Ludwig's Odyssey: October 2015

We stopped over for two nights in Melaka (Melacca) (after returning from Japan and staying in KL for 4 nights) and it was nice to get back into traveller mode again.

Melaka is a smaller version of Georgetown in Penang in many ways with a very similar historical background and influence. There’s Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial era architecture and a China town too with some street art added in for good measure.

Only a couple of hours away from KL, it could easily be visited in a day but we stopped for two to take it all in.

What it does have that Georgetown didn’t was a pleasant river side walk with pretty decorated houses complete with a replica Portuguese Ship at the end of the walk.

The whole town is not too big so it’s easily walked around.

The Stadhuys the old Dutch governor’s office is a bright salmon pink building (originally white but was repainted after Malaysian independence) and the main landmark of Melaka, believed to be the oldest surviving Dutch building in the east. It houses a museum re-telling Melaka’s history from when it was founded by a Hindu prince called Parameswara in the 12th Century to present day.

Outside of it there are loads of trishaws waiting to take you around the place but these are trishaws with a twist, most of them are garishly decorated in Hello Kitty or Disney’s Frozen colours complete with cuddly toys and they play the loudest cheesy music too, quite bizarre but as usual the Chinese and even the Malay can’t get enough of this sort of tacky fun and you can’t help but smile when you see them come past.

Other sites to see are the ruins of and old church and fort of which little remains in truth.

The ruined church also has a statue outside of it of St Francis Xavier, which was a name we recognised and after about 20 minutes, the penny dropped, it turns out we saw a bit of him from afar when we were in Old Goa (his embalmed body was brought out on display for a few weeks which happens every ten years and there were huge queues of Indian christians lining up to see him).

Apparently, St Paul’s Church in Melaka was regularly visited by him and after he died in China his body was temporarily interred at St Paul’s for nine months before being transferred to Goa.

In Chinatown, the colonial architecture remains and there are streets filled with pretty buildings.

We enjoyed some good Chinese food including some very good pork filled Tai Pao as well as some very tasty rice balls. One does have to enjoy ones food early however, the sellers start to shut up shop around 7.30pm, well the local food eateries do anyway which of course is what we were after. Indeed some are just open for breakfast or just for lunch. They take it easy around here.

Well, a good couple of days then back to the airport for the second time in a week, this time though just the domestic airplane to Kuching, the stepping stone into the wilds of Borneo, let’s hope we see some Orangutans!

You go all the way to Japan and Totoro is here anyway!

Tai Pao

Having now been to KL on three different occasions in the past two months, I think we’re now ready to write about it.

The first time we arrived, we stayed for four nights in between our visits to the Cameron Highlands and Tioman. We didn’t visit much if anything during this first stint as we were planning our next moves. We did however go to some of the ubiquitous malls to do some shopping for various things as mentioned at the beginning of the Tioman Blog.

Friends we met in Thailand said on their blog about KL being a frustrating place to walk around and we totally agree. It’s a big concrete jungle made for cars and trains with fly-overs everywhere you look, but no pedestrian walkways, not meant for walkers at all. With most of the main sites accessible by the very cheap KL trains and monorail system it doesn’t really matter, plus with the high humidity it’s easy to see why people don’t walk. It is a bit of a giant building site, new shopping malls and high rise buildings being constructed just about everywhere.

The second time around, we stayed for seven nights so we could take it all in and see the main sites.

On the first night we got back from Tioman, we met up with an ex work colleague of mine from ASL, Jonathan Ross (no not the TV host!).

He was in town on business but unfortunately because of the boat delay and us having to stay in Mersing one more night we didn’t meet up as we wanted to, so in the end it was a very brief catch up for about an hour. Be that as it may, it was still very nice to see a familiar face and catch up with what’s happening back at home. Wendy was really glad too as Jon kindly bought some new contact lenses (a special prescription that Wendy has) with him from home. I got a nice card from some old friends at work wishing us well on our travels so thanks guys and special thanks Jon for bringing the contacts.

We of course visited the main site that everyone will know, the Petronas Towers. Sadly every time, we’ve been in KL the weather has been somewhat hazy so we’ve never managed to get a great photo in the day from a distance (maybe next time we come), it also seemed pointless to go up as the visibility was poor. Still, even from below they are an impressive site, a cathedral of stainless steel. The KLCC park around the towers is well manicured and provides good views of the towers too.

We went to the KL bird park, one of the biggest walk-in aviaries in the world and that was good fun, especially in the parrot house. The birds seemed happy too and that’s the main thing from our point of view. The surrounding area had many other gardens and attractions too. We went to see the Orchid Garden but we were probably a month too late, not many about so we walked around the lake area and saw monitor lizards doing their thing by the edge of the water.

Another day, we visited the Batu Caves, a very popular Hindu Shrine(s). The 40m tall statue of Murugan at the entrance to the caves was the highlight for us, once up the stairs and in, the shrines were not that amazing, having been to India of course, we’ve been spoilt.

The place was also full of macaques and after my close call on Tioman I didn’t fancy getting too close but that was not a choice I could make as the buggers roam freely and snatch food from anyone. No mis-haps this time though or should I say, no alpha male giving me evil looks!

We walked around Chinatown which is quite a big area with many religious monuments of Hindu and Islamic faiths, the architecture in some streets had that colonial feel of Georgetown in Penang but it wasn’t as well maintained for the most part. There is of course a huge walking street with stalls selling everything and anything you can think of and many food hawkers.

These being the usual sites that people visit, we also did something a little different and on a Sunday morning got up early to head to FRIM about 30 mins on the train from us. FRIM, the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia, is basically a very big park/jungle area that offers lots of walking and cycling opportunities for the locals. The main reason we went though was to go on the canopy walkway they have built up there. It’s a slog to get up the hill for the start of it and by the time we got there, we were pretty sweaty from all the humidity even at 10am. It was a little busy with various Malaysians but not that busy. It certainly was a fun thing to do, the walkway was maybe 30m or so above the ground and about 150 metres long going from tree to tree.

The views over KL were ok with our eyes but could not be reproduced by photo due to the haze. Once we had completed the walk, we walked around a large portion of the park but there was not too much to see in the way of wildlife, just a few birds flying around. We stopped for a quick drink walking past some old re-constructed farm buildings that had been bought in from the countryside and made our way back into town to cool down in one of the air conditioned shopping malls where plenty of good cheap food is available as well.

During our second stint, we also experienced some good thunderstorms, one so loud that we felt it was in the room! A great lightning show gave us the opportunity to take some good shots.

On our third visit after our trip to Japan, the haze was even worse.

During the day we stayed in and planned our next moves to pastures new and went out at night to get cheap eats and take a few photos of some of the sites all lit up. The Petronas Towers actually looking a little bit more impressive in the dark somehow, the water-light show adding some more colour.

It’s a funny place KL, I wouldn’t really recommend it as one of the best capital cities in the world to visit but then again there is nothing bad about it. It doesn’t have so much of an identity as other big cities around the area such as Bangkok or Hanoi probably in part because it’s sill a relatively new capital in a very new country. It is a modern place in many ways feeding the mass-consumerism of our time but with very cheap food options.