Sorry for the Group Email

The morning after we arrived in Langkawi, my camera, having sulkily refused to respond all night after getting thoroughly drenched, showed a flicker of life. I un-expectantly flicked it on and it rewarded me by coming to life. I hesitantly tried a shot. It clicked away and produced a perfect image. This was little short of a miracle. Cameras hate the water. If you get your camera wet, and it’s a compact job with minimal mechanics, you need to leave it to dry for a day before chancing it. If it’s a DSLR with lots of exceedingly fragile mechanics, you need to leave it for a day, then cross your fingers and hope. If you’ve managed to get saltwater in there, you may as well not bother with the finger crossing.

I was in a good mood, so when Tim suggested hiring a car and exploring Langkawi for the morning while we waited for the ferry, we jumped at the chance. Car hire in Malaysia is famously cheap, and we bagged ourselves a ten-year-old Nissan for about $10. It came with a virtually empty petrol tank, of course, and the pre-drive walkaround took ten minutes while I pointed out the myriad bumps, dents and scratches to the patient salesman, but with everything noted and paid for, we set off.

Driving in Asia looks scary. Certainly, in places like Vietnam and Thailand it’s generally not recommended, but Malaysia and Singapore benefit from decades of British rule in that driving standards are rigidly enforced, and as a result, the benchmark is set a little higher. Certainly, Langkawi doesn’t present any major challenges; you drive on the left, the speed limits are observed, and there are fewer scooters than in most other south-east Asian countries.

We spent a happy morning cruising around the backroads of Langkawi. We visited, of all the random places to visit, a museum of rice, which sounds unutterably tedious but was instead fascinating. Rice, after all, is what everyone in south-east Asia eats. There are dozens of varieties and a myriad ways of farming it. Once it’s farmed you can use it simply as rice, or turn it into wheat, or, indeed, booze. The full-to-bursting guestbook told us that Channel 4 had visited the day before.

Tim knew the good spots to visit, and we found ourselves atop viewing galleries and hillsides all morning. We kept a keen eye open for Langkawi’s most famous wildlife – its eagles, but were unrewarded.

In the afternoon we boarded our fifth boat in two days. The water was barely calmer, but exhaustion was setting in. The ferry from Langkawi to Penang was air-conditioned to within an inch of its life, but we settled in to a film (fans of martial arts films should find Ong Bak the next time they’re near their Lovefilm account) and a bag of comforting crisps.

Dave recommends impromptu car hire. I also recommend that you cast your eye over the latest batch of Malaysian pictures in Flickr. The geeky might also try a tutorial on removing dust spots from pictures, found here.