Thursday, March 27, 2008

Day 60 – Malaysia Day 5 - Langkawi Island – Easter Sunday!

We were able to wake up early enough to get the first 7am tender to shore and reach our ferry with plenty of time to go to Langkawi Island. The ferry was interesting. It basically felt a lot like an airplane inside. They showed 10,000 AD which I REALLY wanted to see on the TV’s but there wasn’t any sound, it was all in captions so I didn’t end up watching it. I want to be able to really watch and listen to the movie the first time I see it. Has anyone seen it yet? The previews before I left looked way intense. I opted to sleep instead for the 3 hour ride.

The harbor in Langkawi where our ferry landed was almost exactly like what you would see at an airport, only with boats. There was a waiting place, boards with up to date times for ferry’s coming in and out, stores, security checks, luggage checks, basically everything that you would find at an airport. It was kind of interesting to see. Unfortunately, we had absolutely no luck finding a place that was doing one afternoon dive. If we had booked the dive even a day in advance we would have been able to do two dives in the short time that we were on the island. Stupid of us for not thinking of that and just calling them on Skype when we had all of that time at our hotel in KL. Just in case we could find a dive and weren’t able to get back to our ferry by 2:30pm we bought another ferry to Kadah at 4:30. We could take an hour ferry to Kadah, then take a 2 hour bus from Kadah to Penang. So it would have taken the same amount of time, but since we ended up not finding any afternoon dives we stuck with the original 2:30 ferry. David had a good point while we were in the midst of winging this whole day trip to Langkawi. The difference between a traveler and a tourist is that a tourist has everything booked already through their tour agency. We’re travelers because we go where we want and make our own plans. We try to make it work the best we can, and that’s half of the experience.

We ended up walking to the beach that was located right outside of the Westin, a nice 5-star resort on Langkawi. We relaxed on the beach and swam for a couple of hours then decided to take our 2:30 ferry back to Penang.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sounds like a great time, Joe...and thanks for the post card! Beautiful photo!
Regarding 10,000 B.C., I don't want to be negative, but we thought it was a let-down. Kind of amateurish filmmaking. A shame, because the previews were so great. But you might like it better than we did.
Take care of yourself!
Anitra