Malacca

Malacca holds good childhood memories for me. Even now, it is a place that I would look forward to visiting for a few days or so. I have relatives there whom I have been visiting from the days when my father would drive us all the way from Singapore in a car that had no air-conditioning. I wonder how we had survived those long journeys travelling, not on highways, but on narrow coastal roads and often enough found ourselves sandwiched like sardines because a trip by car was to be maximised by packing in as many people as the car could possibly accommodate in those days. 

I remember the old Morris Minor and the Volkswagon that 'swam' across a flooded road near Muar and I remember that on hot, humid days, all the windows were wound down and to sit next to a window was like a business-class treat on an aeroplane in those days. I remember that we passed by boring scenery of endless rubber tree plantations and when we finally saw padi fields and bullock carts on the roads we knew that we had arrived in the state of Malacca. These scenes are of course non-existent today. The padi fields are gone and the bullock carts are now tourist items located in Ayer Keroh where you can pay for short rides. The rubber trees are now replaced by the more lucrative oil palms. 

Still, nostalgia is something that stays with you throughout your life and is activated by unexpected encounters with the things that everyday living has pushed to the past and becomes forgotten with time like these thermos flasks and the display of cups of 'cooling herbal teas' that you could purchase to counteract the heatiness in your system - to balance the yin and yang in your body. Malacca could still evoke these feelings in me and as usual I overworked my camera to capture all that I felt connected with. Click here to see the photos taken over two days at Jonker Street and Bunga Raya (Chinatown) in Malacca.