langkawi magazine

Reviews SECTION

Look and learn

Not even the locals are quite sure how many islands form the archipelago of Langkawi, floating like a shower of lotus petals off the north west coast of the Malaysian peninsula.
Some say 104; others plump for 99. But by anyone's calculations Langkawi is a stunner. Cyan waves scroll gently onto crushed-shell beaches, trees sag under the weight of strange fruit, and mist-furled limestone mountains are thick-knit with rainforest.
Strange, then, that until recently Langkawi languished pretty much unsung. Backpackers and luxury seekers have tended to plump for the bars and beaches of Phuket and the southern Thai islands just an hour's ferry ride to the north. Thank goodness.
Being left out of the limelight has kept Langkawi a pristine wildlife reserve with some of the rarest - and most bizarre - creatures on the planet (giant squirrels and mouse deer like pocket-size Bambis are just for starters).
In fact, you don't even need to stir from your lounger for a close-up more intimate than a BBC wildlife documentary.
Lolling on my outdoor daybed at the new Four Seasons resort on Pulau Langkawi, the largest island, I hear the rasping cackle of the hornbill from a pandanus palm, while a baby monitor lizard - these mini-dinosaurs can grow to almost seven feet - slips quietly under the railway sleeper path. And if I don't keep my windows shut, I'll have a band of macaques tucking in to room service.
Gravel-voiced Aidi, the Four Seasons resident naturalist, helps open guests' eyes to the wonders within the resort, rainforests and rivers.
Top trip is the swamp tour, which sounds stinky, but is spellbinding. In a shallow, canopied boat we glide like a tropical punting party through the milky green channels of the Kilim river, entering the mangrove, a dwarf forest of woven vegetation. The mud bank is covered in tangles of roots - short stumps, knobbly roots and looped cable roots, dense, dark and twisted.
It's an odd place for a science lesson, but there's a desperate Darwinian struggle taking place.
"A mangrove is a forest between land and sea, trees which have evolved to living in a seawater environment," says Aidi.
"Salt is poisonous to plants, so these trees go to great lengths to have a drink. Very high osmatic pressure draws water through the root, and ion exclusion removes the salt. The roots are so dense because they help to maximise the amount of air each plant has. Not a square inch of mud is wasted. There's something either on it or in it."
The mangrove is home to many rare species. Our boat hovers by a bank, where tiny crabs like boiled sweets - orange, purple, white, red - are scurrying across the mud. "You're in luck - trapdoor crabs and fiddler crabs," Aidi points out enthusiastically.
Further on we feed chicken skins to swooping brahminy kites and white-bellied sea eagles, stroke a stingray at a fish farm (spongy as tripe to the touch), and tiptoe through caves with sleeping fruit bats packed tight as pomegranate seeds. Ecotourism doesn't get more immersive than this.
It can get a bit too touchy-feely: the mosquitoes are militant. One night without insect repellent and I wake up pimplier than a teenage boy.
But nature provides an answer to that too - the local sea cucumbers are renowned for their medicinal qualities. Aidi produces a bottle of dark brown gamat oil, pressed from sea slugs, to dab on my swellings. It's not quite a miracle cure, but at least I feel part of the ecosystem.
The hotels are Langkawi's second great asset - here are some of the most sumptuous resorts in the region, if not the world. First there was the Datai, a high-rise hideaway in the heart of million-year-old jungle for luxury-loving Tarzans. Now the Four Seasons group has opened a beach-side hotel in Tanjung Rhu, on Pulau Langkawi's undeveloped northern coast.
The opening couldn't have come at a worse time, just three months after the tsunami - though Langkawi was largely unscathed. But the resort is so spectacular it's become a tourist attraction in its own right.
Part Malaysian kampong (or village), part Alhambra, it's a fantasy palace of high-walled courtyards, shimmering pools and Mughal niches - though the tight-packed slate stone walls and river-stone cobbled paths look strangely like the Lake District.
Rooms are equally opulent. My beach suite is a huge, glass and wood pavilion framing the Andaman Sea like a plasma-screen television, with a hamam bath big enough for four, and a wireless lighting system (don't lose the remote control, or you'll have to go to sleep with all lights blazing).
Then there's a jaw-dropping 180-foot, infinity-edged, sapphire-blue lap pool, and an enormous spa, a cool green seraglio with relaxation mattresses floating like lily pads over gleaming pools. I daren't leave my room without the site map, yet I still end up in the service area with the dustbins.
Getting round the island, on the other hand, is easy - left-hand drive is a legacy of British colonial times, along with a touching passion for Lulu, Liverpool FC and the Carry On films.
Street life, though, is strictly South-East Asia, a blur of influences from mainland Malaysia, Bali, India, China and Thailand from the time when Langkawi was a stepping stone on the ancient spice route.
There are mosques and temples, corrugated roadside shelters offering banana fritters or a Malay massage, and hijab-wearing moped riders weaving in and out of the traffic.
We pitch up in Kuah, the main town, for the night market. Like a culinary car boot, farmers and local women serve up snacks cooked on rickety trestle-top stoves: coconut rice cooked inside bamboo, sticky peanut pancakes, sweet, nutty chicken satay, and sugar cane juice cranked out by a man with a miniature mangle.
You could fill up quite happily for under £1, but we're off to dine at Bon Ton, a boutique mini-resort in an old coconut plantation on the south-west coast of the island.
Owned by Narelle McMurtrie, a formidable Australian with an animal sanctuary for more than 100 cats and dogs in her back yard, Bon Ton is a cluster of stilted kampong houses, entered by ladders and furnished like a warlord's boudoir with ornately carved beds and chests.
This is where the Spectator journalist Ron Liddle got married before things went horribly wrong. It's also a favourite of the chef Rick Stein and no wonder: Bon Ton has a superb restaurant specialising in Nyona food - a marriage of Chinese and Malay cuisines dating back to the spice trade period. And it's all astonishingly inexpensive - prices are kept low by the island's duty-free status, devised in the 1980s to encourage tourism.
After feasting on spicy and sour fish curry, mango and cashew nut rice, and pineapple sambai belean, we head for Pantai Kok, home, someone assures us, of the island's hottest nightlife.
A dark street on the harbour with a handful of bars and cafés, it's not quite what we had in mind. In the authentically dour USSR Bar - empty apart from the owner's friends - we half-heartedly nurse happy-hour vodka cocktails and wonder whether the action has moved elsewhere.
But you don't come here to party. Back at the Four Seasons, we sit in a swing seat above a burnished, torch-lit pool, sipping chocolatinis and listening to the midnight thrum of frogs and cicadas - nightlife Langkawi-style.
It may not have Phuket's verve or Bali's cultural heritage, but Langkawi's natural charms are a knock-out. Just make sure you get here before the rest of the world discovers them.

2005-08-29