Jenjarom

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The village of Jenjarom is predominantly Hokkien and it is about an hour's drive away from Kuala Lumpur. The famous Hokkien families who lived here were Tan, Yang, Ang and Gan. This village was set up in the 1950s during the Malayan Emergency to segregate rural Chinese villages from the Communist insurgents within Malaya under the Briggs Plan launched by Sir Henry Gurney. Shockingly, Jenjarom was well-known for its "bad boy" image; it has a reputation of gangsterism, gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking. Today it is known as The Happy Village!

Heritaste makes her own peanut candy. We had to pay a visit and purchase to try.

Downtown Jenjarom

I read in Google that there is a very famous banana fritter stall just opposite the school. A must try. So I hunted for this stall. Walked all around the school and found a fried chicken stall and a fritter stall but no bananas! Looked around and decided to walk towards a Chinese temple. Opposite the temple, right at the corner of some shop houses, I spotted "Pisang Tanduk" or Horn Plantain. Walla... the famous banana fritter stall. People were queuing up to purchase the fritters. The couple couldn't fry up the fritters quick enough. People were buying RM20 to take away and some ordered to be eaten at the coffee shop. So imagine their surprise faces when I said I only wanted 2 pieces to try and not the usual 20 pieces they were so used of listening to!!! THEY WERE VERY GOOD!

Ban Siew Keng temple is a Taoist temple. It is situated along Jalan Sungai Buaya, on the way to the more famous and grand Dong Zen Temple. This temple is beautiful but more interesting were the food stalls in front of the temple and the food shops on the opposite side of the food stalls.

The tastiest Coconut Shake in the world is found here!

This is the ever famous Fo Guang Shan Dong Zen Temple in Jenjarom. I prefer to call it Dong Zen, simpler and less headachy! It sits on 16 acres of well maintained land. There is a School of Buddhism here where monks lived. A visit to this temple during Chinese New Year is a MUST and has become a tradition to the locals here because of its gigantic lantern and floral exhibition.

The Garden

First character on the lantern is "Phin" and second character is "An" . Put together and it means Safe and Sound.

Food court

The Zen place

Mango Frost - yummy

I believed the whole Chinese nation of Malaysia was there on the last weekend of Chinese New Year (before Chap Goh Meh). The place was literally crawling with humans. Not very nice to walk around when there were too many people everywhere; taking photos were difficult. And ohhhhh the TOILETS! (Use your imagination). Food? Plentiful but queues were long so you need to be super duper tolerant.. Also, the traffic jam was horrendous when it was time for us to get outta there. I have never seen that many tourist buses in my life, along that small road. My next blog entry will be the Dong Zen temple at night. You will see its magnificence.