The only way to travel

Yesterday we (minus Nelly, also known as Osama, who was busy back home with the baby-sitter planning her next "terrorist attack") sailed away on a 6 hour long cruise. Or wait, make that 6 hour short cruise, cause time sure flew out there in the big blue, it was such a beautiful day it felt more like 6 minutes long.

The Langkawi archipelago with it's 99 tropical islands is a natural paradise. To discover it from the seaside while cruising the Andaman Sea is an unforgettable experience. We saw spectacular views of unique rock formations, lush green rainforest, fine lonely beaches, hidden lagoons and eagles (apparently the name Langkawi means eagle rock in Malay).

We got over our fear of sharks (just for a day) and dared to jump from the yacht right into the sea. What can we tell you, it felt great! Not even for a second we thought that the water was too cold and on a plus side we spotted no sharks.

Obviously we appreciate comfortable traveling but "the net jacuzzi" on the outer side of the yacht bumped up the meaning of comfortable to a new level. While the yacht was smoothly sailing, we were relaxing in the net, bubbling around and sipping cocktails which were served frequently (we kind of lost track of how many).

Check us out!

Year of the tiger

Today marks the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations. We won't miss it too much. Sure the dragon dancing and the colorful decoration is exotic for us and quite interesting to see. But the loud-off-beat-my-grandma-got-more-rhythm-in-her-left-toe-nail drum music we could easily live without. We don't wanna offend 19,64% of the world population but really it's just a lot of noise. The sound of garbage men collecting the trash early on a Monday morning is more melodic and harmonizing. We still love your food though!

OK now it's cliffhanger time. Big day for us coming up tomorrow, with lots of exiting stuff happening, more on that in the next post, stay tuned.

Living on the edge

Life as a parent consists of many routines and yesterday we decided that we were ready for a real adrenaline kick - cable car ride.

The cable car ride is amazing. You get a spectacular view of the rainforest and an awesome panorama of the Andaman Sea. There are two stations on the way up but we decided to go for the scary top one without wasting our time on the "chicken's stop".







On the top station 708m above sea-level you get a 360-degree panoramic view of the Langkawi islands, Kedah and Southern Thailand. Once we took our photos we continued to the Sky bridge which is an architectural wonder. The bridge is 125 m long and it is a link between the top station and Machincang mountain range. The valley under the bridge is breathtaking but kind of scary. We felt a bit shaky walking on the bridge with Nelly, she on the other hand was very cool. At times it felt like she was a bigger attraction that the bridge itself - let's just say that many photos of our daughter were taken and many hands were shaken.















On our way down while Martin was admiring the solid construction of the cable car, I happened to mention that according to me the scary part is the fact that there is one only cable which keeps the gondolas up and no second security cable!
He looked at me, holding our daughter a bit tighter and said: Thanks for sharing!



To keep the story short we made it back to solid ground again and went for a snack. Four huge glasses of freshly squeezed orange juice plus Nasi Goreng for two (which is chicken with fried rice) costed us 26 Ringgit. That's about 17 PLN or 50 SEK. We've now been here for so long that it acctualy felt a little too expensive.

Check out our daughter entertaining herself and everyone else around while we were eating.

Three reasons to celebrate

Today's Valentines day and it's also exactly one year since I went down on my knee and proposed to the love of my life Beata. It goes without saying it calls for some kind of celebration. Today's also Chinese New Year which is a pretty big thing over here. Most shops are closed and restaurant tables are booked. Luckily for us we had already reserved a table at the Phan Thai Restaurant not far from Pantai Kok on Langkawis west side (we live on the east).

We started with drinks, my memory is a little fuzzy right now I must admit, I vaguely recall a Cuba Libre, a Tequila Sunrise, and I think we ordered a Singapore Sling as well. Food was good but not great, I guess what you really pay for at a place like this is the view, and that's priceless!

BBQ very nice!

Today we called our baby-sitter again. We haven't used her service since we got married even though baby-sitting is THE greatest invention since sliced bread. Knowing that Nelly was in safe hands we jumped in our car and drove west to Pantai Cenang. After a slow hand in hand stroll along the waterfront we found a nice place called La Sal where we ate the best god damn appetizer since we arrived to Malaysia: kataifi prawns.



The sunset played the role of dinner entertainment, the atmosphere was really quiet just what we were looking for.









In the water right in front of the restaurant they had an under water fence that blocked... well naturally we thought it was there to block sharks. But when I asked the waiter if they had problems with sharks he answered "No problem, shark barbecue very nice". So there you go, maybe we should stop worrying about sharks, the locals sure did long time ago.

Oh, and the fence was there to keep Jet-Skis away :-)

After dinner we slow danced on the beach to "Just the two of us" by Grover Washington Jr.

Meanwhile back in the apartment Nelly was playing hide-n-seek with the baby-sitter.

Half Swede half Poolish

This morning we took it real easy (vacation style). Just went down to the pool and let Nelly play around some. She was skeptical at first, like she always is but then she lit up.











It is an interesting neighborhood we live in! It feels like we got into a little society of its own, which created its own rules and if you happen to ignore them or misunderstand them, you will get a gentle yet determined warning so you behave next time. Our neighbors are nice and they insist on always greeting one another when there's an eye contact. It seems like it is important to them to keep the feeling that they know each other a little bit. They learned our names right away and they use them often, so you "almost" get a feeling that you belong. Not that we have any problem with any of this it's just ... I don't know sometimes it feels weird to be forced to be nice to strangers all the time (god I'm Swedish). It really is a closed apartment complex where we live, I'm not gonna go so far and say it's like in that movie "La Zona" but you never know what's gonna happen if you suddenly broke one of all the unwritten rules they have here.

The Life Aquatic

Yesterday we took the car to Underwater World Langkawi located right in the middle of the tourist delta Pantai Cenang. It's about a 30 minute ride from our place. It was fun to see real live versions of everything from our Finding Nemo DVD. My favorite character the seagulls were not present, but then on the other hand, if Nelly could speak she would fill that void in a second going "Mine, mine, mine" all the time.