Hao Jie A Famosa Day 1 | Chan's Kingdom
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Thursday, December 29, 2011

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A Famosa Day 1

When you see this post, it has been almost a week after my little trip with my family to A Famosa and Johor.

What we planned:
A Famosa( Melaka)----- Kluang( Johor)------Sagil( Johor)---Gunung Ledang Waterfall( Sagil)

Seems pretty boring huh? I would call this as a "Family Trip in an Old Friends Reunion"

Family Trip- A Famosa of course. OFR( Old Friends Reunion)--- It's all about Johor.

Before I go into details, let's talk about what I have learnt.( Sounds boring~)
Pleasure of a vacation is of course included, but I got something unexpected: a little information of my mom and dad's romantic experience. ( like in How I Met Your Mom) They met in Kluang, then lived in the same house among their old friends. They taught in the same school, then they got separated with their friends when they got  transferred out of that school. 

Thus, I got the opportunity to visit that school, met with some (senior) teachers/ parents' friends.

First of all, A Famosa. Hmmm, I last visited that place when I was still in Standard 4 or 5. The only remaining memory piece in my brain is parrots! Lots of them!


We stayed in A Famosa Resort Hotel. Nice room, nice bathroom and nice money. (I would prefer they use the space for bathroom for more room spaces though) As the hotel was only intended for a place for us to sleep at the night, I would not expect mush out of it.( If I was to have relatives/ friends/etc. in Melaka .....) 

We reached Melaka in the evening, entered A Famosa area and checked in to the hotel. The only programme available for us at the time was the Cowboy Town, which was only available from 6pm to 12am. 

A Famosa has a lot of space, as they claimed "they are a 520-Hectare Integrated Resort", but a lot of spaces are really wasted. Piles of sands (maybe it's for construction, just maybe) could be seen in the A Famosa and some abandoned buildings could also be found there.

My younger sister took a ride on a horse for 3 rounds in the small field, for RM 10.  I think it was a bit pricey. Anyway, I could not resist the temptations and persuasion form my parents and bought another "ticket" for a ride too.


         Pony in the barn besides the Paintball Park


 After some sight-seeing around the compound, finally, it is 6pm!

With much excitements and anticipation, we entered Cowboy Town, after buying the tickets. With the price of the tickets ( higher than the amount needed to play in the Outdoor Park in Genting Highlands!), I anticipated great facilities and experiences. 

The town, was like a GHOST TOWN. Maybe that is exagerated, but that was what I thought when I first entered the compound. 

Old building, checked, 
minimal humans around, checked( because the main show is on 8.30pm ), 
Old painting, checked!

Heck, I though I had entered an abandoned amusement park in ghost movie. Okay, that was fine. With the time past away, the number of people increases as well. 

Advice given by me, a cheapskate: Have your dinner before you entered the park, because you won't find another restaurant other than their own.

They have two restaurants: Huang Di Chinese Restaurant and Ranch Steak House. We chose Steakhouse. The quality, was overestimated. Expensive price, slow serving time( maybe again, caused by our hunger ) and the amount of drinks served, enough for us to last until the main dish only! I often find the amount of drinks served is highly connected to a restaurant's quality. With that stingy amount of Ice Lemon Tea served, I would rather bring myself 2 big bottle of 1.5L Mineral Water! (which I regretted because we only brought 2 500ml mineral water into the park!)

Another disappointment started when the rain started in the night. We had to hide ourselves from the rain in the shopping complex, which leads us to the "stage" where they perform their shows. Nothing much here, except that we entered the park too early, as there was literally nothing to do in the park. Karaoke was closed, massage centre was closed, beer garden was closed. It made me thought A Famosa was closing down, and this park was their last attempt to squeeze any reaming milk from this dying milk cow.

Finally, they let the tourists to enter the "stage". To my amazement, the "stage" didn't even have a roof! With the rain making their stone seats all wet, things started to annoy me. No dry seats? fine, I could stand. the problem is, the only place with a "roof" is the final bar with some plastic chairs at the corner. It wasn't cleaned obviously as rubbish were all over the floor under the roof.

All the umbrellas.


  
The wet floor and seats.



Red Indian Show started, and of course, they weren't actually Red Indians. The only thing I saw is fire. More fire and so on. Their show was only about performances with fire, dances with fire and playing with fire. Next please!

The Carnival. Well, this was worth watching. With their performers riding on the horses, acting as cowboys, it was actually worth the time. It was total hilarious with the animals coming out from the gate, especially chickens. One thing worth noting is that some foul smell, similar to cows' dung could be sensed during the entire shows. I am fine with this as zoo has the same smell. But if you aren't comfortable with that kind of experience, forget about it.

Almost the end of the show, looks like the rain did not chase the visitors away.

The carnival ended with a great parade of animals, costumes, dances and etc. It was enjoyable, as the rain had stopped as well. We entered the shopping complex again, to watch the so called 4D movie. It was worse than the one in Genting, seriously. The movie was not changed throughout the year, as seen from their advertisement channel in the TV. The movements of the chair were only vertically, the quality was also outdated. If you really want a movie experience, use less money and catch a 3D movie in the cinema, but , you CAN'T choose, haha. All tickets were bundled with the 4D movies, so you have to pay for the movies.

*EDIT*
To add to more disappointment, we watched the advertisement channel of Cowboy Town in the hotel's television. The day could end pretty well with the carnival, but after the advertisement, the feeling of "this place is going to doom" rose again.

The advertisement is shot when A Famosa first opened so it showed the best out of the best. There were so many performances, so much more animals and there were even clothing for the animals! Now, it was just some visitors' favourite shows, without anything new.

This ends the DAY 1 in Melaka. Next post is all about DAY 2, might be a little bit photo heavy too.

Conclusion:
Cowboy Town---
 Definitely needs a lot of renovations and maintenance to keep it running.
 Until that time, NOT Recommended unless you just want to taste the feel of a carnival.

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Author: Chan HJ
An enthusiast in papercraft. Paper model designing sounds fun too! More about me at my Blog Bio or

2 comments :

  1. get to go on a holiday still complain. at least u're not stuck in boringville.

    ReplyDelete
  2. find something interesting to do in the "boringville" la.

    With your genius mind I think you can make some differences there. :D

    I bet you will also complain if you go there... I can't imagine why isn't there a roof? For 10 years there isn't even any improvements?

    ReplyDelete