Goodbye to the Windowless Palace and hello to the Room with a view of Exploration Transportation and Civilisation (with a detour to smelly markets..).
Ok - so we spent this morning all teary and stuff at the idea we may never again spend a night-or-day in the Windowless Palace, so it was just dawdling around the market stalls, feasting on a typical Malaysian - OMG-how-can-you-fit-so-many-calories-into-one-bite- breakfast, then decided it was time to head south to the fabled port city of Malacca.
Ma..what you ask? Well the only reason there is a war in Iraq, an ability to protest in China's Hong Kong, elections in the Philippines, and a Prime Minister discussing the need for reform for Aboriginal communities is these Straits of Malacca where Craig and I are busy typing away to you back home.
You see European food used to be rather dull and rather poisonous after a few days, until they started dealing with Arabs who just so happened to be sitting on a gold mine, yep that's right, before Europeans craved oil they craved spices, and the Arabs were between them and the Spice Islands. That is until the poor blue-eyed people with the bad food realised if you built a big enough boat and loaded it with enough gunpowder, you could go and get the spices yourself for a fraction of the cost and curtail the rather hostile Arabs who had a penchant for hacking off your head then taking your cash..
Then basic supply and demand comes into play, with the different European powers getting involved, and suddenly the world is carved up by a bunch of gunpowder toting, smelly bad food eating Europeans and this place Malacca was the centre of the fun. So it has been a dream from my time as a wide-eyed kid, still trying to get my head around how I, as a ethnic Anglo-Celt, ended up getting sunburn in Queensland, to come to the Straits of Malacca and look out to the tiny piece of water which started it all and lead to the Dutch controlling Southern Africa (which lead to Apartheid as well as a certain gent's long walk to freedomno not Mandela, I mean Gandhi and him taking the colonised world with him..hence ended what all started here in the Straits of Malacca) which was a pit stop to their colonies here and the British controlling everything else.. because, well, they could.
Whoa world history in two paragraphs?
So what were two Aussie farm boys to do to live out this dream of mineeasy, walk on by the $10 a night backpacker quarter and straight into the swish 5 Star Equatorial Hotel and our suite on the 20th floor with magnificent views of the Straits and the hundreds of oil tankers on their way to fill up your car and that of every Asian nation east of here. Considering there are a few billion, you can imagine how important this view is to the economy of the world.
Just visible in the distance behind the lines of tankers you can make out Indonesia through the smog, which is thanks to their penchant for burning off their invaluable rainforests. It was tempting this morning to get on a ferry to go visit Sumatra for the day seeing as how, when checking out of the hotel with the view, we realised we have another day here in Malaysia.. however we thought best to avoid delays, what with two tsunami warnings in the area the last few days.
So we are headed away from Malacca today, away from where the world collided and left only a few ancient but incredibly significant buildings to show for one of the most incredible meeting points of empires and civilisations, and onto the Cameron Highlands to pick and boil our own tea- You know the Dilmah ads- Well that will be me today.. can't wait?