Langkawi Cable Car
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Langkawi Cable Car
  After lunch at The Loaf (Telaga) we
headed to the cable car where we paid a bit extra to jump the huge queue. Helen and Mark enjoy the view downhill, we see the steep climb.
   Looking up and
left. Looking right toward the waterfall and
down from whence we came
 We could see the
sky walk above as we passed the middle
station.
 The second or top station.
 We left our gondola and looked
toward Middle Station.
The Langkawi cable car project was first mooted in 1999
by the then Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad
when he flew over Gunung Machinchang in a helicopter during his visit to
Langkawi. The project was a joint venture by Doppelmayr of Austria and a local company.
After a survey of the mountain conducted in May 2000, the construction of Langkawi Cable Car began in April 2001. The gondola cable car system was selected as it permitted a long span of over 900 metres. There are three stations for the cable car; the Top Station is located at the peak of Gunung Machinchang which is the second highest peak of Langkawi. In the middle is an "angle station" where the gondolas make a 45-degree turn to reach the Top Station. As there is no road to the top due to the steepness of Gunung Machinchang, all the structural components needed to be lifted to top with helicopters in combination with an auxiliary working cable and then assembled on site. The gradient or the slope between the Base Station and the Middle Station is said to be the second steepest in the world at 42°, right after Israel's Rosh HaNikra cable car (which gradient is at 60°). It also has the longest free span for a mono-cable car at 950 metres (3,120 feet). When there are strong winds, the cable car operation would be put on hold. There are 35 normal gondolas, each of these can carry six persons with total weight up to 480 kg, with a total maximum capacity of 700 to 800 passengers per hour. There are also 4 bottom glass gondolas which sit 6 passengers and 2 VIP gondolas each with 3 leather nuclear seats. The gondolas travel at a distance of some 70 meters above the canopy of forest of the Machinchang Range. The Langkawi cable car was completed in August 2002 at a cost of RM 46 million. The soft launch for the cable car was held for six days in October 2002 which was well-received, it then opened to the general public on the 1st of November 2002. It was officially opened in 2003.
We bimbled to the other tower................
..........passing by loads of love locks.
The views across the mountains..........
.................and down to Telaga Marina.
A quick look in the shop and we learn that London is 10,147 kilometres away.
We head to the sky walk and read information boards at the top. Marchinchang Mountain is made up of a group of sedimentary rock know as the Marchinchang Formation.
  
Machinchang Formation consists of sandstone, mudstone, siltstone and conglomerate. Various fossil species and sedimentary structure are found within the layers of rock. Sedimentary structure are structure formed during sediment deposition used by geologists to understand the depositional environment of the sediment. Among the most important sedimentary structures found in Marchinchang Formation are parallel and cross bedding, lenses, load casts and ripple mark. Well, beat me with a feather duster.......
Langkawi Geopark comprises of ninety nine islands (Langkawi is the biggest and most populated island). The total land area is about 478 square kilometres with a total population of around 96,000, predominantly of Malay ethnic origin.
This little chap sang us a lovely tune but wouldn’t turn around for his applause. Time to head down from this ‘must do’ visit.
Going down.
Back down the queues were still enormous. We had a really good laugh in the six-d ride where we fell out of a plane, into a cart which whizzed us round a mine, over a rollercoaster and through all kinds of creatures. That done it was time for an ice cream before heading home.
ALL IN ALL A SMASHING AFTERNOON WONDERFUL VIEWS OVER LANGKAWI |
