I’m so excited…

Indeed, I was so excited when I saw this banner…

…at this shop (2.293347,111.821331)…

…the first one in the block of shops to the left of Paramount Hotel (this one that I’ve blogged about a few times before is the last one in that same block). “The best in town“? Where would I be able to find the 2nd best or 3rd best…or not so best? I wonder if anybody can enlighten me on this for as far as I know, this is the only place around here selling this.

Now, why was I so excited, you may ask? All this while, I have heard talk about this ice cream in Kuching, how very nice it is and how there would be long queues of people all the time lining up to buy but unfortunately, when I went to Kuching that day, I dropped by the Open Air Market in the morning hoping to give it a try but it was closed – they told me that it would only be open in the afternoon around 4 something. Thus, I had to leave the place disappointed and no, in the end, I did not get the chance at all during my brief stay there.

For the uninitiated, gula apong is our version of palm sugar. The one in the peninsula would be derived from the coconut tree and is called gula Melaka while ours here is from the nipah palm, found growing wild among the mangrove swamps in the lower reaches of our majestic Rejang River. In Chinese (Hokkien), we call it attap therng or attap sugar, attap being what was made from the leaves and used in the old days for the thatched roofs of houses. So ais krim gula apong would be simply ice cream served with the sugar…

I asked the man at the stall…

…and he said that it would be RM3.00 each but if you want to add any of those things in the plastic jars with the red covers, those would be an additional 80 sen each.

The ice cream was like those soft-serve ice cream that you can find easily at places like Sugar Bun or McD and the one here was very good – very smooth and nice, vanilla flavour. I asked for the peanut and Nestum but somehow, I could not taste the latter…

…and I was charged RM3.80 only so my guess is the guy probably just gave me one of the two.

So was it really all that great? Well, it was nice, I can’t deny that, and the gula apong with the ice cream came across to me like salted caramel, and that was something that I liked about it. However, at the end of the day, I would have to say that unfortunately, it did not get me jumping up and down with delight unlike the durian ice cream…

*Archive photo: Payung Cafe’s durian ice cream*

…here. That one sure has an edge over this and has that wow factor! Everyone who has had it would, without doubt, be wanting to go back for more whereas in the case of this one, I don’t know if it has that same effect on other people but no, it sure did not bowl me over, not at all. Of course, the durian ice cream is more expensive, RM8.00 but it has fresh durian cream in it and the serving is bigger, around double that of this ais krim gula apong…and considering the satisfaction derived, no prize for guessing which one I would much sooner go for.