The name of the city I visited last week with my friends Dirk, Voj and Georg will most likely sound familiar for you. The historic city gives name for the ocean between West Malaysia and Indonesia, which is called “Straits of Melaka”. This is originated in the founder of the city, who was some Sumatran prince founding the “Sultanat of Malacca” after converting to Islam (in 1414). In the following decades Melaka had some stirred times, with Portuguese, Dutch and British conquerors occupying the city. Read the full history on Wikipedia.

We started in PJ at about 2pm and chose not to use the highway KL-JB, but to pass Port Dickson, in order to have a short glimpse on the F1 circuit near Sepang and the Power Station Dirk is working on. Taking the country road we also met some cows. Since we were in no hurry we arrived in Melaka at dinner time, and had some dinner at the Discovery café. Georg had an interesting drink with strawberry juice, sprite lemonade and milk, which I wouldn’t have tried, but the food was nice.

After the dinner we finally started searching for a hotel. But that seemed to be a problem – the first five hotels we called from the lonely planet listing were fully booked. We decided to split up and try our look separated. Georg found some guy who promised a room for four with air con for MYR 60. “Not far away”.. We had a little walk ALL Around the inner city following his motorbike (would have been only half as far if we could have crossed directly – but since this guy got there on his motorbike we had to walk around). But meanwhile Dirk and Voj found some rooms near the road were our car was parked, and we decided to stay there. Also we had no air con there MYR 25 per double room seemed to be quite fair. But you can’t expect to much of a budget hotel, so we had some noisy rooms to the road, and the bathroom was interesting. But at the night we were out to celebrate Voj’s brilliant rating of her Masters Thesis, so the hotel room was the last thing to worry about.

We went out on Jonker’s Walk and visited the market there and had some beer on our way there. Later we ended up boozing in some comfy café, were a buck with 5 tiger beer was only MYR 35. Staying there long we also met Tobi, an American who is traveling Asia for some time. But also he already stayed in Melaka for a while he couldn’t help us to find a place to go dancing, when our café closed.. We also had quite some trouble finding a place to get some food. (Of course this wasn’t our food.) Finally in some remote area we at least got some Sati. When we arrived back at our hotel the sun was almost rising up again.

So we slept until noon, and went for some sightseeing then. The food at some of the major places of the city was a little expensive, but quite good (I had a seafood salad with pineapple), and strengthened we went up to (passing the Dutch Stadthuys) to see the ruins of St. Pauls Church. From the hill we had a beautiful view of the city. Seeing this traditional colonial architecture, you wouldn’t expect to be in Malaysia.

After a short visit to a shopping center we had a look through the city’s historic museum, which is set up in a reproduced sailing ship. The special thing about that museum is, that you have to take of your shoes entering. That results in a pretty nosy smell, and a real mess outside, since every visitor receives a plastic bag for his shoes. On our back to the car we saw some Chinese temples. At 6pm we were about to head (Georg was “left back” in Melaka, since he planned to go to Singapore the next morning) back to KL, but finding our way to the highway was our first adventure..

Signposting is surely none of the strength of the Malay. You can follow a sign to the highway KL-JB, and when you turn around you may discover another sign to this highway leading into the opposite direction.. After we finally managed to get onto the highway it only got worse. Since there are still school-holidays, many people wanted to get back home. Even after the two lane highway was converted into 4 lanes (using the emergency lane, and one lane from the opposite direction) there was an awful jam. We managed to leave the highway at Seremban and chose to go back passing Port Dickson once more. This gave us the chance to have some late dinner at the cactus, which was Dirk’s favorite haunt when he stayed in PD last year. We arrived back home in PJ at half past eleven.

Note added Tu, 14.06.05: This entry has a trackback here http://www.abseits.de/weblog/2005/06/discovery-caf.html don't know why it get's not listed. But seems like i'm slowly getting involved into some blogger networks.

This entry was posted by Jürgen Hösch on Tuesday, June 7. 2005 at 08:23. and is filed under Travel. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own blog.