The Slitherants: Melaka - Friday 5th Feb to Monday 8th Feb

Melaka….photography, food, feet and fish. These are the things that make Melaka a place worth visiting. Throw in the occasional tropical thunderstorm, Chinese dragons and a bloke who can break open a coconut with his finger and you have the makings of an interesting stay. Our time in Melaka was divided between eating mouth watering dishes (mainly of Chinese extraction but with some Indian and all, happily, very cheap) and wandering the narrow streets and laneways. Photo opportunities literally abound around every corner and there are just too many cool looking old buildings and houses to get photos of them all.

Melaka is a unique place in Malaysia owing to the town’s former colonial heritage and strategic location on the Straits of Malacca. This has made it a coveted port by the Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese and British dating back to the 16th century. Modern day Melaka is a reflection of all of these former influences and this is most obvious in the local architecture. The Melaka River runs through the city and is reminiscent of the canals of Amsterdam with Dutch style buildings squeezed in alongside one another all painted the same colour, white.

Melaka is undoubtedly a Chinese city nowadays with the lanes and alleys filled with all manner of shops run by Chinese merchants and decorated accordingly. We were fortunate as it was the lead up to Chinese New Year and there were performances in the main square, Jonker Walk, every night. These ranged from the obligatory Chinese lounge crooner with the quaffed hair to dragon dances, a kung fu demonstration, and my favourite, the masked lady who could change her face mask seemingly by magic during her performance.

We also had the pleasure of seeing Melaka’s modern day ‘snake oil merchant’ who has the unenviable act of having to break a coconut with his index finger every night. This bloke started out with what seemed like a never ending sales pitch whereby he sold a pinky concoction in a bottle to the crowd that he claimed could cure every ailment from arthritis to rheumatism and presumably injuries sustained whilst breaking coconuts with your digits. When he had sold enough of his brew the bloke finally got on with the job of what we were all there to see. Incidentally, it turns out that this guy is actually in the Guinness Book of Records for this particular talent. He did succeed in breaking into the coconut eventually after about 5 or 6 finger splitting attempts earning him groans from our section of the crowd and cheers of admiration from the other quarters. Cleverly, he even managed to rub his own snake oil on his dislocated finger before stealthily popping his finger back into place to give the impression that the goop he had just sold to the crowd was actually worth the sum they had just parted with for it. Fascinating stuff.
Something that also deserves a mention is the restaurant that sold a selection of skewers containing various meats and sea foods for about 30c AUD per skewer. Pretty cheap I hear you say but the beauty of this place was that they bought you a tall pot of satay sauce that you heated up in the centre of your table and then dipped all your skewers in one by one to cook. That’s right dear reader a whole bucket of satay. It didn’t matter whether you dipped in Chicken, Beef or whatever it all came out tasting like satay-pure heaven.

Now one thing I need to mention before I wrap this up is the feet and the fish I alluded to in the first line of this update. This is something I have never seen before and I’m convinced that if you exported this idea to New Zealand or Australia it would be a winner. My feet are not normally something I inflict on any person or animal usually but here in Melaka I had to make an exception. I’m talking about putting your feet in a tank full of dead skin-cell eating fish that see your grimy hooves as some kind of all you can eat buffet where no one has to leave before they’ve had their fill. Kate and I were literally rolling about giggling hysterically as these voracious little critters chowed down on the skin of our feet like it was their last meal. To say it tickled would be an understatement but when my feet emerged from that tank after 20 minutes they were positively beaming the way that only feet that have been massaged by a fish’s mouth can. This has to be one of the stranger things we have done so far but also probably one of the most fun. If you get the chance to let a fish eat the skin off your feet I highly recommend you jump at it, you won’t regret it and my feet have never looked so healthy!! Seriously….

So to finish I can say that Melaka was an extremely cool place to visit full of history and more good food than you can shake a chopstick at. Well worth a visit.
Alrighty well, I’ve said more than enough (as usual) and I shall sign off again until the next installment. Find out what happens when we hit Tioman Island and get to know the locals, such as the wallet stealing monkeys (the wallet with all the money in it), have fun with dead snakes, cheap vodka and much-too-pissed sea captains that tell you at length how they had to throw the ship’s cats overboard because ‘they shat too much’. All this and more to come next time in the next installment of the life and times of ‘The Slitherants’. Til then.

The view from the balcony at our guesthouse. Back in the day, boats would travel up the river dropping supplies off at the house/storage sheds along the river front. The guesthouse owners said that the building was estimated to be around 200 years old.

The view from the balcony at our guesthouse at night time.

Windows of buildings in Melaka. There were many building getting a new splash of paint before Chinese New Year! A lot of these building are hundreds of years old.

A street in Melaka. You see a lot of old men riding around the city on their rustic bikes. The city was obviously not built for traffic as the streets are really narrow – just one vehicle wide.

Satay heaven! Choosing our skewers and bowls of fish balls.

Fishing out our fish balls form the boiling brew of satay.

Our skewers cooking in the satay brew.

Eating the yummy satayed food.

Chendol or cendol– the best desert ever! It is shaven ice with coconut cream, brown sugar syrup, red kidney beans, corn kernels and green worms (not real worms). We were told to mix all the ingredients together before eating to make it into slushy, sweet soup.

A coffee shop with the best coffee from all the 13 states of Malaysia. Mine had coffee combined with 5 spices, and Tim’s had 75% coffee with Margarine and salt. They were both yummy!

The heavens opened and down poured the rain! Tim and I hadn’t seen any rain like this in a very long time. We were so excited that we went ‘swimming’ in the rain. I think everyone thought we were nuts!

The fish massage. I am very ticklish when it comes to my feet so you can imagine my reaction when the fish where biting me and to make it worse, the fish loved my feet more than Tim’s! These fish, Garra Rufa/doctor fish, are found in the Middle East. The mineral content and warmth of their water makes food scarce. Because of this, it is believed that they have developed their unusual behavior of nibbling at dead skin from people in the water.