morning that is worth the train fare on its own.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Ipoh worth a stop?
- If you like eating and old buildings, very much. It is the least touristed of Malaysia's heritage towns and the only one where the restaurants are full of locals rather than visitors. If you want beaches or nightlife, it is not for you.
- How long do I need in Ipoh?
- Two nights. One day for the old town, one for the cave temples and Kellie's Castle, and a morning for dim sum before the train. A single night works if you skip the castle.
- What is Ipoh white coffee?
- Beans roasted in palm-oil margarine instead of sugar, which produces a lighter, less bitter roast, then served with condensed milk. White refers to the roast, not the colour of the drink. Two shops on the same street both claim to have started it and the argument is now about ninety years old.
- Can I do Ipoh as a day trip from Kuala Lumpur?
- You can, and the train makes it possible, but you would arrive after the dim sum has gone and leave before dinner. The town is at its best early. Stay a night.
- How does Ipoh fit into a Malaysia trip?
- It sits directly on the rail line between Kuala Lumpur and Penang, so it costs you nothing in backtracking. Two hours from Kuala Lumpur, two hours on to Butterworth for George Town. Copy this into the planner and drop it between the two.