Malacca, the next two days

We did manage to get some relaxing and little items completed during our five nights in Malacca - we took all of our dirty laundry to a 24-hour coin operated laundromat, we sat in the hotel room and streamed the final episodes of the Amazing Race. But we also still got out and saw more sights, and every day we thoroughly enjoyed the foods - eating Indian, Chinese, and the local Nyonya specialties.

We took the local river cruise after a nice lunch and got a nice view of parts of the city that we wouldn't have walked to. The river cruise had a multi-language tape that played as the boat moved along the river, first in Malay, then Chinese, and finishing up in English, so it did have the slightly annoying issue in that when it would state "And now if you look to your left..." it was mentioning something that passed approximately 5 minutes prior, and it did not seem to have been updated in a few years in that it made references to places that had closed up sometime since it was recorded.

After the tour we strolled along the riverfront some more, at least until the heat got to us and we once again sought refuge under some ceiling fans that could provide some comfort and got us out of the sun.

We strolled down Jonker Street, which closes down in the evenings and is converted into a street market selling all sorts of items, and we even managed to find a few abandoned buildings that we could get some great photos of.

Later in the afternoon we wandered over and signed up for their duck boat tour that takes you out into the harbor - having done the Boston Duckboats a few times we had a different level of expectations for the tour.

It's not worth it, it's annoyingly loud so you can't hear (at least understand) the information that is playing, and you don't really get to see to much. We were shocked at the amount of new construction that they drove by to get out to the water - there is so much new being built but none of it is being occupied, we could see places that were obviously built a few years prior but that have just been sitting empty. It's similar to what we had seen in China years ago where they would build just for the sake of building.

We did get some views of the setting sun, and from the tour we rushed over to a rooftop bar. We were warned that it was expensive (Singaporean Pricing is what a comment said), but when we got there it was closed for a private event. By the time we got back out of the hotel the bar was located in, the sunset was done with - we managed to get there the next night and see the sunset, it just wasn't as nice as it had been the previous night.

Our last day we decided to head to the upside down museum, we figured that we could afford the $22 MYR ($5.50 USD) to have some fun before just aimlessly wandering around the old city center and the river walks again.

The next morning we were done with our short time in Malacca and off to the train station heading up to Ipoh for the next portion of our trip.

One thing that did come up as we were shuffling clothes around with laundry and just trying to move some of the more spring/fall based items into the base of one suitcase since we will be in full summer mode for the next 6+ months, was that Tina looked at me and said "I haven't seen my bathing suit, where did you pack it?" So I pulled everything out again and we came to the realization the somehow it wasn't packed back in early February when we were getting started for this trip. I remember it being out in our piles of items to bring, and neither of us remember moving it or packing it, but it didn't end up making the trip. So we did have to try and find a store that had, not just bathing suits, but normal person sized suits and ones in a style that Tina would wear. I joked that Tina should have bought one of the suits that has the head covering built into it, but apparently she was fine with a simple plain two-piece suit. It only took us 4 shops to find a sporting goods store that had a full selection, they even had wet suits for only $200 MYR ($50 USD) which is crazy when you compare it to my buying a used one last summer for $300 USD.

The takeaway there is to really do a double check on what you're packing - we thought we had done a great job verifying that we had the majority of the items we would need during out trip. I forgot to pack extra razor blades, we both forgot to throw in an additional thing of deodorant, I'm slightly over packed in long sleeve shirts, and knowing we would be doing a beach resort missing the bathing suit is a fairly major miss....