Imagine a beautiful Malaysian hillside, covered with that mysterious deep green jungle. Perhaps you’ll picture a tea estate, miles of rolling hills and tea plants, and possibly some colonial style buildings, relic of a past long gone in which the British retreated up these cool slopes to escape the heat and humidity of the plains. That’s more or less what you expect when you head out to the Malaysian highlands. What you don’t expect to find is a continental European style ‘town’ hiding away amidst the peaks.
Well, this is (sort of) just what we found when we eagerly headed up one weekend to visit Colmar, ostensibly modelled after Colmar in Alsace, France. I’ve visited the French version, a beautiful ancient town, and so I was full of anticipation about paying a call on its twin here in Malaysia. Surely I wasn’t going to be disappointed?
After parking the car in a fake castle, which I guess should have alerted me somewhat, we headed down the road to the town itself. If I’d been willing to make allowances for the carpark castle, my critical eyes were now fully peeled, and before we’d gone fully 50 metres those critical eyes were having a field day. “Wrong!”, I cried on spotting the drawbridge lined with fluttering flags, which we would have to cross to enter Colmar. “Inauthentic!”, on seeing the moat curving away below.
To be fair though there is a river in real Colmar, so full marks for going to the effort of actually creating a waterway, and wait! What’s that down below. Swans?! Unheard of in Malaysia, there on the moat were a pair of white swans. Watching them regally gliding along I allowed my critical stance to soften, just a little. Clearly someone has been paying attention to the details, I thought, nostalgically.
I just hope those swans are enjoying their unexpectedly tropical lifestyle. Not sure how they are coping with the monkeys, but at least the tigers are fake. This one scared me to death lurking in the bushes like that. So glad they put the clarificatory notice there or I might have thought it was intended to frighten me off.
Hope renewed we stepped through the castle-like archway and into Colmar itself.
And there was France, encapsulated in cobbled streets, timber-framed buildings, sidewalk cafés, and a Chinese acrobatic show. Full marks to the performers though, it was a really good show.
In fact, although the ‘town’ was smaller than I had expected (I had very high expectations as you can see) the buildings satisfied even my critical eye. I’m no architecture expert, but I did feel for an instant like I was back in Europe, and that’s nothing to be sniffed at. The detail was actually quite impressive, especially once we climbed the tower at the end of the street and saw that some of the roofs had been tiled in those famous colourful patterns.
I love colourful window boxes, and although these were not the brightest I’d ever seen, I was willing to let it pass for the nostalgia value.
While there certainly was at least one fountain in real Colmar, it didn't look anything like this one, being far more ornate and with a statue on top, but I decided to be forgiving. Who knows, there might indeed be one just like this tucked away somewhere in Colmar.
Now for the moment of truth, how does it compare to the real deal? I couldn't find my photos from when I visited real Colmar several years ago, so here's one I borrowed from the Internet. Spot the difference?
Not bad huh?! And now that I look more closely at real Colmar I see that their window boxes are not the brightest either, so I will fully retract my snippy comment above.
All it needs now is a little of that French je ne sais quoi (I mean 'arrogance' - joking! but seriously, Malaysians are way too polite to pass for French 😉) and I would feel like I was right in the heart of Alsace.
So there you have it - Colmar Tropicale. The tigers are the fakest thing about it, and if that's not a ringing endorsement I don't know what is.
