Adventures By Design

In which the travelers don’t buy snake oil

Today was a day of walking. All of the sights in Melaka are within walking distance of each other, making it a convenient, if sweaty, place to see. We ate a delicious breakfast at the Secret Recipe restaurant in the middle of a mall, which provided a cool place to watch the world walk by, and scam someone’s wifi internet connection at the same time. What a deal!

Leaving the mall, we walked to Christ Church, originally built by the Dutch Reform Church, then taken over by the Anglican Church. Outside the Church were a bunch of cyclos (bicycle taxis) waiting for fares. Here cyclos seemed to be competing for the Most Garish in Yellow award, and the competition is fierce. Everywhere you looked you could see three wheeled bicycles covered in fake plastic yellow flowers and blinking LED lights. Some of them even blared tinny music.

We walked around the city, visiting vestiges of Melaka’s colonial and trading port heritage. Walking around the city wasn’t difficult especially with our map and compass (we’d recommend bringing a compass whenever traveling). But after several hours we were tired and thirsty, so we found a Dutch coffee shop (at some time the Dutch colonized Melaka, along with the Portuguese and British). Gin was excited to see they had Ollie Bollen on the menu! (Ollie Bollen are traditional Dutch fritters that Janet used to make for New Year’s Eve.) But her elation was short lived: Ollie Bollen are only available on weekends.

It was getting late and we were getting hungry so we left our coffee shop to walk toward Chinatown where we popped into a restaurant for a quick bite before continuing on to the Jonker Walk night market. This market was like most of the others we’ve been to, and we didn’t have very high expectations. But we were surprised to find a few things to buy. First, we bought two pairs of simple wood chopsticks to keep in our backpacks in case we need them while eating on the road. Secondly, we bought a small draw-string bag to store our cards and dice. The vendors would customize the bag by painting stuff on it. Using some of designs on other bags, we created our own picture of two people standing under a tree. And just as Gin was whispering to me that we should have asked them to make the two people holding hands, the artist painted them holding hands. Finally the last thing we bought was a necklace with pendant made of twisted glass.

Just as we were leaving the market we heard the fanfare music announcing that Malaysia’s most famous street performer would shortly be starting his routine. Within minutes he had a sizable audience straining to see him, and his signature trick: impaling a large coconut using only his index finger! His act was quite polished and he bantered with the audience in both English and Chinese (which couldn’t have been easy). For his first trick, he pulled out two bull whips and whipped the air several times, making the audience jump (whips are loud). He then called for a member of the audience and asked him to throw three playing cards, ninja-star style. Not surprisingly, the cards fluttered limply to the ground, however when the performer picked them up, he hurled them into the air far above everyone’s heads. Tricky cards, eh? The performer then wowed us with fire eating, and blew several impressive fire balls into the air. At last it was time for the coconut-impaling finger trick. He asked the audience volunteer to select one coconut from a pile, which he then examined and drew a target on with a black marker. Placing the coconut on a special stand, the audience was on the edge of its seat, er… curb. But then the performer pulled out a bottle of brown liquid and explained that using ancient Chinese secrets, he held in his hand a secret elixir that could solve all your heath ails. Rheumatoid arthritis? No problem. Disfiguring warts? Piece of cake. For a low low price of $3 you too could own a bottle of traditional Chinese snake water. We waited for ten minutes for the coconut impaling to begin, but this performer seemed to show no signs of resuming the show, so, disappointed, we moved on and returned home.

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