Langkawi

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03/10/08 Friday Day 50 24 hours of Travel Part 1
Didn’t do much else in Phangan this morning. Just checked out and sat on the beach until we got out taxi to the ferry at 4pm. The ferry was uneventful except that it took 2 and a half hours. I would have swam it faster. The ferry was a car ferry so I suppose it couldn’t really go that fast. After getting off the boat we hopped on a bus to Suratthani town to get another local taxi/converted pickup truck with all the other backpackers heading for the train station. We landed there around half 9 and our train wasn’t until 00:40 so a bit of a wait of doing nothing. More trains came and passed. At one stage I went for a walk and looked at the board and saw some delays with some of the trains but not ours so I was laughing. Around 00.15 I went for another walk and now we had a 70 minute delay, so now it wouldn’t be here until 01:50.
We got on our train anyway, a second class sleeper where the day time seats were converted into upper and lower beds. Not bad you’d say. There are curtains across your bed so no one can look in but they leave the lights on in the carriage which doesn’t help one bit. Luckily I had kept my little free pouch of goodies I got from Quntas on the very first flight which included an eye mask. It allowed me to get some bit of sleep.

03/10/08 Friday Day 50 24 hours of Travel Part 1
Didn’t do much else in Phangan this morning. Just checked out and sat on the beach until we got out taxi to the ferry at 4pm. The ferry was uneventful except that it took 2 and a half hours. I would have swam it faster. The ferry was a car ferry so I suppose it couldn’t really go that fast. After getting off the boat we hopped on a bus to Suratthani town to get another local taxi/converted pickup truck with all the other backpackers heading for the train station. We landed there around half 9 and our train wasn’t until 00:40 so a bit of a wait of doing nothing. More trains came and passed. At one stage I went for a walk and looked at the board and saw some delays with some of the trains but not ours so I was laughing. Around 00.15 I went for another walk and now we had a 70 minute delay, so now it wouldn’t be here until 01:50.
We got on our train anyway, a second class sleeper where the day time seats were converted into upper and lower beds. Not bad you’d say. There are curtains across your bed so no one can look in but they leave the lights on in the carriage which doesn’t help one bit. Luckily I had kept my little free pouch of goodies I got from Quntas on the very first flight which included an eye mask. It allowed me to get some bit of sleep.

04/10/08 Saturday Day 51 24 hours of Travel part 2
The eye mask helped a bit but it didn’t matter that much because the first stop was around 6.30am so there were people up and about making as much noise as they could!
Went through immigration no problem and got back one our train to head to Alor Setar to get the ferry to Langkawi. Our intention at the train station in Alor Setar was to get our ticket to Kuala Lumpur for the next day. No good. The train that we wanted was completely full for the next 3 days so that threw our plans out the window.
We headed into Alor Setar town to get a taxi to the ferry which was a short drive away. The ticket area at the ferry terminal was in chaos. There’s no organisation with the Malaysian people by the looks of it. Everyone skips queues, they don’t see queues in the first place I reckon. I also had forgotten that Langkawi is like the Canary Islands to Irish and English people, and that means only 1 thing. Kids! And not only kids but whole families, including aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins and neighbours. Bloody kids all over the place. The biggest problem was that the floor in the waiting area was dusty and skeety so they were all taking massive runs and then sliding around the place. All the kids were all happy anyway and ateing shite so were full of sugar. The minute they started heading for the ferry half of them started crying. One bucko started howling like dog. I was fit to throw them all over board.
We got to Langkawi anyway and sorted our travel plans to Kuala Lumpur. We’re getting a ferry back to the mainland and then getting an overnight bus instead. It’s quicker anyway that the train would you believe.
Our hotel is huge alright, the Bayview hotel. We’re only hear for one night so it’s right comfortable. We seem to be ourside the town centre. We gave a little bit of a walk looking for some kind of eating house because we were famished. I had a chocolate swiss roll for breakfast. End the end we found nothing close to the hotel so we just got the room service instead.
Went for a drink in the bar and it looked more like the entrance to a right dodgy club, black glass doors and all. Plus there was some serious unce unce being played. There was no one else in the bar except us, about a million staff and the 5 members of the house band. Next we know they’re up out of their seats and start playing. No need really. We had a few drinks there so that we didn’t look too stingy. Then we left to find another bar down town. We walked around a few blocks where there were shop fronts (closed) that looked like they were on the outskirts of any town. However this was town. We knew this after going back to the hotel and looked up a map of the town on the net.

05/10/08 Sunday Day 52
Again the buffet breakfast was full of kids and whole families running around like headless chickens. One child brought down a full plate of sausages. The cheeky brat didn’t even eat them all!
This town is full of shops with duty free stuff that you’d find in an airport. That’s all there is to it. There’s 2 shopping centres and loads of other small shops selling all the same stuff; fags, booze, chocolates, bottles of smelly stuff, bags, clothes, etc.
We headed for the ferry around half 3 even though our boat wasn’t until 6pm. This is because there is another shopping centre at the pier. We passed through it on the way here so it looked pretty big. Wrong. We must have done about 20 laps of the place. It’s small. Again it’s full of kids running around. And they still have about a million bags. God be good to my Nan. She loved the plastic bags and so do these people.
The boat journey to Kuala Perlis was grand. This is where we were going to get our overnight bus to Kuala Lumpur. The picture of the bus at the check in desk looked very cool. One thing though, we didn’t get that bus. We got a different one but it was fine. The only problem now was that after picking up some more people in a town a few minutes out the road, the next thing the driver turns on the radio, badly tuned too, and loud. Just awful. It was also freezing in there because he had the air conditioning on full blast. One the driver realised the radio wasn’t great he decided to throw on a cd of some crazy local rock/metal group. Again, just awful. It was impossible to get any sort of sleep. I spent the hour from 1am to 2am looking out the window at the lightening storm we were going through.
We stopped around 2am for 30 minutes and when the driver was outside somewhere, one of the passengers went up and turned off the radio, which still hadn’t been turned down. After the stop I think one of the passengers told him to turn down or turn off the radio which was good. It was still freezing though.

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