Day 36: Bonus day #1 in Malacca

Today was the first of the two extra days we'd planned to spend in Malacca. In no particular rush, we checked out of our hotel around 11am and took the enormous walk next door to the new hotel - a newly opened "flashpacking" hostel. Essentially it's just a hostel but everything is a bit fancy and nice. Helps that it's very new as well! Clean and modern industrial design, with murals on the walls and raw materials occupying the rooms (eg unstained wood, unpainted metal and concrete, exposed copper piping in the bathrooms etc).

Shandos had organised a stay at media rates with the proprietor Carol in exchange for some blog and Instagram coverage, so we met with her on check-in and had a good long chat about the hostel, her background in hospitality, Malacca and Malaysia in general. She's a lovely lady in (I'm guessing) early 40s with twin daughters and a Chinese Malaccan native. She'd also worked in a couple of other industries before hospitality along with both large and small hotels in Malaysia, and was also fairly well travelled in Asia.

It was quite refreshing to have someone else to talk too so we ended up chatting for a couple of hours, then headed out for lunch with her! She took us to a place with no name in the back-streets near the canal, which is apparently very well known in the Chinese community for serving a dish of pork slices in gravy accompanied by a bowl of yam-flavoured rice. It was delicious, though thankfully she knew how to order serves with no pig intestines for us!

We headed back to the hostel and just lazed around in the common areas for a few hours. Booked our bus tickets to Kuala Lumpur for Saturday, along with our flights to Sarawak later that day. Spent a bit of time on Skype to mum as well. Later in the day we ventured out for coffee at another cafe we'd liked the look of, and it was probably the best coffee I'd had since leaving Australia!

Back to the hotel around 6pm, where Carol had agreed to take us out to the Straits Mosque for sunset followed by dinner in the Portuguese settlement. The mosque is on a large man-made island, but juts out over the water so that at high tide it appears to just be floating on the water. Had a look around inside, and of course we were all required to put on modesty robes (yes even me, my shorts were just above the knee = unacceptable) along with headscarves for the women. There wasn't much to see inside as mosques generally tend to favour function over aesthetic, but outside it looked great.

Handed back our robes and walked along the breakwater a little way to get a fantastic view of the sun setting just behind the mosque. Carol busted out the selfie stick and we took a bunch of photos, setting aside my dislike of those things temporarily! After sunset we drove over to the Portuguese settlement where the small but still existent Portuguese community still live. On the waterfront nearby is a large collection of "restaurants" but it's really more of an outdoor food court with no fast food outlets if that makes sense.

There's about 25 stalls and every single one of them has a couple of hawkers convincing you to buy from their business, and of course they all swarm you the moment the car pulls up and they all talk at once etc. Good fun! We just picked one at random since according to Carol the best outlet had closed a couple of years ago when the owners got tired of running it.

We ordered baked fish in Portuguese black sauce (based on spicy black pepper, much different to bland supermarket black pepper), sweet & sour squid and some sort of vegetable dish in a spicy sauce. All were excellent - the fish was crispy on the outside without being too bony, the squid wasn't the slightest bit rubbery, and the vegetables were good too if a little hot. Washed it down with a sweet and sour mango blended drink that Carol recommended - it's a secret mixture involving mango, plums and a couple of other things. Very refreshing!

We headed back to the hotel stopping briefly to pick up the best pineapple tarts in town from what was literally a house! No signs or anything, Carol just stopped the car in the middle of a neighbourhood and ran into a house. Go figure! These were also delicious. On the way back she showed us a couple of other places to try for local satay, tandoori and laksa delicacies - there's actually a huge hawker centre a couple of hundred metres from the hotel but in a direction we've never walked! It's slightly away from the heritage district so that's why we hadn't ventured that direction.

Off to bed by 10pm, though neither of us would sleep that well as the frosted glass window above the door didn't have a curtain on it, and was letting in a lot of light from the hallway making it difficult to sleep.Read more