A Big Adventure

Friday 23rd January 2009, Malacca (Melaka), Malaysia

At 1:00pm we all met at reception, we asked the hotel to organize us a taxi to take us to the A’Famosa Waterpark and bring us back later.

We all piled in the vehicle which was being driven by an old man of I would say Chinese decent. Our day was about to really start, this guy was driving on his own special road, he would go up the inside of traffic cut in at traffic lights and approach junctions way to fast.He also did not seem to understand English. We were all clearly not comfortable with his driving, he actually hit the umbrella of s poor woman, he was just inches away from hitting her and a couple of times at junctions rolled back so that the cars behind us had to hit the horn, he did manage to get us there in about an hour. So after a very eventful journey we ended up at the waterpark.

For the next four hours, everything was sunny and relaxing, the waterpark is very good with a wave pool, a selection of waterslides a lazy river which Sofia and I were floating around while the girls read and sun bathed and Basty threw himself down every waterslide he could find in the park. The rubber rings were quite difficult for Sofia to squeeze over her bust and hips, she did get a bit stuck when she was washed into the shallows in the wave pool, I had to rescue her as she kept getting knocked over by the waves, very funny (for me). The girls eventually got in the water and I think they enjoyed themselves.

We watched a Gibbon put on a world class, Olympic gold medal winning performance on an island in the middle of a lake on the adjacent wild life park, it was a real joy to watch as it really looked like it was having a great time.

The weather was perfect, it was hard to see the muslim ladies covered from head to toe in black even when swimming and even worse was them not swimming while all their families did.

We all enjoyed ourselves and at 6:30 we all piled back into the taxi and he set off. The next hour and a bit was a very scary period, I don’t know what he had been up to while we were in the park but I suspect it involved either drugs or alcohol or both as his driving was worse by a magnitude. At one stage he was doing his usual trick of making his own road by going down the layby actually onto the grass verge, I look up quite shocked at what he was doing and as I did I realized he was closing fast on a cyclist and although in broad daylight he obviously was not seeing it, at the last minute I  shouted out “what are you doing? STOP” at that he seemed to finally act and instead of smashing the bike straight up the back he caught him with the wing mirror at about 40mph depositing the cyclist on the road, I can not tell you any more than that as our hero did not stop, he just kept driving. I at that point should have stopped him and we all should have got out, but we were in the middle of nowhere we knew and so we stuck with it, our next adventure was when he got to a police checkpoint and seemed unwilling to stick around and talk to the police, at the check point it was also clear our driver was lost and we had to turn around, for the rest of the journey we were all very unhappy and a couple of times I screamed for the driver to get onto the right side of the road. Finally back at the Hotel, we reported him to the girl at the hotel reception desk, recommending they never use him again.

No one had eaten all day so we told the kids to get ready and we all headed out to the street market at Jonkers Walk.

As we walked through the mall there were Chinese dancers that we watched for a while, Sofia thought they were quite cute very gay guys who were more graceful than the girls, what do I know?

When we got to the street there was a man with bull whips who was putting on a show of punching his fingers into coconuts, we left the kids to watch and carried on down the street, we found the Limau Limau Café still open in the evening for a change, so we ducked in from the crazy heat and got fruit juice while we waited for the kids, we waited and waited but there was no sign of them so we ordered food, it came, we ate it and had some beer, still no children.

So we continued on through the market and waited up by the place we had discussed having food, they turned up as soon as we got there, so we fed them.

We all headed back to the market, Sofia’s new flip flops were hurting her toes so Basty kindly swopped shoes with me. The girls went off and we saw a huge iguana sitting on a mans shoulder and another man having a tattoo in the street.

So much colour and life and bats dancing above it all with Samba music playing and stars in the velvet sky.

Sofia, Basty and I headed back to the hotel.

We watched Boston Legal but could only watch one episode as the next one is the final episode.

[mappress]