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Wow! Made in Derby England
We put our postcards to Derby in this postbox we found in the back streets of Melaka! Tuesday 1st: Local Food Day + 1st day of May, Matt has B'day on the 12th: Well, after leaving Kuala Lumpur pretty early we arrived in Melaka Sentral (Main bus station). Instead of getting ripped off with a taxi we got the guy touting a hotel to tell us where to get the No. 17 bus to Melaka Parade (get off at the Equestrian hotel). Anyway, finding a hotel was easy this time. Pudu in KL and Traveller's lodge here have some kind of mutual agreement to plug eachother (Or it certainly seems that way.). In any case, we got a clean big room, with balcony (Shared bathrooms, but clean) all for 27RM (4 quid 50p)! Bargain.
So, with the bus journey being only about 2 and a half hours we had all day to see Melaka (Which really isn't all that big). It's basically a town with 2 big shopping centres, and a load of history and museums - It's trying desperately to become a world heritage site, but at the same time keeps knocking it's heritage down, to make way for more modern tourist attractions.
So, we had breakfast across the road in a kind of Malay/Indonesian
Porta De Santaigo.
Next to St. Paul's church. All that remains of A'Famosa the Portugese fortress built by Alfonso de Albuquerque in 1512 type place. They did hot rice with cold curries, and Matt had a Rose flavoured drink - just like Turkish delight.
Melaka you could see in about 1/4 of a day, so in a day we saw:
1. Porta de Santiago (1512 ad)
2. Muzium Budaya
3. Independence memorial
4. Muzium Rakyat
5.stadthuys
6. Christ church
7. Peranakan type houses (also called Chinese Palladian or Chinese Baroque)
8. Baba-Nonya Heritage museum
9. Malaqa House
10. Hotel Puri
11. Chee Mansion
12. Baba house
13. Eng Choon (Yong Chun) Association
14. Leong San Thong
15. JI Hang Jebat (Junkers St./Junk St./ The Jonker walk)
16. Hang Kasturi's tomb
17. Guanyin temple
18. Wah Tech
19. Kiong Temple
20. Gunagfa temple
21. Wah Aik
22. Chen Hoon Teng temple
23. Kampung Kling Mosque
24. Sri Poyatta Vinayagar Moorthi temple
25. Sanduo temple
26. Seri Melaka.
Most of which are just things to look at, get the obliguatory toursit snap and move on. Which we did.
Although
Wah Aik was weird, basically this guy - Mr. Yeo Ding Guat (Well, his son actually because he's dead now) still makes bound feet shoes. He even knows a few families that
still bind their daughters feet!, and his book of names of people that have bought shoes there is quite impressive - it even had Jaques Chirac in there. Matt asked the man why they bound women's feet, to which he replied "So the women cannot run away from their husbands.". The sad thing was he was being deadly serious.
After seeing Chinatown we stopped at a Baba-Nonya (Traditional Malay-straits Chinese) shop-house for Pineapple tarts, and tea. Unfortunately the woman lied. Matt asked her if it was tea and she said yes. We ended up with
Durian Cendol which is this : Shaved ice with Durian pulp ontop, then treacle is poured on, some gelatine things and red-kidney beans are added, then as if things couldn't get worse, condensed milk is added. We both feel sick thinking about it.
So we pottered about for a bit before decided to trek up to
Capital Satay for dinner. It's an understated little cafe, but the queue was forever - it took over an hour of queing to get in! It was worth it though. You get seated at a table with a whole in the middle, under the whole is butane
(Or something) in a tank, and in the whole fits a giant tub of satay. Then there is fridge full of raw chicken, seafood, vegetables, tofu and breads on skewers (All 50 Sen/ Half a Ringgit). So you pick what you want and cook it yourself in the boiling satay sauce - doesn't matter what you have - everything takes 3 minutes.
Wednesday 2nd: After having walked around a lot yesterday, we decided to enjoy a lie-in for once. After we finally got up we ate at
Toast 'N' Toast, a kind of pretencious little cafe, that surprisingly did toast. Whilst there we figured we'd go and see the 2 Museums that appealed to us.
One being the Muzium Rakyat, with 3 floors. One was just kites from all over the world, neither of us knew they had such a religious significance. Another floor was dedicated to local and Malay history and the 3rd top floor was dedicated to the lengths people have gone through in the name of beauty. Neck coils, lip plates, corsets, bound feet, some really weird stuff.
The second museum was the Maritime museum, set inside a replica of the
Flora De Capitol Satay
Every city should have one. Choose as many of the sticks of meat, fish, veg ect for 50 sen each (7.5p) and cook it yourself at your table in boiling satay sauce. mmmm! la MarA Portugese galleon.
So, after that, being a bit bored (We pretty much
did Melaka in 24 hours - with ease), we went to walk around the shopping centres. Going down an escalator we passed Julie (coming up opposite us.). So we stopped and chatted. She got bored with Tiomen island so went for a long weekend in Singapore before heading up to the Cameron highlands. In the end we decided to go to 'Capital Satay' again, which was even better than last night. There was no queue and Matt descovered he actually likes prawns (especially the big ones you have to crack and peel). Then it was back to the hotel and that was that.
Thurdsay 3rd: Got up early and got a lift with Julie to The bus station - Melaka Sentral (In a taxi, she's getting the bus to Cameron Highlands) and we got our bus up to Alor Gajah (No. 28 or 26) and got dropped off at A'Famosa. It's basically a giant resort. Big hotel, paintballing, microlites, go-carts, cowboy town, 18 hole golf course, fishing lake and other stuff, and of course - Waterworld, which is where we went.
A'Famosa Waterworld
The fridge of sticks
Food fridge at Capitol Satay had about 10 waterslides (Although 3 were bust.). It was a good fun day, and that's all we did all day, there was noone there aswell - so no queues. On one fast slide the water pressure hurt Leanne's bumhole.
Leaving was a problem, there's no bus stop, so waited for a taxi, but luckily the guy that drives the internal shuttle-bus had just finished his shift so gave us a lift to Tampin. Which was nice. Unfortunatly the bus from Tapin to Melaka Sentral took about 2 hours (30 Km).
So we got back tired, went to Nando's, had a giant 16RM ice-cream, did the blog and went beddybyes.
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stevekin
non-member comment
welcome to malaysia
Nice blog, even though I'm local from KL, but i haven't been to melaka since this few years lately. Just had some sweet memories there while i was a child with my family.