Blogs from Melaka, Malaysia, Asia - page 5

You can’t help but get a feeling of what used to be in Melaka. It was such an important port for the whole of South East Asia and played a huge roll in the development of this region but now all of that seems to be dead. This change is even evident in the name of the town as nobody seems to use the original spelling anymore. In honour of the great colonial port it once was, I will use the original spelling that the locals still use - Malacca. We took the bus from the TBS terminal in Kuala Lumpur to Malacca at 5:45pm on a Friday evening. We hadn’t booked this and there were many buses doing this route so I would not worry about pre-booking. The bus terminal has just been renovated and ... read more

Hey everyone For the last part of our journey we left the sleepy island of Tioman and headed over to Melaka, took us ages to get there on the bus but it was well worth the journey, its a lovely place full of different cultures and lovely things to see. We stayed in a lovely hotel right on the river and got to know our neighbour quite well, he was the biggest monitor lizard that we have ever seen and liked to sunbathe in the private garden a couple of doors down. Melaka was definitely the place to do some final shopping and boy did we we shop! Treated ourselves to some lovely things. In between shopping, eating lovely Nonya food and having a beer or two by the river we had a river cruise at ... read more

MALACCA, it has always sounded very exotic & a bit weird to me. And so it is a little bit. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site with an extraordinary history of ancient power & wealth mixed in with European history & empires. Malacca is a famous seaport situated on the Malaysian side of the Straits of Malacca. It was sort of the old capital of Malaysia before Malaysia really existed. For many many centuries the Straits of Malacca offered safe passage between the major trading partners, China & India. The city of Malacca was a strategic & politically important post. And marriages were arranged with the children of the Sultan of Malacca, to ensure security & safe passage through the strait formed between Sumatra & Malaysia. Islam was brought down to Malaysia & lndonesia from ... read more

HE SAID... I woke early to the rumble of the train outside our KL hotel window. We headed down to breakfast around 7am and went for the conventional option of juice, coffee, cornflakes and toast, as we had a two hour bus trip to Melaka ahead of us. We checked out of our KL hotel (Ancasa Express) and jumped on a public bus to Terminal Bersepadu Selatan on the outskirts of KL, where we boarded a bus for Melaka at 11am. We arrived around 1pm, jumped into a minibus and headed to the Hash House Hotel, where we’d stayed only a few weeks before. We checked in, dropped our bags and walked to Nancy’s Kitchen for lunch. We eventually sat down at 2.30pm and ordered popiah (carrots, turnip, bean sprouts, lettuce and shallots drizzled with a ... read more

We started our day with a visit to the Swift Discovery museum where we learnt how this magical combination of bird spit and feathers is made into soup, drinks, etc = yuk. To escape the heat for a while we headed to the Mega Mall. Did a little shopping. Aced the indoor carnival complete with ring-toss, poorly sited air rifles, chocolate wheels, darts etc. Ate lunch in the mega food court then split up. Nic and Jesse went to the cinema to watch the new hobbit movie with delicious caramel popcorn. Tash and I got manicures and pedicures back at the Baba House. Wayne continued his self-guided walking tour and lined up (along with people from Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Korea) for the best Chicken Rice around. If you are interested in trying it for ... read more