November 10, 2012
The Classic Hotel was fantastic and super comfortable. We had a few things to take care of in town. One was figuring out how to get internet on the road. My Google tablet has GPS but sometimes I can't get the zoom feature to produce a clear image. My Garmin GPS has been useless. For some reason it isn't reading the map chip of SE Asia. Kathryn has an old iphone that could use a local sim card and maybe we could use that for internet. I also wanted to see about getting a hotspot since the Google Nexus doesn't use a sim card. The people at Digi were great. The woman who helped spoke fluent English and really understood what we needed. While we were standing there a huge storm opened up. We were only across the street from the hotel and I volunteered to go back and get our umbrellas leaving Kathryn to sort out the sim card. I was completely soaked to the bone just crossing the street and actually had to change clothes. By the time I returned with the umbrellas the rains weren't nearly as strong and Kathryn had purchased a one month sim card plan. We decided to try this and wait on the hotspot.
In the morning we got going and the temperatures felt more reasonable. We continued up highway 5 passing lots of palm oil and coconut orchards. I love our stops for juice. We are starting to put together a few words in Malay asking for various fruit juices with less sugar and no milk. Everyone seems to get a kick out of our attempts and we always have to repeat ourselves a few times. Sometimes I think they do it just to hear how we say the words. Occassionally they correct us. Somewhere we learned the word for meat was 'makan' which actually means eat. We kept asking for 'tidak makan' thinking we were asking for no meat when we actually asking for no eat. As you can imagine the reaction was a lot of confusion. I was very happy to finally learn the correct way to say 'no meat' which is 'daging tidak' or atleast that is what it sounds like.
Just before getting to the Melaka district there is a huge monument to the tri-shaw on the side of the road. We took lots of pictures of this enormous structure. Then we turned off highway 5 on to a side road into Melaka. This was a lovely ride. Everyone was so happy to see us the whole way. As we got into town we started checking out hotels. Sometimes the rates were too high and sometimes they didn't have a secure place for the trikes. We ended up at the Hotel Time for $39. The reception people were super nice. The Deepavali holiday is in the next few days and Melaka is busy. We actually got the last room with 2 beds and felt very lucky to get it at an affordable rate.
Melaka seems to have a lot to offer. We are going to stay an extra day to check it all out.
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