There are lots of things to do in Langkawi; however during our time here we didn’t do a lot of them. If you’ve read the previous few posts, you’ll know that we’ve spent the last few weeks in tourist hotspots and big cities where we’ve been running round trying to do lots of activities. We’d been craving some beach relaxation time.

Before you disregard this blog post completely, we weren’t completely comatose for our time here, so if you are planning a trip to Langkawi in the future there are a few things that we learnt that might help you.

Picking a good beach
We stayed in the region of Pantai Cenang, which is the most popular beach area. However, instead of staying on the main beach, we stayed on the next beach down, which was only a ten minute walk away from the action. This beach was a lot quieter, there was plenty of shade and during the day we had the place to ourselves!

Sunset Drinks
The sunsets in this part of the world are amazing, and we found a couple of good places to relax with a drink to take this in. One place is ‘The Cliff’, which is right over the beach and had a good happy hour.

Our second (and favourite) place, was a unique rooftop bar called Nest. This had the best view of the sunset and a really laid back atmosphere. What made things better was that for only RM20 each, you could bring all your own alcohol with you! They provided ice buckets, glasses with ice, and also mixers (at an additional cost). It’s fair to say that Carissa was a little bit worse for wear the next morning…

Duty Free Booze
Another thing you’ll know if you’ve read some of our other blog posts is that the price of alcohol in Malaysia has been a bit of a challenge. Well thankfully, this all changed in Langkawi, as the whole island was duty free. We picked up a bottle of gin for RM55, wine for RM25, and the beers in our hostel were only RM2 a can – less than A$1!

And that’s about it! There are plenty of other things to do in Langkawi, such as a cable car and sky bridge, but we were happy giving these a miss and spend the rest of our time reading and swimming.

Overall we really liked the atmosphere in Langkawi, it was very relaxed and not at all touristy, which was a welcome relief compared to Georgetown a few days earlier. After four well rested days, we had finished our two weeks in Peninsula Malaysia and it was time to catch the ferry up to Thailand. First stop Koh Lipe!!