Cuti Cuti Langkawi - 7th June 2011

From the moment that dawn broke you could tell that Langkawi was going to be a beautiful place to visit.

I think I heard someone say there are 99 islands within this area.  I love the way that islands are named after what they look like.... Pregnant Maiden Island looks like the a pregnant maiden lying down or Shoe island that looks like a shoe.

The tour we booked today was the Sea Eagle feeding and mangrove cruise with princess...  We noticed taxi’s that you could negotiate with on the wharf but I also heard that if you walk off the wharf area you can pick one up cheaper... we spoke to one group who walked to the end of the pier and hired scooters. The had a great time for the princely sum of 45 ringgits.. ($15) and they could have kept the bikes till the next day if we were staying there.  All reports from this island were positive... well the only negative was if you are going up the cable car (independently or with princess ) be prepared for a wait...

Our tour left the wharf by bus for a 40 min drive to the Kilim Geoforest  Park.  Once we arrived we were divided into groups of 8 and boarded these little run abouts that were going to take up, down and around the mangrove system...

Our first stop was the Bat Caves... here we hopped off the boats and walked along a walk way that weaved through the caves. In the first section we saw all these little bats hanging from the ceiling.... No flashes allowed here so the quality of our pictures depended on the torch our guide shone on the groups of bats... Then through to see the stalactites and stalagmites and then through another cave that we had to practically crawl through to get back to the boats... This I think proved a bit of a challenge for the older demographics on this tour... We did see  a lady with a walking stick walk off the buses but we never saw her anywhere near the boats, so we don’t know if she gave up early.

Next it was onto the floating pontoon to see some sea life that they are breeding there...  We saw big fish, little fish, fish that would spit to retrieve a bit of bread the tour guide placed on the edge of railing.... they have terrific aim... he fed a stingray and I got to hold a very old species of what looked like a mixture of stingray, crab and lobster....

Now each guide was to have 2 boats .... we managed to lose one of our boats, so we had a private tour for 8... it was great J.... We then zoomed down the river passing the Kayakers... ( got some great pictures of a couple we thought were Katie and Helen from our Crazy Cruisers group, but when we zoomed into the photo’s it wasn’t them ... Oh Well ... we have great photo’s of someone ) . We ended up in a much more open area where the Sea Eagles feed... They dropped chicken into the water and we moved back and watched the eagle swoop down to the water for a nibble... It was amazing to watch especially when there was lots of them and they all seem to circle in the one direction and come down one at time to pick the food... reminded of Sydney Airport on a busy day!!!

As Malaysians seem to love their island and rock formations our next stop was a vantage point when on one side of the river it looked like a maidens face where the trees looked like her eyelashes and on the opposite side looking over the man who looked like a bit an apache Indian.

We had a great day in this port, the only disappointing part was that they cut our shore time by several hours leaving at 2pm instead of I think it was 5pm, we would have loved to have been able to take advantage of the duty free prices....

Oh well another reason to go back J

Garry’s world cruise Bread Roll Count so far - 44

Joanne’s  Lobster count – 2