Every longish trip has a breaking point. It's easy, in your first few days in a new place, to see only the good--or to cover the bad with the glitter of exoticism and novelty. Sometimes the newness wears away as the heat or the traffic or the pollution become overwhelming. Often, though, there's some event, or some series of events in rapid succession, that can make you want to scream and smash bottles and get on the first plane out out of wherever you are. On some trips, you don't recover from this point. On others--the better ones--you do, enjoying the place afterward but hopefully in a more balanced, nuanced way.

Today at 6 p.m. was my breaking point. Four hours later, things are looking up. I'm back in love with Malaysia, if slightly more warily so.

Early this morning I checked out of my guesthouse and walked the mile to Puduraya bus station, carrying my 30-pound backpack. Although the bus station was as overwhelmingly crowded as it was yesterday, the bus itself was spacious and airconditioned, and the highways leaving KL are beautifully maintained and lined on both sides with palm trees and huge bushes, making for a lovely ride. An hour and a half later, I was in Melaka, former Portuguese and Dutch port city.

Melaka's historical town center--the ruins of an old church; several old Dutch buildings, since turned into museums; a model windmill (a recent addition)--is, well, hideous. It's all been painted rust to look like it may have looked at some point in the past--but the result is that all the buildings look like 40-year-old recreations of buildings that might or might not have existed at some point, rather than like buildings with any authentic history of their own. The large number of trishaws adorned with fake flowers (think waxy plastic leis from a party store), many blaring Chinese pop music once their drivers convinced tourists to climb in for a ride, didn't do much to add to the area's appeal.

After a long walk (inadvertant--I thought I was taking a shortcut, but this trip has already reminded me many times that my sense of direction is less than stellar) I wound up at a street lined with Malay food stalls. I sat down for a roti filled with egg, onions and red chilis and a glass of iced tea--both delicious. Two bites in, I looked down at the table--and noticed that I had been joined by a tarantula. I'm not a spider expert, and it's possible that this spider was not in fact an official tarantula, as it was not particularly furry. However, it was brown and the size of a tarantula (its legs were about two inches long) and it was less than a foot away from me. I moved my chair as far away from the table as I could, finished my food, and basically ran out.

That was the beginning of the breaking point.

I spent my remaining few hours in Melaka walking around Chinatown--enormous, lovely (full of brightly-painted, wood-shuttered two-story houses), and in much better shape than KL's. I walked to the oldest mosque in Malaysia--simple but lovely--and returned to the train station, where I had a rootbeer float at the A & W Root Beer store. It came in a frosted mug (labelled A&W All American Food), and I enjoyed sitting among families speaking Malay, wearing traditional clothes, and chowing down on floats, curly fries and halal burgers.

The ride back to KL was long, as another Melaka-KL bus had crashed into the highway median, causing an hour-long delay. As a result, I missed my bus to Penang. By five minutes. By this evening the bus station was such a madhouse that it was unclear whether or not I had missed the bus--so many buses were coming in and out that the information office was posting info completely haphazardly, and no one else could tell me whether the bus had left yet. So I stood on a filthy, hot, unlit bus platform for an hour, surrounded by hundreds of people trying to shove their way onto buses to various provinces, while I waited for a bus that had already left. Eventually I figured out that the bus was gone, bought another ticket for tomorrow, and got out of the bus station as quickly as I could.

That was the real breaking point. I was sick of being sweaty, sick of being stared at (buying sunglasses helped a bit--my blue eyes are way too strange for some people here to handle--but not much), sick of being whistled at, sick of "Hello, hello!" everywhere I go, sick of carrying a heavy bag, sick of rats running in front of me on the street, sick of being away from home.

What a difference four hours makes. I've returned to my lovely guesthouse (fortunately, they have a bed for me for tonight), shared dinner and good conversation with the owners, eaten delicious satay and durian at street stalls (it's illegal to bring durian onto public transportation or into many buildings in Malaysia, so lots of people go to corner stalls to sit at a plastic table and gorge themselves on the fruit, which is custardy and incredibly delicious if you can get bast the smell), and--perhaps the best of all--showered. I"m actually looking forward to having another day in Kuala Lumpur, too. As long as there are no tarantulas involved, I don't doubt that it will be a day well spent.