Langkawi - Lovely but time to move on

It has been a lovely 16 nights in Langkawi and we have been lucky enough to stay in a really lovely resort, eat lots of delicious food and have Charlie's mum and sister join us for the time. But we are now getting itchy feet and our week's kayak trip in Tarutao National Park across the border in Thailand calls. So tomorrow we are taking the ferry from Langkawi to Satun in Thailand and lucky us, we gain an hour of time as well as Thailand is only 7 hours ahead of GMT whereas Malaysia is 8 hours ahead.

We rented a car for a day and did our own tour of the island - to be honest there is not really that much to see, but we did go to the capital to see the giant sculpture of a sea eagle at the quayside. Lang means Eagle and Kawi means Rock, so Langkawi is Eagle Rock in Malay. And yes, we have seen many sea eagles, quite extraordinary. I know that after I took this picture of the giant sculpture, Charlie was still taking pictures with his digital slr (rather better than my snappy thing but less portable), a sea eagle came and hovered right in front of Charlie and the sculpture and yes, he really did get a great picture. We'll upload it when we get the stick done.

Funny story on New Year's Eve... muggins here (Nay surely not I hear you all say!) was tasked with ordering the wine in advance for the gala dinner which I did. A lovely bottle of Yellow Tail ozzie Shiraz was the request, so I faithfully complied. When we got to the table, there was a big ice bucket and we know its hot here, but we thought that was a bit steep chilling the shiraz down that much. So, just before complaining, it appears that the hotel did get the wine right, it was a bottle of Chardonnay... and it was written on the ticket, both the hotel's and mine, so god only knows what planet I was on. It was nice wine anyway, but as the house wine and beer were on "free flow", it didn't really matter. We all drank far far too much, staggered to the beach to catch the fireworks (I think I just about noticed them in between drinks) and then crashed into bed before 2am.

Needless to say that we were all very quiet on New Year's Day! Lets all hope that 2008 will be a super year for us and for you. Take care, Richard and Charlie

PS - thank you Jennie and Pat for being such super companions for the last couple of weeks, we're going to miss you!