In harmony with monsoon music
Monsoon rain buckets down magnificently on my jungle villa roof. Here is weather to stay home for - a joyous sluicing of the heavens, a crescendo of water music on the shingles.
"Without rain you've got no rainforest," an old Queenslander once told me (perhaps stating the obvious) but this is far more than a regular tropical downpour. Langkawi's version of "raining" is an equatorial cataract of dogs, cats and ever more rain, glorious rain. And then, apres le deluge, five minutes later the forest beyond my balcony is already dripping dry, a squirrel is poking around on a sunny bough and I'm out the door, exploring.
Malaysia's Langkawi Island is an air hop north from Kuala Lumpur or a 30km ferry ride from the adjacent mainland (by a fast boat sometimes known ominously as "the vomit comet").
This is as far as you can go up Malaysia's western, or Andaman Sea, coast without tripping over Thailand. Unlike many islands competing for tourist dollars in Asia, Langkawi's shores haven't been heedlessly strip-mined for pop-up resorts, bling malls and beer bars.
I'm staying seemingly miles from anywhere but on heavenly shores, up on the island's jungled north-west tip at the ruinously good Datai resort. It's a retreat that lets me have snoozy days of reading, writing, swimming or doing nothing, punctuated by forays to Langkawi's more sociable possibilities.
The 10,000ha island and its 100 satellite isles were declared a UNESCO Geopark in 2007. "We haven't got a Big Five here, like Africa," says my Junglewalla eco-tour guide Shakira as we board a launch to cruise the Tanjung Rhu River in the Kilim Karst Geoforest Park. Instead, they have what might be called Langkawi's Flying Five: the flying lemur, flying lizard, flying frog, flying paradise tree snake and flying squirrels.
It turns out that I don't spot any members of this aerial quintet as we head up the mangrove and limestone-hemmed river but there are plenty of sea eagles, kingfishers and brahminy kites swooping low across the water, scooping up fish as they go. A 2m water monitor basks on the shore. We watch macaque monkeys that have learnt how to leap aboard tour boats and pester visitors.
Shakira tells me that, more deviously, the island's crab-eater macaques have figured how to hunt by "fishing", dangling their tails beside the crab-holes on the beach. It sounds extraordinary - but would a tour guide lie? (No. Don't answer.) In this case I believe what Shakira, an earnest and highly educated environmentalist, says. More to the point, I believe that the kleptomaniac macaque is capable of almost any form of self-advantage.
We pull into a wharf called Hole in the Wall, a fish farm-cum- restaurant. The submerged pens hold, among other species, large black stingrays that you can feed and stroke as they poke their smooth, gleaming "faces" above the water and take food from your hand.
Over the centuries Langkawi, "the Jewel of Kedah State", has been passed back and forth between Siam-Thailand on one hand and local sultans and national administrations on the other. The lush but undeveloped island began to bloom when a Malaysian premier of the 1980s, the ever-competitive and combative Dr Mahathir, saw other Asian islands prospering from domestic and foreign tourism. Let there be resorts and duty-free stores, he declared. And overnight there were.
I wander along Langkawi's most popular beach, Pantai Cenang. Several Malay women sit happily in the shallows, shrouded in billowing chadors - not ideal for body surfing, I imagine - while others stroll by in bathing suits. The water is clean. There are kids and kites and selfies galore, and only a few pestilential jet skis. Nearby are plenty of eat-drink- music-shopping options. It's a democratic and amiable shore, resembling a polite Kuta of decades ago.
I decide to climb a mountain but the easy way. The island's oldest geological formation, Gunung Machinchang, is said to be the first part of South-East Asia to have emerged from the sea, 500 million years ago. I line up for the terrific SkyCab cable-car trip to its 700m summit, pile into a gondola and soon find myself climbing high above a dense rainforest canopy. From here we can see the misty shapes of neighbouring Thailand's Koh Tarutao-Adang archipelago - some 150 islands - a few kilometres north.
Afternoon thunder begins rumbling somewhere beyond the horizon like a dropped piano. It's time for the drive back to our hotel, The Datai, but on the way I visit its adjacent Els Club golf course. When it comes to golf, I get what Mark Twain meant about it amounting to "a good walk spoiled". I can also see golf's attraction (for others): open space, fresh air, exercise and 19th hole recuperation. Langkawi's state-of- the-art course, designed (not surprisingly) by Ernie Els, has all of that, plus a seaside location.
But forget the "good walk" bit - the players here don't walk a step. Your GPS-guided golf buggy delivers you right to each tee.
And when you've sliced, diced, eagled, birdied or holed-in-10, your score is beamed by wi-fi straight back to the clubhouse. I leave these rolling, high-tech fairways to those who love them best and, as the rain begins again, I head back to my villa suite and its jungle monsoon music.
fact file *
·Air AsiaX flies daily from Perth to Kuala Lumpur, with connections to Langkawi. airasia.com.
·For more on The Datai, see thedatai.com.
·For Junglewalla Wildlife and Birding Tours, go to junglewalla.com.
·Langkawi's dry season is December-February, and the wet is March-November, with August the wettest month.
John Borthwick travelled courtesy of AirAsiaX and The Datai.
