Langkawi

Our journey to Malaysia was horrendous. We’ve had plenty of bad journeys along the way, but back then we were fresh-faced, excited little travellers. Now we are old, grumpy and weary, and getting moved from bus to bus (three shitty mini buses in total), then a sketchy ferry ride, a long border crossing and an expensive taxi ride later we finally arrived at our accommodation, Gecko guesthouse! They were fully booked on hostel world, but I messaged them on Facebook before I went off WIFI, and we turned up in the hope that they’d got my message and had a room. As we walked into the bar, the guy behind the bar Roy called out ‘Annie?’. Music to my ears. We had a private fan room where we dropped our bags, and headed out to get dinner. We’d not eaten all day (read as: we’d eaten only junk food all day), so we excited to have a proper meal. We went out to find Malaysian food and accidentally found ourselves in a French Crepe restaurant. It had been a pretty crepe day, but this certainly made it seem a lot better! 

Explorin’

We’re keen scooter riders, which you’ll know by now if you’ve been reading this. So we hired scooters from the most awesome woman called Lio, who ran a travel shop at the end of our road. She was certainly a character, and we ended up spending a lot of time chatting to her, laughing and exchanging stories. 

Off we went – a 20km ride to the cable car. Luckily it was well-sign posted and the roads were actually really good, so it made the ride pretty fun – we could spend more time enjoying it and less time worrying about meeting our end in a sad-looking pothole. 

The Cable Car

The cable car is one of the must-dos in Langkawi. The president of Langkawi had the idea for it when flying over the mountains in a helicopter in 2000, and in 2001 his dream became a reality as work began – with Austria’s finest architects coming across to construct it. It is the steepest cable car in the world and also has the most distance between supports. Something like that anyway, I’m writing this after a glass of wine – but I believe this to be true.

We queued for a while, got to the front of the queue, then realised we were supposed to buy tickets before we joined the queue, ughhh. So we asked the woman if we could rejoin the queue at the same place once we’d bought tickets, and she nodded. So off we went to buy our tickets. We returned 10 minutes later, and she got all sassy at us and made us go to the back of the line. Chloe had more fight in her than me, and pleaded our case, but to no avail. So we went back to the end and did what Brits do best. 30 minutes of queuing later, we boarded the cable car! The sides of the car were entirely glass, and I’m not going to lie and saw I wasn’t totally freaked at how high we went, and my mind did begin to picture us dropping 3 million feet to our deaths. Other than that, I quite enjoyed it. 

There were a couple of viewing points along the way, and the views were superb. On a clearer day, you can see some of the Thai islands, but on our day all we could see was blue – we couldn’t actually tell where the sky ended and the sea begun, which was pretty cool. And the views of Langkawi were great – what a beautiful, tropical island it is!

3D Art Museum

Included in our ticket price was the 3D art museum, so we thought we’d check it out. It was basically loads of optical illusions that you could take pictures in front of (yeah, spoiler, I didn’t swim underwater and Chloe didn’t find a mysterious palace. But it was very fun and we enjoyed an hour or so goofing around taking pictures. Then we had doughnuts for lunch. At this point we decided we quite like being adults, cos we can do what we want.

7 Wells Waterfall

Next we headed to the 7 Wells Waterfalls which…you guessed it, was formed from 7 wells. We made the hike up the 300-odd steps to the top, and my god did we complain about it in the heat. At the top we were greeting by an awesome sight – lots of little pools where you could swim. The rocks were really slippery with algae, but we quickly learned from other people that this made it an awesome slide, and we slid down the rocks! The view was great – we could see down the waterfall, the sea, and up to the mountains and the cable car. After a bit of floating in the pools, we headed down to the bottom and did pretty much the same thing.

Finally, as weary little travellers, we hopped back on our bikes and headed back. We stopped at the gas station to refuel, and looked like absolute amateurs trying to refill a bike. We eventually worked it out and were back on the road. One of the coolest things happened on the way back; the road passes the airport and literally wraps around the runway, and as we were riding along one side of the runway we could see a plane in the distance coming in to land. It flew right over our heads as we turned the corner to the end of the runway. It literally nearly touched us (it probably didn’t, but it felt that close), then as we rode along the other side of the runway we were driving alongside the plane, with only a fence in between us. I can’t remember the last time I felt that cool.

10 minutes later, we found we were quite lost and a bit stressed, and I found myself feeling a little less cool. I should also add that I was wearing a child’s helmet, which was actually the best fitting helmet I’d worn in Asia. Finally we got home and returned our bikes.

We grabbed a cheap dinner (£1 noodles/rice) and back at the hostel we had a happy hour glass of wine. We’d been stressing about what to do the next day and were trying to find a tour or something cool to do. But then we realised we have a busy week and a half ahead of us, and after some wine we decided f**k it, we’re gonna have a beach day and chill out tomorrow. We deserve it, right?

So that night we let our hair down, drunk wine, ate crepes and enjoyed being alive.

Let’s go to the Beach!

Day two was an incredibly lazy one. We had talked about doing a tour around the islands, or going on a tour to the Geoforest park. However to be totally honest with you, by this point into our trip (nearly 4 months) we’re starting to feel quite weary, and money is tight. And I really couldn’t face another bloody boat after the terrifying experience on Koh Lanta (both tours involved boats). So we decided to do sweet F.A. Which turns out a good decision as Chloe suffered badly from heat stroke in the night, so a rest day was much needed.

The beach was right next to our guesthouse, the sands were virtually white, and the water crystal clear. It was a watersports beach, but there was a designated swimming area and the sea was LUSH. I still can’t quite get over how warm the sea is in Asia, its almost like getting into a lukewarm bath. 

We sunbathed, read our books and relaxed. And had ice cream for lunch. 

That evening we went to the crepe place again (3rd visit, no regrets), and went back to the guesthouse to drink more wine. It’s a duty free island after all, so when wine is tax-free its pretty much impossible to say no.

It was only a whistle stop, but what a beautiful island Langkawi is! A must-visit if you’re heading to Malaysia and want some relaxation in paradise!

Annie x