Hello everyone,

Well we have been up to quite a bit here. It’s been nice. The journey down was good and only took two hours. We think its the shortest coach journey we've ever done so far. When we arrived we thought it was a real dump to be honest. But when we started looking around it was really very nice and realised we'd picked a rubbish area which is very unlike us. So we decided to move out of the hotel which again was a bit crap and moved 1km down the road to a much nicer area and probably the newest and cleanest hotel we've ever stayed in which made for a lot of good night sleeps! George was ecstatic! By the second day we had completely fallen in love with Melaka.

We got a taxi from the bus station and to our surprise there was a baby squirrel sitting in the front seat. The driver couldn’t speak any English so couldn’t ask him where he had found the squirrel. The squirrel then climbed up the front seat and into the back with us. He was very sweet and didn’t bite us. He made lots of squeaks (the squirrel, not Darren) and was very content with being in the car and crawling all over us. Very strange car journey but a funny one. We didn’t have the camera on us though as it was in the boot.

Melaka is a place full of museums either free or just dirt cheap. So we knew it would be quite an interesting place. The Maritime museum was good and got to go on a ship which was a replica of one that had sunk just off the coast from here. It was on its voyage to Europe but never got there. Didn’t get very far at all then did it! The Navy museum was also good and was connected to the Maritime one so got in free there. We loved all the guns and wicked machinery.

The Sultans Palace was great and was another replica of the original one. It was all made of wood without any nails attached. Quite impressive. It was huge as well as the gardens. They were one of the best gardens we had seen since Stellenbosch, South Africa which we miss loads :o(

St Paul's Church ruins with the fort at the bottom of it were good. We climbed some steps up to the hill and had some great views of Melaka. The ruins were cool and there were a lot of tomb stones which dated back to the 1500's. We brought two paintings up there to add to our collection. Never mentioned it before but we try and get a couple of paintings from each country we visit which we have been successful in doing so far.

Town Square is beautiful and has a lot of old buildings. We both loved the look of the Old Dutch buildings which are all over Melaka. China Town here is really cool as well. We seemed to have stayed in or near a 'China Town' in most countries as the area is normally the cheapest. The night market was cool but not the best. We tried sausage wrapped in waffle. Gemma had it with tomato sauce and Darren had it with chili sauce. It was very nice, a little weird but kindda worked.

We have done a lot of walking around the streets and just exploring Melaka. We also went to an Malay Museum which had a lot of models of Malay buildings. This was all free which is always good.

On Monday we leave to head down to Singapore. We are traveling down on a luxury coach cos we thought why not for once. It's only a 20 seater but is still a full size coach so it should be really comfy.

We won’t update the Singapore bit till we're in New Zealand as we only have 3 days in Singapore and as we want to do so much there, we won’t have time to go in any internet cafes. So we'll speak to you all soon, hopefully no longer than a week!

Lots of love Darren, Gemma and George xxx xxx xxx