Since we had left Sungai Petani, for our last day cycling towards Langkawi, there was silence on the blog. No real reason, just that Langkawi has been very nice to us and therefore blogging just did not happen; especially with the visit from our very special guest (see below)...
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| Leaving Sungai Petani with the Gunung Jerai in the background. This is a 1200m high mountain we hiked on our previous trip in northern Malaysia - and to my surprise, that is actually our most popular blog post of all time!... |
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| Getting out of Sungai Petani was not too bad, very soon we were out of the city roads. Initially traffic was dense, with little room for cyclists, but that did not last too long. Once we were on the way to Merbok and Yan, traffic became very light and the road very beautiful. This is the first part of the journey where we are following the exact same road as in 2016. |
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| Luckily, once past Yan, we chose to go on the small roads towards Kuala Kedah, which were very nice for cycling - while the main road was quite busy and rather unpleasant riding. |
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| The small road became very small, and then... this highway to Langkawi! Yoohoo, very nice (for a little while at least) |
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| In the previous post, I mentioned there were a lot of birds in the paddie fields but no picture of it. Well, on this part we had many birds as well, and now I do have a picture! |
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| Unfortunately, riding along small roads comes hand in hand with this: garbage dumps! No idea why this still happens in Malaysia, but it's all over the place and it's really disgusting! |
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| After another easy riding day of a good 70-ish km, we arrived at the ferry to Langkawi in Kuala Kedah, half an hour before departure of the ferry we wanted to hop on. With an unpleasant surprise: bicycles now have to be packed on these ferries! Totally ridiculous, but luckily we had our bicycle bags with us and we quickly stuffed the bikes into these (with handlebars and saddles outside, but which was thankfully good enough). Really ridiculous, getting the bicycles on and off the boat was actually easier without packing. It was not required before. The reason it changed: "there had been an incident some time ago". Really??? There will be more incidents this way, I'm afraid! |
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| Anyway, after another hour of cycling from Kuah, bringing the total to 8 days on the road and around 630km from Kuala Lumpur, we arrived at the Bon Ton Resort for a nice treat. A place we really love but never stayed at, we now found we earned this treat for a night! And it was absolutely fantastic, what a magnificent place, with amazing hospitality and service and all in all, a reasonable price too. |
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| No comment needed... |
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| In Langkawi, a day after our arrival, we met up with our very good friend Veckie (in green) and we spent 3 days with him exploring the island. We also met up for a lunch with our good friends from Kuala Lumpur, Wouter and Katelijne, who happened to be in Langkawi for a wedding. |
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| Langkawi is very well known for its incredible sunsets... |
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| We went on a mangrove trip, a very lovely 2-hour boat trip through the immense Langkawi mangroves. Mangroves are a very important part of the planet's ecosystem, you can read more here about that. They seem to be well protected in Langkawi, and hopefully it will stay like that... |
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| Monkeys live in the mangroves, and they are drawn to the tour boats because they often get food - a bad practice. This macaque and some friends came to our boat and got... freshwater! Which they were drinking from a bottle the boatman had brought. I guess/hope that is better than feeding them... |
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| A deserted beach along the Langkawi coast, facing the Andaman Sea and Thailand. |
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| Finally, after almost 5 very nice days in Langkawi, we left again today. The bicycles nicely packed for our flight back to KL. Flight, you said??? Yes indeed... Malaysia is making it really hard for cyclists to move around by public transport. I already wrote about the packing, required for the ferry nowadays. Then, after the ferry, we would need to unpack the bicycles again to ride to the nearest bus station. There we would need to pack them again, and hope for a bus company willing to take the bicycles - because many don't do that. Even easier, and more carbon footprint friendly, would be to take the ETS train back to KL. Unfortunately, bicycles are NOT allowed on the ETS. So in the end, we decided flying from Langkawi directly was by far the preferred option. Then I really wanted to find out what the difference in carbon footprint is. That brought in fact a surprising conclusion. This kind of fast ferry boats have terrible emissions; also, a (often old) bus is OK but not a magic solution. My estimation of the CO2 emission per person would be around 60kg via ferry and bus (the ferry being almost half of that!). To my surprise, the estimation of the CO2 emission per person, for the flight Langkawi-KL, is... 64kg! So in the end it hardly made a difference in fact... |
