Melaka - A visit on 18th Nov 09

We organized a day-trip to Melaka on 18th Nov 09. It is exactly one month ago and I decided to put them into writting now when reviewing the photos taken.

The idea came in at the very last minute to have some outdoor team building activities. We have Cameron Highland and Melaka as our choice of destinations. We have opted out Cameron Highland as we only have a day (no overnight) for this trip and Cameron Highland would be too tiring for all. We have only 4 working days to organize this before the trip (You can imagine how rush it was). The event turned out to be quite an interesting one. Thanks to Andrew to co-organize this with me in such a short period.

Let's focus on the trip now. It was a good day with lovely weather (not too hot, no rain as well). There were 34 of us in this trip. It was 41 person initially and some last minutes drop-out as usual. We gathered at Cyberjaya Park & Ride as it has a spacious parking space and we also like to be slightly away from the office buiding. Alan and Andrew pick up our 6 foreign colleagues from Putrajaya train station who travelled from KL Sentral. The coach departed on 8:15am after a group photo session.

The tour guide explained a fair bit of history about Melaka. We spent RM150 for this tour guide so that hopefully he can explain to our foreign colleagues saving us some "hassles" in explaining. Well he did not seem to serve much purpose for the entire trip except the history portion in the beginning.

We arrived the first destination at Mini Malaysia, which is immediately not far from the Melaka Tol. Lee Quan recommended to have this destination so that we can give our foreign colleagues to have a chance to see the traditional style of housing of all the 13 states of Malaysia. It turned out to be not impressive for the local colleagues and I believe they must have seen these houses in other locations. I recalled seeing these houses in the similar Sarawak Cultural Village in Kuching which is in fact bigger in size and much more interesting. This is perhaps something our authority need to think about as a lot of our travel destinations are quite similar in nature.

We resumed our journey and did not miss out the popular destinations in Melaka such as Red Square, St. Paul’s Church and A’ Farmosa. Of course lot's of photos are captured in these locations.

We had the local nyonya food in the Seri Nyonya Restaurant in Hotel Equatorial Melaka. We could not pursue the more popular first choice venue of Ole Sayang Restoran as it was closed on Wednesday. The peranakan dishes served in Seri Nyonya are lovely especially the Pongteh chicken which is served in soy source with the juicy chinese mushroom. However the lunch turned up to be quite pricey (about RM 2400 for 36 people) especially the drinks ordered.

Jonker Street and the surroundings were our next destinations. We commenced the street tour with a short visit in Cheng Hoon Teng Temple, the oldest chinese temple in Melaka. The Jonker Street was not too busy during the day time and we wandered in between the shops for about 45 minutes. We left the popular street and continued our journey to the Melaka river for a river cruise. The river cruise took about 20 minutes and cost us RM10 per person. I am not quite impressed with this new attraction as it seems to me that it is still not that complete as a lot of bridges are still being built. Comparing this with the Putrajaya lake cruise we took subsequently on 20th Nov, the latter is definitely much more attractive with more locations visited.

We concluded our journey with a visit to the Tan Kim Hock outlet. We tried the popular durian cendol and imagine the facial expression we seen on our foreign colleagues. We also pick up some local food such as pineapple tart, cococuts sweets, dodol, from this popular outlet.

We reached Cyberjaya at about 7:30pm. Everyone ran to the nearest toilet as the coach did not stop in between for the entire 2 hours trip back to Cyberjaya.