One quarter of the world’s traded goods flow through the long, narrow Strait of Malacca, as well as one quarter of all of the world’s oil that is shipped by sea! That is amazing. Check out the photos…it looks so calm, so serene. Yet it is the busiest strait in the world, with close to 100,000 vessels navigating through annually. It connects the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and is the shortest route from China and the Pacific to India and the Middle East. Piracy has been a problem in recent times, and there are shipwrecks in the strait. The maximum size of a vessel that can pass through is referred to as Malaccamax; for the world’s largest ships, mostly oil tankers, the strait is not deep enough, at only 82 feet. These vessels must detour several thousand nautical miles as a result.
The last two photos still show the strait, but with a little swag: trees on the deck of the observation tower, and a great shot from our hotel’s infinity pool, where you can see the strait to the left of, and in between, the two towers of an adjacent hotel!
