I got sucked in on Langkawi. I ended up striking up a conversation with a Dutch girl at the beach one afternoon, and she invited me to go out for dinner and drinks with the crew of people she was staying with. This turned into a 24-hour adventure. What was supposed to be a meal and a chill evening at the beach bar, turned into drinks at their guesthouse for about 3 hours, followed by a trip to the beach bar, a 3am swim (where I saw the most amazing bioluminescence I’ve ever seen), topped off with dinner at 4am.
I crawled into bed at 5am with plans to meet Dragan and Lorne at 9:30 the following morning. Hiroko came knocking at my door at 9:30 to let me know that they were waiting, and we had a coffee at the guesthouse before heading for breakfast. Then, the rest of the day just sort of took off in its own direction, and we just followed.
We made our way by mopeds to the northeast side of the island, where we literally plopped ourselves in the water for the next couple of hours, just sitting in the wave breaks, talking life. Dragan is an outgoing and very inquisitive 35-year old Serbian man, who now lives in Denmark. He left Serbia in 1998 and attended college in Florida on a soccer scholarship before moving to Kentucky and then Chicago. He recently divorced and decided to come to Malaysia for 3 weeks to sort out life and get some perspective on things. Lorne was born in America, but grew up in England (my opposite). He’s an outside the box, jovial guy who is traveling indefinitely and very interested in anything and everything philisophical. Needless to say, this made for some pretty deep and interesting conversations throughout the day. All pretty amazing considering we had known each other for less than 24 hours.
But, that’s the beauty of it, and that’s what I look forward to and love most about these types of travels. Sometimes you get the perfect combination of people, timing and places, and bang! what you have is so special. It’s difficult to put into words, but as we left dinner at the end of the night, Lorne said he felt like he was coming off drugs- that’s how high our day was. It was the perfect combination of people and I could tell how much we all appreciated the time we had together.
Unfortunately, Lorne had to move on the following morning. He was headed to Ko Lanta for a free-diving competition, so we parted ways with him. Dragan and I took the moped to the northwest side of the island to explore and we ended up at a cafe, which was very much off the beaten path. When we arrived, we were the only ones there. We got chatting to Jeffrey, one of the owners. He is one of those people who you can look at and instantly see their kindness. We ended up sitting at this cafe for most of the afternoon, while they insisted we try every type of fresh fruit juice – watermelon, dragonfruit, honey melon. When the bill came, they had only charged us $2.
We wished we had more time on the island so we could have gone back for lunch or dinner, but it was time to move on. The Perhentian Islands were calling. And at that point in time, I didn’t think an island could get much prettier than Langkawi…
