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By Mihar Dias September 2025
Growing up in Alor Setar in the 1950s, Penang felt impossibly far away. A hundred kilometres down the old trunk road may not sound like much today, but for a child whose world stretched no farther than the Kedah River, the island might as well have been overseas.
The highlight of that journey was always the ferry. First came the wait—long, sweaty hours in the queue at Butterworth terminal.
Occasionally, we would step out of my uncle’s car, only to plant our bare feet on sheets of belacan drying along the roadside. The smell was unforgettable. My father, never missing a chance at a joke, would say, “That’s why they call it Butterworth—the worst butter comes from here.” For years, I half-believed him.
The ferry itself was no joy either—dirty, sooty, and crammed with rickety cars and lorries heading for Georgetown.
Yet to my ten-year-old eyes, it was magnificent. I had never seen a body of water as wide as the channel. Afraid I might get seasick, my parents handed me seasickness tablets, the same kind pilgrims took for their voyage to Mecca. As it turned out, the crossing was calm and short, but for me, it was a first glimpse of how large the world beyond Kedah could be.
The second time I rode the ferry, I was nineteen and headed to sit for my SAT at the U.S. Consulate on Beach Street. That short ride across the channel felt momentous, carrying me one step closer to a college education in New York. The ferry, unknowingly, became part of my passport to the world.
Years later, when I returned to work in Penang in the 1970s, the ferries were part of my life again. Every fortnight I would take one back to Alor Setar to see my family. By then, they were more modern, cleaner, and sturdier, but each crossing still carried an echo of my boyhood awe.
Then came the bridges, and with them, the ferries slowly slipped into memory. They retired quietly, their engines silenced, their decks emptied of lorries and cars.
And yet, this Malaysia Day, nostalgia sails again. One of the grand old dames of the sea—the Pulau Pinang—has been reborn as the world’s first floating ferry museum. Docked at Tanjung City Marina, Weld Quay, she is now open daily from 9 AM to 10 PM (last entry at 9 PM). https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FLKDpWncv/
Visitors can wander four decks of history, explore the engine rooms, view artefacts, and stand on the rooftop for the same seascape that once made a ten-year-old boy think he was crossing an ocean. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FLKDpWncv/
I long to step aboard once more, not just to remember the soot and belacan, but to relive the magic of those crossings—when Penang was still a distant dream, and the ferry was the bridge between my small world and the promise of something larger.
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