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Published: December 7th 2014
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Rice Paddies
Rice Museum, Langkawi, Malaysia Langkawi, Malaysia WOW…I think we are in the Caribbean! Warm, humid, beautiful green, lush island surrounded by high peaks and mountains. Lots of little islands jutting out of the water towards the sky all around us.
Today we are visiting a Rice Museum which may sound a little boring, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting places of our trip. We saw rice fields in various stages of maturity, water buffalos that work the fields, all of the equipment and tools necessary to grow and harvest the rice…and chickens all over the place. Life here is as it has been for many years. Rice is still planted by hand, harvested with scythes or long knifes, beat by hand on a wooden stanchion to separate the rice from the stalks, and ground to separate the rice from the husks, which are then fed to the water buffalo……the buffalo do not eat the rice itself. Why? We don’t know ;-) We learned how the “beasts” are hand fed from birth, and then become pets. The farmers just call them by name when work is to be done, and they docilely follow the farmer
to the fields. Pretty humane.
Next we went to a modern women’s craft complex where all kinds of goods are locally produced, (by women) displayed and sold. We used every minute of our allotted hour to shop and buy some jewelry, clothes, and scarves that I will really be able to use when we get home. The prices were extremely reasonable and each individual shop in the complex was managed by the women who made the goods.
Chocoffee! What the heck is Chocoffee? Well, just what the name implies. Combination of locally grown coffee and all kinds of chocolates. Cope loved this place because there were small samples of all kinds of chocolate for tasting. They also had some wonderful coffee we could sample-it turned out to be a powder that could be used to make instant coffee with, and it was really good. Fortunately they wouldn’t take credit cards and we were low on Ringgits so, after many more samples I was able to drag Cope out of this store without buying anything ;-)
On our way to Underwater World we had a brief stop at a yacht harbor nestled
along some mountain peaks. Beautiful. We had a moment’s respite so just wandered around and looked at the ever so blue/green water and admired the yachts and power boats.
Underwater World Aquarium. This is a quite nice aquarium with lots of displays of all kinds of fish and sea animals, along with some beautifully displayed coral. The high light for us was two separate enclosures of rock penguins (Rockies, as they are called). They are carefully cared for and the displays are clean and beautifully maintained. They were playing around and swimming. One penguin came right up to the window and stood there “talking” to a little girl who was just thrilled ;-)
We left the aquarium and wandered down to the beautiful, long, white sand beach. I continued collecting beach sand to take back home. It was an extremely hot, humid day… you just felt wet all the time. One thing we have learned in Asia is if you want ice McDonalds is the place. Every local heads to McDonalds when they want a drink with ice and we were no different. This is an island of 100,000 people but they get 3.4M
visitors a year so this McDonalds was one of the largest we have seen in Asia and the cold Coke light hit the spot. It was packed with locals and people from all over the world.
In the afternoon a heavy rain shower came through, yea! So refreshing! Whoops that only lasted a few minutes… now the sun is out and the humidity is…what? 99%!?(MISSING) LOL
Next: Phuket, Thailand
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