Day 2: Melaka, Cloudy, 31°

7-Eleven – Heaven!!

After finishing my blog post last night I was completely done ad the jet lag basically overwhelmed me. I tried to read, but that lasted less than a minute. Sleep was definitely calling.

We went for an early morning walk to find breakfast and to look around our very quiet neighbourhood. At least it was quiet at 8AM.

We eventually found a really nice place called the Station House where we enjoyed an excellent, if perhaps a bit pricey, breakfast and really wonderful hot drinks! I woke up this morning very hungry, and a quick check indicated that it was dinner time at home. My body clock is clearly still shifting, but a few more days will hopefully change this.

We normally have a light breakfast, but our hunger being as it was, we splurged. It was really delicious!😋 They had an unusual pepper mill which I managed to mess up completely, resulting in pepper corns cascading all over the place. Fortunately, we were the only people in the cafe!😅

We continued our walk and found the Cheng Hoon Teng Chinese temple. While still in bed, I had read that it’s the oldest and most beautiful temple in the city. Figuring that it would get busy as the day progressed we decided to visit early.

We weren’t disappointed. Very calming inside.

After returning briefly to our accommodation and having a nice chat with our host, we decided to follow his advice and made our way up river to the floating market. Many people take the tour boats, but being who we are, we walked. It was a lovely walk and we had the path pretty much to ourselves.

There were a series of beautiful older wooden homes along the river, with newer buildings filling in behind.

Eventually arriving at the site of the market we discovered that it’s only open at night. Oh well. Undeterred we decided to follow the river back along the opposite side. We almost took a tourist boat back, but decided that a continuation of our walk would be a good idea. This proved to be a good decision, otherwise we would have missed all the dragons located in the mangrove areas!

I took videos and of course sent them off to our grandkids knowing that they will love them when they wake up. Yesterday I sent videos of some caged birds in an open street shop, and that seemed to cause some interesting discussions. So today, no cages!😅

We walked back into the centre of the old town in search of a cold drink. It had warmed up considerably and a break was in order. We stopped at a simple outdoor cafe which happened to be directly across from the colonial Red Building.

The church was built for the Dutch and later it was taken over by the British and eventually converted to an Anglican Church. Some of the grave markets inside the church were quite interesting and even tragic, clearly reflected the much shorter lifespans of the people posted to this tropical part of the world. By way of a bit of the sequential history, the Europeans began colonizing Malaysia in 1511 when the Portuguese captured Malacca. The Dutch took over in 1641, and the British took over from them in 1824. The British were after control the tin mines, and for that matter, everything else that they could get their greedy hands on.

One of the biggest attractions of the Red Building area are the colourful tuk tuks.

They seemed pretty popular!

Moving on towards our place to get out of the heat, our day was destined to become even better! I know, hard to believe, right?

We found our first 7-Eleven!!

Unlike at home, the 7-Eleven convenience stores in Asia are amazing! I became very familiar with them and the other combini when walking in Japan in 2017. 7-Eleven, Lawsons and CircleK became part of my support network because I could find almost anything and everything in these stores. Particularly filling good during the walking day and ice cold beer at the end of each stage!

I assume that because we are in a Muslim country that this explains the absence of beer and other spirits so common in Japan. But there were lots of other things, like A&W root beer.😂

I am looking forward to finding other 7-Elevens as we travel along, and I promise to provide further updates.

Tonight we are going to find dinner in the famous Jonker weekend night market. We are particularly looking forward to this experience, and hope that the forecast rain holds off. I will report on this much anticipated event tomorrow.

I must say that so far we are finding the Malaysian people extremely friendly and welcoming as is their reputation. It’s been a very good decision to come to Melaka to get through the jet lag before taking on the much busier city of Kuala Lumpur. We will have another day here tomorrow with plans to walk downstream towards the Malacca Straights, weather permitting.

Thanks for following.

Geoff🌴🌤️