In passing the beach on Penang Island while headed to the Butterfly Garden, I noticed that it was not a place I wanted to be. A local I met told me about Langkawi, an underdeveloped island about two hours north by ferry. I made a quick decision and left early the next morning. I'm not usually a beach person, but let's face it, there's a part in all of us that likes that lazy relaxation a beach can offer. I got a nice chalet right on the beach for rather inexpensively, down right cheap really. My friend had been telling the truth. The beach here was so clean, so quiet, so perfect. I spent hours just laying in the sun, listening to the rhythm of the ocean, and reading Kandinsky's essays. The person sitting in the beach chair near me was a Finnish fellow named Telo. A musician from Helsinki, it was strange how he seemed most content in talking about all things Russian. Politics, literature, and whatever, I'm convinced it was just subconscious for his missing his three year old daughter. Her name was Greisa (like Gorbechev) and it was his first time away from her. The conversations with him were good. He said that Fins don't like idle chit chat. So that was my two and a half days in Langkawi. I drank fresh mango juice every day and and strolled with my feet ankle deep in the tide. I watched the hundreds of small crabs burrow in the sand in seconds of sensing movement, leaving starfish patterns in the wet sand. I had good conversations with locals. And everynight I watched the sun fall behind the other small islands that mark Malaysia. All in all, it was a good decision. The tension which had originally brought me on this journey finally seemed to have disappeared. The next morning, I was on a plane back to Japan.
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Copyright H.Krebs 2000