6:18.11N 99:51.01E

Sunday 31st October 2010

Langkawi

View of the mountain range where cable car is located from the Cruise ship terminal

David and I managed a trip up the cable car on our second visit, once the weather had improved!   Sadly Ollie missed out due to the strong wind and rain warning putting a halt to it, but we did get to visit the waterfall, which we saw on the way up.

  It’s more impressive close up:

Ollie said it drops away into a vertical fall, , there he is standing there, with no safety barrier?  We had had a huge amount of rain the night before, which in fact we also had when we went up on the cable car, so the waterfall was in full flood!

Thankfully Ollie dried his feet before jumping between the rocks,

Or he might have got a wet ride along the waterfall to the bottom of the precipice!

Having a conversation with a maquak monkey on the way up to the top.

 A whole family of them were just walking along the side in the woods, not jumping through the trees at all, as we would have expected.

This suspension bridge at the top, has a path through the woods to it which continues from the waterfall, quite a climb at 720 Meters high, the cable car is easier.

You get more of the sensation of height from this picture, Telaga marina is tiny in the bottom RH corner of this picture.

What a great feat of engineering, a bit unnerving when it sways in the wind, if winds exceed 15 knots, it’s shut down.

Those islands behind me are part of Thailand!  So close... we went there by ferry as the weather was too bad for us to go sailing before this pic!

A rare photo of the two of us, taken by our cable car companions – the white patch on my nose matches the white shade for the cable car station behind?

This is the ‘Haj’ Holy Day, so we also had many of the Malaysians of Muslim faith in amongst the tourists experiencing the trip, I think the cable car had stopped at this point, and the two girls are looking a bit worried.

Ollie and I took the ferry over to Rebak island marina and resort to visit our friends, Claude and George who have their boat ‘Cariad’ out of the water, as did David and Di from Amoenitas.

My David finally had  a well deserved round of golf with Ian.

The Rebak resort is available to all the marina berth holders – not bad a bad place to cool off after a hard days work on the boat!

Next day, David, Ollie and I drove to Telaga Marina (Notice it’s still raining).  It was great to have time to catch up with our French friends, Florence and Thierry with their two boys, Ouan and Laewen with their new boat, Geronimo.  We had first met up with them in 1998 on their 28 ft. boat ‘Malvina’ whilst we were in Bonaire, close to Venezuella.  They sailed to the French island of New Caledonia in 1999, where they both got themselves a job, then Florence became pregnant.   They have now had two boys, saved up enough money and have bought themselves another larger 45 ft. boat to continue their around the world trip back to Europe.  Florence is finding a huge challenge ‘home schooling’ the two boys on the way round, before they reach the age of secondary school, where they will be put back into the French schooling system.   They had also helped us a lot by sending us the whole copy of the book ‘101 anchorages in Indonesia’ by email, which was invaluable.  They had done the same trip as us the previous year.

Just the three of us enjoying an ‘AK47’; ‘Sex on The Beach’and ‘Singapore Sling’ before joining up with our friends for a meal at the Lamen Paddy restaurant

George and Claude (Cariad), Graham and Heidi (Persian Lady) are very good friends we have enjoyed a great deal of time with during our time in the South Pacific  and now Asia, they are almost like family!