Short trip on the long weekend - Melaka :)

Long weekends are the most welcome times of any year. Unlike the festive time holidays, there is no set menu for this meal :) You can go ahead and mix your own ingredients - sleep the weekend off or shop the weekend off or travel on. 

This long weekend, I did all of these :). I could ramble on and on about how much fun the whole weekend was, but that might take a while. For now, I would just write about the most amazing part of this weekend - Road trip from KL to Melaka. It's a short three hours drive, which is pretty much the amount I had to spend driving to and from my office in my hometown.

Yes!! That is a cycle rickshaw and every glitzy thing on it is battery operated!!

But since I have been living in KL for the past one year (more about that coming up in another post) I don't have the privilege of owning a car. So, road trips are fun now, even with a lot of traffic.

My co-travellers insisted that any road trip must start at least at 6 o clock in the morning. For those of you that don't know me yet, that hour in the clock is unknown to me. So they compromised on starting the trip at a reasonable 8 in the morning, which was the time I opened my eyes rolling over in my bed, still sleepy :P. After much ado, we finally started at 10.30 and they did crib a little about it but all-in-all they were really sporting. You can see the excitement on our faces at the start of our journey :)

It was afternoon when we reached Melaka and checked in our hotel. Not having eaten for almost five hours, we were ready to devour anything edible we could find. It so happened that the closest restaurant was this amazing Chinese vegetarian mock meat place. This is exactly the kind of local food I like to eat however, I couldn't ever get my husband to try it in KL when there are always other options available. But this time, there was no escape so he joined us and he loved the food. For all the vegetarian friends visiting Melaka, I highly recommend Man Yuan Fang. 

After the sumptuous lunch, we headed towards a major attraction in Melaka - Menara Taming Sari. It gives a 360-degree view of Melaka from a height of 100 metres, complete with binoculars. We timed our visit close to sunset. The view was amazing. This picture quite doesn't do justice to what we saw.

Melaka is a small colorful city vibrant with culture and history, very different from the metros we are used to. Everything right down to the cycle rickshaws is colorful. So we spent the evening exploring the local markets and lanes of the city that have some rather funny signages.

City view from Menara Taming Sari :)

Even the buildings add color to this beautiful city!!

Weird signage... So much in the name of a hint!!

The next day started early in the morning at 10 AM again (early by my standards of a morning). We just managed to catch breakfast when the heat started catching up in the city. It was a hot day, so we spent it absorbing more of the local culture indoors in museums and churches. The local museums are beautiful and give exhaustive knowledge of the city's history, but the galleries could be more organized. Each gallery is inter-connected to the other one which means you can go from the 16th century to 18th or to 14th depending on where you turned. This could cause confusion on what happened when. It is best to take a guided tour which is available at fixed timings.

Exhausted after the fun ride through history, we headed back home traversing through the traffic, which brought us back to the colorless lifeless tall buildings reality of metro life :(

This amazing trip was the first of many road trips that we three shall take together. It turned out to be a trip of quite a few firsts for all three of us. The first time, my husband experimented with Chinese vegetarian food. The first time, I didn't drive on a road trip (not complaining at all) :) The first time, all three of us had our cartoon impressions made. The first time, I let a bird willingly sit on me. I would leave it to you to judge how that felt :)