Monday, February 06, 2012

Langkawi Part 2

Few more pics from our Chinese New Year trip... a game of chicken in the pool!
The beach where we stayed in Datai Bay has a small reef out from the shore.  It was badly damaged in the tsunami five years ago and is slowly recovering.  It was fun to poke around a little with mask and snorkel.  :-)

Here is the maze of little crab trails covering the beach by low tide, and the tiny balls of sand they roll to form their tunnels.  Scott is in the distance on the beach.  Picture in first blog about Langkawi of one of these teeny crabs. 
We had fun one late afternoon when Seth had his guitar down at the beach taking what I call "album cover" photos of him.  Can't you just see it on the front of a CD?
Or this one?
This variety of monkey is a bit more shy than the ones with whom we shared our fruit bowl.  These guys with the big eyes and apricot colored babies hide out in the tree tops, eating only leaves.  We spotted them a couple of times.  Love that cute baby!  Doesn't he look like a stuffed animal toy?
On this morning, we were climbing 600+ steps to a waterfall.  The friendly monkeys hopped along the way with us.  Here Madelyn is having a conversation with one of them. 


We rode the Langkawi cable car, one of the longest and highest I've ever been on, to the top of the mountain for an amazing view of the islands all around.  On a clear day they say you can see all the way to Thailand!

Amazing sky bridge at the top...  these pictures are for you, Andrew, since you knew about this bridge before we did.  :-)


Dinner among the trees on the beach patio... cool look with all the lanterns!  After dinner we loved walking out on the beach to look at the stars.  Amazing how many there are when you get away from the lights and smog of the big city!  The heavens definitely declare the glory of God.  :-)
One afternoon we went out on this Hobie Cat.  Seth got a mini lesson from a local and sailed the boat basically on his own, with just a little help!  The water looks calm by the shore and it actually took us a few minutes to catch a breeze and get out, but once we were out from the bay the waves picked up and it was a bit of a challenge to control this thing. 
Later the same day Seth gave wind surfing a try.  He found out that it's not as easy as it looks. 
He got a great upper body workout, pulling the sail up again and again!  I was amazed he stuck with it for an hour... I think I would have been back on the beach in ten minutes.  :-)

I helped with a reef clean up project one morning.  Once or twice a month, when the tide is at the very lowest, the resort encourages guests to come help rescue small, unattached live corals to put in their coral nursery, and to remove dead and broken corals and loose rocks that are tossed around by the waves, damaging the live corals.   Here are a few live corals.

The recovering reef, at the lowest tide of the month.  It looks like a bunch of brown rocks, but there is an amazing amount of life in it. 
Loved Langkawi!  What a beautiful place.  Missed having Caleb with us...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

what a wonderful place! It truly is a paradise! Mark tried the wind surfing once at Linwood and found that it was very difficult! Mom