​We took the ferry from Koh Lipe, Thailand, to Langkawi, Malaysia with our friends Mel and Thomas. We’d found a super nice 3 bedroom apartment in a complex with a rooftop gym and pool. On the ferry we got chatting to a guy we’d met at the dive shop in Koh Lipe – he was working there, and doing a one day visit to Malaysia to reset his Thai visa. We invited him to come and stay in our 3rd bedroom and he gladly accepted, and the following night his friend also from the dive shop was doing the same visa run, so we invited him too.

Unfortunately, whatever bug had been keeping me feeling not great for the previous 3 weeks got steadily worse from the beginning of this week, and I was not up for much excitement. I ended up going to the doctor on Wednesday, and he gave me some antibiotics and requested a stool sample (you’re here for the fun travel stories right? Let me know if this is TMI!). If you have to be sick, a luxury private apartment with a large TV and an app to order food and no need to ever go anywhere is the best place to do it. I made the most of having a kitchen for the first time in a while and made my ultimate comfort food, mac and cheese.

On Thursday we rented bikes and spent the afternoon exploring Langkawi. We went to Gunung Raya, the highest point on the island, and, while the view from the top was only of a certain direction and obscured by trees, we saw hornbills and weird looking monkeys called dusky leaf monkeys on the ride down, which made it a worthwhile adventure. We also went to a hidden beach which was very pretty aside from the enormous power plant on the opposite side of the bay, another beach so hidden that we never actually figured out how to get to it, and a waterfall that had completely dried up. On the way back to the apartment we went to the enormous main beach on the island for a swim, and picked up a spread of some local food from the night market, before getting caught in the rain 20 minutes from home. A successful day.

The next morning we headed to the sky bridge, the biggest tourist attraction in Langkawi and the main reason we wanted the bikes. We had thought we could hike up to the top but soon discovered that taking the cable car was the only way, and my fragile stomach was quite relieved. It’s the steepest cable car in the world, and the viewing platform at the top is supposedly the longest suspension bridge in the world. I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but I haven’t looked it up. Either way, it’s very high, and a very cool view. There was a bit of a walk from the cable car to the bridge itself, and I was very slow and everyone made fun of me very loudly, so that all the strangers around us turned to look at me struggling up the steps. It’s great to have such kind friends when you’re ill. A number of other attractions have been built up around the sky bridge, presumably to justify charging a higher amount, but since the extras were included in the price we made the most of them. We took a 3D simulator ride through Jurassic Park and then participated in some 3D art.

Saturday was another lazy day and I was starting to feel a lot better and get my appetite back. It had been a fairly relaxing week – we ate homemade burgers and a kilo of freezer chips, we watched Harry Potter 5-8 (Mel had never seen them), and we enjoyed many sunsets from the pool. The entire island of Langkawi is duty free, so there are shops everywhere selling huge packs of international chocolate and alcohol, and I just couldn’t make use of it! I ate as much chocolate as I could over the weekend to make up for not wanting any earlier, but I still wasn’t up to my usual standards. On Sunday we left the island and headed towards Ipoh, and there was no point in stocking up on chocolate because it would all melt immediately.

Ipoh was once the richest in Malaysia thanks to the nearby tin mines, and Chinese businessmen took it over to make their fortune. During this time a lot of opium dens and brothels sprung up on a little alley named Concubine Street – today this alley is full of fun quirky shops and market stalls but the name stuck. There’s also a Wife Street which is much less interesting. Thomas picked up a new card game that we took to a local café to play over lunch, and immediately decided we needed to also buy the extension pack to play many more times throughout the rest of the week. We tried the famous local white coffee, and ‘cham’, a coffee and tea mixture that was okay, not great. We visited a bookshop in an old bank, with underground vaults full of fiction from every genre. We ended the day in the pool at our apartment – luxury Airbnb apartments are very common and cheap in Malaysia, and going back to budget hotel rooms is going to be a shock to the system!

On Tuesday we fit in a morning trip to one of the Chinese cave temples on the outskirts of town. The cave was huge, and the paintings all over the walls were stunning. There was a 500 step climb to the top of the limestone mountain with a view point over Ipoh and the mountains beyond. In the afternoon, we headed into those mountains, to the tea country of the Cameron Highlands, and to yet another luxury apartment.

We did a few hikes on Wednesday and Thursday on some pretty tricky trails, made worse by the fact that it rained all night every night. I enjoyed the hiking even with the slipping and sliding, but there were many complaints from the others! Our hike on Thursday ended at the biggest tea plantation in the area, where we took a very speedy tour through the factory and tasted a couple of samples. We ended up buying a multipack of flavoured teas to do a more leisurely tasting in our own time and headed back to the apartment. Creed also found a caramel tea from the same factory that he had tasted when travelling through 9 years earlier and has been looking for ever since – apparently it’s impossible to find anywhere else in the world, and even in local supermarkets they usually don’t have the caramel flavour, so he stocked up and is now carrying around a pound and a half of tea packets. 

Friday was a life admin day. Mel and Thomas were heading on to the Perhentian Islands to go back to work as diving instructors, so they wanted to do some shopping for things they knew they couldn’t get on the island. Creed got a haircut from Mel who is a professional hairdresser, and I did some research on future travel plans. In classic Creed and Ros style, we didn’t decide until 20 minutes before they walked out the door to catch the bus if we were going to join them in the Perhentians or not, but we ended up parting ways with the Europeans and headed on to Kuala Lumpur on Saturday. This was only the first part of the decision – the bigger part was whether to stay in Asia and meet up with Mel and Thomas in around a month to travel together again, or to leave the continent for new adventures. You’ve probably grasped by now that we don’t do well making decisions, and I think this has been even worse recently than usual. My head has been all over the place going back and forth on what I want, what I need, and what to prioritise. This went on a lot longer than it should have, but on Sunday we finally forced ourselves to come to a conclusion, and booked a flight to Taiwan for Tuesday night.

 Kuala Lumpur is somewhere we’d both been before, so we didn’t feel the need to do any sightseeing. Instead, we enjoyed the return to privacy, and felt a lot more relaxed on Monday, which was spent cooking delicious wagyu shabu shabu on the hot plate in front of the TV, and getting excited about upcoming plans in new places rather than stressing about them.

Our last day in Malaysia was spent just trying to fill time until heading to the airport late in the evening for a 2am flight, which was then delayed to 4.20am. We wandered around some malls, I replaced my raincoat for one that is actually waterproof, my trainers for ones without holes in and my head torch for one that hadn’t been trodden on. We visited a mosque, which wasn’t super exciting but was the only touristy thing we had really done in the city, so we considered that a success. When we got to the airport, the lounge had live music and excellent tapas, and the rest of the time before the flight felt like an enjoyable evening at a real bar, not just an airport wait.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!