Langkawi

Langkawi is a small island off the coast of northern Malaysia, just south of the country's border with Thailand. We figured we could use a bit of island relaxation before stopping over in the US on our way home, just like the break we took last year in Maui. The view at sunset from our hotel room was spectacular.

Langkawi is a small island, but it has several interesting sites to visit. One is the Langkawi Sky Bridge, which is a curved bridge that is over 2,000 feet above sea level. The bridge itself is amazing, but in some ways the trip up was even more so. 

To get to the bridge, you take two cable cars up to the top of a hill before walking back down to the level of the bridge. The first gondola is one of the steepest in the world at 42 degrees, and has the longest free span for a mono-cable car. Shana and I generally do not have issues with heights, but this ride was a bit scary, even for us, as it feels like you are going virtually straight up the side of the mountain. 

Once at the middle station, it is a much more normal cable car ride to the top, where the views of the bridge are really spectacular.

On the walk down to the bridge, which takes about 20 minutes, there are many monkeys near and even on the trail. We even saw some juveniles with their mother.

The bridge itself is very cool. A curved span over 400 feet long, it provides great views of both the surrounding jungle, and the island and ocean below.

After our time up on the bridge, we wandered through the 3D "Art" Museum at the base of the hill. The museum is a series of rooms with large pictures set up to allow you to take photos that make it seem as if you are part of the art. It was more fun than we expected, and it really was a big hit with the kids.

The next day, we did one of our favorite things: a jet-ski tour. Unlike our previous tour in Australia, the weather was fantastic and the seas calm. 

With our guide and four others, we jetted around exploring some of the islands that are part of the Langkawi archipelago. Our first stop was an island that had a large, freshwater lake where we were able to swim (which was nice because the ocean itself had many jellyfish that we wanted to avoid). We also saw a number of other, smaller islands, and even maneuvered through a small cave.

One of the best stops was near an island where a large number of eagles live and there are boats that feed the eagles. This allowed us to observe them sweeping down to pick up food (mostly chicken) out of the water before flying back to the island to enjoy their meal. It was amazing to watch these majestic birds swoop around (somehow avoiding each other).

That was essentially the end of our Malaysian adventure. We flew from Langkawi back to Kuala Lumpur for one more night before setting off on the long trip through Singapore to the western US where we will spend three weeks seeing family and friends in San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles before returning to San Sebastian.

We found it very interesting to visit a Muslim-majority country and learn a lot about Islam. We also definitely enjoyed eating in Malaysia, finding all kinds of food options that are definitely not available to us at home. However, the extreme heat and (especially) humidity made Malaysia a difficult place to visit and enjoy. We honestly do not know how people live there. Overall, we would rate Malaysia below Japan, Vietnam and Thailand, but we are still glad we chose it as a destination to explore in depth.

Now, after spending more than nine of the last 17 months on the road, we are ready to get back home and return to a routine. This does not, of course, mean that we will not be travelling, but we will definitely be taking a break from the kind of long trips we did in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024.

More from Spain soon.

Jeff and Shana 

Penang

Leaving the jungle, we drove back to Kuala Lumpur and flew to Penang in the northern part of the country. In paticular, we were in Georgetown on Penang Island, an area whose population is majority Chinese. Of course, there is still a strong Muslin presence with many Mosques, but note the Chinese lanterns hung for New Year right in front of the Mosque:

We spent a lot of time wandering around Georgetown, giving us an opportunity to view the extensive (and intricate) street art in the city.

We also visited Khoo Kongsi, which is the largest Hokkien clanhouse in the country. Established in the mid 19th century by members of the Khoo family who had been in Penang since the 17th century, the clanhouse is more of a little community where the family lived, dominated by an impressive temple. Most Chinese in the area speak the Hokkien dialect, in addition to Malay and English.

In the photo on the right, the yellow sign prohibits rolling the granite ball that is in the lion's mouth (there were a number of these statues). We were not even aware of the granite ball until we read the sign and, of course, after reading all we wanted to do was roll the ball. Nonetheless, we restrained ourselves.

One of the coolest things in the temple was a giant tome that was one of eight (!) tracing the genealogy of the Khoo family back over 650 years.

Food, and particularly street food, is very big in Georgetown. We found a stand selling a kind of fritter filled with various things, and stopped to share one with banana and chocolate, but we had to wait a bit as many locals were there buying a significant number of the yummy treats to take home.

On our second day in Penang, we went to Kek Lok Si Temple, which is the largest Buddhist Temple in Malaysia, and is a pilgrimage site for Buddhists from all over Southeast Asia. The temple includes several large pagodas including the Pagoda of Ten Thousand Buddhas, which actually has 10,000 alabaster and bronze statues of Buddha within it. Also interesting, it is made up of different Buddhist architectual styles -- Chinese, Burmese and Thai (from bottom to top). (It is in the background of the photo below.)

Above the temple, reached by funicular from one of the numerous temple buildings, there is a giant statue of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.

There are also statues of the animals in the Chinese zodiac, and the area was heavily decorated with dragons for the (then) upcoming Year of the Dragon.

After leaving Kek Lok Si, we walked to the the base of Penang Hill, and caught the funicular to the top. We have ridden many funicular railways all over the world, but this one was the most impressive because it is both incredibly steep and incredibly fast. Shana enjoyed learning about the railway from the "driver" on our way down.

The top of Penang Hill provides a great view of Georgetown and even the part of Penang that is on the mainland.

There was not a lot to do on the top of Penang Hill, but we did enjoy the relative cool at over 2,000 feet, and we did walk through a new museum that provided information on the history of Penang Hill, which was used as both a residence and a getaway by a wealthy British colonialist starting in the 18th century. Now, although some people live there (there is both a Mosque and a Hindu Temple at the top), it is mostly a place to visit for locals and tourists alike.

We enjoyed our time in Georgetown, but were looking forward to our next destination -- Langkawi.

More soon.

Jeff and Shana

The Mountains and The Jungle

The next part of our Malaysian adventure required that we rent a car. Yes, yet more driving on the "wrong" side of the road for me. We picked up the car in Malacca, but what was odd was that the car was parked far enough away that the person in the rental car office went to get it on a motorcycle. Nonetheless, as we will discuss in a future post, this was only our second-strangest rental car pickup in Malaysia/ever.

Our first stop was the Cameron Highlands, about four-and-a-half hours away. The drive was mostly on a very good highway with frequent rest stops that were more like small towns with bathrooms,  gas stations and multiple restaurants. At our first stop we even had Baskin Robbins Ice Cream (as usual, it was extremely hot and humid). The last 90 minutes of the trip was up a winding mountain road, but we were impressed with how wide (i.e. two full lanes) and well-maintained the road is. Better than many roads we drove in Tasmania. Another difference we noted from Tasmania, despite seeing many dogs and monkeys on the side of the roads we drove, we saw very little roadkill. Apparently, dogs and monkeys have better adapted to living near roads than marsupials.

Being in the mountains, the Cameron Highlands were significantly cooler than our previous stops (to our delight). In addition, it rained every afternoon often quite heavily. The main thing we learned about the highlands is that this is where much of Malaysia's crops are grown, often in greenhouses (this is similar to what we experienced in Dalat, Vietnam, which is also in the mountains).

We went to a little agriculture park in the town where we stayed, which was not overly impressive, but we did note that there were a lot of Malaysians there picnicking, as well as groups of school children. We were impressed by the butterfly display, which had a large number of different species, many of which we had never seen before. In addition, in the section on local plants, we saw this flower, which was such an odd color that it almost didn't look real.

One of the main crops in the area is tea. We visited the tea plantation of Cameron Valley Tea, a well-known Malaysian brand. Walking among the tea trees was pretty cool, but since tea is not my thing at all, we quickly moved on to a local strawberry farm to try strawberry "milkshakes".

While we enjoyed our very fresh strawberry drinks, they were really smoothies. We learned on this trip that Asia/Australia/NZ do not really abide by the convention that milkshakes are made with ice cream. In fact, a "milkshake" is often just whipped, flavored milk while a "thickshake" has ice cream. In any event, our strawberry smoothies were delicious.

Next, we stopped at a huge cactus store, which seemed a bit strange given that the climate is not really cactus friendly. However, the selection at the store was enormous and varied. Shana was quite thrilled to check out all of the cacti and suculents of varrying sizes and colors.

After leaving the highlands, we headed to a national park called Taman Negara. On the drive we once again found that even the smaller roads in Malaysia are well maintained. However, we did run into a problem when one of the roads was totally flooded forcing us to turn around. As a result we had to drive back an hour to take another route so our four-hour drive turned into a six-hour drive.

Arriving at Mutiara Negara, the only resort within Taman Negara, was an adventure as we had to cross a fast-moving river in a pretty small boat with all of our luggage. Fortunately we managed to do so while keeping everything dry, and were given our chalet, which thankfully had very good air-conditioning.

Shana quickly encountered the local wildlife ,who had found a very recognizable snack in the garbage: Ritz crackers.

We were amused to learn that the purpose of the stuffed tigers spread around the reort was to keep the monkeys away. Apparently while there are tigers in the jungle, they are almost never seem near the resort. Nonetheless, the monkeys know to avoid tigers, and apparently don't understand the difference between a stuffed tiger and a real one. While this doesn't seem particularly intelligent, you don't mess with tigers!

Our first evening, we did a guided walk through the jungle where we saw a number of insects including stick insects, millipedes, giant timber ants, butterflies/moths, hairy poisonous spiders and scorpions. We also saw magpies and other birds along with geckos and a couple of deer from a blind set up on the edge of a large clearing. Although insects are not really my thing, it was interesting to learn a bit about the main creatures we would encounter in the jungle.

The next day, we did a longer hike, which took us to a great viewpoint to see a small part of the protected national park (which at 4,343 square km is larger than the state of Rhode Island).

We also did a canopy walk that had us crossing several narrow suspension bridges at up to 120 feet above the jungle floor -- a bit disconcerting at times.

Our guide, Mohommed, was fantastic. He taught us a lot about the plants and insects of the jungle, along with a bit about the natives that continue to live there without significant contact with non-tribesmen. In particular, we were impressed by this fern, which turns blue after a certain point in the day when it is done doing photosynthesis.

Our second tour of the day took us a bit downriver in a low boat for a hike to a waterfall. Along the way, we got up close with a giant tree that was over four-hundred years old.

Now that is a big tree!

Our time in the jungle was actually pretty relaxing, and as we were there on an all inclusive package, we basically did not have to make decisions about where to eat, what to do, etc. A nice break.

More to come soon.

Jeff and Shana