Picture perfect beaches on Langkawi

Arriving at the ferry terminal on Pulau Langkawi.
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About three hours after leaving George Town, we arrived at Pulau Langkawi.  Right off the boat, we got some food in the terminal before making the 15mile ride to the beach.  We caught a taxi out to the southwest corner of the island.  After checking into a hotel, it didn't take long to realize that this room also had some permanent residents.  A quick scream and a cry for help, I found Aspen Annie standing on the toilet pointing at a very large brown spider with lightning speed.  After several failed attempts on my part to evict him peacefully, the poor spider met an untimely demise at the bottom of my huge flip-flop.

Malaysian Island Hopper.
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Off to the beach!  Pulau Langkawi has some great white sand beaches.  We spent the rest of our day just roaming up and down the beach.  Lazy days are beer again.  We had an early dinner and grabbed a few brews to take back down to the beach for sunst.  Sunsets in Southeast Asia are quite a sight to behold.  The sun is super intense all day long, but about 20 minutes before it falls into the sea, it turns a nice orange color that isn't so hard on the eyes.  It's really hard not to just stare directly at it.  Never have I seen the sun appear so big.  Our Tiger Beers disappeared not so long after the sun.

Paradise found, time to relax.
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The next day was a whole lot more of the same.  Beachin' relaxation!  Once again, with a little more time, Langkawi seems like a place worth further exploring. With only five weeks and a whole lot of miles before I get back to Kunming, we didn't have the luxurey of staying in any one place for more than a few days.  Whirlwind travelling at it's finest.  Ordinarily, I prefer to just go to a few places in one trip and get to know them well.  However, a trip like this one has it's good points too.  The amount of places we got to see, and going through a different country every week, made a 5 week trip seem to feel more like I had been gone for 3 months.  Things that happened the week before, seemed like they happened ages ago.

It's a hard life, but somebody's gotta do it.
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After another day of chillin' on the beach, we decided to go ahead and head into Thailand the following morning.  We caught a mini-van back to the boat terminal the next morning and purchased tickets to Satun, Thailand, about an hour and twenty minute ferry ride through a sea full of huge jellyfish.  After another breakfast of Roti and curry, we were on our way.  We met Dan the Devonshire Man on the ferry, a fella we ended up hanging out with for the next several days.  We sat up on the roof of the ferry as we made our way through a bunch more islands, soaking up the sun.

Huge jellyfish. We saw hundreds of these things on our way to Thailand. Even when they aren't directly on you, broken tentacles are constantly annoying you as you try to enjoy a swim.
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The border crossing at Satun is fairly painless, about 25 minutes and we were through the door and surrounded by 10 touts, all wanting to change money for you and arrange some "Cheap transportation" to our next destination.  Once they found out that all I had was RMB, they were no longer interested in changing my money for me.  We caught a shared taxi to a bus that was leaving for Krabi at noon.  Hit up an ATM, had some lunch, and were on the move again.  4-5 hours to Krabi.  The bus wasn't nearly as nice as the ones in Malaysia, but it wasn't full and I got two seats to myself.  I would doze off for a bit and wake up to seeing things like six guys riding down the road on the backs of elephants.  Back into sleep, dreams of Thailand.