April 5, 2010: Melaka to Kuala Lumpur

On our last morning in Melaka, our only objective was to find a breakfast more interesting than the one offered at our hotel. Although they don't have a dedicated breakfast menu, the staff at Geographer Cafe were happy to fill that request. We had walked past them several times over the past few days and noticed many a pink-faced tourist sipping drinks from coconuts at their tables. When we stopped by ourselves they were out of coconuts, but their other tropical juices were very much to our liking.

Eating at such a tourist-friendly restaurant meant a couple of things - the prices were a little inflated compared to other restaurants we'd visited (though it was still very affordable by our Aussie standards) and the menu was easy to navigate. In fact, there was a dedicated page of 'Geographer's vegetarian specialties'!

Michael thoroughly enjoyed the Geographer Curry Rice (RM9.90 ~ $3.30), and pronounced that he would happily work more breakfast curries into the Australian diet.

My Nasi Lemak (RM5.90 ~ $2) was a very pleasant surprise indeed. Though I'm not much of an egg or chilli eater, they went down a treat with the coconut rice. The chef had chosen to use brown rice and I found that its filling, nourishing qualities sat well with me at this time of day. The peanuts and tempeh chips had a toasty flavour and pleasing crunch, which worked well against the steamed greens. Nasi Lemak isn't the kind of meal I'd typically cook or order at home but this experience of it had me wanting to change that.

With that, we finished our packing and headed to the bus station. These pineapple tarts, bought from the night market when we first arrived in Melaka, didn't last much of the journey back to Kuala Lumpur.

Michael led the way on our first exploration of KL, nutting out the monorail system and tracing the Lonely Planet's walking tour through the colonial district. Here we saw fountains, stately buildings, and even a cricket field.

The tour took us on to Little India, our dinner destination. We wandered round shops and street markets, noticing that a number of the dedicated vegetarian Indian restaurants were on Lebuh Ampang.

Hot and very sweaty by this stage, we ventured into Sangeetha - it out-competed the other vego restaurants with its promise of air-conditioning.

Sangeetha also boasted a menu with dozens and dozens of items. We may have deliberated over the drinks even longer than the food, eventually going with a ginger lemon cool for Michael and a lime mint cooler for me (RM7.50 ~ $2.50 each).

Michael can never resist a thali and at RM16 (~ $5.40), this Punjabi thali was certainly one of the better value ones of this holiday.

I'm a similarly predictable sucker for dosai, and their were numerous options to choose from. I eventually settled on the cauliflower masala dosa (RM6.50 ~ $2.20) and did not regret it one bit - tender cauliflower made a fabulous filling.

Even while devouring a dosa so good, I couldn't help but take furtive glances at the dessert cabinet throughout our meal. It was heaving with fudgy Indian sweets, and we had some Date Ladhu and Kaju Katli (RM2.50-3.50 ~ $0.80-1.20 each) boxed up to enjoy later (... for breakfast, as it turns out. You'll see why, later.)

We were just barely cooler, though utterly content, as we made our way back past the glamourous Petronas twin towers to our hotel.

April 4, 2010: Melaka

Our one full day in Melaka dawned fine and hot - too hot to go adventuring anywhere for breakfast, so we settled down for a fairly disappointing buffet at our hotel. It was all pretty meaty, but we did get to have our first sample of kaya, which was a pretty tasty treat (although not pictured).

The main plan for the day was to wander through the Lonely Planet's Melaka walking tour. Our first stop was Hokkien Huay Kuan, an impressive Chinese guildhall decorated lavishly with warriors and tigers.


Then it was a quick jaunt out of Chinatown to the historic town centre by the Melaka River.


The centrepiece of historic Melaka is the Town Square, surrounded by the Dutch Stadthuys, the Queen Victoria Fountain and overrun with Melaka's famous blinged up tri-shaws.



Then it was up the hill to the ruins of the 16th Century St Paul's Church. Perched on the top of the hill, the church ruins catch the sea-breeze and are probably the coolest part of the town. They're also impressively moody and atmospheric.



Down the other side of the hill is the last remaining chunk of the old Dutch fort A'Famosa built in 1512.


Having worked up a hunger with all this walking, hill-climbing and sweating, we decided to break up the walking tour and track down some lunch. Weirdly, the map in the Lonely Planet guide to Melaka had a whole section of the town missing, but luckily the streets were numbered logically, and we managed to track down Mei Lin Vegetarian Restaurant without too much trouble.

It's a mock-meat Chinese restaurant with blessed air-conditioning and an astonishing menu - there were dozens and dozens of wonderful sounding dishes. Clearly most of the Westerners who come through their doors are a bit hopeless - despite our best efforts, we were forced to eat with forks, as soon as we pinched chopsticks from a spare place setting the waitress came by and cleared them away - twice! We settled on three dishes - two mains and an entree. First up were the 'chicken' satay sticks (RM6, ~$2). The faux-chicken was well put together, but was really just a vessel for the wonderfully spicy and peanutty sauce.

We couldn't resist ordering the fanciest thing on the menu as one of our mains - the chef's speciality ginger fish (RM28, ~ $10).

This was the most amazing faux-fish I've ever tasted, with tender 'flesh' and slightly crispy skin, swimming in a rich ginger and coriander sauce. The fish had been embedded with a few big chunks of ginger as well, giving it a depth of flavour that took it well above the usual fake fish delights.

Finally, we also went with the Ayam Masak Merah (red-cooked chicken, RM8, ~ $3), a tomato and chilli based dish with just the right amount of bite.

We had a cracking lunch at Mei Lin - possibly the best faux-meat meal that I've had anywhere, and certainly the best value. As we were about to leave, one of the other customers friendlily grabbed us and told us about two other nearby vego places: MG's cafe and Simple Life, neither of which we ended up trying. Still, MGs hadn't turned up in my internet searching during our Melaka-planning, so it was good to know that there were some other well-located options out there for vegos spending more than a day or two in town.

Re-energised, we headed back out into the heat to finish our walking tour, wandering mostly around the streets of Chinatown. The dragons adorning the Eng Choon Association building were a particular highlight.

Again the heat started to knock us around, so we ducked into a cafe for our first shot at a weird Malaysian speciality: Cendol.

Cendol is an icy concoction made up of coconut milk, green noodles, red beans, sugar and shaved ice. It's a little strange, but incredibly cooling and quite tasty. We'd return to cendol a few times in the coming days to help us get through the sweltering Malaysian heat.

We had a bit more walking left in us, swinging by the Cheng Hoon Teng temple:

and past the Kampung Kling Mosque (where we heard the evocative call to prayer).

Then it was back to the hotel for a quick rest before dinner. Unfortunately we didn't have a Friday night in Melaka to sample the famed 10-dish vegetarian feast at Selvam (which goes for a ludicrous RM6 or $2), but we decided to check this restaurant out anyway.

The vegetarian thali came in at RM6 ($2) each, and was served up on a coconut leaf and with no cutlery.

The thali consisted of a big pile of rice, two fairly dry vegie dishes, a daal, some pickles and fresh naan breads. Having watched a few more coordinated people calmly polish these off with their bare hands without smearing it all over themselves, we decided to brave it without begging for cutlery. It wasn't a pretty sight, but we quickly stopped caring, too caught up in the spicy delights in front of us. Life's pretty great when you can stuff yourself to bursting point with curry, have a lassi and a beer and still walk out having spent less than $6 in total (for both of us!).

We wandered home via the Chinatown markets, grabbing some dessert in the form of Melaka's Portugese-inspired custard tarts, which were small enough for us to squeeze in and tasty enough for us to want seconds.

April 3, 2010: Tokyo to Melaka

After a brilliant 11 days in Japan, it was time for us to bid Matt adieu and journey out to Narita for our flight to Malaysia. We'd decided that we really wanted to go to the Jonkers Walk night market in Melaka during our time in Malaysia, which basically meant jumping in a long distance cab at KL airport and heading down south to the historic capital. We were staying right in the midst of Chinatown, just one block away from the famous night market, and by the time our cabbie had found his way through the traffic, the market was in full swing.

The airline food had been a mixed bag (note to self: from now on always order the 'Asian vegetarian' meal), so we were both ready to find some food. The market is chock full of little food stalls, but we were pretty overwhelmed on our initial wanders - lots of street-meats cooking away and masses of people everywhere we turned. My eye was caught by the words 'oyster mushrom' on this stall:

...and a quick perusal of the 4 menu items reassured us that we'd found one of the vego-specific stalls. We opted for a couple of spring rolls and a couple of vegie cakes (grand total RM7; ~$2), which were served chopped up, thrown in a plastic bag and drizzled with chilli sauce, to be eaten with a couple of wooden skewers.

Fantastic!

The rest of the market was pretty hit and miss - lots of cheap nonsense, but also a load of cool looking food stalls: fruit skewers, weird drinks, durian lollies and dozens of little hot-plate based places. Our next stop was one of the two guys cooking up turnip cakes (which we'd been introduced to via Toby's vegan version).

Our two cakes (RM2.00, $0.85 each) were prepared fresh - he was churning them out. This was the one stall on the strip that explicitly promised 'pork free' food.  Toothpicks were the serving implement of choice this time, and this was another fried sensation. I guess when you make the same dish repeatedly thousands and thousands of times, you get pretty good at it.

The heat and the cooking smells and the people were starting to wear us down by this stage - it was quite a change from the snow we'd seen in Kyoto a few days back - so we hunted down something to drink.

At RM1.20 (~ 40 cents), the sweet sour lime and plum juice was just the ticket - tart and refreshing. By the time we'd finished our drinks, it was bed time (we'd been up very early for our flights), so we headed back to our hotel - like us, the edible-nest swiftlets that lived in the foyer had decided to hit the sack.