Damnit, Monkey

What a great past few days.  We left the silk draped women of Kota Bharu and made it to Langkawi Island on the West coast of Malaysia.  Langkawi is a beautiful archipelago of 104 tiny islands about an hour ferry ride from the mainland.  While there we hired the parasailing guys to drive us out to a deserted island and private beach and spent the day on "Diamond Island" before they picked us up 6 hours later.  The next day we took a cab to the cable car that goes to the top of the island and got some amazing pictures and finished up by playing in a nearby waterfall.

Funny story, when we were on Diamond Island we had a humorous encounter with a monkey who decided to to go through our stuff while we were swimming.  We ran up to the beach to get him away but before we could shove him off he went through all of our stuff debating whether to take our clothes, a life jacket and our books before he finally settled on taking the rest of Mo's food. 

Today we hopped on a ferry to Satun, Thailand then took a bus to Phuket.  We aren't sure how long we'll stay here but the hotel room is very very nice (for $20 a night) so we might be persuaded to stay a few days.  The bus ride up here was interesting... for the first time we didn't have a luxury bus and our driver must have been playing Meatloaf's masterpiece, Bat Out of Hell, on his iPod.  Surprisingly, no nausea for the first 6 hours... until the baby behind us had to go to the bathroom and the mother couldn't do anything with it for over an hour... in a hot bus with no AC.  WOOO!  :)  But it's all funny now that it's behind us.

We'll leave you with one really nice mental image from the past few days (not regarding baby poop or a beach.)  Kota Bharu is a highly Muslim city and all of the major intersections have huge loudspeakers that play a chanting prayer 5 times a day.  Since there isn't much to do in the city, one day at dusk we're laying in the hotel room reading with all of the windows open.  It started to pour raining and as soon as it did, the prayers started up on the loud speakers for 20 minutes.  Everything combined for a most lovely scene.