Heading into Malaysia
Updated: Apr 8, 2018
From spending our time in Hong Kong and catching up with old friends we hopped on a plane down to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We had five days before we had to find our way up to Ipoh to see our adopted family, so we planned to use the time for a little break to just relax and catch up on little outstanding items. Instead of spending a few nights in KL we decided to schedule our 5 nights of down time in the old Portuguese city of Malacca (Melaka). We had been here before back in 2009 when we were still living in China, and we enjoyed it and figured that we had seen enough of the main sights that we would be able to relax.
We took the bus straight down from the airport, you can book it right when you arrive and it's about $12 USD per person for the 2 hour ride. The bus station in Malacca is about a 15 minute cab ride into the old town where we were staying, that taxi appeared to be a fixed price of $20 Malaysian Ringgit, about $5 USD.
Turns out, as Tina warned me, I'm not good at just sitting around not doing much, as I'll start getting antsy with some quick "maybe we should just walk around, head out and see something new..." type statements. I figured that we'd have real time for relaxing and doing nothing a few week further into the future. Tina wanted to step into the relax time now since we had just come in off of 10 days running around Seoul and the Winter Olympics followed by 7 days running through Macau and catching up with friends in Hong Kong. We had been exceptionally busy, without much time to stop and really take in the fact that we were entering the third week of our new life living out of a suitcase. Turns out we managed a comprise, Tina not getting as much lets just sit and do nothing time, but with me getting a lot more then I would have done if I had my way.
The first night we arrived we were met with a torrential downpour right after we walked about a mile from the hotel into the old center. We stopped into an covered outdoor cafe to grab a cold drink and get out of the intense heat and within a few minutes the skies darkened and opened up. This marked my first usage of a newly installed Uber app, and we managed to get home dry for a total cost of $1.43 USD.
The next two days were somewhat cloudy and still horribly hot and muggy, but we managed to get out and see a few sights, the old churches, the tomb of Hang Jebat with an unknown date since it already existed when the Portuguese took over the town in 1511, and the remains of the old fort that the English almost completely destroyed when they took over the town from the Dutch in 1824.
The second day we took a free tour of the Proclamation of Independence Museum, with its very Malay based spin, and enjoyed some of that relaxing time along the riverfront with all of it's quaint little cafes, guesthouses and hotels.
It still is a great city, it's changed some in the 9 years since we've been here in becoming more of a tourist destination, but it isn't overdone in the way that some other cites lose a bit of their soul as they try to capture more tourist dollars.
Like I said, day two we relaxed, the next few days we managed to get some more in - I'll follow up with that in another quick post.