A Short Trip Back to Old Malacca

"Let me recall your mind
for a little while..."
- George Bosco Lazaroo

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On my most recent visit to Malacca in the saummer of 1997, an historic portuguese city in Malaysia, I took a river boat cruise for tourists, which I was that day.  It was a very enjoyable experience, if only for (well- actually completely due to) the company, and the live narrator, Mr. George Bosco Lazaroo.  Our party of three were the only patrons present for the 12:10pm sailing down the malacca river.  So when we cast off, the only other two people aboard on that lazy afternoon were the captain, and Mr. Lazaroo.

Shortly after getting underway, the big plastic outdoor PA speaker sputtered to life with a loud scratchy, "Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Malacca, historic city."  It was so loud and annoying that I instinctively tuned it out. However, after several minutes of steady put-put through the brown water past nothing particularly remarkable, I noticed that the narration, as much as it sounded like a prerecorded tape, and may as well have been, was actually being recited live by an old man in the forward open cabin, Mr. Lazaroo.

To make a long tour short... it was this narration that held us rapt for the entire trip.  I am happy to be able to share the entire narration.

Long before he introduced himself, he had already instructed us about the chinese, how to address your friends when camping, how young girls once regarded Raleigh bicycles, how to interact with flowers, the origin and cause of saliva flow, even more about the chinese, and a thing or two about WWF wrestling!

Mr. Lazaroo sat barefoot on a platic chair facing away from the tourists with a microphone in one hand and a notebook in the other.   After the initial awe of the monologue, I crept up and looked over his shoulder at his notebook.  It was actually an old desk diary which he was obviously reading from.  The historic facts and anecdotes we were enjoying were scrawled on pages originally designed to hold the appointments of unknown executives to attend to during the important days of february and march 1982. 

He was obviously speaking english, but I couldn't make out one english word on the page I was able to peek at.  It looked like arabic to me, which is taught in malaysian schools.  The arabic script works phonetically.  I was amazed that this man quite possibly was reciting the sounds off of the paper, perhaps written by someone else, which, once in the air, could be interpreted as english speech by us tourists.  It was possible that the live narrator didn't even know what he was saying!*

I was so "taken with" the hilarious audio part of the trip, that I was actually saddened to be experiencing something that I coudn't take a snapshot of in order to share with others.  When we disembarked, what the hell, I asked the narrator if he could possibly record his tour on a cassette and post it to me so that I could have it forever.  I told him that my sister was interested in Malacca but couldn't come on this trip.  He agreed!  I gave him my card and paid him in advance for the postage and price of a cassette tape.  I can't say that I placed much confidence in this actually coming to pass, but it was definately a bet worth placing.

After returning home I quickly forgot about it.  So, when a package came in the mail from Malaysia months later, I couldn't guess who it was coming from.  But it contained a letter, and a cassette!

The cassette contained not only the entire narration, word for word (syllable for syllable*), but also a couple bonus tracks!

Without further ado, please sit back, turn up the humidity, summon some maritime diesel fumes, close your eyes and enjoy the definative trip back to old Malacca.   (These are long audio files in mpeg layer 3 format (.mp3).  You will need an MP3 player to player to play them, such as the small convenient winamp.  An MP3 player is a very handy thing to have, well worth the tiny disk space.  Many MP3 players, including winamp, can play while downloading.)

As you float down the Malacca River, enjoy these photos: 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Regrettably, that's all the photos I have.  I would have been more attentive if i'd known that Mr. Lazaroo would be contributing his recording.  Not knowing my reader, I can't say that I necessarily recommend visiting Malacca, but if you do, I absolutely recommend this realxing (sic) enjoyable river trip.  It's easy to find a pié

-glen

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* It turns out that the script he was reading from the diary into the mic was not arabic, but shorthand.  (I know neither! Looked the same to me.)   Mr. Lazaroo, obviously, is somewhat of a shorthand expert.