Langkawi: Island hopping trip to Dayang Bunting Island and Beras Basah Island

Langkawi Islands is made out of a total of 99 islands. Sounds like quite a lot for me. The main island is of course the Langkawi Island where a population of more than 45,000 lived in, the rest smaller islands are scattered around the main island.

Langkawi got macam-macam islands

Great islands come great boats

With so many beautiful islands around it, I don’t want to miss it so I decided to go on the island hopping trip offered by the hotel where I stayed.

The boat took off from a small fishing village nearby the hotel and headed straight towards one of the famous island in Langkawi, the Dayang Bunting Island. The island is the second largest island of the Langkawi Islands and it’s a 15 minutes boat ride away.

The island gets its name from an old time legend that surrounds the freshwater lake called Dayang Bunting Lake. The lake waters are said to possess magical powers that will enable women to bear children if they drink it. So if you girls don’t want to get knocked up after a Langkawi trip, here’s a leongyiyang.blogspot.com top tip of the day: Don’t drink the Dayang Bunting Lake water.

The legend about the magical lake water came from the shape of the island’s mountains. If seen from far away, the Dayang Bunting Island looks like a pregnant woman. For me the shape is not exactly a pregnant woman because it’s quite weird.

When I arrived at the island I had to climb up a small mountain before I reached the legendary lake. The way up and down the mountains was challenging, first of all the stairs were steep, everyone had to climb like hell, secondly we had to beware of monkey attacks because the monkeys there will attack anyone with plastic bags as they think that there’ll be foods inside.

If the monkeys weren't attacking you, they were scratching each other's back

The lake is between circles of mountains. It was tranquil before the whole bunch of visitors including me arrived. There’s a protected swimming area for the visitors to swim and to go for a paddle boat ride.

I decided to go for the paddle boat ride. There were 2 kinds of paddle boat, the traditional one and the solar powered one. As a lazy person I chose the solar powered one, when I sat inside the boat I was impressed at how the technology of paddle boats went. Powered by a solar panel on the roof, the boat gets 6 forward gears and 3 reverse gears.

3 reverse gears… even our magnificent Proton cars have only 1 reverse gear.

If you think that the boat can go fast because of so many gears then you are wrong. The boat was as slow as 5km/h and sometimes I even had to paddle it for extra speed.

I don't think not many people will want to drink it

When I was paddling around the lake I found out that the lake water was dark green and can’t even see the bottom of the lake. Plus with so many people swimming around, I think that if a woman drinks the lake water, she’ll get a stomach ache instead of getting pregnant.

When my time limit for paddle boat was up, I came ashore to return the boat and found there were people gathering around near the swimming pool area. Out of curiosity I went to sam pat to see what’s going on.


When I got there I got to know that there were free foot massages. Not human foot massage but those fish foot massage where you put your smelly legs into the water and some small fishes will suck on your feet dead skins. Some say it can help improve blood circulation or help you to extend your life to another 1,000 years. This has become a big business for some people as more and more fish massage centers opened in the cities.

I wanted to try it out myself to see what the hype is all about so I put my super smelly feet into the lake. Some fishes came and “kissed” on my feet, the feeling was at first “geli”, after a while I actually quite enjoy the massage. However, a minute later all the fishes went away to other people’s feet, maybe my feet were too smelly for the fishes.

Apa tengok-tengok?!

Just when I wanted to take out my feet from the water I felt something weird. I looked down and found something scary. A big ikan keli was “kissing” my feet, the feeling was as comfortable as the other small fishes but appearance do matter for things like this, a weird looking ikan keli cannot compare with those cute little fishes, so I decided to take off before more ikan kelis come.

Next destination of the island hopping trip was the Beras Basah Island.


I don’t know why it was named Beras Basah which means “wet rice” in Malay, but I guess maybe the sands there were as white as rice and were wet because of the sea water, so they named it Beras Basah Island.

Sounds like a stupid assumption.



But the fact that the sands there were as white as cooked rice isn’t an overstatement. When the boat reached the dock of Beras Basah Island I couldn’t wait but to run towards the beach. When I ran until I reached the sea, I realized that I forgot to bring my swimming trunks, so I went back to the beach miserably with a half-wet khaki pants.


See how I am attracted to nice beach.


It was hard to see other people swimming happily in the crystal clear sea water and I just watched by the beach.

Damn, I missed one of the best swimming places in Langkawi Islands just because I forgot to bring my swimming trunks.

I never knew that a simple swimming trunks can make my travel in Langkawi so miserable… If I got the chance to travel to Langkawi again I will definitely bring my swimming trunks wherever I go.

Langkawi: Eagle Square

Langkawi Islands is named after a bird.

The name Langkawi is a combination of 2 different languages. The “Lang” comes from the Malay word helang, which means eagle. This is because the islands were famous for its number of eagles in the past. On the other hand, the word “Kawi” means marble in Sanskrit, because marble is found in excess there. So both words combined and eventually became Langkawi.

See, who say auditor’s history knowledge sucks?

As mentioned above, Langkawi was a home for a large number of eagles is the past, but now due to excessive hunting by us humans, the numbers plummeted until the government had to protect it using laws by categorizing the eagles as endangered species in Malaysia.

So to celebrate the falling of numbers of eagle, sorry, to create a symbol to represent Langkawi, the government decided to build a damn huge eagle sculpture near the Kuah jetty.



The eagle sculpture was so big that it can be seen kilometers away from the Kuah Jetty.



So big that when I got near it, I am so scared that the stupid bird will shit on me.

I think the eagle's shit will be as huge as a car

To be honest if you stand from afar and see it, the whole sculpture is a magnificent view. A lot of visitors like me went all the way to there just to take photos of the stupid bird.

Some Chinese locals think that the eagle sculpture is a good thing because it symbolizes that Langkawi’s economic will take off greatly in the future as the sculpture is an eagle ready to fly off to the sky. It’s something related to feng shui stuff lah.

The view was nice but I was sleepy...

The sunset view at the Eagle Square was beautiful. I am always a big fan of sunset or sunrise views so I couldn’t resist but to take some photos of the nice view.

A big bird sculpture and sunset view, only in Langkawi.

Langkawi: Crocodile Farm and Galeria Perdana

The Langkawi Crocodile Farm is famous for its huge number of crocodiles, there are more than 3,000 different species of crocodiles inside the farm. Its various performances also attracted thousands of visitors during holidays. Sounds interesting right?

However, the day I went there was not holiday and it was near to the farm’s closing time, so I missed out some performances such as the boxing match between crocodile and man and the daredevil show where a man sleep on top of an adult crocodile or put his head into the crocodile’s mouth.

A cacat crocodile

Despite missing all the shows, the crocodile farm still has something that can attract me.

You can always have your nail trimmed by poking the crocodiles

First of all, the time I went there the farm had only a few visitors, so I can see the crocodile close up without having to squeeze into the large crowd. When I said close up, it was really very close, it was only a fence away from me and the crocodile. You can actually poke at the crocodile if you feel like losing one finger.

Some not so professional employees poking at the crocodiles at work

Secondly, I managed to see some of the “shows” near to the farm’s closing time. There was a cleaner who cleaned up one of the crocodile ponds. Looked innocent but when I looked around there were actually 3 adult crocodiles inside the pond. What a challenging job. I do audit OT until 3am also don't want to go wash that freakin' pond.

A very professional employee

After cleaning up the pond, the cleaner then walked to one of the crocodiles, sat down on its tail and started smoking. Maybe he thinks that smoking near crocodile got more “feel”.

You come down lah, I treat you 1 cigarette

Before the crocodile farm was closed, I managed to video the employees of the farm feeding the crocodiles dinner.

Here’s the video.

I really cannot imagine what will happen when someone falls inside the crocodile pond.

Nice ceiling

Besides the crocodile farm, I also went to an interesting place called the Galeria Perdana.

Galeria Perdana is a place where Tun Mahathir keeps all the gifts and souvenir he received from macam-macam people or corporations or countries during his 22 years as the 4th Prime Minister of Malaysia.

At first I thought that the place will be filled with numerous simple gifts and souvenirs such as medals or pen holders like we used to have during our school times. But when I entered the building, I was kind of amazed.

I don't know the name of the collections inside so I just name the pictures below cin-cai-ly.

A si pek big jade

3D pewter horses painting

Erm... a glass with many faces on it?

There were no stupid cheap medals or pen holders, everything inside there were absolutely top-class gifts or souvenirs. All the gifts and souvenirs were received from countries he visited or from famous people such as Anwar, erm sorry, Bill Clinton.

Keris clock with some precious stone on it

Basically you can find many nice things inside there. There were so many things inside, if you want to read all the descriptions of the gifts you’ll probably have to spend a million years inside there. I don’t have enough time so I just browsed through all the items, yet I had to spend almost 2 hours just to browse through.

Glass fish

As I just cin-cai browsed through the items, I am not able to tell you which items were from which countries or persons, I only know that all the things inside there were expensive.

Small elephants

Most of the items there were artistic gifts and souvenirs, they were beautiful, but were kind of useless. However, when I entered into another building of Galeria Perdana, my perception of gifts and souvenirs being useless things changed entirely.

A Mitsubishi

Lincoln, very rare in Malaysia

BMW, and our Super Little Kancil (SLK) behind me

A square van like those used by pasar malam vendors

Antique car with big rims, don't play play

Some damn rich countries or corporations or people gave the lucky dude cars. Not one, but many of them. There were at least more than 15 cars inside there.

And some kedekut people gave him toy cars...

Besides, normal cars, he also got one very special car.

A multi-million dollars F1 car.

Wtf, I don’t understand why they gave an F1 car to an old man like Tun Mahathir, as if Tun Mahathir will take it out to the street to race it against those Protons fitted with ridiculously large spoilers at the back.

Look how people were willing to spend just to make the Prime Minister of Malaysia happy, no wonder got so many people die die also want to become Prime Minister lah.