Monday, December 21, 2009
Melaka Trip Day Two
@1:42 AM
131209@1:42 AM
Batu Pahat to Melaka
Distance: 106km, Time: 6:30 hrs
The Fairyland Hotel I stayed in at Batu Pahat is probably the second best in the whole trip, and the most expensive at 30RM. Its location is also rather brilliant as it is located smack in the town center.
Along the way to Melaka, the Johor road proves to be a treasure trove of sights and sounds, with a dollop of culture served in hints here and there.
The picture above is a standard road-side stall that you see quite often in Johor, usually run by the family. It is not uncommon to see a small restaurant, with a house behind; the breadwinners go out to work, and the family members left behind does the restaurant business, catering to travelers and locals alike.
This is the Johor-Melaka bridge. When transiting from Johor to Melaka, you can tell the difference in how the states are governed by the nature of the highway. From Pontian Kechil till Melaka, all I have to do is to follow the federal highway 5 and not be misled off this beaten trail. In Johor, all the towns are built along and centered on the highway, and businesses actually base their livelihood on the traffic through these towns. In Melaka, however, the towns are like a separate entity all of its own. The highways act merely as a means to ease transportation to and fro, kind of like a fruit and plant relationship. It is more common to have to turn off the main road, go on for a couple of kilometers before you enter the town proper, so I felt that Melaka is somewhat impersonal, much more so than Johor’s roads are.
Compare and contrast: the clutter and close contact of Johor, versus the wide, empty and impersonal roads of Melaka. I’ll take the former any day. What this difference means for the cyclist is that the 50+ km of Muar-Melaka stretch is long, hot, boring and somewhat agonising. There is no tree shelter the entire time unlike in Johor, so the sun burns relentlessly unless the weather turns cloudy.
My hand is swollen from sunburn after two days of cycling in intense heat.
When I reached Melaka, I blindly followed Rough Guides in the choice of accommodation. The Discovery Café is friendly, but costs are doubled compared to Travellers’ Lodge and most other hostels around. The good part of it is that they have very nice owners who gave me free drinks and paos, later passing me a fantastically juicy pamelo, a godsent after such a long time in the sun. They are also located very close to the major attractions, so I guess I ought not to complain so much for paying 17RM. However, their accommodation is still somewhat seedy…
The bunk itself is down the alleyway, upstairs from the back of a grocery store. I locked my bike inside.
Sights and sounds of Melaka at night.
The Café is the only time where I actually met backpackers like myself, and other interesting figures besides. When I first reached, I met this American who is married to a Melakan Chinese, and he complained to me about how so few people speaks English in Melaka. His mother-in-law speaks Chinese which he had to pretend to understand, and when his wife is home, the television will remain in the Chinese channel which he watched dumbly. In the entire family (including relatives) only his wife and child speaks English. Kind of sad, because he gets to return to the United States only once in a long while, and that must be especially liberating.
A British guy also talked about how nice it was in Malaysia where you get to smoke anywhere you want, whereas back in the UK, smoking is banned indoors and you have to stand 25m away from building (in theory) AND have ashtrays with you before you smoke. He complained about how he was forced out of a purchase of a house here when Melaka was declared a “World Heritage City”, because the government decided to only allow locals to own properties in the inner city. He has a Melakan Chinese girlfriend whom he can communicate with face to face, but absolutely cannot do so on the phone.
It is also of utmost importance to the touring cyclist to note that 1.5L water bottles at the Café costs only 1.50RM, compared to 2.00RM even in the Jonker’s Walk night market.
