Got up early after a luxurious sleep and went for a swim in the hotel pool. Came back in to the room to find Phil and Honey on Skype, chatted for a while until I had to get ready. We took with us all the luxury soaps, shampoos etc for which we had paid so dearly.
Hearty hot breakfast with Beef Bacon – due to Malaysia being an Islamic country, most people do not eat pork, so they make bacon out of beef. Not bad at all, I got seconds.
Our flight was with Air Asia, a super budget airline. They do not have reserved seating, you just have to fight and be one of the first on the plane if you want a good seat. This is particularly hard for me, being so tall, as Air Asia does not have emergency exits. No exits = no exit rows, so the only row that could fit me was the front row. Luckily for some reason everyone wanted to sit up the back and I took a seat in the totally empty front row.
Flying into the island of Pulau Langkawi I could see a clear demarcation line in the sea where two kinds of water meet – clean (sea) water and dirty (land) water. The water at Langkawi’s beaches is quite murky – you cannot see your feet. I have heard theories that this is due to silt from the tsunami, which affected this island.
We got a cab to the resort, cabs being the only form of public transport on the island. Almost all the cabs are mini-buses and do not have meters, the fare is negotiated beforehand. The fare to get from any part of the island to any other part of the island is RM16. The Langkawi Village Resort has a good website that allows you to book online. Unfortunately the website and the resort do not communicate and there was no record of our reservation. Luckily there was one standard room available for the first night, and then a fancy room available for the rest of our stay.
The resort is of course right on the beach (Pillai Centang?) and has a bar between the pools and the beach. To the bar. After a few tasty Tigers I was ready for a nap and 3 hours later woke up refreshed. Kip and I went for a bit of an exploratory walk and ended up sitting at a table on the beach that had table service. Drank some beers on the beach while the sun set over the water. Not bad at all. Ate a tasty Indian meal there, like other Indian meals in Malaysia it came in a metal tray with sections, like a TV dinner, and not with rice automatically.
After dinner we walked along the beach to our resort, stopping to watch a fire twirler. Had a cleansing ale at the bar before retiring to our room to watch The Last Samurai before falling asleep.
“Pillai Centang?”
That’ll be “Pantai Cenang” (Cenang Beach) I believe. Though Langkawi Village Resort website says it is on “Pantai Tengah” (Middle Beach). Its map does indicate it’s near the popular Cenang Beach.
regards, sabre23t =^.^=
“The fare to get from any part of the island to any other part of the island is RM16.”
An alternative would be to rent a car, that should cost not much more than RM80/day, add about RM40 for a full tank (about say 400km travel), you can have a leisurely all day drive around the island. Not much fear of getting lost in Langkawi small island, though you might miss a cabby’s chatter.
Last I did that, I drove in the car to the airport for flight back home to KL, and just left the keys in the car, for the owner to pickup later. It seems there’s no worry of the car being stolen in Langkawi. 😉
regards, sabre23t =^.^=