Set Adrift On Memory Bliss

Recreating the classic Malaysian road trip in a Mini Countryman Cooper S.

- Low Ka Wei

Back in the day, holidays meant piling into the back of the family car with the siblings and puttering across the border to exotic locations like Desaru or Cameron Highlands.

The North-South Expressway was a mere glint in the eye; getting anywhere was a slog on Malaysia’s trunk roads, which were crumbling, one-lane-in-each-direction affairs.

You had to watch out for three things: landslides, motorcycles with no headlights and Daredevil lorry drivers, who would pass each other at a speed differential of 1km per year, head-on collisions be damned. But we, the kids, would be oblivious to all this, plugged into our Walkman through a shared set of earphones. Fun times.

With multi-lane highways now criss-crossing our northern neighbour, such journeys are no longer as colourful today. So when the PR officer at Mini rang me up and asked if I would like to take a press car with a customer convoy up to Kuantan, taking the old road cutting diagonally across to the east coast, instead of the longer but faster highway via the capital, how could I say no?