Today we did a tour that went down to Melaka or sometimes spelt Malakka. What is really funny here is the spelling, much easier than in PNG. Restaurant is spelt restaron, bus is spelt bas, taxi is spelt teksi and of course there are McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Dominos, KFC etc. The plan was to leave her at 9am for an eight hour day trip. Melaka is about two hours drive south of Kuala Lumpur and is very interesting because it is where the Dutch and Portugese were in power until Malaysia fought for and won Independence in 1956.
So we were all ready in the foyer waiting for the bus and it didn't arrive. A couple of phone calls and a much apologetic tour organizer later and the bus arrived about 10.15. The moral of the story is do not try to go to Melaka on the day after a Public Holiday in the school holidays. Saturday was a public holiday for the Kings birthday, it meant nothing to us, all the shops were open from 10am until 10pm as usual and it didn't affect any of the tourist services. The largest industry in KL is tourism. Driving to Melaka was like driving to Ocean Grove from Ballarat on Boxing Day. Lots of traffic flowing well until you get about 15km from town, then it just stops and you crawl along. The two hour trip took 2.5 hours and as we had left late we drove past the oldest and largest Chinese cemetary outside China and went straight to lunch. Lunch was included in the tour and was at a Chinese restoran. The food was delicious although I discovered that Iced Tea means hot tea with ice blocks in it, who would have thunk that.
After lunch we toured off to the Dutch area and had a look at the old Dutch style buildings and stopped off at the headquarters of the Dutch and at Francis Xavier Church and a lovely old fountain in memory of Queen Victoria. Of course, there was a market full of the usual rubbish, although Gerard bought a shirt, of course. There were highly decorated tuk tuk type bicycles complete with a variety of drivers and all fitted out with boom boxes that play disco type music at a million decibel and deafen anyone silly enough to ride in them.
We then moved onto the Memorial to Independence and where the historic Portugese fort is. The war went on for about 11 years and the most casualties were civilians, by a long way. It was so hot, all the days have been over 30 here usually 33 or 34. Coming home to the cold is going to be a shock. The memorial to Independence was very interesting and included a museum and a number of different buildings including the very old 16th century Dutch fort. Unfortunately it was not in as good a condition as the old buildings in Europe. The museum was quite modern with short videos and dioramas as well as models and articles.
We got back on the bus about 4.30pm and started the journey back to KL. I always thought the traffic on the Monash was bad at peak hour, but man, the traffic from Malaka to KL on the Sunday night after a public holiday and the start of the school holidays would run rings around it. We spent most of the trip home either travelling up the emergency lane or stop/start in traffic. Motorbikes use the emergency lane most of the time and if they were coming along they would too at the bus and we would move over out of the way back into the three lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. Times it was a bit of a squeeze between our little bus and the big coaches and the railing on the side of the freeway. Our two hour trip took almost four hours and we got back to the hotel quite late, we went out for a quick meal at the nearby Italian restaurant.
