It’s been a while since I posted something no-nonsense lately.. so here goes one, finally. A report from my last family holiday in Langkawi island. I’m just gonna put some pics on Mangrove tour that we had, since it was pretty unusual, at least to me, apart from the more usual stuff you may find yourself doing on an island holiday.. beaching, snorkeling, shopping (yeah, Langkawi is heaven for shoppers, yay for duty-free price!). I only found out recently that even cars are significantly cheaper in Langkawi than in the rest of Malaysia… which I still cant find myself a good argument why and how, but here’s an excellent proof from Honda’s website. I mean, you can get a CR-V with RM50k cheaper in Langkawi for God’s sake!! O_O But you cannot just go shopping for a car and bring it back instantly, coz a car bought in Langkawi has to stay in Langkawi for at least 5 years (if I’m not mistaken) before can be shipped out to the mainland. Then again, dont you feel like moving to there at once anyway? Not bad okay, buy a small piece of land, build a good small apartment and you’ll be making loads of money by running a busy island resort easily. Tourists keep flooding to there like waterfall. Ah yes, include to that, car-rental service too, and it’s a sure thing you have spent your bucks to something totally worth for business. Az himself used to work as an accountant in a hotel in Langkawi for a couple of years, and God knows how leisure his life was at that time ;P (sorry, I didnt mean to mention Az in this post purposely okay, just something worth sharing that coincidentally he used to work in Langkawi).
Now back to Mangrove expedition. Panjang pulak intro… :P
Mangrove tour takes place around the part I circled with red.. where you can find mangrove forest all around in between swamps and small islands, beautiful eco-systems, that’s it. The boat trip varies according to packages, the one we opted was RM200 (originally RM250) per boat of 3 hours sightseeing all around the hidden part of this magnificent island, plus eagle feeding (yes, believe it!), plus bat cave tour, plus Kilim Geopark, plus dining on a floating restaurant in the middle of ocean (okay, food was separate price).
The birds are eagles okay. Dont play-play. And when I was still having suspicious feeling of how safe it could be to feed eagles, it turned out that we dont actually feed them manually :P rather the boat-driver-cum-narrator would slowly throw pieces of chickens into the water before driving the boat around the area for us watching from afar, witnessing how fast the eagles come out from nowhere, speeding to the water surface to grab the food and fly away eating, and come back to water again for next food available.. real good catch!! *big claps* And there were loads of them. I guess they’re so happy that everyday people come all the way by boat to feed them with chickens here :D
It was rather amusing when we were going through mangrove swamp with river-like water, and shortly later come out into widest view of green-blue ocean.. and suddenly going through another area of mangrove swamp again, and later the sea water again.. and we got to see tiny monkeys and crabs living their quiet life by the swamp and river banks.. well, it’s helluva fun of National Geographic- like eco tours! :D This Kilim Geoforest Park in Langkawi has been listed as Unesco Geopark in 2007. Now anyone wants a postcard from here? ;-)
We passed by many (yes, many!) posh boats and yatches like this being “parked” along the streams.. the boat-driver told us they belong to rich Europeans who sailed long-term to this region, usually for weeks to a couple of months, before heading to the next destinations. And it instantly strikes me of how adventurous the idea is! Really, to think that those people only spend their life going on holiday all the times without the need to go work.. hmm..
We dropped by this Gua Kelawar (cave of bats) for another quirky adventure.. walking through paths built on the swamp into a deadly dark cave.. and you could only see thousands of bats hanging onto the cave wall and ceilings with a help of torch-light. SPOOKY! Though my camera-phone was hopeless to take pics in such darkness even though we could see light and the bats, so no bats pics here, but OH! I prepared a short video of this tour, and you could see some light revealing the bats when I was in this cave, but as usual I cannot access to YouTube with USM internet so there’s no other way to upload it now. Maybe later.
Ahah, so after hours of expedition, it’s good to lunch in this restaurant floating in the middle of ocean.. what do we have here? Fish and lobster and shrimps caught fresh from their nest (well actually we had dropped by the restaurant earlier to order and choose our food before continuing the rest of the tour and as soon as we came back 1.5 hours later, the lunch was ready and we didnt have to wait :)). And the ikan pari (stingray fish) was the most bigass stingray fish exist around, as he’s claimed to be.. weighing over 100kgs! His name is Johhny ^_^
So okay, it was my third trip to Langkawi in my life history (first was 1988, second was 1998) so it’s been ages since the last one which I almost forgotten what we were doing then, and it was good that we did something new this time. Soon I get to access YouTube I’ll upload the short clip :)
India, Travel 
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