Thursday night we went to a festival in honor of Lunar New Year in China town (Georgetown City). We were walking around when we heard, "Heather" it was our friend Cedric from our university in Seoul!! We knew him and his wife were in Malaysia, but didn't expect to see him at the festival!!
The Dragon Dance; performed for the Chief Minister of the state.
The crowd was a bit over-whelming!
Friday morning we boarded a ferry bound for Langkawi, one of Malaysia's most famous islands. Three hours later we arrived to sunny weather and clear blue waters. We ended up sharing a cab with a Chinese-Malay couple who were quite friendly to talk to, we even ended up staying at the same motel as them! We're right on the water, with a comfy room. After settling in, we decided to go "island hopping" as they call it here. For $10, we were able to visit 3 islands in 4 hours. There were 6 of us in the boat; we were joined by 2 Malay couples our same age so it was nice chatting with them. 1st we stopped at the swimming island (clear water) and next we moved to a bay where we saw eagles eating (they drop chicken in the water and there were about 10 eagles swooping around us!) The 3rd place was the pregnant woman mountain, named aptly for its apprearance of a woman with a belly. This island has a lake, but to get to it you have to walk this trail inhabited by hundreds of monkeys. They have become quite rude in that if you have a bag of open snacks, they may try to steal them from you. We made it out in one piece though! For dinner we ended up a restaurant owned and operated by a Korean family. They served really excellent Malay food for reasonable prices, and we met a nice server from Bangladesh also.
On our way to the swimming beach.
Today we rented a motorbike for the day to cruise around the island. We stared off riding a cable car to the top of a mountain, with spectacular views! Next we went to the 7 wells water fall, where you can actually slide down the small wells into the next pool! We were having a blast doing this and met a couple from Holland. Right before leaving, B wanted another go at the slides but our underwater camera ended up falling out of his pocket and into one of the deep pools. After 20 minutes, our new Dutch friend was able to recover it! In our haste to leave, B's wallet was accidentally left behind. An hour later at the next beach we realized it was missing when we went to buy a juice...we hauled back there on our scooter, hiked up the more than 400 stairs to the top of the waterfall, only to see an empty place....after searching for 5 minutes, a man came up asking if he could help us. We told him our wallet was missing and he said, "oh, yeah, i picked that up a bit ago" and promplty handed it back to us!! B's ID, credit card, and cash were all there!!! A man came up to us and said, "1st your camera, now your wallet?!" He had seen us searching for our cam a few hours prior!! When we got down to the parking lot, the attendants were also relieved that we found our stuff. For dinner we returned to our new fave restaurant for another tasty meal. We're a bit burnt so tomorrow we may just relax a bit, but hopefully Monday we'll take a day tour to go snorkelling around the islands. With all of the excitement, we should sleep well tonight!
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