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 s...

Kuala Lumpur (or KL to us, darling) is a busy city. Compared to sweet little biscuit-tin-top Melacca, stepping into KL was a bit like stepping into a metal music gig after a gentle afternoon of Pimms and string quartets: loud, hot, overwhelming and exciting. Our first night we hunted down some new culture in the form of a free display of traditional dancing. It was fun - the dancers' enthusiasm and happy mood was infectious, especially when they laughed at ea...

Next stop Malaysia and Tioman island. After planning our New Zealand leg in meticulous detail for two months before we actually went, I can say with some confidence that we're getting more laid back about logistics. After watching a film, we arrived back to our hostel in Singapore at 12:30am on our last night there and prepared to plan our way to our next destination. On the off-chance, we asked the hostel receptionist if he knew how to get to Tioman. He was a k...

After a last day in Medan (which is nothing to write home about really, so I won't) we left Indonesia and travelled on to Singapore. Maybe it was the air conditioning, or the signs being in English, or maybe it was the fact that nobody tried to sell us anything that made us fall in love with Singapore a little bit. It was a well-needed breath of fresh air, after the thrill of Indonesia. By the time we left the airport, Si was actually in a bit of a gentlemanly d...

After the volcano came the flood. Well, sort of, from our travelling perspective anyway. We spent the last few days of our time in Indonesia in the town of Banda Aceh which lies on the furthest northernmost tip of Sumatra. Banda Aceh has a troubled history. After failing to be conquered by the Dutch, the province of Aceh retained a seperate status until Indonesia gained independence after WWII. Indonesia sort of dragged Aceh under it's banner and that annoyed an...