Langkawi Langkawi!!

I went, I saw and I floated.

It was a beautiful place. Pretty sunrises and beautiful sunsets. A place just like Goa, but without the crowds or the drugs. And murders too. Langkawi Island or Pulao as they like to call them, is about an hour's flight away from Kuala Lumpur and man is it beautiful.

It is a small little cluster of islands, with no buildings higher than three stories in the main island. I went there for training and was there for a week. My week started on a Sunday and I was free for the whole day. With no training or most importantly Jet lag after just five hours flying time, I immediately started exploring the hotel. The hotel was a resort on a beach front. White sandy beaches and blue waters full of miniature hermit crabs floating in them. Just sat down and took it all in. Collected all the small crabs and built a small cancerian army to command and conquer. With only about 15 neural ganglion between them, was kinda hard to get them to come out of their shells and parade in any semblance of a war like formation, but it was not due to lack of initiative or invective. (somehow Hindi abuses don't seem to work as well on Malay crabs, but what the bloody hell, right?)

Rushed back to the hotel room and got in my swimming costume, this really weird floral red shorts I had picked up in a nearby market for about 10rm or around 150 Indian. With me and just my non swimming colleague in the whole beach, it was kinda fun lording over all the Malay life forms littering around under our feet.

The water. It's something else swimming in the calm bay of langkawi's andaman sea. With barely any tide or waves, its almost as still as a saline swimming pool. Waded in deep and started swimming away. Had been a long time since I swam and pretty soon was out of breath. After 15 minutes of splashing in the sea water, I gave up playing shark and pretty much was back to the more natural Vibhu position; prone on my back. It's amazing how something so light can support a 90k frame so easily. Watching the sun set between the V of your feet lying back on the sea's surface is something I am not going to forget anytime soon. By now my friend was bored watching me frolick like a sea nymph and wanted to get about exploring the market places.

So off to the showers and a quick change, we caught a cab back to the main town. The town market has a lot of small shack like shops selling Langkawi T-shirts and other apparel also exorbitantly priced souveniers. Like true blue Indians, immediately we started bargaining, half this price, reduce it further and all that jazz. There is something really different in conduction complex negotiations in english, it's just not a language conducive to big reductions. But, we managed. By the end of our extended shopping spread over a week, we managed to make two pretty malay girls bow down and exclaim " You are indeed Lucky. This we sell for thirty ringie and you have gotten it for twenty" This was after a long protracted negotiation involving lots of vigorous head shakes for no and displaying of the wallet contents to convince them about the poverty of Indians traveling abroad on business. We even went to the extent of telling them, if you reduce the price, we will take photos of the shop and ask all our friends in India to buy from them when they come to their beautiful paradise island.

What else was there except for beaches and pretty Malay shop women? Well, there was this water world theme park with some amazing marine and terrestrial life forms. Again when we went there, we pretty much had the whole place to ourselves. So, we snapped photos of all the seals frolicking and the penguins giving the cold shoulder to each other. All the fresh water sharks and piranha cousins. Jelly fishes, sea anemones and puffer fish. It was real interesting if a trifle expensive. Then again there was the langkawi cable car, the one main attraction of the island. It goes right to the top of the one huge mountain around 710m high. The platforms there command an amazing view of the islands, with sea on one side and all the beaches on the other. The whole mountain is pretty much preserved with lush green forests. A suspension bridge connecting one platform to the other is also a pretty good sight. At the bottom of the cable car towers is a small petting zoo. Where wild hare and fowl run amok in a small enclosure. Every time you go near the fence, they would gambol up to you; expectantly looking at finding some small tit bit or other. We just scratched behind their ears and disappointed the little buggers with our empty palms.

Pretty soon, my week was up. With a heavy heart and a considerably lighter wallet, I returned back to my city of love, Mumbai. A short flight and here I was. All the smoke and all the smells, the rickety taxis and the long queues to get in them. It's all worthwhile though to hear that voice again.