Monkey Business

After two blissful days of doing nothing but sleeping in, editing pics, and writing the blog I had grossly neglected out of sheer lack of time over the past two weeks - I finally saw a bit of the island today. 😄

I took a boat tour to a few notable spots.

An eagle observation area, for one. You could see the eagles - Brahminy Kites - diving into the water right next to the boat. It was quite stunning, especially considering how impressively large they actually are up close.

We saw lots and lots of mangroves and were told about their role when the 2004 tsunami struck the region - devastating much of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

Langkawi was largely spared, thanks to the natural capacity of mangroves to absorb and deflect rising water levels. There was, unfortunately, one casualty. Thanks to the mangroves, only one.

There were also quite a few monkeys living in the mangroves. Monkeys that could swim, as it turned out.

The arrangement was that the monkeys were accustomed to people on the boats bringing food - bananas, peanuts, and so on. All engineered to get them to interact with tourists. The guides even mentioned they were aware that some tourists don’t like monkeys or have had bad experiences with aggressive ones - those people were told to close their eyes and deal with it for the sake of the others.

Yeah. Not a fan of that. The monkeys didn’t attack anyone while I was on the boat, but they were certainly adamant about being fed. All it takes is one stolen item, one startled tourist screaming, or direct eye contact at the wrong moment to make things feel very unsafe very quickly. It’s not rocket science.

We also stopped at a fish farm - though frankly, staring at fish trapped in tight, algae-ridden, murky confines didn’t appeal to me, nor did the opportunity to choose your favourite sea creature and have it prepared for lunch. I don’t think anyone in my group went for it.

Another stop was a bat cave - with bats, naturally, and also monkeys. Plenty of signs warned you not to touch the monkeys and made it very clear that death or injury would be entirely your own problem. So, happy days.

The bat cave smelled ripe. And while it was genuinely cool to look up at them, we were told not to open our mouths while doing so. I’ll let you arrive at your own conclusions as to why.

I was rather happy to leave that cave behind.

Eventually we were dropped off at a beautiful beach for lunch. It was far too short a stop to properly enjoy it - but the beach was full of seashells. Put one and one together and you’ll know exactly what I was doing. It’s a shame they’re so heavy. But I’ll soldier through. 😄
My driver had informed me in the morning that he wouldn’t be there for the stated pick-up time because he had to pray. He arrived somewhat on time regardless - largely because the tour guide reminded him it was, in fact, his job.

All in all, a good day and I do believe Langkawi is worth visiting.Read more