Malacca

We spent a pleasant few days in Malacca - or Melaka, as the locals spell it, and I guess they should know. Actually, I've been rather enjoying some of the 'Manglish' spellings of words over here in Malaysia. You can, for example, take a bas or a teksi to a local kafe, where you can enjoy maybe a sweet pastri or a piece of kek with your koffee, before shopping for some nice aksesoris for your new frock.. If you're thinking of doing some studying, you could attend your local koleg and, upon graduating, become a truly useful member of your local komuniti!

Anyway, enough of that. Our hotel in Melaka, a recommendation of Adrian and Michelle, whom we were supposed to be meeting up with there, was a real highlight; a lovely, very old Peranakan (Chinese-Malay) mansion, originally owned by a Chinese self-made millionaire and local benefactor around 250 years ago! It had no fewer than 4 inner courtyards inside the large, imposing and labarynthine building. Each courtyard is open to the skies 4 stories up, following the principles of Feng Shui: these dictate, amongst other things, that rainwater must be allowed to flow freely and swiftly into a house and only let out again as slowly as possible, water being a welcome element in Feng Shui terms. So, under each of these open roofspaces, there's a square sunken floor in the courtyard - in this case each at least 12 feet by 12 feet , rather like an indoor, beautifully-tiled paddling pool really - with a specially designed drainage system which slows down the rate at which the rain then leaves and is dispersed into the open street drains.

There were also all kinds of ancient paintings, vases, sculptures and artefacts from different eras of the mansion's history - from Baba-Nyonya time (this is another term, like Peranakan, meaning Chinese merchants (male: Baba) who inter-married with Malay (female: nyonya); as well as from Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial times, and even the relatively brief time of the Japanese invastion during WW2. Fascinating!

Had we not already visited George Town in Penang, I think we'd have enjoyed Malacca even more. There are plenty of lovely old 'heritage' buildings in Chinatown in Malacca - shophouses, temples, and one or two other Peranakan mansions - as well as some rather grand colonial architecture, but there's nothing like as many, or any of them as magnificent, as those we'd already seen in Penang.

Certainly, if asked, we'd recommend prioritising a trip to Georgetown rather than Malacca, if time is tight. Also, the coastline here is pretty industrial, the Malacca Straits being amongst the busiest of shipping lanes in the whole of Asia, and you'd need to travel at leat 50km north or south of the city to find anywhere decent enough to swim off the coast.

That said, however, we did thoroughly enjoy squeezing through the numerous Chinese families swarming down 'Jonker Walk' (pronounced 'Yonker Walk', it being a Dutch name) , who spent their time feasting on all kinds of street food, as well as seemingly being attracted by shops and stalls selling just about the worst 'Made-in-China' you could ever wish to see! We also enjoyed seeing the craziest, most colourful collection of trishaws we've ever seen. Outrageously kitsch, the favoured decorations which just about smother these trishaws are literally hundreds of brightly-coloured artificial flowers, flashing fairy lights, photographs of Elvis, Englebert Humperdinck, and even Brenda Lee (remember her?) huge soft toys straight from a fairground bazaar, hideous religious paraphernalia, and sound systems blasting out ancient hits from the 1950s to the 1980s!

We also witnessed a few 'Lion's Dance' troupes (the nomenclature is puzzzling, given that they're all formed into long pantomime dragons dancing through the streets, hotels, shops, etc.), and dozens and dozens of loud,but not visually spectacular, fire-cracker displays celebrating Chinese New Year. And we also enjoyed the longest dragon street decoration we've ever seen, going the whole length of Jonker Walk (maybe a kilometer long), with the dragon's head poised menacingly overhead at a busy traffic island junction by the river-bridge.

In the event, our stay in Malacca was fore-shortened - which was probably just as well, as we were running out of ideas of what to explore next, the main higlights being fairly limited. We'd had an e-mail from Adrian, the day after we'd arrived, to say that he and Michelle were no longer in a position to join us for the final few days of our stay in Malacca after all (despite all four of us having spent quite some time, eventually successfully, trying to get a hotel room for them in this already over-booked city). Seems his grandmother, the family matriarch, had made a last-minute decision to fly from her home in Borneo to join the family in KL for Chinese New Year, thus obligating all family members to abandon their original plans and spend time with, and pay due respect to her instead.

So, at Adrian and Michelle's suggestion, we went back to KL a couple of days early, in advance of our already booked flight from there to Borneo, and managed to spend some fun time with those two in between his commitments to his grandmother.

They took us to more shopping malls, but mainly for fun window-shopping: they're both really keen on visiting the many 'Super-Hero' stores here, full of all kinds of outfits and gadgets linked to Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Wonderwoman, etc., and which we're sure our grandson, Rui, would just love too! We also went for coffee and cakes in a very upmarket Japanese coffee-house, and even spent an hour dozing together whilst sitting in a row of large comfy chairs having simultaneous foot and leg massages.







We also enjoyed looking around a huge display of 'Buddy Bears', each representing a particular country, and covering most of the planet, which is currently being featured in KL outside one of their huge shopping malls.   Seems this installation is on a 'world tour', going off in February to Sri Lanka, and we've been trying, without success so far, to find out if it's coming to the UK at all.   It was a really colourful display, and a smashing talking point amongst all of us, tourists and residents alike, about how our respective countries had been represented.

Now, though, we're in Borneo. We've based ourselves initially in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak, one of two virtually independent Malaysian States on the island of Borneo (the other being Sabah, which will be our last stop in Malaysia), these two States being either side of the Sultanate of Brunei in the north, and bordering Indonesia in the south. From here, we plan to explore at least one of the many National Parks within striking distance - probably Bako National Park, which necessitates flagging down a bus as it whizzes by the corner of our guest-house at 8 am in the morning, and, half an hour later, commissioning a boatman to take us across a choppy 30-40 minute crossing to the Park's Headquarters. Once there, however, we're assured we'll see some wonderful wildlife: monitor lizards, macaques, proboscis monkeys, silver-leaf monkeys, bearded pigs, palm squirrels, civets, mouse deer, flying lemurs, and loads and loads of unusual bird life. So ... watch this space!