Biking the Straights - well more like from the youngest of the Straights settlements aka Singapore, to the oldest one, also known as Malacca or Melaka - could be the name of my last trip to Malacca with Christiane. As Chinese New Year saw us both off work for 4 days we decided to grab the chance and execute our long talked about motorbike trip to Malacca.

Thus we booked ourselves into the Riverview Guesthouse right in the historic centre of town, packed our few things and went on the road. First landmark of the trip was the Tuas Checkpoint where I had to wait for Christiane, who was late, and as the friendly custom officer told me, waiting is not permitted, even though there was hardly anybody there on the first day of Chinese New Year at 8:30 in the morning. He was kind enough to let me wait behind the custom's clearing, and once Christiane arrived we headed across the bridge to the Malaysian side, where our next challenge was to pass the toll booth. It turned out that since I last sat in any vehicle in Malaysia they had "fully automated" the tollbooth, meaning that one cannot pay cash anymore, instead one has to buy a "touch-and-go" card. The confusing part is that each cubicle is still manned with a member of staff who can sell you the cards, which left us wondering why they cannot just take the money for the toll fare? Nevertheless a friendly Singaporean biker explained the details to us, where the Malaysian staff had failed and so we were on our way with our newly purchased card, which we did not need apart from this once, as we were leaving the motorway at exit 307 heading along the national road number 5 to Pontian Kechil and from there always along the coast and via Muar directly to Melacca.

The way lasted 500m and ended at the rest stop where we had a tea, and got ourselves mentally prepared for the road. Yet, against all my expectations the ride turned out to be rather civilised. The major problem seemed to be to find open coffeeshops on the first day of Chinese New Year. Despite the fact that the majority of Malaysians are non-Chinese, this rule seems not reflected in the demographic distribution of coffeeshops. Anyway, we finally managed to find a place that served us fried rice, which was good enough to strengthen us for the second leg of the journey.

The next major problem only hit us once we arrive at the outskirts of Malacca. For some odd reason the local Government does not seem to see the need for putting even one English sign, or even any indicator what so ever that directs the non-locals from the newly build route 5 to the historic town centre. Therefore we had to follow any sign that we thought would lead us to the right place, only to find out that Melaka Central as indicated on the directional sign was not only the name of the bus terminal which is right next to the historic town centre, but also the name of a new shopping mall in the outskirts, which is where we ended up at. The very helpful guy at the petrol station where we asked for directions then got the address wrong and even though he sent us generally in the right direction we ended up at the wrong side of the river and in the worst traffic jam known to mankind. It is amazing that nobody, especially the local administration has not thought about pedestrianising the core of the historic town centre, when it takes maximum 10min to walk from one end to the next. Despite the short distances from one end to the next people, that is to say tourists, end up DRIVING through the narrow one-way lanes to park right in front of a restaurant or shop. This is absolutely pathetic and spoils the atmosphere of the place completely. The traffic is so bad that the local Melakans never use their car unless the go out of town. Unfortunately we had to go through all of this in order to find our hostel, which we finally did after only about an hour of going stop and go through town!!!

Yet once we got there is was brilliant, the hostel is cosy, the beds huge, the owners super friendly and helpful, and we simply enjoyed our shower, north Indian meal and beer before falling super tired into bed. The next two days simply saw us walking through the old part of town, interlaced with some shopping at the nearby mall, and terminating with a late afternoon river cruise and a sunset view from St Paul's.

Our guesthouse was in Jalan Kampong Pentai, which is right at the river and runs parallel to the Tatong, Jonker and Heeren Street, which together with the Fort Famosa area on the other side of the river constitute the Malacca Unesco World Heritage site. Malacca and Penang got the World Heritage status together a couple of years ago, and even though the former has a lot more well preserved heritage buildings I personally prefer the more authentically Malaysian and less tourist overrun atmosphere of Penang (where Hakim and I travelled to again last December to meet Mario, Marie and Pascal).

The way back was even more easy, because most of the country still seemed to have been in holiday mood, thus there was neither weekend nor rush-hour traffic. Only the sky was threatening with rain so we kept on riding all the way to Pontian before we had the first drizzle. Just on time we found a great little coffeeshop that served vegetarian soup and wanton mee, over which we watched the downpour, before going on the last leg of the journey back to Tuas Checkpoint and good old Singapore, that seemed awfully busy in comparison with rural Malaysia. All in all it was a fun trip, which left me keen to go more often on longer trips, even when it means that at the end of the day your bum and your legs hurt a lot :P