Malacca

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The journey to Malacca, which is the name of the city in the state of Melaka (weird) started by boarding a bus out of Singapore across to the Malaysian border town of Johor Bahru. This involved getting off the bus and walking across the border out of Singapore, and then getting a bus across the bridge that links the island to the mainland, getting off the bus again, going through Malaysian immigration, and getting on the bus again when we were finally in Malaysia. The fact that we explained we had a bus ticket through to the next town didn't stop every man and his dog trying to get us into their taxi. All in all, the border crossing was pretty hectic, especially as noone spoke English. At one point, I think it was entering Malaysia, we were escorted to a Police Office where we literally had to sign what seemed like a hotel guestbook to allow us into the country.

Finally arriving at Johor Bahru, we fought through the sea of ticket vendors to a ticket office window that we could buy tickets to Malacca, a 1st class 3 1/2 hour journey, for a few quid. The bus was the most luxurious vehicle I've been on, like a 1st class aeroplane seat. There were only 3 seats in the row, and they fully reclined. Time to catch up on some kip.

We checked into a budget hostel with no air con and a rubbish fan, and more importantly, no bog roll (apparently you're supposed to carry your own out here!) and headed to the Chinatown night markets via a museum in the shape of a Portuguese galleon, which we managed to blag student tickets for, saving ourselves about 5p each. I thought that the museum was pretty pants but really liked the night market, which along with the town square, was Malacca's only saving grace. We ate in a restaurant by the river and then headed back to the night market for a few beers and some Asian Karaoke which really was comedy. There was a huge stage in the middle of the street and about 50 people were watching whoever was singing. Most of them were only marginally better than me (i.e. really bad) and the Dj had the volume maxed out, which the speakers couldn't really handle at the best of times. Needless to say, we moved up the market out of earshot and found ourselves listening to a Chinese duo singing James Blunt's 'Beautiful' but getting half of the words wrong, which we all found highly amusing.

We then crashed out at the hostel, which was horribly hot and sticky, and managed to catch a bus to the terminal outside of town by basically forcing it to stop for us as we had no idea where the bus stop was. We then booked on a bus direct to Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia's capital city.

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