Malaka, Malaysia

Malaka, Malaysia

Town Center, Malaka

Thanks Kuala Lumpur for another great comfortable bus ride! We really appreciate them when they’re not rough and crappy. We arrived in Malaka only 3 hours later from KL, and grabbed a quick taxi to take us to……duh duh duh duhhh…yep… China Town area of Malaka. It was the weekend and although a small town was really quite packed with local tourist making a weekend there, so it took some more searching to find a guesthouse, but 2 hours later, we snagged another solid bargin for $14 and settled in. Complete with hot water and aircon and 1 bad tv station 
There’s not a whole lot to Malaka really, it’s a nice little touristic town (at least in the China Town Touristic area) on the south-western coast of Malaysia. Probably at once an important port city. Keep in mind, when I say “nice, little town”, we’re talking about a town that has 400,000 people in it. The populations are so dense in cities here, it’s hard to adjust to just how many people live in this great big world. It’s a misconception we had ourselves and it easily reminds you daily why there are 7 billion people in the world now (a mere 300 million in the US), and what crammed will feel like if it continues. The taxi driver even commented how it was just a quiet small town. Well it’s twice as large as Evansville and 8 times the size of Owensboro.

adult tri-cycles for hire to tour around the city (these were so colorful and some had their own little soundsystems, hilarious)

Malaka was our planned jumping off city to get into Sumatra, Indonesia, but we decided to instead fly to Bali as the boat ticket to Sumatra was half the price of an airline ticket anyway. Indonesia is about the width, east to west as the US, so it’s a lot of land to cover and not just gonna be a quick 3 hour bus ride to get to the next city, it’ll be a 14 hr trip we’re afraid. So we just settled in Malaka for 3 short days, figuring out our next plan of attack and exploring some of China town’s night markets, food, the reconstructed churches, and a really enjoyable evening stroll through a Saturday Evening block party.

Christina getting her block party street grub on, fresh vegetable tofu burrito w/ caramalized turnip, was actually pretty darn good

The block party was a bunch of food stalls, people selling stuff, families eating, a farmers market, etc…Kind of felt like the fall festival in Evansville, just a lot smaller. We really had fun eating a dinner of snacks from different booths, sampling new items, and still finding room for a traditional bag of kettle corn and a cold sugar cane squeezed iced beverage…yummy.

unusual triple scoop cone of icecream, although the purple scoop flavor was un-identfiable :)

Well....
We bus back to KL and catch our flight to Bali as we grab new 30 day visas in Indonesia and are excited to see some of the world’s most renowned surf beaches, volcano lakes and countryside and do some serious Chillinnnn.

Christina adds a new patch to her pack. 6 down, lots more to go.