Malacca Day Trip from Kuala Lumpur: Two Hours to UNESCO

Kuala Lumpur is a great food city pretending to be a great tourist city. The Petronas Towers are excellent for ten minutes. Batu Caves are an excellent hour. Bukit Bintang is a mall. Chinatown is a single street. The genuine reason to be in KL is the food, and you can do that food in two days. Day three is when you get on a bus and go to Malacca.

How do you get from Kuala Lumpur to Malacca?

Executive coach from TBS station (Terminal Bersepadu Selatan). Around 12 ringgit (£2.20) one way, two hours, leaves every thirty minutes, drops you at Melaka Sentral on the outskirts of town, where you grab a Grab to the historic centre for another 6 ringgit. The alternative is a private driver for around 350 ringgit (£60) round-trip including waiting time. We took the coach. It was fine.

What should I see first in Malacca?

The compact bit worth walking is bordered by Christ Church on the north (the iconic salmon-pink Dutch building, built in 1753, the oldest Dutch buildings in Asia), the river through the middle, and Jonker Street on the south. You can walk the whole thing in a slow afternoon.

Outside Christ Church and Stadthuys, the trishaws are decorated like Hello Kitty hallucinations: pedicab drivers with full speaker rigs blasting K-pop, glittering tinsel, plastic flowers, fairy lights at noon. You either find this charming or alarming. We found it both, and spent ten minutes photographing the most extreme one.

What should I eat in Malacca?

The food crawl on Jonker Street is the main event:

Chicken rice balls at Hoe Kee or Chung Wah (locals say Chung Wah is older, tourists say Hoe Kee is more famous, both are genuinely good). Golf-ball-sized rice balls served with poached chicken and chilli sauce, a Malaccan speciality.

Pineapple tarts at San Shu Gong, the kind of bakery your grandmother would run if she were Peranakan and wanted to ruin your dietary plans.

Cendol at Jonker 88: shaved ice with palm sugar and pandan jelly, famous, crowded, and worth every minute of the queue.

About 50 ringgit (£9) for the full lunch crawl.

What is the best museum in Malacca?

The Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum on Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock. A private home from the late 19th century turned museum, owned by a Peranakan family who still live above it. Entry is 20 ringgit (£3.60), tours run hourly, and you get an actual descendant walking you through their great-grandmother's wedding bedroom and explaining how Peranakan culture works as a class structure. It's a 45-minute tour. It's the highlight of the day and possibly the best £3.60 you'll spend in Malaysia.

Is the Malacca river walk worth doing?

The Malacca River cuts through the centre and the buildings on either side are a layered set of murals, art-school graffiti, painted shophouses, and the occasional restored pre-war villa. Walk one bank in about an hour. There's also a river boat (30 ringgit per person, 45 minutes) which gives you a different angle on the murals. We walked one way and boated back. Both work.

Then the Cheng Hoon Teng Temple (oldest functioning Chinese temple in Malaysia, 1645) and the Kampung Kling Mosque (the Indonesian-Hindu-Chinese hybrid mosque from 1748 with the pagoda-like minaret). Both free, both ten minutes, both worth it.

How much does a Malacca day trip cost for two people?