Simon's despatch: Melaka

Melaka is an historic port town on the west coast of Malaysia. It's rather handy for trading as it's at the origin of the SW monsoon wind for 6 months and then at the end of the NE monsoon wind for the other 6 months.

If your ships are sail powered it means you can nip over from China, unload, wait from 6 months to 1 day depending on your planning and luck, then catch the next monsoon winds home again.

As Indians and Arabs can do a similar trick from the west, you become the most valuable port in the world, full of permanent multi-ethnic trader outposts - until someone invents the engine and all of a sudden your precious winds are just good for flying kites.

A quick bit of rebranding later and you get Melaka - historic food town of museums! Perfect for me as I love both. The LP had a section of "foods you must try before leaving Melaka" which I took as a personal challenge (Beth being under qualified as a veggie).

There were only 5 foods listed and we had 2 full days plus the straggly ends so it should have been quite easy. However, the tandoori restaurant we went to on the first night served the best tandoori chicken I've ever tasted so we had to return. Most irretrievably the dim sum restaurant didn't play ball being closed mysteriously everyday and the more tourist friendly signed 'dumpling restaurant' that we tried as emergency plan b, turned out to be a front for a pineapple tart purveyor? Luckily those were also on the list so I only failed on 1 food :(

Beth actually achieved beyond expectation when we went to a restaurant with a big sign proclaiming 'vegetarian restaurant'. She had the "laksa" which is noodles in a spicy coconut and SHRIMP sauce - hense the quotes. However, it turned out to be laksa with no quotes and the surprisingly convincing "fish dumplings" were in fact real fish dumplings as the owner calmly confirmed when asked. Beware the validity of signage in Melaka!

I guess at least the (based upon one observation) Chinese method of classifying fish as a vegetable does clear up the mystery of why, to the untrained western eye, most Chinese dishes appear a bit carb and protein heavy. Unfortunately this revelation cost quite a few polos to remove the taste of dead animals from Beth's mouth and has engendered a deep distrust of Chinese "veggie" food.

In summary I can say that real laksa is very nice and quite substantial, chicken rice balls are almost as good and again quite substantial. Then supplementary to the LP list, Chinese porridge is reasonably nice and extremely filling and should not be consumed for breakfast if you also need to consume the previous two dishes that same and last day to complete your tick list!

Luckily a fat waddle is all that's required to get round a museum, of which there are more than I can count in Melaka! (including a kite one).

We went to one on authentic Dutch period restoration techniques - it was free. Another on the history of Melaka and Melay culture in general, then finally we also crammed in a quick pop to one on baba nyonya life.

Baba nyonya is the name given to straights born Chinese who marry Melay women. Typically they were rich traders with rather swish houses.

The Melaka history museum basically outlined the risks of being prime minister (or his family) when working for a dynasty of knife happy sultans and also the downside of being such an attractive port when you have empire loving nations such as the Portuguese, then Dutch, then English kicking around - Especially if, thanks to your unforgiving ways, you're down to an old cripple who can't even stand as prime minister, to organise the defence!

So with a great weight of knowledge in my head and an even greater weight of food still distending my stomach we left the nice compact town of Melaka for the sprawling metropolis of Kuala Lumpur.