Cedang Beach Langkawi

23 November

Hotel Sentral, Kuala Lumpur

 On our fifth visit to KL we feel like locals. Our favourite cheap digs, the Sentral Hotel, is not the flashest place in the city, but its location, just over the road from Sentral Station, makes for easy transfers, as the station is terminus for both the bus and the express train to and from the airport. A new terminal has replaced the old LCCT, (Low Cost Carrier Terminal), which we used to call the “cattle shed”. The replacement, KLIA2, is enormous and very flash! Most staggering for us is that the whole thing was completed in two years. We transited through KLIA2 just a couple of weeks ago, on the way back from our Trans-Siberian trip. This time the lack of signage only had us confused for a few minutes before we found our way to the Transport Hub and the Skybus into KL.

26 November

FaveHotel, Langkawi

Most unusual for Air Asia, our flight was almost an hour late leaving KL this afternoon. By the time we sorted our hire car and drove down the coast to our hotel, the temperature and humidity had hit “tropical” on the comfort scale. Having just returned from two months travelling in Russia, Mongolia and Northern Europe through an unusually cool autumn, we were not well acclimatised to the tropics. Nevertheless, sitting in our hotel room after a late afternoon re-con of the beach, things feel a lot better. We have a view over the rice fields to the jungle-covered mountains, a water buffalo is grazing in the fields, the late afternoon sun is tinting the coconut palms yellow and the air-conditioning is pumping. As well, the beer is flowing and with Langkawi being totally duty free, it is super cheap!

27 November

FaveHotel, Langkawi

You just have to love tropical Asia. Life has a certain rhythm here. Even with all the development that has happened in places like Malaysia, even on resort islands like Langkawi, the rice fields have to be maintained, the water buffalo still need to wallow and graze and the afternoon storm will still roll in just before sunset. We could see the storm coming, but the farmer with the whipper-snipper, cleaning out the mounds between his paddies, couldn’t. Even so, his reaction was immediate, he must have smelt the storm coming. He was on his bike and out of there in seconds. All this we have observed from our hotel window, just off the main coast road, as we sip on a few beers before heading out to find a suitable eatery.

We made a late decision to hire a car here on Langkawi. Good call as it turned out. While we had read that Langkawi was not as crowded as other Asian resort islands, we had been a little reluctant to hire a car. We had driven in Malaysia before with very few problems, so that wasn’t our issue; we just thought we’d be better off in taxis. But, while it is a fairly small island, there is a lot to see, and it is better to have the independence a car provides than wait about for taxis. So, in our Proton chariot, we spent the day hitting some of the local sights and cruising the back roads. The Proton is a Malaysian manufactured vehicle which, from our experience of driving them, is much like an Asian version of the Lada - a bit of a disaster. They drive like a tractor!

The big hit of the day was the Langkawi Cable Car which is the longest of its type in the world, hauling us to a spectacular view point above the island on a near-perfect day.

A late swim off Cenang Beach and a cleansing dip in the hotel pool closed our day.

28 November

FaveHotel, Langkawi

Right on cue, the 5:00pm storm drove us from the pool. The buffalo didn’t blink, but the farmer was probably Muslim and still at Friday prayers.

As we have probably said before, we are not resort people. So our choice of lodgings here was just a nice hotel, a little back from the beach, but close to the main trading street of Cenang. Most of the resorts cut you off from the local traders and restaurants, preferring to lock guests into their own closeted, over-priced world. The Fave Hotel was a good choice from this point of view. With the luxury of a car, we have been able to enjoy some of the local lifestyle as well as the beaches and the tourist strip along the beach front.

Today we completed our exploration of the island, dragging our poor little Proton up the winding 12 kms to the top of Gunung Raya, the highest point on the island. The view was fantastic, even with the few scuds of clouds that shrouded some of the coast.

Heading to Kuah, the main town on the island for lunch, we made a quick stop at a small fishing village which, despite all the development around it, still looked like the real deal. Kuah itself is a bustling port with a couple of very popular shopping malls. The traffic in the centre of town was a little hectic, so we grabbed a nice lunch at a little café and headed back to Cenang for our afternoon swim. The call to Friday prayers lightened the traffic as the dozens of mosques on the island drew in the faithful, men only of course.

A soothing Tiger at a bar on the beach and our day was done.