Historic Melaka

I called this post Historic Melaka because I was horrified when the first thing I saw as our bus pulled into town was a Tesco Express. Good grief!

Luckily, we were staying over the bridge in the old town which has Unesco World Heritage status, and I quickly calmed myself as the lovely old terracotta and ochre buildings came into view.

Melaka was exciting and very different to anywhere else we've been on this trip. Signs were all in an unknown tongue, and English wasn't as widely spoken as elsewhere on our travels, so we really felt as though we were in unfamiliar territory at last.

Despite the punishing heat, we made sure we did our share of rubbernecking, and our five-a-day in Melaka was ancient monuments and museums, not vegetables.

One morning we visited a shiny new mall in the newer part of town, supposedly to buy essential toiletries etc, but really to escape the heat and bask in the air-conditioning for a while. We allowed ourselves to be lured into a fish spa by a tiny cute Malaysian girl who giggled as she handed out leaflets to unsuspecting passers-by.

Although I didn't know anything about fish spas (and for all I know English cities might be full of them), they are BIG in Malaysia. We later noticed at least five more in Melaka alone. The deal is, you leave your shoes at the door, sit on a cushion at the side of a pool of water full of black fish, then voluntarily put your feet in the water and scream your head off when the fish nibble all the dead skin away. We nearly laughed ourselves senseless (it's a very ticklish procedure), and would thoroughly recommend it over a pumice stone.

I mentioned the heat, but it was also the rainy season, and we enjoyed a couple of spectacular tropical storms as well as regular downpours of monsoon rain.

On our last day in Melaka a curious thing happened. Our landlady told us that the President of China had announced that he would be making a surprise visit to Melaka the very next day. First the American President was expected in Singapore the day we were leaving, now the same thing was happening with the Chinese President!

Again, we wondered whether to delay our departure for this momentous event, but I couldn't find a "Free Tibet"banner anywhere, so we decided to stick to our schedule and leave early in the morning as planned.