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MALAYSIA
LANGKAWI :: Sabah 1 :: Sabah 2
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MALAYSIA Page 1: LANGKAWI
We took a long holiday weekend trip to Langkawi from Hong Kong in April 2000. Read more about Malaysia on our Sabah pages.
Frankly, we don't have much to say about our Langkawi trip. We're putting this page up mainly to show you a couple of photos. We stayed at a nice hotel with bungalow-style rooms that we liked. Deb mostly stayed around the hotel, reading and lounging on the beach while George went diving at the marine park (little islands an hour or so offshore of Langkawi) and took a few underwater photos.
George on the diving...
I should mention that I was seriously ill for most of this trip, but went diving anyway because I wasn't about to sit in the room for the whole vacation. So I'm not sure how much of what follows is just a fever-induced hallucination.
The visibility wasn't nearly as poor as in Hong Kong, and was occasionally quite good, but overall visibility wasn't great (maybe 10 meters). The critters made up for it, though. I saw my first shark underwater on this trip - a blacktip reef shark, 5 or 6 feet long. I also met lots of his relatives during the surface intervals, when we stopped at a beach that had a dozen or more baby blacktips cruising around. They get lots of scraps tossed to them by picnickers. Apparently the sharks head off for deeper water and more solitude once they reach a certain size. My divemaster said no one has ever been bitten except for the occasional dumbass who loses a thumb trying to hand-feed them. No one lost any digits while I was there, but some people seemed dangerously nonchalant about letting their toddlers splash around near the sharks. I mean, they're only a couple of feet long, but they're still sharks.
Other good dive critters included a remora (one of those fish that stick to sharks and rays to lap up their leftovers) which followed us around for a couple of dives, a number of massive cod (or groupers, I don't know the difference), a school of barracuda cruising at the edge of our visibility, morays, triggerfish, a pipefish (like a seahorse with a straight tail), and more. Also a couple of goby-and-shrimp relationships (they live in one hole - the goby is the guard and the shrimp is the excavator), including one goby who had two shrimps.
And that's about it for Langkawi, aside from some nice scenery on the boat ride to the islands. We'll spare you the story of how being on a "package tour" made check-in and check-out very exasperating.
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