Melaka and on to Singapore

We spent the last couple of days in Melaka, formerly the hub of everything on the Malay peninsula (it's not really at that level any more, but it is a really interesting place). I'm not using my computer so I won't bother we any pictures today.

Anyhow, we got the bus down to Melaka, I was expecting it to take longer, but it was pretty smooth getting to Melaka Sentral, from there it was on to an old old old bus packed to full house, we didn't really know where we were going, something about Ocean, I'd only written down some vague notes. We ended up in the square of town and Francisca's bag had one of the handles fall off and we just decided to get a taxi.

He took us around the block and charged us 15x the amount that the bus was (we could have walked in about 5 mins, or caught the taxi from Sentral for the same price. What we didn't do though was ask for the price before getting in (rookie error), so when I heard the locks go down, I knew we were in his power.

Up the stairs to Ringo's Foyer Guest House, where we meet Howard, what a character. A good bloke to run a hostel, getting everyone together, and Jonathan is there too. We go for some lunch and then we drink some beers and play this game called Carrom. I'll tell more about that later...it's an Indian game, with elements of pool, air hockey and chess. Howard gets everyone together from the hostel and we all go for dinner in a satay place. That's the way to create a good vibe, get everyone together, knowing each other and having a good time.

Walked around quite a lot yesterday. By the end of the day we were retracing our steps, so two solid days was probably enough, although I was keen to check out the Muesum in the Statdyhus (Ethnography, History and Literature), Melaka in itself is a museum (it is a UNESCO listed site after all), but I am definitely glad to have gone there, somewhere I didn't really know anything about before this trip, but now I would like to learn a lot more, particularly about the days of the rule of the Sultan.

Now we are down in Singapore, we got another bus today, most of our other mates from the hostel headed up to KL, but we had already been there, most of them had come up from Singapore. The hostel here, old mate is sure no Howard. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact...

We're going to have another night here, then we'll head back into KL and move on from there to India, which is the next phase of the trip. We've already been going for almost a week, it's really only just begun but feels like we've been a while on the road.

Speaking of On The Road, I just finished The Portable Jack Kerouac. Good read, I bought that in San Francisco last year. Has taken me a while to get stuck right into it. All done now. I wouldn't mind finding some kind of (light) book on the history of the Melaka area or something along those lines...