We arrived into Langkawi around 7.45am and were docked by 8am. It was a beautiful morning. I have actually seen the sun rise on more than one morning on this cruise which is a nice change. We didn’t have a tour booked as we have previously spent a full week here and have seen most things except the main attraction which is the cable car. Don’t know how we missed that but that is what our plan is for today. We got off the ship around 10am and got the free ship’s shuttle to a small village where we negotiated the price for a taxi for the day… well we didn’t really negotiate we just accepted his offer of 200 ringgit which is about $65. We did meet people at the cable car who got their taxi for 110 ringgit for 4 hours. We had ours for about 5 hours so we were happy as he could speak quite good English, had a reasonably newish car that was clean and had air conditioning. Firstly we went to the cable car which was a mistake because there were a number of buses from the ship their so we waited 45 minutes in a line to go to the top. The cable car is located in the Oriental Village which is really just a tourist trap a bit like the village at Pokolbin with a few oriental bridges and water lillies complementing Japanese style buildings housing many souvenir and fast food shops. Once at the top the view was spectacular of the islands. It was a bit unfortunate that there was a bit of haze around so the view was not that clear. Apparently it is often closed due to wind. There was also a suspended boardwalk which was quite spectacular especially the engineering of it. Langkawi is made up of 99 islands and is part of Malaysia but is very close to Thailand. The Straits of Malaca separate Langkawi from the mainland. We then headed for a Temurun waterfall in the northwest of the island. It was in a very lush area and was quite a high waterfall falling in a number of cascading ponds. It would be much more spectacular with a bit more water but was still quite scenic.
After the waterfall we headed for the black sand beach followed by the white sand beach followed by the river and mangroves. Our time was starting to run out fast now so we then headed down the middle of the island to the Mahsuri Tomb. This is a shrine erected for Mahsuri who was a beautiful young maiden accused of adultery. She put a curse on the island so that for the next 7 generations the island would not prosper and according to the locals this is pretty much what happened.
This was followed by a quick visit to the Field of Burnt Rice where the Rajah/King had the people burn their rice to stop the Thai invaders from getting it.
We then made a quick dash to the duty free store as Langkawi is reknowned for very cheap grog but on comparing the prices to the ship they were pretty similar so didn’t bother.
All on board by 4.30pm and we sailed out pretty soon after that sitting on our balcony with a drink in hand.
There were only the usual 4 of us for dinner which was quite enjoyable. Peter went to the show which was the P&O “Headliner’s Theatre Company” performing classic/swing numbers from Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jnr, Bobby Darin etc. I went to bed and enjoyed the peace of my own company and my kindle. The clock’s went back one hour which was a bonus.
Further updates tomorrow…
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