Well here we are - 17 August today which means exactly one calendar month until we fly out of Langkawi (albeit just a puddle-jump to Kuala Lumpur for one night). But then there will really be a change of pace - KL to Dubai for a 3 day stopover then on up to Dublin and the lovely South-West of Ireland - one of our spiritual homes. The last couple of weeks (weeks 12 and 13 of our 17 week adventure in the tropics) have been alternately quiet and busy - which we suppose averages out to quite-busy). We've had a couple of different groups of guests through the little beach house - a family of four from Belgium and a group of 4 friends from Italy. We are feeling quite the multi-cultural hosts indeed! We have cut our preparation time of the beach house down to 2 hours (from 3) - so hoping to be even more efficient when we get our next booking. We've been enjoying as much Asian food as possible as we know the "eating out willy-nilly" tap will be turned off when we reach Ireland - so have been visiting our favourite Ikan Bakar (literally Fish Fried... but essentially a lunch joint) and having Roti Cenai for breakfast just down the road every few days. €1.50 will certainly not be buying us breakfast for two for much longer. We've been doing long beach walks almost every day and as we get a bit fitter, the walks get longer. We've finally reached the end of the accessible beach area and it's about an hour and a half return walk - very pleasant when we leave about 7.30 am, before the heat of the day gets set in. We have been scoping out the absolute beach front Villas at the massive Four Seasons Resort just along the beach - even looked up the cheapest price for a villa - US$1600! Per night! And that's just the 1-bedders... the large villas are essentially "Price on Application" - and if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Speaking of hotel bookings, from the Weird-Things-Department, we had the funniest email from a major booking site the other night cancelling our hotel for our one night stay in Kuala Lumpur in a month's time. Weird because we did not cancel it. Paranoia struck immediately and I raced to change my password and re-book a night in a hotel near the airport. Turns out, hiding in the Spam folder, was another email from them telling me The Concorde Hotel, KL, had suffered major damage in a fire and was closed for business for repairs and renovations. Ahhhh - that makes sense. Thankfully a) no casualties and b) we weren't there for it. In other excitement, during this morning's walk we picked up a large, 'empty' shell. It travelled for 45 minutes in James's pocket, sat on the shell tray on the dining table for about an hour then proceeded to scare me half to death when it started jumping up and down and a large snail with a vicious looking barb emerged. He didn't look happy and was smartly deposited well out in the garden. In other entertainment news, we didn't think we'd be watching a lot of telly and strictly speaking we're not - no interest in telly programmes at all. We do however watch a movie or two most evenings via the Astro pay TV channels which have Fox and HBO and what not... Even if we felt like a night out, which we occasionally do, there is nothing much up here and a 30 minute drive each way to Cenang Beach doesn't appeal much on dark island roads. Hence our movie addiction! We've been continuing to indulge our other vice - a weekly massage at a great Thai massage joint in Kuah town - I was devastated one week because my regular girl had to 'get her chop' and was gone for a week back to Thailand. Chop of course being stamp and essentially heading out of Malaysia on a visa run so she could come back in and keep working illegally. Happy to say she's back this week which was wonderful! Thai massage is said to be yoga for lazy people and we'd agree - improving our flexibility no end. Weather wise we are experiencing sun-drenched days mostly. With the occasional rain drenched one thrown in for good measure. The winds have changed direction in the last week or so and even when a gale blows our upstairs bedroom with 3 floor to ceiling windows open, wasn't getting a breath of air. Even with a fan, 28 degrees is simply not sleeping weather. We have therefore decamped to the downstairs air-conditioned room which is proving much more do-able. Friday night saw us head to the night market with great excitement as it is Fish & Chips night for us. Super economical we can buy 3 pieces of crumbed fish and chips for 8 RM/A$3/€2 - not a big serve but a treat we look forward to. Which brings me to my "it depends" speech. Whenever we have guests and I'm briefing them on the local restaurants, I always specify that opening hours here in Langkawi are more like guidelines than rules. Whether a restaurant/shop/stall is open depends on many factors... is it too hot? is it pouring with rain? has it been busy enough to warrant a couple of days off? has it been a busy night or a quiet night? is it Friday, thus Muslim day off? is it Sunday, thus Chinese day off? is it a day ending with the word day?... So even though we know all this and have over 3 months on the ground now, we were still devastated that our Friday night fish and chip guys didn't have any... just samosas. Sigh... Bit like using credit cards on Langkawi. Not so much surcharges... but minimums - usually 100 RM / A$33 to use a card. Which means carting around quite a bit of cash "just in case". In fact, with a month to go we decided it was time to get our packing priorities straight, so with price research in hand we did some shopping around on Cenang Beach. We found a great shop where we could save 25 RM on the planned bottle of Drambuie - and their credit card minimum was only 50 RM - so we handed over the Visa card and were told the lines were down. Initially we thought it was the old "machine broken - you pay cash" routine. But it was a genuine outage. Sigh... Tried again a couple of days ago and succeeded - as the last of the big spenders we paid out about A$65 / €43 in total for a litre each of Drambuie, Frangelico and Kahlua. Should definitely keep us happy for a couple of months in Ireland where alcohol is a tad expensive. Another speech we usually give to new guests involves a recommendation for a little local restaurant on the super-gorgeous Tanjung Rhu beach just up the road. Yesterday we put our money where our mouths were and tootled up for lunch (even bumping into our current crop of Italian guests). Just as good as we remember - "expensive" though at A$11 for two compared to our regular haunts - but the food is easily 100% nicer. So it's on our list of things to do more often over the next month. We'll put some cash aside for it (right next to the massage cash!)