TALES FROM THE ROAD – MALAYSIA #1

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LANGKAWI

This past week, Michelle and I made a short getaway to Langkawi, Malaysia.  From Kuala Lumpur, it’s only a 1 hour flight (which is just the right length of time to fly if you ask me).    We flew with Air Asia and for round trip tickets for both the cost was $78.00 total!  Flying is cheap in Asia and especially from Kuala Lumpur since it’s a main hub in Asia.

We stayed at the “Wings by Croske Resort” (click here for their website).  This was a really nice hotel and very reasonably priced.  We stayed for 4 nights and it cost a total of $234.00 including breakfast.  We rated this hotel 5 out of 5 stars!

During our stay, we rented a scooter to get around the island, which was a lot of fun!  We knew we would be going up into the mountains so we chose to rent the larger 200cc scooter and I was really quite amazed at how much power this scooter had!  It got us up every mountain we faced with room to spare!  Our cost for 3 days for this bad boy was about $60.00, which is more expensive than we’ve seen in most of Asia, but it did include insurance and 2 helmets.  The cost of a 125cc scooter would have been about half of that, but we weren’t sure it would carry us up the mountains since we’re both larger than your average size Asian person.  

The first day we had the scooter, we rode up to Temurun Waterfall on the northwest side of the Island.  Along the way we saw several “troops” of monkeys so I decided to stop and take pictures.  However, once I stopped the scooter, a group of 50-75 monkeys started to wander towards us (with mischief in their eyes).  We’ve heard that monkeys here are not shy and want to be fed.  They’ll snatch articles from you looking for things to eat and to play with and can get a little aggressive if you look them in the eye or even smile at them.  They don’t know you’re smiling.  They only see your teeth, which to them is a sign of aggression and a challenge to fight.  So, we decided not to bother them and hastily sped away to safety further down the road.     

The only monkey I was brave enough to photograph!

The next day we once again took our scooter out for an adventure, this time going to the highest point on the island to see a breathtaking view all the way to the sea!  Afterward, we selected a road and made a loop around the lower eastern side of the island.  On this day we also saw several troops of monkeys, but didn’t get pictures due to the aforementioned reasons above.  

On our final day, we went to see the Malaga Tujuh Waterfall (seeing monkeys yet once again!) and then went out to dinner at a beach side restaurant to finish off our visit to Langkawi.  

Overall we had a very nice, relaxing and fun time here.  There is a lot more to the island that we didn’t see, so we’ll just have to come back again one day.  

We really enjoyed it here.  Having our own transportation made it a lot more fun!  We highly recommend visiting here if you ever get a chance!

Have a great day everyone and safe travels!