Island hopping in Langkawi

One of the joys of writing these blogs is getting to go back through all my old pictures and videos that I never really had time to review or digest at the time, it used to be get back to the ship back up my memory card of the day to the ships computer, my own hard drive, a spare hard drive and burn the files onto blank DVD's for storage. Yes, I was a little apprehensive about losing all my footage even back then and over the years I've seen so amny former colleagues who have lost their footage/pictures from those days!

A by-product of writing is having to research the places I went to and I'm acutally learning more now than I did at the time for some of the locations I visited. For example in this chapter I visit Langkawi, Malaysia for the first time and I'd never heard of it before I went there. It was one of those strange situations where you do not know if its an island, town, city, state or country you are visiting and as both times I went there I ended up on beach / island tours I'm still not sure if I actually stepped foot in the mainland of Langkawi!

Fortunately the internet exists and I can tell you that Langkawi is a district and archipelago of 99 islands in the Andaman Sea which form the state of Kedah which is right next door to Thailand, so essentially Langkawi is a group of different islands and we ended up in a boat hopping between 3 of the different islands

Most days I'm out on my own with the PAX on the tour and occasionally there will be another crew member on the same excursion as me but rarely would we be on the same bus but on this day I was lucky and had 3 other crew members on the same boat.

The island hopping tour we were on was going to take us to three different islands around Langkawi starting at Pulau Dayang Bunting, onto Beras Basah beach before finishing at Pulau Singa Besar. The other crew were from the cast and I'd become friends with them due to being on excursions with them most days and living in the same corridor. As a bonus on our boat there was only two PAX with us so it really felt like a day off as opposed to work!

This was probably the only time in my life someone thought I was a professional dancer (I know right!) but I'm sure it was by accident and poor eyesight! 'Oh so are you all dancers then?' the old lady asked, she definitely had poor eyesight as I was still wearing my shirt that said video staff but I took the complement.

At the next location we had to walk up some rickety steps (that I'm not sure would have passed health and safety back in 2008 let alone now) and press on through some dense rainforest to get to our next dock where our boat was waiting for us.

It was cool on the trek through to see a family of monkeys and I knew that baby monkeys in a video would make people stop onboard and drive up my DVD sales as well as the saddest monkey I've ever seen in my life (pictured below)

By the time we got to the final stop on the tour there was a small lagoon that you could jump into from the wooden jetty, I guess not all the PAX wanted to make the jump so it was just us crew jumping. Afterwards onto our last location Beras Basah Island which was more or less just a beach stop for an hour or two.

After 'work' none of us had noticed that the time was getting quite late and as it was tender port we still had to get back to there before we got back on the ship, as always as we were on an official ship tour (and we had guests with us!) it didn't matter if we were late however we were going to be cutting it extremely close!

As we were definitely running late now, someone made the decision for our little island hopping boat to take us directly back to the ship! I'm fairly certain that this was against a whole bunch of security roles and regulations but it did mean we were not late!

I always look back fondly on this day as it was like having the passenger experience they pay for, but getting to do it while 'working' and hanging out with friends from other departments!

On the next cruise diaries - Going to school in Vietnam, Buddhas and Butterflys in Penang and Elephants in Thailand