Our Malaysian guide Ping Ping loves her food. We know this because she talks about it - a lot - and when we walk on along the riverside in

Melaka for a few minutes, she stays behind. She admits to us when we return that she has used the time well, though. She's been snacking on bird's nest pudding.

Call it reconnaissance if you like. Maybe research. She hustles us to're told, while Ping Ping has a second helping. It's then, as the sweetly gelatinous substance slips between our teeth, that we realise, queasily, what we are eating. It's not the home of cave swifts at all (nests had seemed bad enough) but, worse, their dribble.

Malaysia is a bit like Ping Ping: food is paramount. But it's also a little like bird's nest soup, too: nothing is as it at first appears. There is always more to discover.

This year UNESCO has added two Malaysian cities to the World Heritage List as Historic Cities of the Straits of Malacca, joining just 24 other 'mixed' properties currently on the list.

Georgetown, the capital of the island of Penang, established in 1786 and named for Britain's King George III was Britain's first colony in the Malay peninsula. It's hundreds of kilometres north of Melaka and at first glance there seem few similarities, although both are located on the Straits of Malacca which separates peninsula Malaysia from the island of Sumatra. However, the World Heritage Committee found that these cities had much in common, each fitting three major cultural UNESCO criteria.

Over the past 500 years each city has evolved into multicultural cameos of their individual histories. Rather than interacting with each other, or even their own country as such, the influences they have drawn from their trading partners in Asia and Europe and from successive colonists have seeped into every aspect of their culture. Architecture, language, traditions, food, have all been indelibly affected. Their personalities, as UNESCO puts it, have been "forged from the mercantile and cultural exchanges of Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures and three successive European colonial powers for almost 500 years".

The two cities reflect different eras. Melaka, Malaysia's oldest city, resonates to its origin as a 15th-century Malay sultanate and the early 16th-century Portuguese and Dutch periods. Georgetown echoes the late 18th-century British era. They are unique in that they each have complete surviving historic centres, and the carefully acquisitive UNESCO committee valued this.

Despite this, we find today's Melaka, less than two hours' drive south from Kuala Lumpur, bursting with 21st-century vibrancy. For all the time we spend driving around (and around and around) the city, it's a wonder we don't know it better. Today's Melaka with a population exceeding 200 000, sprawls. It has grown enormously since our last visit 20 years ago, with multi-storey developments now drifting across expanses of reclaimed land and former mangrove swamps.

Trishaws clog the main square outside Melaka's rose red Christ Church, built by the Dutch in 1753. They're decorated within an inch of their superstructure in a blatant effort to attract attention and snare a fare. Flowers, a chieftain's face complete with feather headdress, flashing lights and gee-gaws, anything that might tip the scales in favour of this trishaw over the next even more titivated one are put to use.

Between jobs the drivers stroll around, chatting with each other, touting for jobs from people like us. Suddenly, there's a loud bang, but no one jumps. It's just a balloon bursting - one of a cluster floating over one trishaw as an additional entrepreneurial effort.

To one side of the square stands the Dutch-built 17th-century Stadthuys, or town hall, and higher still is the crumbling ruins of A Famosa, built even earlier by the Portuguese, and with an interesting connection with Penang. 

It seems that on acquiring Melaka from the Dutch in 1795, the British decided to dismantle the fort to avoid future sieges and transfer the locals to the newer colony of Penang. Much backbreaking work was carried out as an attempt was made to destroy the massive stone walls, some of them three metres thick. Just as they were about to light the gelignite to fast track the demolition, a 27-year-old British civil servant on sick leave arrived and persuaded the officers to allow the Santo Domingo Gate to remain. Melaka's evacuation was suspended. His name was Thomas Stamford Raffles, later to found Singapore and play a role in Penang's development as well.

You could call Raffles an over-achiever, or maybe somehow he knew his time was short. Knighted at 36, he founded Singapore at 38, and died a day short of his 45th birthday. He was only 24 in 1805 when the East India Company decided to install a regular presidency in the embryonic colony of Penang. Appointed assistant-secretary, he began to study the Malay language on the journey from England, and had mastered its grammar before his arrival.

Another thing common to both Georgetown and Melaka is the nonya (or nyonya) culture, a term used for the descendants of the very early Chinese immigrants to the British Straits Settlements of Malaya. Today the culture is most apparent in its food.

Ping Ping takes us to the airy and opulent Restoran Peranakan in Melaka and we feast on ayam rendang (chicken curry) and prawns in pineapple juice. In Georgetown, it's the bright and noisy Nyonya Breeze where we chow down on sweeter and spicier food, laced with tamarind and nutmeg, raisins and unidentifiable local herbs.

Penang is bursting with development too, and has its detractors because of it. Some say it is the Silicon Valley of Malaysia; that it is virtually supporting the rest of the country. Others decry the surge of buildings. While the central 'heritage' part of Georgetown, population around 220 000, is now UNESCO-protected, the rest of the capital and much of the eastern side of the island is punching upwards with forests of high rise apartments and shopping centres.

Yet the look reflects prosperity rather than developer greed. The tall buildings are not crowded, and from many apartments you feel there would be glistening glimpses of the strait that separates the island from the mainland.

In the heart of Georgetown it is as if nothing has changed for a hundred years or more, though. The streets are still jammed with pedestrians and bikes, bicycle-propelled trishaws and leftover lorries from the days of British rule. Doubtless it was this unique architectural and cultural townscape that captured the UNESCO researchers.

A helpful food trail map directs us through the shopping streets, almost totally comprised of colonial-era shop houses with names as colourful as their wares - Kedai Hang On, Dilly Deli, Mee Fatt Too. It was here in the 19th-century that the Chinese set up their stalls and markets and even today most of Georgetown's population is Chinese. The tea shops are still here. There is a cake shop known for its pepper biscuits and another for chicken rice. Further along one dispenses barbecue pork sandwiches, and we pass a stall where a woman on a scooter waits, the motor revving, for her takeaway serve of 'BBQ internal organs'.

That night we visit the massive New World undercover hawker area for dinner. The food is good, laughably inexpensive, and clean, but we are craving the colour and action - the smoke and fumes, the feel - of the outdoor ones we remember from previous trips. We find it at Lorong Bahru's brightly lit hawker stalls and joyously jostle our way through queues for Penang laksa and bee hoon, tangling with others waiting for cendol and wantan mee soup.

Towards the end of our time in Penang, I ask Ping Ping, who grew up here, what is so good about Penang?

"People in Penang are more relaxed," she says instantly. It's easier to get places, everything is so close and it's easier to shop." She goes on to extol the good transport, the beaches, the places to go at the weekend.

As soon as she has seen us off, Ping Ping will return to KL where she now lives and works.

So when she is back in Kuala Lumpur, I ask her, what does she most miss about Georgetown?

"I miss the food," she answers. I'd expected that.

 (Sally Hammond)

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FACTFILE:
The World Heritage List includes 878 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value. These include 679 cultural, 174 natural and 25 mixed properties in 145 States Parties. As of November 2007, 185 States Parties have ratified the World Heritage Convention.

More information on UNESCO properties.