Leaving Borneo required a flight back to KL, partly to apply for our 60-day visas for the next phase of our journey: Indonesia. After a long trek across town to the embassy, I was pretty shocked to be turned away for being inappropriately dressed. It seems shorts and flip-flops are the equivalent of turning up in briefs to Indonesian officials! Stoopidly, I had been more worried about Maja covering up and hadn't realised I might be a liability with my over-casual attitude to dress.So, leaving Maja and the boys in a cafe, I walked off to find a gents' clothes shop. After a sweaty half an hour of wandering through hideously expensive designer shops I did find a mall with a Gap where I spent 45 unnecessary pounds (enough to get a hotel room for 3 or 4 days here) on a pair of grey slacks. They did the job, though, and we got the visas. I cheekily went back and exchanged the trousers for a nice shirt afterwards, so all was not lost.
Moving on, Melaka (Melacca in the English spelling) was somewhere that we had been looking forward to reaching after good reports from several people. It was indeed a relaxed chilled out town, very much moulded by the colonial era and sporting buildings from the three phases of invasion - Portuguese, Dutch and then English.
The Chinatown here is more of a delight, though, full of antique shops and community centres doing traditional Chinese arts and even some unexpected cultural novelties like line dancing.
The food here is great too, with the usual Malaysian mix of Indian and Chinese along with Nyonya specialities - spicy but straightforward dishes developed by the decendants of Chinese merchants who married local Malay women (Nyonya means married).
We met up with some artist friends of our KL host Jasmine here and all did a bit of pottery.
Maja did a coil bowl inspired by African potters,
while Aron made a lovely little decorative pot, also with coils,
and Ariel made a wild mountain with vegetation (somehow the three-year-old made the best art)...
I made a host of bottles, one of which I left to be glazed for Jasmine's birthday.
We hadn't expected any wildlife here so were very surprised to come across a pair of large water monitor lizards spotted crawling up the open drains from the river - mini Komodo dragons on the hunt for rats or scraps.
City visits always need a good chill-out period afterwards, so for our final Malaysian fling we headed next to Tioman island - a much visited but still lovely paradise with an inaccessible jungle mountain interior and sandy beaches around the fringe. We stayed at ABC, also called Air Batang, and moved into a beautiful chalet right on the beach below a forested headland.
Five minutes walk away, we discovered B&J dive school who had a small pool that I hoped would be the key in getting me over a previous frightening 'chuck 'em in and see' dive experience, so I signed up for a PADI Open Water course (4 days) - on the condition that if I couldn't handle it after a day, I could drop out and pay less. Well, the teacher (a Londoner called Grahame) was great. He helped me over my nerves and, step by step, I became a diver. I loved it.
And the cherry on the cake of the whole experience was when I turned up for my first ever boat dive on day 4 and there was a small whale shark (small for the species but still the size of a large 'normal' shark) swimming around above Tiger reef. So we all leapt in and spent 10 minutes with the beast. Surprisingly, it seemed quite curious about us and kept circling in for a closer look. My first glimpse as I entered the water was the 3m shark heading straight towards me!
The dive course and meeting the shark have to be some of the best few days of my life, (waiting around for four days was less exciting for Maja, but the boys were in heaven, playing on the beach all day).
The trip also brought to an end to out time in Malaysia. We headed back to the mainland and caught a bus to clean, expensive, but surprisingly likeable Singapore.
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