Early morning call.
Trip Start
Unknown
1
61
101
Trip End
Ongoing
Melaka, Melaka State, Malaysia
Thursday, January 13, 2011
It was an old bus but it did the job perfectly as we smuggled our two bananas into Malaysia (forgot to take them out of our bags...oops). As we were getting on and off the bus a German couple were near our side the whole time, pushing past and racing to get on and off the bus, by the time we got to Malaysia boarder control I got really mad as he stood on my bag and tried to knock me out of his way in the bus isle, I shouted "Can you wait one minute?" as he just looked at me. We headed to passport control and there they were racing to get past us, so once we realised we all had to fill in customs forms we let them past knowing they hadn’t done it and just laughed. They even followed us to a bus queue and the daft thing was that we were in the wrong queue so they followed us again into the right one. This did make us laugh through what could have been a long and boring day.
When we arrived at Melaka we had a right job getting a hostel as the one we had booked forgot about us, so we walked around the town like Mary and Joseph looking for an Inn for the night (No baby though) and just as I was about to throw myself to the ground in an all time paddy, there it was a hostel with vacancies. We booked into a private room as we had both had enough of other people at this point. It was clean and new, perfect. We had a street meal then went straight to sleep very tired.
The following morning was an early one in fact it was a 5am early one, it was this point we realised why the hostel had vacancies. It was directly opposite a mosque which had a load speaker blasting out prayers three times a day; it was so loud we both jumped. We did a lot of walking about to see all the sights in this hot tourist destination, the most attractive one is Dutch square which was built by the Dutch in 1941 when they captured it. It is a very attractive little plaza with colourful trishaws parked up ready to take all the tourists for a ride around the town. One even had 80’s music blasting out of a speaker in the back; it was really funny to watch as he cycled around with a really old couple sat in the back. That evening we walked down Jonker Walk night market, it sets up every weekend with stalls selling everything from jewellery to food; the town was so busy it’s clear that a lot of locals come here for the weekend fun, we bought some amazing chocolate pancakes for about 20p and a box of really tasty pineapple tarts which were everywhere. We walked to a recommended Indian restaurant that evening and had tandoori chicken with rice, a nan bread and a drink for three pounds and it tasted so good.
Our last day we walked a bit further out of town and saw St Pauls church ruins, the church was originally built in 1852 so it’s steeped in history. A Chinese girl thought it would be nice to pose provocatively against a tomb inside the church full of smiles; some people just don’t get it! They really do feel the need to be photographed next to everything and whatever it may be they are always smiling, let’s hope they don’t visit the Killing Field’s god only knows what they will do in the pictures cartwheels or maybe forward rolls!! After our first l4esson in Chinese posing we walked to the coast to find a ferris wheel apparently the largest in the world, I really wont bore you with the details of how long we were looking or how many maps we looked at but we couldn’t find it, honest to god we really couldn’t find it, we were at the spot but nothing was there so we figured it may have been taken down and shipped somewhere else. We both decided not to speak of this with other fellow travellers so as not to appear stupid. Running out of things to look at Justin saw an old Sailing ship on the harbour; it turned out to be the Maritime Museum which he really wanted to go in so I agreed I would follow but nothing more. As we walked about the decks in the ship I just got really bored, I just wasn’t interested there were no buttons to press or exciting display cabinets so I just slipped into mess about mode which went down like a lead balloon. After I was told off I just waited on the steps for Justin to broaden his knowledge on the Flora De La Mar ship, the crazy thing is when I asked him what he had learned when he came out he struggled to inform me. We both agreed we would leave the following day and head to Kuala Lumpur.
