Something is troubling me as I land at Kuala Lumpur late at night. It’s not nervousness at being in a new city, or wondering how I’m going to get from the airport to my hotel. Or whether the hotel would still have my booking, or still be open this late. I’m worried about how I’m going to get to Malacca in a couple of days. Because Malacca is where I really want to be.

Before coming, I researched the train trip on The Man in Seat 61 website (an awesome resource for train travel by the way). I love train travel. But this time, the train I want is fully booked. If I can’t get the train I want, it’s not worth it, because the closest station to Malacca is actually in Tampin, a hole in the wall 30 km away. I don’t want to arrive in Tampin late at night and then have to try to negotiate my way to Malacca with taxi drivers that may well be sadistic axe-murderers or worse, non-existent.

Hmmm. Bugger.

The day (or night, as it were) is saved by Kay. Kay is my taxi driver from KL airport into town and she is neither non-existent nor psychopathic- she’s a small, talkative woman who welcomes me to Malaysia with a warmth not displayed by strangers where I am from, although I later learn it is the norm in Malaysia. After an initial discussion about driving techniques, talk turns to the issues in my plans to visit Malacca. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I will drive you to Malacca for 250 Ringgit” (about US$80). I am quite surprised by this. Not only is that fairly cheap for a longish drive (2 hours), but I realise it’s a much simpler route than the train or bus:

1. Get thee (somehow) to the train/bus station.
2. Train/bus to Tampin train station/Malacca bus station.
3. Taxi to central Malacca.

After adding up all that time and cost, I realise her offer is not much more expensive than that and signficantly simpler- pick up from guesthouse in KL anytime, drop off at guesthouse in Malacca anytime. And yet because I’m so seduced by the lure of rail travel, and in denial that it isn’t going to happen, I wait two days in KL before calling Kay back to accept the offer.

“Why you didn’t call me yesterday?” she asks moodily. “Silly boy. I’m booked out now. Can no longer drive you.” Hmmm. Bugger.
“Forget what you were going to do and drive me anyway,” I suggest hopefully.
“I tell you what,” Kay says. “I call my friend. He will drive you to Malacca. Very good driver.”

I am a bit paranoid that Kay might be trying to involve me in some sort of Malaysian ponzi scheme, some sort of abduction racket, or some sort of Malaysian ponzi abduction racket. But I judge her to be of good character and besides, I’ve got no other way of getting to Malacca now. So after two surprisingly amazing monsoon days in Kuala Lumpur, I find myself cruising out of the city with Roger* (not his actual name because I can’t remember what his actual name was).

“How long will it take to get to Malacca?” I ask.
“Oh not long. One hour.”
“Wow. Fantastic.” This is much shorter than anybody previously told me, including Kay.
“Maybe 1.5 hours,” Roger clarifies. “Depends on traffic.”

It is not long at all til we hit the aforementioned traffic. It’s pretty chockers, but then things really slow up as the monsoon rain hits. This is no shower. Rather, the freeway soon resembles a river. Great gushing torrents cascade from the hills above and the windscreen is a white-out, punctuated periodically by the swipe from the wipers. Roger starts to stress at not being able to see the road properly. When I catch glimpses, it’s packed full of cars and they’re all travelling at 20 km/hr, the water lapping their hubcaps. Great.

We travel under an overpass and there are hundreds of drenched motorcyclists huddled underneath waiting for the rain to stop. I think how torrid a time the monsoon must be for the nation’s vast motorcyclist population and realise that sitting dry in the back of this air-conditioned private car, I’m really in pretty good shape. So I sit back and chat with Roger and try to enjoy the ride.

At the one hour mark, KL barely even out of the rear-vision mirror, Roger pulls up at a service station. “Very tired, need to piss” he explains. “You want coffee? Chocolate bar?”
“No thanks,” I reply, “I’m ok.” The rain has stopped so I take the chance to stretch my legs and look around. It’s all palm oil plantations, as far as the eye can see.

At the 2 hour mark Roger again informs me that a piss is imminent. It’s almost déjà vu, the palm-covered expanse looks the same as before. By the time we stop again at the 2-and-a-half hour mark, palm trees all around, Roger again asking “you need piss?”, I’m beginning to wonder if we will ever arrive.

But next thing I know, the traffic gets even heavier (if that’s possible), and the road gets narrower and it’s surrounded by buildings. And they are glorious! A very, very faded elegance from centuries of colonial presence- first the Portuguese (from 1511 to 1641), then the Dutch (1641 to 1798) and finally the British (1826 to 1946). We pull up at my hotel (the Hotel Puri), a beautiful old historic house, though the room is nothing to write home about.

The town is pumping. It’s Saturday night and the antique markets on Jonker Street are in full swing. I listen to an old-fashioned phonograph in a store and look through piles of old boat anchors and lanterns and endless piles of other antiques. I imagine it’s quite the place if you’re in the mood for an eclectic shopping spree. The street is teeming with throngs of shoppers, and insanely, a car tries to drive down the crowded street and gets jammed in surrounded by angry shouting people and stalls. The place is like a moshpit so I dive down a more peaceful sidestreet and grab a meal at a place that specialises in iced tea and laksas. Both of which I am obsessed by, though tonight I’m eating some sort of chickeny ricey potato thing and it’s bloody delicious.

The river (Sungai Malaka) is sublimely peaceful, framed by cracked pretty houses and trees full of bats. I grab a beer at another little bar right on the edge of the water and watch the tour boats that ply the river, their bows bizarrely square pushing forcefully through the water.

Across the bridge in front of the Christ Church and the Stadthuys (a red Dutch town hall) is the historic part of Malacca. I’ll be exploring the sites tomorrow during the day, but at night there’s an interesting attraction- a score of “disco rickshaws” set up, waiting to entice tourists on roundtrips of the historic sites. Each one more gaudy than the next, with colourful lights and flower arrangements, it’s so cheesy I just have to do it. I choose a rickshaw with shocking pink lights and Hello Kitty figurines. The driver and I agree on a price and he connects a set of jumper leads to a lead-acid car battery under the footrest. A techno beat starts up. We ride past the old town hall to A’ Famosa, the ruins of the Portuguese fort, with the pedestrians for miles around stopping to look at the westerner riding a noisy yet romantic Hello Kitty disco rickshaw.

On my walk back through town I stop in at an impressive mosque and a guesthouse full of foreigners. It’s standing room only with a girl on guitar. I grab a couple of beers and sit around enjoying the ambience. It’s been quite a night.

The next day I explore the historic sites in earnest. First on the agenda is the impressive ruins of St. Paul’s Church, on the summit of St. Paul’s Hill. Constructed in the early 1500’s by the Portuguese, nowdays only bits of it are left, and the roof is pretty much non-existent. It’s got that really “dark” Renaissance era vibe running through its veins though, and comes complete with dozens of spooky headstones. The church used to overlook the famous Malacca Strait, but nowdays the ocean is a few kilometres away. I can see it in the distance over A’ Famosa and the red-tiled rooftops of the new town.

A’ Famosa, which used to guard the town from attack from the sea, is likewise now well inland. It has a chequered history.  When the Portuguese defeated the Malaccan sultan in 1511, their commander Afonso de Albuquerque had the fort built to protect the fledging village. It was handed over to the Dutch in 1641 when they defeated the Portuguese, and then the Dutch handed it over to the British in the early 1800s to prevent it falling into the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French. The British, thinking they’d eventually have to hand it back and fearful of the power of the Dutch colony, had the fortress almost completely demolished. Only the gate and other small bits were preserved and only then because of the intervention of Sir Stamford Raffles, the father of modern Singapore, who seemed to be the only heritage-minded Englishman in Malaya at the time.

It seems odd to visit Malacca and not visit the Malacca Strait, so after my visit to A’ Famosa I head out towards the coast. I imagine a sweeping rocky coastline or a long lovely beach; but there’s nothing there except an overhead freeway, the silted-up river mouth, and a low lying, unappealing sandy expanse covered with a rusty barge and some bulldozers. Oh well.

It’s time to leave for Singapore. My plans for the train having been long abandoned, I am not happy about the prospect of catching the bus, however as I jump aboard I’m pleasantly surprised. This is no ordinary bus. It’s super luxurious, with plush comfortable seats that fully recline, personal video screens and a jolly conductor who keeps making jokes about us travelling to Kuala Lumpur or other destinations instead of Singapore. We humour him until it becomes necessary to ignore him and cruise out of town and past the ubiquitous palm plantations.

At this point, something has to be said about Malaysia’s palm plantations. I was very sad to see that almost the entire expanse of southern Malaysia’s natural forests seems to have been cleared to make way for them. I’ve never seen such environmental degradation or obscene slavery to the almighty buck. It’s both awe-inspiring and scary and I would hate to see the forests of other developing countries be lost in the same way. The forests are the lungs of the earth!

As the clouds gather in the sky, and we reach the border with Singapore at the Johor-Singapore causeway, the journey takes a turn for the worse. We’re stuck in an abominable traffic jam of buses and traffic waiting to get to Malaysian immigration. We all have to get off the bus, leaving our luggage behind, and we’re told that if we’re held up by the officials longer than 15 minutes then the bus cannot wait for us. Predictably, it’s a shitfight. The queues inside leave me stressing that I’ve been left behind with no luggage. I can’t recognise any of the passengers from the bus. On exiting the building, I’m in a huuuuge indoor carpark absolutely teeming with disorganised crowds, exhaust and hundreds of buses with their engines running. The clock is ticking but I have no idea where my bus is. Just as I start to panic, I’m miraculously tapped on the shoulder by the conductor from our bus. He tells me where the bus is and I clamber aboard, and I’m not even the last back.

Driving through southern Malaysia heading for Singapore. Nothing but palm trees as far as the eye can see.

The Singapore side must surely be better, I think. I’m wrong. We spend an hour in a traffic jam on the causeway, the exhaust of hundreds of stinking buses burning in my nostrils. I dream of the train, where immigration officials simply climb aboard, check your passport and the train moves on. The Singapore car and bus immigration buildings are gigantic, multiple space-age bubble-buildings and there’s so many of them I can’t believe how long we’re held up. How many people are trying to enter this metropolis?! When we finally arrive at our space-age bubble-building on an elevated roadway, I make sure to stick with a Canadian couple from the bus so as not to get lost. But we’re in line for 45 minutes inside the building, and stressing the whole time that our bus has not waited.

Mercifully, it has- it’s probably considered bad form to arrive at your destination with only half your passengers left. But by the time we roll into Singapore city, it’s midnight and all the gleaming lights of the city are dimmed. We’re dropped off in a dark backstreet. It’s supposed to be a taxi-rank, but there’s no cabs at all and a busload of tired, frustrated passengers are eager to get to their hotels. Not keen on another hour-plus wait, I abandon them and put into practice one of my travel-tricks: look for a nearby hotel, go in one entrance and out the other and pretend to be a guest of the hotel checking out. The helpful valet gets me a cab and I tell the surprised driver the name of my hotel, rather than the airport.

It’s been quite an adventure, but it’s time for some sleep. After a big ol’ juicy room service burger. Yeeeee haaa!

Have you been to Malacca? I’d love to hear from you. And if you know of any other good places to visit in southern Malaysia, perhaps daytrips from Singapore, let me know in the comments! Meanwhile, if you need a driver in Malaysia and want Kay’s number, contact me.