Langkawi Trip (3/30 -4/1)

It's my first time!!! First time to Langkawi! Hehe ... a bit "3 8" right? have been living in Malaysia for so long but never been to Langkawi before. This is because I always no chance to go and everytime when I asked my friends to go along, they sure will say there has nothing to see. I must see by myself instead of believing them ... It's so coincident that my sister has a free hotel stay at Langkawi, so we chose a date and went to buy the ferry ticket and just packed and go without any hesitation :)

We took the ferry and it cost us RM95 each for a round trip. The ferry ride took about 3 hours from Penang pier to the Langkawi Kuah pier. When we reached there, noticed there were a lot of ppl offering the car rental.... we rent a car (red color Hyundai 2 doors car) which cost us about RM100 for 1 day due to it was public holiday -Prophet Muhammed. I was the appointed driver for the whole trip may be it's because my driving skill is better compared to the 2 of them :) hehehe

I did some research the day before we go and printed out the map of some places of interest and our hotel map so i just drove by referring to the map. Luckily we were still able to get to the hotel (Aseania Hotel) and although it was rated as 4 stars but from it's out look , it looks really old and the paint was dropping off. The room was not big, may be because it was free so they gave us a lousy room? perhaps ...

It was a really hot day, we were buring under the hot sun and have to travel here and there. In addition, the airconditon in the car was not really functioning well, plus we had some trouble to wind down the car window, so basically we were baking inside the car and sweating like hell.

Places we went:
1) Underwater World
2) Mahkam Mahsuri
3) Handy Craft Complex
4) Geology Park
5) Akeology park - basically it's a fruit farm
6) Eagle Square
7) Taman perdana

8) Langkawi Crystal

9) Black sand beach

we didn't manage to go all the place as we were running out of time

This round we didn't go for island hopping as I haven't visit the palces of interest in the island itself so we decided to visit all the places and thinking of going for the island hopping next round. It's so coincident that I met Seow Han (my primary schoolmate) there as well.. such a small world :)

On the way back to Penang, the ferry stopped at Pulau Payar to pick up some passengers. A guy named John then sat besides me. He is from Alaska and we talked a lot. He is currently working for military in US and now he is in Kulim Police camp for his work. He has been in Penang for 1 month and will be going back this weekend. He always travel around due to his job needs and he has been to many places e.g. Philipines (hulu island), Japan, Egypt, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam .. His greatest interest is diving... and i think he is a great risk taker as from the way he talked to me, enjoy life is the most important thing for him. Not to forget to mention, he has 12 tatoos on his whole body and he pierced on his tongue (ouch.. must be very pain). It's really nice to know him, and i got to know a lot of things from him although it was a short 2 hours conversation

After this trip, we have came up with some of our opinions for what we like and what we think that's really a problem:-

1) Poor management of the Ferry system - the staff didn't tell us we have to sit according to the seat number and this has led of some foreigner dissatisfactions and complains to the management

2) the aircond in the ferry was really cold - we were shiverring down there and almost got sick

3) Wasting resources - some of the places we visited has really low number of tourist, but they hired a lot of staff, e.g. i saw 4 staffs taking care of 1 cashier counter and more than 5 cleaners cleaning the same area... this is wasting our money especially those who pay tax!!

4) Place of Interest but it's not interesting .... Time to improve how to make it more interesting, some places look really dull and not interesting at all, from far you look at it and you won't want to walk in

5) the hotel service is really bad, especially during the morning breakfast. The food was not enough to serve the guests and moreover although it mentioned there it's breakfast for two but you can see especially the Malays, they will have the husband and wife with 4/5 kids at the breakfast table. That's why!!

Overall i think it will be better if the trip is to island hopping :) nevertheless it's a good experience.

Photos available here