Lazing around in Langkawi - Langkawi, Malaysia
Langkawi, Malaysia
We think there was something in the air on the island of Langkawi as the minute we stepped off the short plane hop from Kuala Lumpur we felt sleepy, lethargic and massively chilled!
Our Air bnb host Irwan met us at the airport and also seemed to have an air of total relaxation about him...maybe there was something in the air here?
The short drive to our guesthouse was in the hands of 'Chief' a large bouncer looking man with a mafia name and broken teeth who owned a car from the 70’s. His hard image was going so well until we saw his old banger of a car, and sensing our disappointment he then seemed to soften into a fat kitten! ‘Chief’ indeed!
Chief was one of the many locals we would meet during our 8 days on the island but onto the others a bit later.
The images of our guesthouse (D’Bendang Studio) when we booked it online were of a single story guesthouse with 4 rooms running in a straight line each with their own little veranda stuck in the middle of a rice paddy field...when we pulled up onto the grass entrance we realised that this was exactly as the pictures had portrayed but miles better in real life!
What the pictures didn’t capture were the stunning distant mountain ranges, rolling lush green hills, palm and banana trees surrounding the property, water buffalo grazing in the nearby fields, eagles soaring overhead and a whole lot of blue skies. This was hard to take it all in at once. We couldn’t help but just sit in silence for a while to take in the picture perfect view that would be our window of Langkawi for 8 days. Absolute peace, tranquillity and simply heaven on earth.
This was the longest we had stayed in any one place on the trip yet, so on our first shopping trip we couldn’t help but invest in a cheap toaster to keep our morning breakfasts cheap and simple whilst taking in the incredible view.
8 days also meant that whilst we would normally be out and about exploring, enquiring and investigating, the extra time meant that we didn’t actually bother doing any of that until 3 days into our stay! We were content with our view, taking short walks and getting to know Irwan who lived in the next room to ours and Whitey his black cat who had 6 claws on each paw!
Irwan was of Indonesian descent who grew up in Singapore but lived in Kuala Lumpur for many years. Working as a sound engineer in the cities were great for his love of music but in the end city life became too much (as it often does) so he brought himself to Langkawi to start a new life as an ‘islander’ and to run D’Bendang Studio’s whilst tuning into his extremely talented artistic side sketching and painting daily Langkawi life.
His local hangout to capture life in his sketches was ‘Breakfast Bar’ – one of the oldest bars in town. He took us there for a coffee on our first day and explained the ins and outs of Langkawi and about its people.
It turned out that there are huge plans in the making for Langkawi but by the sound of it none for the better. A new Government is bought in every four years and the new president has released his intentions to demolish all the present beach guesthouses, beach huts and quaint restaurant’s and replace them with high end 5 star resorts. Until you go to Langkawi and see how the locals have made it unique with their artistic imagination and craftsmanship then it’s hard to explain what a tragedy this will be and marks the end of an era for backpackers, families and mixed budget travellers.
He also told us that all the local artists and musicians are always out on the street performing to show the Government that if you take these people away then the feel of Langkawi will be lost forever which is why Irwan was out every day and night capturing these street performer moments.
The more we talked to Irwan (our initial welcome coffee chat ended up lasting a couple of hours) the more we realised how much we had in common with him even though we were all raised on opposite sides of the world. He also shared our humour so you could say we hit it off like a house on fire and knew we would have great fun with him and would experience the real Langkawi.
The island’s main beach, Cenang (and in our opinion the prettiest), was only a 10 minute walk away from our guesthouse. The beach overlooked a few of Langkawi’s 99 other islands and was lined with rustic beach bars and palm trees. Being low season we were often only one of the handful of people enjoying the mile long walks up and down the white stretch of sand while the calm water gently lapped the shore.
We quickly realised however that this calm sea bought its problems in the way of jellyfish...and we mean thousands of them! The local juice bar man called Aman (who happened to serve the most amazing fresh juices and who knew Irwan) told us that the calmer the sea and hotter the temperature the more jellyfish would be present. As we strolled along the beach avoiding the dangerous blobs of various sizes we couldn’t believe that some people were risking getting stung whilst taking a dip!
One particular day whilst sipping on our banana juices a Russian man came out of the water with a very fat and sore looking knee and a very fat and worried wife! We asked him if he had been stung (he said yes with a little swearing) so we told him he needed to get vinegar or alcohol on the sting asap. When we offered to get him some from a nearby restaurant he waved us away and hobbled off, followed by Mrs fatty.
Paulie then went and told a local dive instructor of the Russians predicament and the next thing I know my husband is running in the direction of the restaurant brandishing a very large and very sharp dive knife...I’m not sure what was going through my mind at that point but no sooner had any thought processed my brain the Russian man then came running out the restaurant now holding the dive knife, followed by Mrs fatty and then Paulie.
At this moment in time I couldn’t help but laugh as a scene from Benny Hill and its accompanying music came into my head...what was going on?!
It soon came to light that the dive instructor had told Paulie to give the guy the knife to scrape off some of the sting before putting alcohol onto it which then made the comical scene of everyone running around all over the place holding knives, perfect sense!
So although we couldn’t swim in the beautiful sea here we still enjoyed our lazy walks with our juices and chatting to the local Malay beach bums chilling on the beach playing music.
We finally decided to hire a scooter on the third day and would keep it until we left. We hired it from a backstreet local man who called himself ‘Smiler’. Unlike the ‘Chief’, Smiler did live up to his name and was always waving and smiling at us whenever we drove past!
Our first attraction was Eagle Point which is the near the town of Kuah where ferry’s dock from Penang on the mainland. Here there is a giant Eagle on a star plinth which is the symbolic bird of Langkawi and was the same as the eagles we could see soaring over the rice paddy field. Other than the giant statue there was nothing else to this area so we set off and headed to the cable car to get a view of the island.
As we approached the cable car it started to cloud over but we decided to go up anyway seeing as we’d driven all the way and knowing with our newly found lazy state we probably wouldn’t be bothered to come again another day!
The cable car was pretty impressive – possibly one of the highest we had ever been on. It took 30 minutes to reach the top but the views became increasingly obscured by the clouds we had entered en route to the top! We stayed up the top for approximately 10 minutes before realising the clouds were there to stay so we captured a few shots of some nearby islands (one group looked like a lady’s face with eyelashes!) then made our way back down the steep decent where it was five degrees warmer!
On the way back we pulled into a small cove and Paulie spotted a group of black and white monkeys up in the trees. Standing quietly he managed to get a shot of them and we later looked up that they were Dusty Leaf Monkeys – found mainly in Malaysia and Indonesia. They were by far the most unique and beautiful monkey we had ever seen and I liked them even more that they kept themselves to themselves and were not interested in us or any food we had on us...see Ko Lanta entry for Macaque incident...!
Our only other day of exploring on the scooter was to the islands highest point Mount Raya where on a clear day you could see the entire island. Well it was clear when we left but as we started our ascent it seemed to get darker and colder by the minute. By the time we got to the top our teeth were chattering and all we could think about was getting back down to the warmth! Needless to say there was no view that day and yep you guessed it, we couldn’t be bothered to do it all again so that was that!
So other than these 3 excursions we mainly used the moped to get shopping supplies and to venture into Cenang at night to try some local restaurants Irwan recommended to us. One was at the furthest end of town called ‘Tomato’ which was a local Muslim eatery where they specialised in Tandoori Chicken fresh from the tandoor oven and homemade breads, absolutely delicious, totally local and extremely cheap! Our other favourite was called ‘Little Iglia’ which was perfectly located on Cenang beach with small candle lit tables and chairs set into the sand.
We often came to Little Iglia to watch the spectacular sunsets directly in front of us with an 80p local beer then wait for the Breakfast Bar boys to set up and start playing their own renditions of Bob Marley and the like while we ate dinner. Some evenings we were treated to a lightning show far out at sea and I was lucky enough to click the camera at the right moment when 2 forks of lightning hit a neighbouring island!
It wasn’t until our last few nights on Langkawi that we met the bar owner, Gee, a local hippy who’s bar was named after his first daughter. Gee seemed to take a liking to us and sat with us drinking his own stock of beer and telling us about his ‘other life’ in the UK.
He told us he spends half the year in Langkawi managing the bar during high season and the other half in the UK where he is an environment architect and resides in Hertfordshire! This means he creates cool environments for festivals using lighting, sounds and different feels. Being quite a character he couldn’t help but mention that he had met the likes of The Rolling Stones and Red Hot Chili Peppers over the years and is a personal friend of Bono from U2! Wow, a character indeed and however elaborate his stories he was a fun guy to spend the evening with and he even threw in a free meal, so a generous character too!
It turned out that whenever we would tell Irwan of the locals we had met, like Aman, Smiler and Gee that he knew them all too! It was like they were all part of a local mafia that we had now become accepted into because we knew Irwan – hilarious!
Our friendship grew the more time we spent with Irwan. We would make him English tea in the mornings and would sit and chat together for hours on our veranda talking about everything and anything, including Star Wars which he and Paulie shared an interest in as kids. In the evenings he would invite us to join him for sketching sessions on the street to capture the local band who by now knew us as Irwan’s friends and this was the perfect opportunity for me to sketch him at work, something which nobody had ever done for him before, he was totally touched by this which made me happy to see.
On one evening he took us to the weekly food market which happened to be at the end of our street! Here we tried his favourite dessert called Apam Balik which was Malaysian style pancake filled with sugar, crushed peanuts and sweetcorn paste made there and then in front of us – heaven! We sat in the market people watching and talking to some of the locals we had met who were also enjoying time off work.
Irwan told us that the following day he was flying to Penang to collect his girlfriend and would be back the day after. It was strange not having our friend around and it was then we were hit with the realisation that we would soon be saying goodbye for real in a few days’ time which we were not looking forward to one bit.
Our last evening when Irwan returned with Emma was just perfect. When they arrived Irwan was like an excited little boy because he had a gift for Paulie which he couldn’t wait to give him! When he opened it we rolled around laughing as it was a Darth Vader mask from their Star Wars discussions! Boys! We had initially planned for the 4 of us to go for a meal in town but with a big storm and relentless rain we did what any other local in the middle of a rice paddy field would do...and called in a takeaway pizza!!!
It took a while for it to arrive as our location was so remote that many locals have no idea how to find it (it’s not even on Google Maps!) but when it did arrive it was delicious and we had a great evening talking, laughing and reminiscing. It was long after midnight when we remembered we had to pack that we called it a night but I think secretly none of us wanted this special moment to end.
We knew we had been lucky to have D’Bendang Studio’s and Irwan to ourselves but we were not prepared for how hard saying goodbye would be.
As we waited for the Chief to pick us up we took the opportunity to get some shots of the Star Wars boys in the rice paddy field and to exchange emails to send each other the pictures we’d captured together.
Before we knew it we were hugging goodbye and looking back through the taxi window at a place and a person that had become so special to us in so many ways. We knew that we’d experienced the real Langkawi because of Irwan, our funny, artistic kind hearted friend that we would miss dearly.
I’m not ashamed to say I cried in the taxi and hoped with all my heart our paths cross with Irwan again someday.