Pulau Langkawi

Hallo!

This week the weekend report comes one day later than usual but I really didn’t feel like writing a long text yesterday. I hope you will all excuse me for doing so. I had a really long and rough weekend going to Pulau Langkawi with Florian and Thomas and also joining a friend from work going to an Indian club on Friday night.
We started out going to this club near Batu Ferringhi on Friday where they only played Indian music and the three of us were the only non-Indian people. The music was like the one some of you might know from the Bollywood movies. Rather different for the European ear but still fun to listen to and also totally different and interesting and therefore a good choice. We really had a great night and of course were dancing after a short while. The next day Thillai (who had come home at around 5am instead of us going home at 3am) woke all of us up to go to the Jetty. That’s the place called where the ferries leave and therefore it’s a rather important word to know around here since traveling with ferries is quite common. So we managed to drive to Georgetown, buy the tickets and go to the Jetty in about 25min! Don’t ask me how because normally it takes you 25min just to get to GT. But as Thillai always says: “We’ll manage!”
Being on the Ferry was really nice and we thought we could relax a little and get some sleep… Stupid foreigners! The ferry was small and the waves were high. You do the math. It didn’t take a long time until most of the people were sick including myself but after I had cleared out my stomach I was able to sleep and did so until we arrived in Kuah (“capital” of Langkawi) 2,5h later.
As we arrived there we where of course surrendered by taxi drivers within seconds but managed to find a nice one after eating something who was supposed to drive us to the hotel. After three minutes he already started to offer us an island trip and after some more minutes he had us convinced to do so. It was actually the right choice even though now I think we could have gotten it cheaper. Anyway he drove us to a waterfall, the nice beaches up north, to the cable car built by “Doppelmayr” in the western part of the island and later to the hotel where we arrived at around 3pm. After checking in we went right to the beach which was about 5m away from the entrance door of our Bungalow. The beach, as you can see on the pictures, was very nice with palm trees and everything but the water is not really great. We stayed there the rest of the day allowing us some beers (which cost 1,5RM a can), relaxing and talking. For dinner we went to a Seafood restaurant picked out some fishes (they were already dead) and enjoying them with some fried rice and vegetables. Very nice lah. After that we went to the “Reggae Bar”, the “Sunny Café” and to “Debbies” at last. All places not filled with a lot of people and 90% of them being male. So Thomas and I decided to finish off the day at the beach enjoying once more the leisure of duty free beer and sitting in the warm water with some chairs looking at the stars in the sky! It was really perfect…
The next morning we woke up at around noon and decided to get some breakfast close by. As we arrived at the “Breakfast Bar” it started to rain very heavily and so we stayed there for a while enjoying very nice coffee and talking to two Germans who work for the “Moto GP” traveling around the world at least 9 months a year. It sounded really interesting and exciting what they get to see during their job but doing this for 30 years like one of them sounds crazy to me.
Anyway we finished the day with some Duty Free shopping in Kuah (I found “Weihenstephaner” Weißbier) and waiting for the ferry. By the way they show ripped movies filmed in theaters on the ferry which I think is very funny and not imaginable in Europe.
Yesterday, Monday, I bought myself a 75 liter backpack to be able to travel to Thailand and other places later on and also got my bike fixed by one of our night guards because I was not able to start the bike anymore.
Tonight I will give it to him again and then he will repair and fix everything else: oil, brakes, lights mudguard… Then I can finally start to ride it on a regular basis.
Since it is already Tuesday morning there is only one more day between me being in Thailand I am very excited and cannot believe it yet, just coming back from a great trip to Langkawi.
I hope you are all doing fine and congrats to the “Ersten” on winning another game in a great way!! Keep up the good work, as people would say here.

Wish you all the best
Robert