Melaka was a recommendation from someone on Tioman. I stayed here for a few nights before heading to Singapore.

I got up very early on my last day on Tioman Island and made it to the jetty for the first ferry back to Mersing. The person who stamped the tickets hadn’t turned up yet and customs was closed, the the bloke selling tickets just told me to wait. The boat arrived slightly later than planned but took us all back to Mersing.

In Mersing I went and got some more roti and made my way to the bus station. Here I waited for a few hours for a bus to Melaka, which took a few hours itself. The journey wasn’t very interesting and I surprised someone at one of the stops by getting off and buying a load of deep-fried tofu and what looked like fish-fingers on sticks.

In Melaka I got dropped at the bus station and asked a woman behind an un-marked desk how I got to Chinatown. She told me what bus to get on and I went and found it, bumping in to two people who had got the same ferry as me from Tioman.

I got off in Chinatown (when the bus driver instructed me) and asked some taxi drivers where to look for hotels and guest houses. They were surprisingly helpful and pointed me in the direction of the streets where most of the accomodation was in Chinatown. I ended up wandering around here for a few hours, until I found somewhere which was incredibly cheap, clean and convenient.

The next two days were spent exploring Melaka, either looking round the independence museum or the city itself. I managed to find at least one abandoned building to look around, plus a security guard showed me around one of the schools I had been peering into from the outside. With Dutch, Portugese and British colonial rule present in Melaka at some point over its varied history, there were architectural influences from all of these countries in many of the buildings. Apart from this though, unless you stuck to the back-alleys of Chinatown, it was a bit touristy.

I spoke to Stanley, the hostel owner, the morning I was leaving for Singapore. He gave me some ideas on how to get there along with a lift to the closest bus stop.