Approach Kuala Sepetang and the first thing you see is sea eagles wheeling and fishing boats docking with catches of fish and prawn. But the former tin-mining centre has something else – charcoal factories.
Off Malaysia's North-South Expressway, two hours to the north of Kuala Lumpur, stands a former tin mining town that is at the centre of a half-hearted struggle between residents who would like to turn it into a tourist attraction and those who would prefer to let sleeping ghosts lie. Papan little more than a strip of crumbling heritage houses.