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.

Langkawi: Underwater World and Cable Car

Langkawi Island is just a 45 minutes ferry ride from Kuala Perlis, while Kuala Perlis is just a 10 minutes drive from Kangar. So as an orang Kangar, there’s no reason for me not to visit Langkawi.

For Perlis people, they think of Langkawi as a place to buy cheap alcohols and cigarettes because Langkawi is one of the duty-free regions in Malaysia. A bottle of branded vodka costs less than RM50 there, a Toyota Vios is only around RM50k. See how the government of Malaysia made us suffer with the sky high tax rates.

Oi ! Apa lu cakap?!

Oops… sorry Pak Lah. The government of Malaysia is the best government in the entire human history. We rakyat are very very satisfied under your leadership. (I don’t want to get into troubles you know)

When me and Amy arrived at Langkawi, we rented a car to go around Langkawi. We got ourselves a map and started driving around to look for interesting places. As soon as I was trying to find the exit to drive out of the Kuah town, I made a mistake.

Our rented car - Proton Wira Aeroback manual, metallic green

I was looking around for road signs and didn’t pay enough attention on the road, I accidentally ran through a red light and nearly crashed into other cars. Luckily the other cars made way for me or else it could have been an accident.

As I felt lucky for myself after avoiding a stupid accident, I suddenly saw two traffic policemen standing just 100 meters in front of me. Needless to say, I was stopped by them. I rolled down the car window and looked at them as if I felt sorry. I know that they wanted duit kopi so here’s how the conversation went between me and one of the policemen:

Police: “Aiyo, lu tau tak tadi itu lampu merah?”

Leong: “Soli la encik, I tourist ma, tak tau jalan, so accidentally langgar itu lampu merah.”

Police: “Kalau ini saman hor, tige ratus ringgit tau?”

Leong: “Wah… tige ratus ringgit ar? Mahal lah encik…”

Police: “So sekarang macam mana mau settle?” (This is the official hint used by all policemen in Malaysia when they are prepared to receive bribe)

Leong: “Settle sini boleh tak encik?” (And this is the official hint used by Malaysian when they are preparing to bribe the police)

Police: “Boleh… mesti boleh punye… Berapa lu mau settle?”

Leong: “Encik I student lagi la, tige puluh ringgit boleh tak?”

Police: “Woi… mana boleh… standard punye price lima puluh ringgit.”

Bribe also got standard price, police these days really are professionals. Don’t want to waste my time and spoil my mood during this Langkawi trip, I quickly slipped a 50 Ringgit note to him. He then kept the money into his pocket very fast and smooth, just like a professional policeman.

Very true

I then carried on with my journey to the first destination, the Langkawi Underwater World. I’ve always wanted to revisit the place because the last time I went was 4 years ago and the place was still new with nothing much to see.

The Langkawi Underwater World was not as big as Singapore’s but it still worth a second visit.

Not quite the best angle because I lazy to walk to the front

I am not familiar with all those underwater creatures’ names. I can only differentiate those creatures as small fish, big fish, beautiful fish, weird fish, sotong (octopus), crabs, and prawns. There were penguins inside the Underwater World but all of the penguins hid inside their caves so I only managed to take one after I used maximum zoom of my camera.

Maximum digital zoom plus shaking hands = blur photo

I got my new camera just 2 days before my Langkawi trip so I still not familiar with it at that time. Some pictures maybe blurry, I am so soli.

Steve Irwin killer

Sotong

Weird fish

Beautiful fish

Big fish

Tortoise doing yoga

To be honest, there’s thousands of species of underwater creatures in Langkawi Underwater World, when you see so many fishes swimming around in the aquariums for hours, you will ki siao.

Trying to find the way to Cable Car

So we decided to head for another place: the Langkawi Cable Car.

The Langkawi Cable Car main attraction is a 20 minutes cable car ride up to the Gunung Machincang viewing platforms. At 708 meters above sea level, you can have a 360 degree panaromic views of the Langkawi islands, Kedah and southern Thailand as well as nice views of the Langkawi mountains, all from the viewing platforms on top of Gunung Machincang.

The cable cars are just like the cable cars in Genting Highlands, but this one in Langkawi is different. This cable car system won quite a few awards locally and internationally:

Endorsed by the MALAYSIA BOOK OF RECORDS for ‘The Longest Free Span Single Rope Cable Car – Total in Length – 919.5 meter’ and ‘One of the Steepest Gradient in the World – 42 degree’

PRIX ACIER AWARDS 2005 for ‘Outstanding construction, architectural quality & technical proficiency of steel works’

And…

FOOTBRIDGE AWARDS 2005 - ‘Winner for Technology LONGEST SPAN’

I’ve no idea what those awards means, maybe when you sit inside their cable car your buttocks can shit gold.

On the way up to the viewing platform

Anyway, the view on top of the mountain was just amazing, I can sit there for hours just to enjoy the views.

According to the leaflets, the temperature was 5 degrees cooler than lowlands but I didn’t realize any difference because I still sweated like hell. Maybe it’s those damn global warming effects again.

5 degree less than lowlands? Don't hao siao me

There’s also a curved suspension bridge just beside the viewing platform which I found it interesting. The bridge was curved and it linked one peak of the mountain to another. The pylon that holds the bridge is 82 meters in height and the foundation is built 605 meter above sea level.

Looking down from the bridge

It’s quite scary to walk so high up across the valley but the view was just spectacular. However, whenever there’s strong wind, I sensed that the bridge was shaking a little bit. No wonder the management will close down the bridge during bad weather.

These are only some of the places I visited in Langkawi, I will post up other places when I got the time. Settle?

Snatch thiefs at petrol station

I want to share a video with you all. This video shows how ridiculous the Malaysian crime has become.

Snatch thiefs doing what they are best of, in broad daylight, with people beside the victim some more.

Start from the beginning of the video you can see that the snatch thiefs already entered the petrol station looking for their first victim.

Just like National Geographic Channel where lions are hunting deers.

If you are a busy person and cannot wait for the whole video to play, kindly forward the video to 1 minute 50 seconds.

My advice is that be careful wherever you are. These chee-bye people are everywhere.