Malaysia (Melacca) and Singapore

From Bali we flew back to Malaysia arriving late in the evening, but thankfully managed to find a hotel; one that wasn’t even officially open yet! It was the first night it accepted guests and work was still ongoing for the official opening the following week. Needless to say we didn’t have to worry about searching for bedbugs as we were the first guests in our room. After stocking up on a few essentials and buying a lightweight tent and heavy sleeping bags for Peru, we caught a three hour (freezing air conditioned) bus Melacca.

Melacca

Melacca is supposedly the cultural capital of Malaysia so we were excited to visit. It didn’t let us down, it’s a very pretty town and played an important role as a major port to shipping vessels back in the day. Enrique 'the black', a Melacca resident even accompanied Magellan around the world as his trusty side kick, completely circumnavigating the world, which Magellan actually fell short of doing- according to the local museum anyway. We stayed at ‘Sunny’s Place’ while it was friendly, it’s a dive nonetheless. The town was hosting some dragon boat racing usually held in Singapore or China, so we were lucky to catch it. It was fun to watch for a while, but when no fire sprang forth from the boats we eventually left to check out the rest of the town.

It was definitely worth the visit, We took a site seeing bus and explored all the areas including china town, little India, the Dutch Square, the port and everything else the town had to offer in our two days.

From our hostel we caught the hottest, metal box local bus to the bus station. No matter where you sat the sun poured in and I have never sweated as much in my entire life! Thankfully our four hour bus ride to Singapore was in a fancy well regulated air-conditioned bus!

Singapore- how far can $2 get you?

We didn’t leave ourselves any time in Singapore as we’d spent a bit of time there a few years ago. We did however manage to get our subway tickets, tea, coffee and dinner out of $2 Singapore and one old travel card! After being dropped from the bus we went to the subway station where the ATM’s weren’t working, I had an old travel card from our last visit which I thought was near empty but it actually had nearly $8, we cashed that in and bought our two tickets to the airport. Naturally all the food at the airport was expensive but we were chatting to an employee who told us about the cafeteria down stairs. We followed the signs that said ‘staff entrance’, which we were sure was a mistake, but sure enough there was a huge buzzing food court. The food was dually priced for public and staff (hardly anything in the difference) so even thought we were the only foreigners there it was ok. For under $5 we had a great meal each, tea and coffee (horrible) afterwards and even enough leftover to buy a little bag of sweets for the plane at a stall near the exit!! Bargain and considering Australia is our next destination, I think our last one for a while!