Day 52, Year 4: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Date: Saturday, December 14, 2008
Weather: Yet Another Beautiful, Hot, Sunny Day
Location: Kuah, Pulau Langkawi, Malaysia
Imagine that it is 8 o’clock in the evening. You are on a tropical island in Malaysia. Most of the population is Muslim with a few Chinese Buddhists thrown into the mix. You walk into town to get the eggs that you had forgotten to buy during the day. It is Saturday night and the streets are jam-packed with families shopping and eating in the street-side cafes. You are the only woman not wearing a head scarf, but that is no problem. Everyone is friendly. When you reach the main street, you
hear music playing. What do you think that music would be? Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Here Comes Santa Claus would not have been my guess. But bizarre as it might sound, that is what was playing in the streets of Kuah tonight. Something just didn’t seem right about this picture. But there you have it.
We spent a crazy day running all over the island today in a rental car. Patrick and Margaret of Aqua Magic went with us as we went to the veggie market, another place to buy frozen ground beef and chicken, a Chinese hardware store where we spent a small fortune on locks and wire rope to secure our new dinghy motor and dinghy and a host of other small goodies, a Chinese restaurant to buy frozen pork chops and a pork tenderloin roast, the marine store that orders from West Marine, and then back to
the yacht club to put the first load in the dinghy and take it back to the boat. We then took off again to the Rebak Marina ferry dock so Patrick and Margaret could visit Rebak before moving their boat there in a couple of days. While they did that, Mark and I did more food shopping. Then we headed back to Kuah for even more food shopping. Just how much food can one sailboat hold? Actually quite a bit, but it sounds so complicated because each thing you want to buy is in a different store and
the stores are spread all over this island.
But by evening, we had completed most of the shopping and only needed bananas and eggs. There is a night open-air market in Kuah on Saturday night not far from where we are anchored, so we went there to get the bananas and then across the bridge to get the eggs. That’s when we ran into Rudolph!
Tomorrow morning we will wind things up here and sail/motor around the island to Telaga Bay. There is a marina there where we will fuel up and it is also the easiest place to check out of the country. Hopefully all of that will be done by day’s end and we will be headed to Ko Tarutau in Thailand to rendezvous with Kevin and Claire. We thought Langkawi was going to be turquoise waters and white sand beaches. Actually those things are here but only on the north side of the island where we have
not gone. But we are assured that crystal clear water and white sand beaches await us in southern Thailand.
