Asian Adventure
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2004
1
25
44
Trip End
Dec 22, 2004
Where I stayed
Malacca, Malaysia
Monday, November 1, 2004
We spent four hours on a very comfortable and air-conditioned bus from the lovely Singapore to Malacca this morning and have had a wonderful time since we got here. The city is so cultually diverse and has everything you can imagine from South East Asia squished into a small city. It's a pretty, historical city south of Kuala Lumpur and the people are really, really lovely.
From the moment we left the borders of Singapore, though, it really started to feel adventurous. I find myself turning into a wee girl and clinging onto Andy (even more) and wanting him to figure it all out, it's strange! The whole experience is really alien to us. Australia and New Zealand, even Singapore - we had English to get by on and everything was so westernised that, not that we didn't love every minute of being there, that they all weren't exciting or amazing in their own right, but they were somewhat familiar. South America was very different, but Spanish and Portuguese are more close to our language than Malay and other Asian languages and it was just that we'd known what to expect and what we wanted to do there. This part of our trip, though, is the real backpacking adventure - we have no real plan, don't speak any of the languages, have no accommodation booked and don't really know what to expect, and.. it's brilliant!
The adventure begins...
It was quite a struggle finding where the main accomodations where when we got off the bus. A lot of people approached us upon our arrival trying to sell us accomodation and how to get there, but the actual act of getting there was a lot more difficult. After a few near misses with speeding cars and motorbikes, pavements are an alien concept in most of Malacca, we eventually found out our way to where we needed to go. We looked at the rooms in 2 hostels, and eventually plumped for a double room in the Traveller's Inn. Although it wasn't en-suite, it was only 22 Ringgit per night, just over 3 quid! it was clean and also had a balcony. After checking in, we went off on a walk round Malacca, and what a really nice place it is. So much history in such a small place in comparison. There are ruins of an old fort and cathedral which were built by the Portuguese, or rather the Indian labourers they brought with them from their colony in Goa. The fort and cathedral were later captured, and used for defence and worship by the Dutch, then captured by the British, although the British used the cathedral as a gunpowder store.
We then headed for the Indian area, populated by the descendants of the Indian labourers brought to Malaysia by the Portuguese, and later by the British . After seeing the full size replica of a Portuguese galleon which sank in the Malacca straits, which was very impressive, we decided on an Indian curry for dinner. It was lovely but let's say that Indian food for Indians is very different from Indian food for Paddies and Brits :-)
After joyfully assaulting our digestive systems, we took a walk through the Indian area and into Chinatown. Along the way we encountered a street with a Hindu temple, a Buddhist temple and a mosque practically alongside eachother, with a Catholic church very nearby for good measure, what a mix. When the Arabic wailing died down from the mosque's minaret, you could hear the chanting from the Buddhist temple, amazing. The street was very aptly named Harmony Street.
Malacca, and Malaysia in general, is just as equally ethnically diverse. The native and majority people are the Malay who are all Muslim by law, Islam is the state required religion for ethnic Malays, then there are ethnic Chinese who are Buddhist and some Christian, and ethnic Indians who are Hindu, Muslim and some Christian. Malay is the official language, while the Chinese will also speak Chinese dialects, and the Indians also speak the Indian dialect of Tamil. And we think we've problems of identity in Northern Ireland. There is apparently some friction between Malays and the ethnic Chinese, but they all seem to get along and are able to live together. We could learn something from Malaysia. We certainly had a real cultural journey that night, and enjoyed every minute of it. We returned to our hostel by cycle rickshaw, God knows what possessed us after our experience on one in Peru, but we got back safely.
The next day we headed off on another walk around the town, it really is lovely this place, and apart from sitting on the internet for the past 4 hours :-/ that's all we've done today.
Next stop, Kuala Lumpur on the bus tomorrow.
The adventure keeps on going........
