Malaysia, Langkawi Island: Last But Certainly Not Least

Our last destination in Malaysia completely exceeded our expectations, and this was due to a number of factors including the hot sun, beautiful beaches, delicious food, lots of playful monkeys, exciting scooter rides, friendly people and a perfect swimming pool. The island of Langkawi is about 2 hours by boat north of Malaysia's Penang Island, and by boat is exactly how we travelled there. We booked ourselves on an early morning ferry which departed the Georgetown ferry terminal in Penang at 8:30am, and we arrived at Langkawi right at 10:30am. "Selamat Datang" (Welcome to) Langkawi - what a welcome this was.

Langkawi comprises a group of 99 tropical islands, lying off the northwestern coast of peninsular Malaysia, and as soon as the ferry neared the main island (Pulau Langkawi) in the group, we immediately saw that Langkawi is a tropical destination not to be ignored. With a geological history dating back 500 million years, the islands contain unique rock formations that stirred our imaginations and baffled our minds - just as the brochure said it would. We were also told to expect fine beaches, emerald waters and people reknowned for their gentle smiles and warm hospitality, and everything we were told to expect was delivered ten-fold - the beaches alone were massively better than Penang. There were even a few surprises along the way, including Zackry's Guesthouse and their pet monkey Kiko.

His incessant banging with a hammer started promptly at 8:00am each morning and was a much more painful alarm than our Timex watches

Most of the time on the island, we lazed about on the beach and at a swimming pool belonging to the Holiday Villas Resort. We stayed at Zackry's Guesthouse which is situated in Pantai Tengah. Pantai Tengah is a beach area located in the southwest part of the island, and is walking distance from Pantai Cenang, another beach area in this part of the island. Pantai Cenang is the most built-up and visited beach village on the island. We decided to stay at Zackry's Guesthouse because the price for a room was very cheap, and they also offered all the backpacker services we now know to look for when staying somewhere. Upon arrival at Zackry's, we were met with nothing but kindness from Peet, Zackry's wife, and she was extremely helpful in explaining what's hot and what's not on the island. She gave us a much-used tip about walking through Holiday Villas Resort in order to use their swimming pool, advising us to just walk through and act like we were guests there. Thanks to Peet for that excellent travel tip!

Apart from spending time out in the sun and swimming in the sea and pool, we decided to venture around the island for a day. We wanted to try to rent scooters as we had tried to do on Penang, but since we still did not have our drivers licences (see our Malaysia, Penang online journal to read about this drama), we had to take a gamble and try to rent a scooter without showing them. Luckily, the guy we rented a scooter from did not ask to see them, he only asked us to write the licence number down. You can imagine that it was quite easy to remember the numbers at that point, and whether or not Kyle's licence number is really his Social Security number probably doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Finally, before we knew it, we had a scooter ready to drive around Langkawi and were on our way.

We set out on our "round the island" tour early one morning, in order to see as many sights around the island as possible. After driving through Pantai Tengah and Pantai Cenang, we found ourselves in very quiet areas of the island. We rode past a rice paddy field with buffaloes and cows helping shape the land. We then passed the small airport as we travelled towards Telaga Harbour Park, which was our first intended destination on the tour. This destination was very important as it is one of the few places on the island where you can buy petrol and find an ATM machine. We were in luck with petrol as we only spent $2 to fill up the tank, but we had back luck trying to use the ATM machine as we weren't able to withdraw any cash. There was no need to worry at this point, however, as there were 2 other places with ATMs on the island, and one of the places was the last stop we planned on making that day, the town of Kuah.

Just before we reached Telaga Harbour Park, we came across a very unusual road sign which we had not seen before in Malaysia. The sign said "Wildlife Crossing" and had a picture of a monkey on it. The sign was very similar to the ones you see in the US or UK with a picture of a deer on it. We supposed by now that monkeys in Malaysia are as common as deer are where we come from, but the sign was still pretty cool to see. We did slow down a bit, to heed the warnings of the sign and also because the roads we were driving on at this point were steep and windy. Before we knew it, we came upon a group of long-tailed macaques strolling across the road, and we guessed the sign was right! We stopped for a few minutes to observe the monkeys and feed them some treats. An older English couple pulled up along the side of the road where we stopped and brought out lots of fruit to feed the monkeys. They had apparently been feeding the monkeys every morning for quite a few days, so it must be a common place for spotting them - the monkeys, not the older English couple.

After we stopped to see the monkeys and after we got petrol but no cash, we continued our round the island tour. Across from the beach (Pantai Kok) in Telaga Harbour Park, we saw some buffaloes lazing about on the side of the road. After taking a few photos of the buffaloes and the beach, we ventured on to the Oriental Village in order to purchase tickets to ride Langkawi's cable car, which lands atop Gunung Macincang, one of the highest peaks in Langkawi. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the cable car entrance at 12:30pm, the apparatus was not working due to strong winds and they told us to return around 3:30pm. We left thinking that we may return to ride the cable car later in the day but even when we saw the cable car moving again 30 minutes later, we decided to give the ride a miss. We really couldn't be bothered to backtrack on our journey.

Our next stop, Telaga Tujuh, or Seven Wells, was located in the north-western corner of the island and is a geological marvel. The waterfall there is so named because the cascading waters are broken up by a series of seven natural pools of water. Once you survive the steep climb up many, many steps you will realise that surrounding the waterfall and pools is a lush green forest which is home to several long-tailed macaques, tarantulas, scorpions, and other wildlife - luckily we only saw lots of macaques.

At the base of Seven Wells, we bought some peanuts to feed the macaques that were playing around the national park entrance. The monkeys there have evidently learned that when tourists reach into their pockets, food is likely to be offered and, therefore, as soon as we reached into our pockets to get some peanuts out, a swarm of macaques suddenly appeared around us. We decided to leave the area after feeding them most of our peanuts, and as we packed away the leftovers in the seat compartment of the scooter, one of the bigger macaques wised up to the fact that we still had some food which he could take from us. He started getting aggressive and acting vicious. As Kyle was closing the seat compartment to the scooter, the macaque bared his large canines and was nearly ready to attack from behind, and Dan tried to save the day by banging our two scooter helmets together in order to scare the creature off. This didn't work and only aggravated the monkey further, but luckily, Kyle had started to walk away and the monkey got bored and left.

When it was safe to return to the scooter, we carried on around the north part of the island towards Pantai Tanjung Rhu. One of Langkawi's most beautiful beaches, this very quiet and serene strip of beach resided on the northern cape of Langkawi, opposite several nearby islands. There, we saw a couple of insane Norwegians guys trying to capture the best photos of each other jumping and diving crazily into the sea. It looked a bit like one of the tamer scenes from the MTV television programme "Jackass", and if anyone has seen that programme or clips from it, perhaps you can imagine the scene we witnessed. After swimming for awhile in the cool, refreshing water we had a late lunch at one of the restaurants on the beach before hopping back onto our mode of transportation for the day.

Langkawi's Bird and Wildlife Park was the next and penultimate stop on our tour of the island. Despite having passed the park without noticing - and to this day we still don't understand how we could have missed the massive park entrance which lies about 20 feet from the road - we still managed to arrive before they closed. However, it was very late in the afternoon and therefore many of the animals were still heavily into their daytime siestas. Fortunately, and it seems most places in Malaysia cater for this when there are animals involved, we were able to buy different types of food to feed the different species of animals. For example, we bought carrots to feed the small and gentle mouse deer, oranges and bananas for the monkeys and tomatoes for the hornbills. We threw a piece of carrot to the crocodiles they had on display but apparently crocodiles harbour some kind of resentment against anything related to cute, fluffy bunnies - Bugs Bunny would have made a better treat for the croc but there were no live animals on sale (thank goodness).

We spent the last of our cash by the time we left the Bird and Wildlife Park and therefore were glad that Kuah was our next stop. Having one of the town's 3 ATMs, we thought we may have better luck withdrawing cash than we had at Telaga Harbour Park. When we arrived in Kuah, we located the ATM immediately but again received the same negative response. A large group of Norwegians, including the two crazy ones who were taking photos at Pantai Tanjung Rhu, also had the same problem. We started thinking at this point that the problem was due to it being Sunday, and perhaps the ATMs were out of cash. However, we witnessed a local withdrawing cash, so we then changed our hypothesis to believe that the local banks' connections to international banks were down. So, we decided at this point to try one last resort and the last ATM on the island, which was located at the airport.

The airport was on the other side of the island, and instead of taking the main road around the south of the island, we cut across on some smaller roads. We made really good time by speeding a little bit, and without drivers licences, we were lucky we were not pulled over. We didn't actually see any police the entire time we were on the island, but still it feels good to not get a speeding ticket when you have sped. At the airport, we still were not able to withdraw cash and so we finally gave in and decided to change some US dollars into Malaysian Ringgits. We were done with the tour after this and it had now gotten dark. We had to ride back to Pantai Tengah in the dark and therefore removed our sunglasses for the drive. A note of warning for anyone riding scooters or motorbikes at dusk or in the dark on tropical islands: flying insects really hurt when they slap into your face or arms. They also have the most unusual way of getting into your ears when you are trucking along at 60 km/hour... not pleasant.

We were happy to be back at Zackry's after a long but fulfilling day around the island. It was nice to be back in the quiet village of Pantai Tengah after hearing the roar of our scooter engine all day. The next couple of days on the island, we spent our time at the huge and refreshing Holiday Villas Resort swimming pool, which is set in a beautifully landscaped garden area on the beach. Everyone staying at the resort seemed to be European and we had no problem using the pool.

Zackry's Guesthouse was hosting a monkey guest when we stayed there. Kiko was abandoned by his owner and left chained up at the bar next to Zackry's, back in September 2006. Kiko is unfortunately not a Malaysian species of macaque and has had his canine teeth removed, so there is no chance that he will survive in the wild on his own. The Malaysian macaques would gang up on him and kill him if he ventured into the jungle. Zackry and Peet also cannot release him to a zoo as they do not have ownership papers for the monkey, and they would get in trouble for keeping one "illegally". At the moment, they have to keep him caged up or chained up until they can work out what to do. Kiko has spent most of his life in a cage and was treated cruelly by his previous owner, and is sometimes a bit aggressive towards people. So, the owners of Zackry's are currently working on reducing his aggressive behaviour and they are also trying to amend his diet from beer and sweets to more natural fare like water and fruit. We like to think that we contributed to this by feeding Kiko small pieces of fruit whenever we left Zackry's, and making sure that he only received the fruit when he reached out gently towards us from his cage.

The bar adjoining Zackry's is owned by an English man from Bolton ("Big Joe" was his name and he fulfilled nearly every northerner stereotypes) and every night the place was busy until the wee hours of the morning. It was especially busy the night that Bolton won a football match against Fulham and Big Joe gave out shots of vodka and corned beef hash every time Bolton scored. This night, we chose to go out in Pantai Cenang and ended up spending our evening in an internet cafe until 2:00 am, singing online karaoke with a large group of local Malaysians. Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" and Garbage's "Zombie" are two songs that will be forever engrained in our memories, especially since we sang karaoke stone-cold sober for a couple of hours, but this was definitely an evening not to forget, and hanging with the locals seemed like a wiser decision than watching Bolton beat Fulham in Big Joe's Bar.

Zackry's Guesthouse is quite a social place and there we met a group of Americans - Joel, Lindy, Shellie and Stephen - who are currently teaching at a university in China. We're hoping to catch up with them sometime during our five weeks in China and also to get some good travel tips from them. Our daily routine at Zackry's included an early start for breakfast, then watching a DVD with some of the other guests before heading out to the beach and Holiday Villas Resort. The early start each day (except the morning after the Bolton game, as Zackry seems to be the only Malaysian Bolton supporter in existence and was extremely hungover) was a bit forced on us as Zackry decided to build a new room next to ours the week we stayed there. His incessant banging with a hammer started promptly at 8:00am each morning and was a much more painful alarm than our Timex watches. We spent late afternoons walking around the villages at Pantai Tengah and Pantai Cenang looking for someplace new to have dinner. We were fortunate to have lots of free time in Langkawi to work on our travel journal and also to plan our month in Thailand.

To leave Langkawi, we had flights booked on Air Asia to Phuket, Thailand via Kuala Lumpur. Originally, we had booked flights to Kota Bahru, Malaysia in order to visit the Perhentian Islands but we changed our travel plans in order to get to Thailand a week earlier than planned. It was a good move as we need to get through Thailand a week earlier to add a couple of days each to the Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and China portions of our trip, which all follow our month in Thailand.