We left Australia in March after replenishing the anorexic bank accounts and returned to Langwaki where we lived in a room above our favourite lunch spot, the Watergarden Hawkers Centre and finished some work on Yana de Lys on the hard stand.
And finally relaunched with brand new standing rigging, clear see through windows, freshly painted topsides, a lot less leaks, new engine mounts, LED light tricolour and anchor light and a myriad more improvements. Still a lot to do, but at least she’s floating again.
The plan is to sail to Phuket and finish Yana so we can focus on cruising after that.
It’s been fun living in Kuah. Our room came with one TV station – A National Geographic channel which seemed to have The Dog Whisperer on a continual loop. I saw a Bollywood movie shoot, and one car crash out the window . No one was hurt in the crash, just a bit of mangled metal and lot of walking around in circles by both parties. And occasionally I heard all the taxi drivers over the road shouting. That meant another tourist was driving the wrong way up the one way street.
I treated myself to an Ayurvedic massage in Pentai Cenang at one point. The Njaravkizhi treatment was described as a relaxing massage in the brochure, but I did find it a bit hard to relax while I was being bashed by bags of hot rice.
We took the ferry to Penang for three days so we could get our extended Thai visas. I love Penang. The food at the Red Garden is sensational. We ate there every night, even though we tried to talk ourselves into trying somewhere else.
We lost track of how many times we got lost shopping for items for Yana de Lys which weren’t available in Langkawi. On the third day we decided to play tourists and hire a scooter to check out the Funicular rail at Penang Hill. It feels like you’re going up vertically. And when you get to the top the views are sensational. I felt like I could see all of Malaysia, while we drank the most expensive beer of our whole trip.
Meanwhile back in Langkawi we loaded Yana with provisions in readiness for our our trip to Phuket.
