The trip to Langkawi was surprisingly easy. The border crossing was painless and there was a good group of people on there. The ferry over to the actual island was pretty rough and I had to lie down while everyone else watched a brilliant Thai movie- their films are completely ridiculous. When we got to Langkawi we shared a taxi over with 3 people we met on the bus and ended up sharing a room with them. We got there pretty early in the afternoon, so me and Grace took a walk around. It's a nice little place full of gift shops, restaurants and travel shops and the people are really friendly. We went back to the room and met up with the others and went out for dinner. The place we went to turned out to be pretty much the only place we ate at. It was ridiculously cheap, and I'd never had a roti before but now they're one of my favourite cheap foods!
The next day we all got up and tried to find some rotis for breakfast but for some reason nowhere serves them after 11. At breakfast we met another guy and all 6 of us rented motorbikes (more like mopeds but bikes sound cooler). We got automatics, considering half of us had never ridden one before and got a quick chance to practice behind the shop before being let loose on the roads. Our first task was to fill up with petrol, 60p filled the tank and when I returned the bike there was still a quarter left! It was a bit daunting at first but soon got into it and started to race around on the roads. We had to stop once when monsoon season caught up with us and we got soaked and couldn't see through the heavy rain. After a bit more of a drive we arrived at Seven Wells, parked up and were faced with an almost vertical hill to climb. We made it up to the top and I was left feeling that the walk shouldn't have been THAT hard... We were rewarded for our efforts with a pretty awesome waterfall which most of us spent the next hour or so playing in. The rocks were really slippy and I was falling all over the place. It took me a while but I eventually jumped in off of a relatively high rock, it was more the rocks at the bottom of the pool that looked like they'd really hurt which put me off. The next stop was to 'seven wells', up 250 odd steps- another horrible fitness test. The worst thing about this was that when we got up there it was disappointing, just rocks and water, not half as exciting as the waterfall! It was then back down the steps and onto our bikes ready to get to the next point of interest. We were on our way up a mountain but decided at halfway to turn back as it would be getting dark soon. I fell back from the group as I'd decided to take the corners really slowly, the fear of falling and skidding around was pretty big. As we went round we saw a few monkeys, one in particular looked terrifying, it was entirely black except for its bright white eyes- definitely not something I'd like to come across in the dark. We took full advantage of our bikes, driving to dinner, over the road to the shop and then back to our room.
We went out that night and started drinking in our room with a couple of other people playing drinking games with some decent music in the background. We headed out to a reggae bar on the beach, and then moved on to a club. This was a bit rubbish, so I just stayed outside chatting to people before we returned to Tomato for some late night rotis.
The next day we had to get up to return our bikes, some people had said that they'd get up early for a morning drive- that didn't happen. Me and Grace spent the day on the beach and went parasailing. It wasn't as exciting as I thought it'd be, going up into the air was the best bit. When Grace went up, the boat stopped in the middle of the sea and she got dipped in and then landed in the sea rather than on the sand like everyone else, which was pretty hilarious!
We had become a group of 11 by the time we headed to dinner and then went to another beach bar for the rest of the night.
After a rush in the morning as my alarm went off an hour late as my phone hadn't changed to the new time zone, we just made the ferry off of the island and onto the bus to the Cameron Highlands