Blue Eyes goes to Melaka

We haven’t blogged much about Malaysia despite the fact it’s the longest blue eyes has stayed at one place during this trip. We haven’t done much, to be honest, except to repaint the walls of my living room. It’s blue eyes’ second time to Malaysia (he was last here in 2007) but it is also perhaps the country that he explored the least. Partly also due to the fact that I don’t have a car to move about and public transport in Malaysia sucks (!!)

Anyway, in his last week in Malaysia, we decided to head down to Melaka, the most historical city in the country (it was the first place that the Portuguese and Dutch landed before they occupied Malaya centuries ago). Getting to Melaka was a bit of a challenge. On normal circumstances, I’d have driven down and it would have taken about 2-hour drive. This time, since I didn’t have a car (I sold it before going RTW) we took the inter-city bus instead.

I’ve never taken public transport to Melaka before. I had to check online to locate the bus terminal. It sounded easy to reach the terminal as it’s connected via LRT and Komuter but it turned out to be a frustrating affair. For one thing, Komuter has lousy frequency. We bought the tickets only to find out that the next train was in 40 minutes (!!) so we aborted the plan and took cab instead.

Upon arriving at Melaka Sentral (the bus terminal of Melaka), we took the local bus to the city centre and had a calm walk to Jonker Street to have lunch – expensive plates of chicken rice balls (apparently I was wrong to think it’s expensive, as I was told that chicken rice in KL is around RM6-RM7 these days …) that cost a total of RM13.70. I’m not particularly a fan of chicken rice balls but it is a kind of novelty if one has never tried it before.

We had cendol for dessert and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Jonker Street, admiring the old buildings and taking it really easy. We stumbled upon a shoe shop that sells shoes for bound feet (an old Chinese tradition that is no longer in practice) and blue eyes got interested and started chatting with the owner. After some 30 minutes later, we walked out of the shop with a pair of bound feet shoes, blue eyes’ souvenir from Malaysia 🙂 We took a break after that and sat down for beer at Geographer Cafe.

Blue eyes suggested that we check out the ruins of A Famosa Fortress, which was close to  St Paul’s church. I don’t remember having visited St Paul’s church and was surprised by the nice view on top of the hill. The weather was super warm and humid but fortunately the skies were blue so the pictures turned out quite nicely.

To get back to the bus terminal, we had to take the cab instead of local bus since I didn’t know where the local bus stops for the opposite route. Taxis in Melaka don’t use metre and the driver charged us RM15 despite me trying to bargain for a better price 🙁 Oh well, the perils of being car-less; you’re at the mercy of taxi drivers! We took the 6.30pm back to KL and upon reaching the bus terminal, again we had to take the cab, and this time round, we had to buy coupon first before getting into the taxi and the taxi company servicing the terminal charged a whopping 30% extra from the terminal to my place. What a rip off! But hey, like the locals always say, Malaysia boleh!

But to look on the bright side, we did have a nice day in Melaka and it was a trip worth making. Don’t believe us, check out the pix 😀