Melaka/Malacca

Click the pix for larger picture.

After a restful night at the Embassy Hotel in Mersing, we caught an early afternoon bus to Melaka/Malacca.   This is an historic World Heritage city that was the original trading port for the Malaysian peninsula.

This was also to be the most trouble free bus trip of our entire journey.  The scenery was basically palm oil plantations, and palm oil plantations that had been cleared for replanting.  Its novelty wears off rather quickly, so I used this mundane scenery to do some reading and writing.

Malaysian buses are very nice, especially the seats.  They are roomy, deeply cushioned and have the ability to recline in a manner I’ve only experienced with a La-Z-Boy easy chair, never mind the person behind you.  They all have decorative curtains with a distinct oriental flair.  Except for the smattering of ill washed fellow travelers one feels like a real pasha. 

The Melaka bus terminal is decent enough, and we took a taxi to our hotel.  The hotel we booked is a modern three star place on the edge to the historic district.  The street was Chinese and had a number of food carts along the edges.  Since it is the Chinese New Year holiday season, there were also stalls selling the same crappy Chinese candy and cheap decorations we thought we had escaped from.  Fireworks were also readily available.

Melaka is a little disappointing.  It has a very nice area with well preserved buildings, but the effect was spoiled by all the cheesy New Year decorations and the constant stream of cars through its narrow streets.  Food and drink prices were extortionate.

However, we had several pleasant visits with shop owners, who were invariably friendly after finding out we lived in China.  The Chinese antique shops had a much greater selection of antiquities than anything we ever encounter in China.  The Chinese in China have little appreciation for this sort of thing.  It’s a little sad that you have to leave China to get a good look at artifacts from its past.

There is a maritime museum located in a replica of a Portuguese trading ship.  It gave a pretty good account of the history of the port, with a healthy lambasting of the Portuguese and a generous accounting of the merits of Islam on the Malay people.  Across the street from there is a wonderful shopping bazaar and food court.  Food courts are the way to eat in Malaysia.  Malay and Indian food abound, and you can point out what you want if you don’t know the names.  If you like spicy foods you are in heaven.  Since many Malays eat with their fingers, there is no problem for you to grab a chicken leg slathered in chili paste or curry and woof it down.  Hand washing sinks are everywhere to accommodate just such dining methods.  If you don’t like spicy food, then you will be sad.  Bland food is rare, and if that's what you want, then you should visit England.

Tioman Island

Ferry to Tioman

Mersing Ferry Terminal

Embassy Hotel, Mersing

The next morning dawned bright and sunny and we caught the ferry to Tioman Island.  The boat was a smallish passenger vessel good for a hundred or so people, with an air conditioned, comfy seating area and seats with enough room underneath to accommodate our bags.  The boat was fast, the sea was choppy and nobody puked.  There was a movie being shown, and although the engine noise was drowned out the sound, it was close captioned for the hearing impaired, which we were.  It was a “Death Race” movie, which had lots of mayhem, explosions and gratuitous violence, a perfect companion for a bouncy ride to a tropical island.  It was also about 90 minutes long, which is about the length of our voyage.

We landed at Tekek, which is the main village.  There are some cars and motorbikes and it’s kind of bustling.  It seemed pretty nice, but our final destination, Juara, was a little further, on the other side of the island.  The journey to Juara requires either a death march, or a 4 wheel drive ride over the mountain.  We opted for hiring a vehicle which took us up a very steep and winding concrete road like path.  We saw lots of jungle, some monkeys and a damn large lizard.  The journey is about 7 km and takes about 30 minutes.  We arrived at a lovely place located in a cove with the nicest beach I’ve ever seen that wasn’t cold.  It’s the off season, and it’s really off.  We went first to a place that is run by an Australian surfer dude that gets way more credit in the guide books than it deserves.  It was jam packed with seedy types and dreadlocked unfriendly folks.  They had that look of people with enough means to not have to work, but still be able to travel in a kind of cushy hippie lifestyle that I doubt the grandparents who set up their trust funds would approve of.

That was at the north end of the village.  We had our driver take us to the other end where we found a lovely lodge with bungalows set in a nicely landscaped grounds just steps from the deserted beach.  We got the winter rates, and had the whole place to ourselves. After spending the last 5 months in noisy, crowded China, the paradise aspect of our vacation spot was enhanced even more.  It took four days of travel in buses, jets, taxis, boats, 4 wheel drives and foot to get here, and it was completely worth it.

It’s quiet this time of year, very quiet.  The only vehicles are the very occasional motorbike, and the even more seldom seen 4 wheel drive vehicle.  The beach is deserted, and the only sound is that of waves lapping on the shore.  The water is a perfect temperature, and at least for the first 3 days of our stay, very calm.  The cove is surrounded by jungle, and it truly is a paradise.

Juara Beach Resort

We spent the first two days laying about and swimming, trying not to get sunburned.  Since it is near the Equator, the sun can be pretty intense.  Most restaurants are closed for the off season, and we found the ones that were open mostly staffed with indifferent people serving slowly prepared food of varying quality.  After some trial and error we fell into a pattern of going to a certain place for breakfast, and a couple of other places for dinner.  The tiny market offered mostly junk snacks.  They did have Sour Cream and Onion Pringles which is a chip flavor totally alien to the Chinese, who prefer flavors like shrimp and blueberry. (I am not making this up). 

We could find no beer except in one bad restaurant.  Tioman is a duty free place, but I didn’t think to get anything in Tekek, and Juara during the monsoons seems to be under some kind of Islamic Sharia anti alcohol cloud.  However, the owner of our bungalows had a bottle of duty free Guervo Gold that he sold to me at cost, somewhere in the neighborhood of less than 20 dollars, American.  It goes really good with mango/orange juice which Allah in his infinite wisdom allows.

Laundry Day

Main Street

We managed a few excursions and saw some interesting critters.  There are some little crabs that are very fast sprinters, and we discovered some mud skippers near the mouth of a small river.  We saw monkeys in the trees and squirrels.

Muddy Mudskipper

The third day was the beginning of the Tioman surf competition, held in sleepy Juara.  We didn’t know what to expect.  It was at the northern part of the place, about a 20 minute walk from us.  We headed there to check out the action.  There is surf during the monsoons on the north beach, and there were some pretty good surfers from around the region there.  Just like surfers and snowboarders in the USA, these dudes are shaggy, relaxed and appear to have no means of support other than whatever menial work they may deign to do when friends and relatives get sick of them and throw them out.  They have all the manners and charm of their American counterparts, too.  I felt right at home, or at least the home I left four years ago.  There’s nobody like that in China.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

 

Our friends left the fourth day, on their way to Singapore, then Indonesia.  We decided to spend 3 more nights.  We went again to watch the surfers, and the event had gotten much larger and louder.  The Beastie Boys were hollering through the sound system, so we spent 5 or 6 minutes there then returned to our end of the village.  It began to slowly get busier and louder as locals and  surfers began to filter toward our end.  An open air bistro had a band playing, and it was almost like tourist season, except there were still no fat, white people, and our lodgings acquired no new guests.  That night it began to rain.  It rained a bit more.  We were to leave on Tuesday, when the owner came to us on Sunday and told us we should try to get off the island before the weather got really bad.  He himself was on his way to the mainland to celebrate Chinese New Year with relatives in Johar Bahru and would share a ride with us to the ferry.

He refunded our money for Tuesday night, and we spent the day mostly laying about reading.  Then my Kindle broke.  It just made a funny image on the screen and died, leaving behind an image resembling a mostly shaken Etch a Sketch, not unlike Mitt Romney after the Republican primary.  No remedy from the Kindle website was effective in reviving it,  so I am no longer the Kindle fan I once was.

On Tuesday morning we headed back over the mountain in the rain to Tekek.  We arrived there to learn that there would be no ferry to Mersing due to rough seas.  We headed across the street for some breakfast at a big food court.  All the surfer dudes were there since they couldn’t get off the island either.  They were noisily lounging about smoking and laughing trying to purchase as little as possible and still be able to keep a table.  Nobody seemed to mind.

We had fired rice with a fried egg on top, and some coffee.  This was Malay style with plenty of good spices, including this chili paste with dried fish.   This might be a good time to mention Malaysian coffee.  It’s very good, in fact it’s excellent.  A common way to serve it is with the grounds in a bag, like a teabag, only bigger.  If you ask for it with milk, it comes with a sweetened condensed milk added.  It’s better than anything I’ve had outside the US, with the exception of Guatemala. I normally drink tea, which is also excellent here, but I find myself drinking coffee in the mornings.

After finding out the exorbitant rates for the lodging in Tekek, we returned to Juara to stay another night at our private resort.  The owner upgraded us to a premium room for the same price.  It had TV with one HBO channel, a big bathroom and two queen sized beds.  Since it was mostly rainy the TV was an added bonus we were happy to have.

Later the day became only cloudy, and we enjoyed the quiet and solitude of Juara.  The surfer dudes were all over on the other side of the island since they lacked the means to get back to our side.

That night it started raining in earnest with little let up.  It was the kind of rain we get in South China, the kind that leaves you amazed that the sky can hold that much water in the form of vapor, then suddenly release it in such prodigious amounts.  

I doubted the ferry’s ability to run under such conditions, but the next morning found us going over the mountain again.  There were places in the road where the water cascaded along its length, and the streams we crossed were swollen enough that even the locals were expressing some amazement. 

When we arrived in Tekek, we were surprised to learn that the boats were going to be running.  The scheduled departure time was 11:30, which gave us over an hour to have some more yummy breakfast.  After breakfast, we wandered over to the ferry building to learn that the boats would be delayed until sometime between 3 and 4 o’clock.  That left us with some time to kill, and nowhere to kill it, since it was still raining hard enough to float an ark.

We hung out in the food court, doing what I have well become accustomed to doing, while living in China, waiting patiently.  Fortunately, there were plenty of empty picnic style tables in areas where the businesses were not open, so we lounged about commenting on the rain and how good the drainage systems there seemed to be.

Fine Dining Establishment

That Was Good!!!

Waitingwaitinewaitingwaiting

Somewhere along the way we were informed that 4 o’clock would be the departure time.  At around 3, it began to rain as hard as it seemed to any time during the day, and I figured we would make a dash across when it let up.  We did have umbrellas, and the ferry port is just across the street, but we also had to cross a bridge that is covered with a metal roof and  the effect is sort of painful on the ears.

We went over when the rain let up enough so that hearing damage on the bridge was no longer and issue, and we got in line to get our boarding assignments.  We went into the waiting room, a clean, modern and comfortable place, which is good since we didn’t begin boarding until almost 5 o’clock.

It actually stopped raining and the sea was calm.  The skies had a high overcast that looked kind of exhausted from producing so much precipitation.

The previous week our voyage to the island was pleasant, since the cabin was air conditioned and we had “Death Race” on the TV.  The voyage back was less so.  It was not hot and sunny, so they didn’t have the air conditioning on.  The cabin was stuffy and sultry.  We were surrounded by slightly unwashed guys who all were adorned with essence of heavy smoker.

We set sail, but in the wrong direction.  We voyaged about 7 minutes the wrong way to drop one guy off at the next village.  We then began to go the right direction, but then docked right back where we started, and stayed there for a few stifling minutes more, until we finally set sail for the mainland.  The trip then proceeded without any more delays, a hundred plus souls on their way to mainland Malaysia after a two day wait.  The atmosphere  remained unventilated but some of our fellow passengers provide us with some entertaining variations of  flatulence.

When we docked some two hours later, I was truly amazed at how refreshing and cool a steamy tropical evening could be.

We had chosen to go to Tioman in spite of warnings of monsoon because I was in dire need of some serious rest and relaxation.  I got all that I needed and more.  In retrospect, 3 or 4 nights would have been adequate, giving me enough recuperation to tackle the demands of Malaysian bus travel.