Sun sets over Malacca

Malacca wasn't in my original schedule. After our visit to Seremban, my initial plan was to travel to Kuala Lumpur and stay there for a night. But my wife had different ideas. Since Seremban is so close to Malacca, she suggested, why don't we go there instead?

Frankly, this was a spiffingly good idea. Immediately, I booked ourselves into the Hotel Puri, which is one of Malacca's better-known boutique hotels. And immediately after that, I had second thoughts whether a single two-day, one-night stay in Malacca was enough. Without any further hesitation, I booked for a second night's stay there.

Let me say that it wasn't a bad decision to stay three days in this old former Portuguese/Dutch/British colony. It gave us more leeway to do whatever we wanted to do. And I did tell my wife, let's try to make this a food trip. But when we arrived in Malacca, we were wondering whether we should go all out on a makan spree. We've already had crabs in Seremban the day before and we were mindful of our cholesterol level going out of control at our age.

But visiting the Portuguese settlement in Malacca had always been in our plans and we know that there are restaurant there, and a very popular item on the menu are the crabs cooked in whatever way we wanted. How to avoid crabs when this crustacean keeps popping up everywhere in menus? In the end we succumbed to temptation and we did order one large crab cooked with salted egg (double danger for cholesterol: crab and salted duck egg).

Apart from the food at the Portuguese settlement - or more accurately, Portuguese Square - we had a little bonus in watching a very glorious sunset. Here is a series of pictures I took, all within five minutes, between 7.10p.m. and 7.15p.m. Pretty dramatic, don't you think so?