ENTRY 011:

SouthbounD

Along THe Road

To Melaka

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

8.9.2025

The last place I’d thought I’d find myself was Amsterdam. Yet there I was, looking at it straight in the face like a man looks at the mirror in the morning and wonders what the fuck he’s looking at. A canal-spliced Dutch township. That was the last place I expected to be at, not after rushing through the thick heat of Kuala Lumpur that morning. Losing my body weight to the baking pavement, each drop of sweat dampening the concrete like spots of rain.

We were trying to make our bus at KL Sentral. We had spent a little too much time patching together a broken and cut-up form of chinwagging English outside a kopitam—swapping a scrapbook of anecdotes, a kind of verbal collage over cold milo, mopping up more smooth curry with one buttery canai after another.

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. Google Maps had confirmed this initial hypothesis, and we made sure to leave ourselves with at least double that to spare. Half to get there, a quarter to board, a quarter fat left in it as insurance for unexpected calamity. We thought this a fair and reasonable allocation, based on our combined past efforts navigating various cities on foot. We thought we could reach that station, buried somewhere nearby, but well submerged within the nuclei of one of the most clamorous metropolises in Asia, with just enough time to spare and with not too much sweat on our backs to show for it.

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

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 seem to have back home. The same uniformed men with their pants pressed and collars ironed, sitting in their tiny white box offices, behind old computers, monitoring the cameras beneath these lights, and every other set of lights on earth, waiting for none other than Lachlan Woods-Davidson, first of his name, to approach them these lights and their cameras, and then for those uniformed men in their black hats and black boots to decide, “Yes, another red for him, of course”.

It’s just all these factors that one has to negotiate just to get to the other side of a single road in this city—they’re what thrust us into such a maddened rush that morning. As the minutes dripped from my watch onto the pavement, along with droplets of my sweat. Yet we made it. We made it with thirty seconds to spare and the knowledge gained that there cannot possibly be a local 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, nor poultry nor otherwise, ‘Get to the other side.’

It took us three hours to get to Amsterdam. Incredible really. All we had to do was venture southbound, a touch east, 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 town, with a lulling river lulling by and idyllic laneways lined with slim gable-roofed buildings of all kinds of colours, and one large red windmill and a big old stone fort up on the hill.

Three hours by bus to get 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 thought or interest toward the health of the heart, nor the average motorist, nor the pedestrian. Why think of people when you have cement and steel to cater for?

Three hours by bus to get to the once-famous and crucial entrepôt, the heart of the Sultanate. The heat-hazed gridlock all smears of colours and movement outside the bus driver’s big, square, sweating windscreen. His big square head sweating beneath damp dark curls, and more damp dark curls sprouting between the neckline of his partly unbuttoned shirt. Sweat glistened 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 can only be described, judging by my only two examples of the agency personnel, as a Sopranos cosplay. His black pants and shoes hung into the aisle, but as much as he might’ve liked them too, the leather shoes just wouldn’t reach the floor. Nonetheless, he had evidently overcome this physical limitation to 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 the driver’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 the thin fingers would drop a delivery of freshly shelled peanuts into a great, unseen void.

Behind this 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 passed slowly. 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. The buildings growing shorter, making way for intermittent villages signalling their existence ahead, as we barrelled down toward their outskirts, by kids on bikes hugging the clay shoulders of increasingly skinny roads, women behind big square wooden box 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 modest mountain nearby.

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 the old's, for he did not receive the same hand-to-mouth service. Instead, out of some kind of powerful, unseen power, 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 tourisitc 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 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, now infamous episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. In the episode, ‘Shanghaied’, 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.

The more, the better.