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by Purple Mais
Cambridge, United Kingdom
September 8, 2004
The Eastern Heritage Guest house is an old Melakan (Paranakan) building converted into a guest house. From the outside, it is a pretty merchant’s house with colourful tiles and wooden shutters. The reception area looks like a 1920s bar complete with barstools and ornately carved Chinese-style wooden paneling. The dark wood panels screen off the communal area behind, where films are shown every night and oddly enough, a small plunge pool. This pool became alluringly tempting after a hot and sticky day’s sightseeing around the traffic choked streets of Melaka. There was also an eating area where you could get breakfast (not included) and snacks. Shoes have to be removed before venturing upstairs.
The rooms themselves are very basic – box rooms with bare bunk beds and a fan. They’ve tried to liven the rooms up by having funky paintings on the walls, but the shutter windows open out onto the main corridor and there was no view of outside. There is one toilet, one shower and one sink shared between about 10 rooms and so queuing in the morning is inevitable. We were lucky enough to be moved to one of the nicer double rooms which overlooked the stairwell and hence had a welcome breeze from the outside.
This hotel is a budget/backpacker place, so don’t expect any luxuries. It was certainly cheap and cheerful with bagfuls of character and really friendly helpful staff. Definitely one of the more interesting places that we have stayed in.
The hotel is in the vicinity of the little India quarter of Melaka and so there are lots of Indian restaurants nearby selling rotis (pancake-like fried bread served with curry often for breakfast, but you can persuade them to have it with banana instead), thalis (all-you can eat meals of curry and rice) and Indian sweets. There is also a nightmarket within walking distance where, being mainly Chinese, a cacophony of steaming woks will rustle up anything you order. The name of one such foodstall particularly amused us (see picture).
From journal The Melting Pot of Malaysia