ENTRY 011:

Along the Road to Melaka

shifty rushes for the bus, enjoys a colourful journey and arrives in a distinctly different town

13.6.2024

We were trying to make our bus at KL Sentral. We had left ourselves enough time to cover what was, for very nearly any city in the known universe, and for that matter, what most inhabitants of every city in said universe would consider to be, a ten-minute walk.

118-storey Mederka 118 on a hot day - 2nd tallest building on earth.

Google Maps had confirmed our initial hypothesis, and we had made sure of leaving ourselves with at least double that timeframe to work with—half to get there, a quarter to board, a quarter left as insurance for unexpected calamity. And we were confident in the accuracy of our estimation and appropriateness of our allocation, having considered our combined past efforts navigating various cities on foot. We thought we could reach this nearby station with enough time to spare and not too black a sweat patch on our backs. We thought we could reach this central terminus, the nucleus of the city, a drain submerged at the bottom of one of the most clamorous metropolises in all of Asia, this drain to which everything, man and machine, seemed to flow and circle toward like rushing water exiting a basin, with time to spare.

It’s just this country is so damn hot, and the traffic and the sidewalks and overbridges and corners and lanes and alleys and the lights that always go red as you approach them. The same lights that we have back home—oh boy, what I would do for the home address of whoever controls these lights. Ubiquitous uniformed men with their pants pressed and collars ironed, sitting in their tiny white box offices all over the world, behind old computers the world over, monitoring the cameras beneath these lights, and waiting for none other than me to approach, and then to decide, “Yes, another red for him. Of course.” It’s just all these factors that one has to negotiate to get to the other side of a single roadway in this city. They’re what thrust us into such a rush that morning, as we swam around the basin, as the minutes evaporated off my watch along with each drop of my sweat, dampening the concrete like spots of rain.

Yet we made it. We made it with thirty seconds to spare and the knowledge gained that there cannot possibly be a Malaysian iteration of the idiomaticity, ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’. In KL, one does not simply, by any effort capable of the human form, poultry or otherwise, ‘Get to the other side.’

After all that, we had hardly expected to find ourselves in Amsterdam. Yet there we were looking at it not three hours later.

Incredible really. All we had to do was venture southbound, a notch east and parallel to the Melakan Straight for three hours, and we simply appeared in a continentally different dimension from whence we came. Suddenly we were on the outskirts of an old European township. A lulling river lulling by and idyllic laneways lined with slim gable-roofed buildings painted the colours of the daffodils, mountain grass, tulips and the sky, and one large red windmill peering over them all, and a big old stone fort up on the hill, watching from above.

Three hours by bus to the City of Melaka. First, squeezing through the clogged arteries of KL’s highway system, similar to Auckland, in that a series of arterial roads seems to converge upon the heart of the city with no real concern toward the health of the heart. Three hours by bus to get to the once-famous and crucial entrepôt—Melaka—the heart of the ancient Sultanate. First along the highway and through the heat-hazed gridlock—smears movement outside the big, square, sweating windscreen. The bus driver’s big square head, sweating beneath damp dark curls, and more damp dark curls sprouted between the neckline of his partly unbuttoned shirt. Sweat glistening along his arms sliding down his left wrist beneath his silver wristwatch, down his right wrist, beneath a silver chain. His striped shirt clinging to the edge of his plump figure, taut like a drumskin. He looked to be handling the heat worse than the rest of us.

He would make it though. He had a small plastic fan plugged into the cigarette lighter port, propped on his dash. And he had an accomplice. A wiry man sitting in the seat across from him, wearing his own take on the Malaysian Transport Agency’s uniform—what I can only describe, judging by my only two examples of The Agency’s personnel, as a tasteful homage to Tony Soprano.

Tony’s Malaysian Moltisanti sat across from him in black pants and black shoes that across the seat into the aisle, and as much as Mr. Moltisanti might’ve liked them too, his leather shoes just wouldn’t reach the floor.

Evidently, he had shown great resilience to overcome this physical limitation and find employment with The Agency, and during the brief moments of respite we were permitted between bursts of acceleration, crunched gears, and hard braking, a dark outstretched arm would reach across the aisle toward Tony’s silhouetted head.

It wasn’t until the hand at the end of this arm finally reached the corner of the shadowed lips they sought that thin fingers would drop a delivery of freshly shelled peanuts into a great, unseen void.

Behind Moltisanti’s arm and its obligations, I could see the light waves rise from the highway. Wobbling up off the tarmac and rippling away from the fenders, boots and bonnets. With this as my scenery, time crept by, seemingly held up by the traffic as well.

It was not until the first packet of nuts was exhausted that the breathing road ahead of us began to deformalise and the gleaming smears became fewer.

As we barrelled along the road to Melaka, the buildings grew shorter and the outskirts of intermittent villages announced themselves by way of kids on bikes hugging the clay shoulders of an increasingly anaemic road, women behind big square wooden crates filled with cabbages and blackfaced oily men in grey rags working under dripping motorcycles—the machines all sick and in various states of amputation.

These people and their days made themselves clear for brief frames, as if reeling by on some monumental roll of film—the source of which way out of sight. Perhaps at the end of the endless road. Maybe deep in the jungle or at the summit of a small mountain somewhere nearby. I do not know.

We drove by fields and along the forest’s edge as a second packet of nuts was torn open and exhausted, and the only time our driver’s service of shelled sustenance ceased was when he switched roles with his provider. We then learnt why the new driver’s figure was far more sinewy than his prodigee’s, for the latter did not receive the same hand-to-mouth service.

Instead, out of some kind of powerful, unseen coercion, perhaps a divine force imperceptible to the simple commuter travelling down the North-South Expressway from Kuala Lumpur to Melaka, he monastically craned toward the huge steering wheel, remaining there in solemn prayer for the balance of our journey.

Eventually we coasted into a bus depot that would not have looked conspicuous in many regions of the American Midwest.

Here we faced the second challenge of the day: hailing a taxi.

You might think, with the advent of ridesharing and translation apps, that such a mission in 2025 be easy. This is how I know you’ve never tried to book a taxi from the Melakan bus depot. The important thing to consider here, when weighing potential threats to your seamless transport to the more romantic areas of the city, is the fact that the Melakan bus depot can only be exited through a single doorway.

This might not sound like an impossible task. Again, this is a clear indicator of your ignorance toward matters of the Melakan Bus Terminal. The problem lies in a rather curious, if not ominous, design choice.

The portal toward the outside world is an unmarked emergency exit door at the rear of a McDonald’s, buried at the back right corner of the larger, labrynthian depot structure. We had not expected to encounter such a beguiling gateway, and for a period of time long enough to greatly frustrate our prospective driver, but not long enough for him to cancel our journey altogether, we remained in a brief purgatory.

Looking back now, with the ease of schedule and clarity of mind to contemplate such matters in retrospect. I am reminded of the infamous episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, ‘Shanghaied—Season 002, Episode 013.

In this episode, the eponymous yellow sponge and his pink friend attempt to escape the Flying Dutchmen’s sailing vessel—perhaps a large galleon of sorts—only, every time they attempt to do so, they exit through a door that leads to a live-action department store’s perfume section and the aggressive sales tactics of its employees. Do not ask me why my subconscious conjures such an allusion at first instance. All I know is that both experiences have within them an imbued feeling of otherworldliness.

Looking westward out of Melaka old town, toward more urbanised areas.

I write Stories to Tell My Grandkids as a way to memorialise our trip, develop my writing, and add to my portfolio. I want as many people as possible to read my words and see my photos. If you've enjoyed this chapter in the story, please share it with anyone and everyone you know–friends, parents, colleagues, cousins, nanas & grandads, better halves and long lost loves… if you wake up in the morning and don’t recognise the stranger next to you, then by all means show them too.

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