Like the Rough Guide says, Melaka grows on you. We've done a lot of walking around. The first night I left the family asleep and walked a few blocks in a light rain to a big outdoor food court, and had a great bowl of spicy seafood Laksa with a large Tiger beer. Yum. The next day we found an Indian restaurant that serves great roti (griddle flat bread) for breakfast, and fish head curry for dinner. We found lots of other fun/interesting stuff here. The "fish spa" where Melody paid 50 good ringgets to have little fish nibble the dead skin from her feet. The "Museum of Enduring Beauty" which documents self-mutilation in cultures worldwide ("enduring" as in "enduring pain"). Interesting shops in Chinatown (we even encountered some kind of film crew set up on ... read more

Why Malaysia? Melody & I had fond memories from about a week there in 2006, most of it on Pangkor Island off of the west coast. We remembered it as a safe, uncrowded, inexpensive place, with a good bus system, enough tourist infrastructure without being touristy. Thanks to its history as an English colony, and its present popularity with Aussie and Kiwi tourists, English is widely spoken. The culture seemed family-friendly and conservative, without being reactionary. Also, we could fly from LAX for about $700 each round-trip on EVA Airlines, changing planes in Taipei, Taiwan. For awhile we seriously considered a few days in Taiwan, to return to Hualein and gorgeous Taroko Gorge. But we decided trying to front-load the trip with a Chinese country would cause overload. Getting from RDU to LAX would bring the ... read more

Just in case someone might read this who doesn't know us ... we're a family living in Cary, North Carolina. Our kids are Andrea and Benjamin (ages 12 and 9 as of fall 2009). By 1996 Melody & I had been to London and Australia mostly on business. That fall we took our first real international vacation, when we used frequent flier miles from our business trips to fly around the world for about six weeks. We ended up visiting Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Germany, and France. It was on that trip that we developed a style of travel that we’ve used since, with our children, on trips to: Turkey in 1999 and 2001, Hawaii in 2004, California in 2005, Yucatan, Mexico in 2006, and Malaysia in 2009. On these trips our ... read more