TRAVEL MALAYSIA || Georgetown // Langkawi // Perhentian Islands // Taman Negara

We travelled around the Malaysian peninsula in 2 stints; firstly working our way up the west coast, going from Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh to Georgetown to Langkawi. This was our best experience of Malaysian food. Georgetown in particular had lots of little culinary gems. We decided to splash out on accommodation in Langkawi, which allowed us to spend a couple of days chilling by the pool. 2 of our favourite day trips were also in Langkawi, being the cable car & sky bridge (very nervy when you're as afraid of heights as we are) and a boat trip through a geological park.

The 2nd stint on the peninsula saw us travelling to the Perhentian islands off the North-East coast. Whilst pretty expensive, the service on these islands is laughably bad. A representative example being when we asked at the dive shop what the diving was like and what you could see, he asked "what do YOU want to see?". We'd headed to these islands specifically because they're a good place to see Humphead parrotfish, but also reef sharks and turtles are seen regularly. We gave a fairly vague, no-pressure-type response "just any big fish would be cool". His reply? A curt "yeah there's none of those". and that was that! We decided not to go diving there. We DID, however, do a lot of snorkelling on our own off the beaches and fortunately saw LOTS of big fish, including the amazing humpheads, despite most of the reefs being entirely dead and bleached. The Perhentian islands were absolutely stunning and the marine life was incredible, but a few days is more than enough to appreciate these before the not-so-great aspects of staying there get a little tedious.

After leaving the Perhentian islands, we travelled down to Taman Negara National Park, after reading about the amazing jungle life found there (notably tapirs, elephants and even tigers in some of the extremely remote areas). After jungle trips in the Amazon, Borneo and Sumatra we were keen to see how Taman Negara stacked up. The conclusion? Not very favourably! Across 3 days of trekking (and a night safari by jeep), we saw 4 small monitor lizards and a family of macaques (which you can find pretty much anywhere in SE Asia). A very interesting place to walk around, but not quite the animal hotspot it is talked up to be.

Overall we rated Malaysia as middle-of-the-road compared to the other countries we've visited on our trip. There are plenty of interesting parts to it, but there were also quite a few "hmmm" moments (i.e. nothing drastic, just a little disappointing). And there weren't enough top-tier moments for us to rank it ahead of some of the countries we preferred in SE Asia such as Indonesia. Others may disagree!