The Singapore-Melaka bus boasted airline seats, waste bins, and under-coach storage. I shared it with two backpackers and four Singapore women going to Melaka for a weekend of eating and shopping. I pointed that that was why people went to Singapore, and they said that they needed a change.
We stopped at the Woodlands checkpoint and walked our passports through immigration and out of Singapore. We stopped again on the mainland, and walked our passports and luggage into Malaysia. The bus rolled north, past continuous palm plantations, with occasional shaggy hills looming in the distance.
Melaka proved bigger than I expected, and required a lot of walking. Once a key entrepot for the China-India-Europe sea-borne trade, it is still revered as the first and most powerful sultanate on the Malay peninsula. Islam entered Malaysia through Melaka, as did the European colonizers. A Portuguese wrote that "whoever is lord in Melaka has his hand on the throat of Venice," and the Portuguese duly took the city in 1641, losing it to the Dutch 150 years later. Although the Portuguese built an imposing fortress, known as A'Famosa, when Melaka fell to the Europeans it lost its preeminence as a port forever. After the British took control in the 1800s they demolished the fortress -- except for one unimposing gateway -- and made Singapore the area's trading center.
Although Melaka is noted for its Portuguese ruins and Dutch buildings, sometimes a ruin is just a ruin and I didn't find these even worth a photo. It was a pity, because St. Francis Xavier (whose current resting place I had visited in Goa the previous year) was originally buried in Melaka, and I had been looking forward to closing the circle.
The Dutch buildings were big, and stolid, and aggressively red, and in the case of the centerpiece Stadhuys, closed for renovation. The museums that were open were short on exhibits and long on explanations. At least the brand new democracy museum had AC. The reproduction sultan's palace, on the other hand, offered some lovely costumes and a collection of vicious-looking kris, in a beautiful wooden building.
I found my first hotel, in a renovated godown by the river, expensive and noisy -- a cattle grid affair outside my room produced an annoying double-thunk every time a vehicle passed. I moved further into Chinatown and traded atmosphere for amenities (and a lower price).
Melaka's food wasn't bad, but not up to K.L. or Singapore. I ate nyonya cuisine several times -- not especially spicy, although the noodle soup known as laksa had some bite. I enjoyed the aptly named four square beans at one meal, and hard salt shrimp at another in the small Portuguese section. I did a little shopping in Melaka too, picking up a black-and-white sarong, and a bracelet of golden sandstone beads (reminding me of the golden statues of Ganesha I saw in southern India).
I spent three nights in Melaka but felt it could better be done as a day trip from K.L. or Singapore. Mostly run-down older buildings inland, and cookie-cutter developments on reclaimed land by the sea (think of Pete Seeger's "Little Boxes", although these weren't really ticky-tacky), it didn't live up to the guide books' descriptions.
Next-door to my second hotel I found a masseur who had trained at Wat Pho in Bangkok. He gave me an excellent foot massage, but maybe it was too good. Or maybe the steep drop from Melaka's pavements (over open drains, to boot) was the culprit. Either way, my blister was replaced by a sprain/strain and I started limping badly. Not the best way to start a trip to the Cameron Highlands, a place to cool off, but also to hike.
I trekked over to Melaka's long distance bus station three days running. Day one -- I established there was one bus a day, at 9:30 a.m., to Tapah, a two-hour drive below Tanah Rata in the highlands proper. The relevant office was shut for the day. Day two -- I bought a ticket. Day three -- I caught the bus. The bus spent an hour in Klang -- 30 minutes in a side street, 20 minutes in the bus station, and 10 minutes getting gas. It stopped again, for a 30 minute break just outside Slim River. But in Tapah, I barely had time to get my luggage off the bus before it took off again for Ipoh.
As I counted my bags I was accosted by a taxi driver, offering a good price for a shared ride up to Tanah Rata. It was only after we started that I realized that I was in a car with two men I didn't know and no-one knew where I was or where I was going. It was a fleeting thought -- the windshield was plastered with official looking stickers, and it was daylight on a well-traveled road, but it did underline one downside of traveling alone.
Lonely Planet had written rather disparagingly about the road to Tanah Rata, but after the roads I traveled last year in the Himalayas I found it almost a highway -- much like US 64 in western North Carolina, in fact. It kept going up and there were continual bends, but it was two-lane, well marked, and even boasted guard rails at suitable places. A couple of drivers overtook on corners and the buses had to use two lanes to negotiate some of the bends, but I found it scenic rather than scary. The sun shone, the humidity dropped, and we climbed ever-higher among forested mountains.
I traveled K.L. - Singapore - Melaka - Cameron Highlands. The standard order seems to be Singapore - Melaka - K.L. - Cameron Highlands, but the result is the same - lots of tourists in the same places. In the Cameron Highlands especially, lots of young, self-absorbed backpackers in the same place. In India, fellow-travelers struck up conversations in hotels and cafes regardless of age. Here, as a 50-year-old Aussie-turned-Swede pointed out to me, the young ignore the older travelers.
Lonely Planet had also written that the Cameron Highlands should not be missed. I disagree. Admittedly, my view may be colored by the fact that I spent one day resting my feet, doing nothing, but it was a good day for it -- overcast led to drizzle led to downpour. I had a big sitting room with six couches, two tables and a picture window to myself -- with a view of the next-door guesthouse and an unfinished concrete monstrosity. Tanah Rata, the main "town", was just the kind of place I usually avoid -- a couple of blocks of shops, restaurants and backpacker lodges. Maybe I should have sprung for a more up-market hotel, but they were all well out of town, and none seemed to have the historical associations that made last year's Windamere worth the money.
My second day I took a tour of the attractions in company with a couple from Sabah on their honeymoon, and the afore-mentioned Swede and his wife (wearing a neck-brace for an old injury acquired while riding a motorbike in Goa during a hurricane). I limped round a tea plantation, a rose garden and a butterfly farm, and passed on the hydroponic strawberries. At the tea plantation, unlike those at Darjeeling, the pickers used shears instead of their hands, and the bushes grew together in rows instead of standing alone. Since I still haven't drunk the tea I brought back from Darjeeling, I bought no more. I did enjoy the flowers and the butterflies -- huge, motionless, photogenic butterflies -- and the conversation with the Swedish couple, who I would meet again on the bus out of town.
Most of the locals seemed to be of Indian extraction, their forebears brought in by the British to work the tea plantations. Now the Indians run the restaurants and guesthouses, and the field work is done by Bangladeshis. My landlady had been to India just once, to Chennai, and said that she much preferred Malaysia.
I had intended to go on to Georgetown, the original seat of British colonial power, but it sounded like a repeat of Melaka and K.L.. Instead I decided to ride the bus with the other backpackers only as far as Ipoh, and then head for a smaller, less visited town.
As the bus wound down the mountain I started to feel sick -- very unusual for me. I finally realized that from my seat I couldn't see the road and so couldn't anticipate the bends. I was glad when we reached the flatlands, and the ubiquitous palm plantations again, broken up near Ipoh by soaring limestone cliffs reminiscent of Guilin in China.
At the Ipoh bus station I said good-bye to the Swedish couple and made enquiries about the local bus to Kuala Kangsar.
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