We decided to break our trip down south through Malaysia into a smaller step by stopping at an old town steeped with history, Maleka or Malacca. Taking the short walk to the metro in KL, then a 20 mins ride to the TBS bus terminal, collecting our online bus ticket and transferring to the bus terminal gate, resembling an airport terminal, not in size, but in cleanliness and orderliness, we jumped on our bus for the 2 hour intercity ride to Maleka Sentral Terminal, where we transferred onto the local bus number 17, which dropped us off in the town centre near our digs, some 30 minutes later….seamless and on time! Wow….it was so easy to connect!

Jan van Riebeck’s wife’s gravestone

Chinese migrants had settled here along with Indians from Tamil Nadu long before Portuguese sailors landed and used this strategic stronghold for trading. The Dutch followed the Portuguese rule and continued with some of the same treatments of locals before the British came and did their colonial best, this is definitely a pattern in many countries we have travelled through.

Maleka is a wonderful picturesque town by the sea with a river running through its heart, the Jonker Walk in the town centre reflects the nature of the residents’ old housing with street facing shops and living quarters for 30 more people crammed into small dwellings hiding behind the house fronts.

From the churches, Buddhist temples to Mosques this is a town you can easily walk or ride through in a day. We did cycle one day and got ourselves stuck on their ridiculous one way system, its definitely not a town for riding around we figured, if you stay in the town centre and pedal then its fine, venture further afield and you get caught up in traffic. As usual, without any plan we stumbled across a small night market we would never have found and spent a few hours tasting the street foods and checking out the goods in the stalls.