cenang beach

On Langkawi you either shop in the bargain basement or swim at the top end. There are no mid range accommodation options here - it's either optimum luxury or basic beach huts.

This is an island resplendent with five star exclusive resorts, and as such it is more of a magnet for honeymooners than backpackers. It is an incredibly beautiful island, and relatively - and I emphasise the word relatively - under developed. Thailand is just a few miles away to the north, and you wonder what Langkawi would look like if it did not have the more stringent planning regulations enforced by the Malaysians.

That all said, Cenang Beach was still quite lively during our stay despite it being the low season. Close to our new accommodation by the sea was a fabulous beach bar called Babylon. It really does epitomise all that is great about a holiday in SE Asia. A lovely relaxed vibe, cheap drinks, DJs, live music, mad fire related activities on tghe beach, crisp white sand underneath your bare feet and smiles everywhere you look. We stayed until 2am on Wednesday night, and although Laura may have regretted it the next day due to a dreadful hangover, it was worth it just to see a girl in a flowery dress who looked like she was probably an insurance broker from Basingstoke bouncing around the bar as if she was Keith from the Prodigy on LSD.

Despite difficulties with dodgy hotels, I would recommend Cenang Beach. It manages to maintain a young, chilled out vibe without people constantly handing out flyers and trying to sell buckets of whisky and red bull.

langkawi

I left my hotel at the hideous time of 7.15am on Tuesday to be taken to the jetty in Penang for the ferry over to Langkawi.

There is only one boat a day going north to this island, and it leaves at 8.15am. I found it slightly bizarre that two major tourist destinations in Malaysia are so poorly linked, but consoled myself with the thought that it would probably be a pretty decent ferry and a picturesque journey. This would be something of a relief after the puke and diesel smelling vessels I had travelled on in Thailand.

After collecting my boarding pass from the port 'terminal' - two women sat by a desk outside a shed - I was slightly concerned by the look of the boat that would be taking us to Langkawi. This was more a prison ship than a passenger ferry, and my hopes of spending the journey in a cafe having a spot of breakfast as I looked out over clear blue sea were quickly evaporating.

There were absolutely no facilities on board - you couldn't buy so much as a bottle of water, which for a journey lasting the best bit of three hours is pretty damn disgraceful. As we got on our way, the sea became incredibly choppy and at times it felt like we were aboard some kind of amusement park ride - only without the fun. After a while, I braved my way to the grim toilets at the back of the boat, which had thick metal rusty doors and stank. After I had finished and was putting the old chap away, a Chinese girl burst in and threw up in the bog just as I was leaving. Nice.

We arrived in Langkawi just before 11, and my mood instantly brightened as we sailed through crystal clear waters and the sun shone brightly on the island's palm trees. From the jetty I caught a taxi - which was basically a bloke driving a clapped out old van - to Cenang Beach, the most popular part of Langkawi and where my hotel was.

I was due to meet my friend Laura, who was flying in from her holiday in Singapore, at the hotel. We were not expecting much of this place - it was a relatively cheap option, it had rooms available and it guaranteed us a place to stay in Cenang for the next three days.

Despite low expectations, I was still unprepared for what I encountered at the ironically named Langkawi Boutique Resort. The front of the hotel is a huge building, with a vast wooden hallway and restaurant, and a massive staircase. It might have looked impressive at some point, but in its run down and desolate state it seemed like something from another age. The building looked like something out of the Soviet Union. I was half expecting to see a bust of Stalin on the reception desk

After checking in, I was then led out of the vast building and behind it down a road, past a building site and to where the rooms were. By now things were getting worse. If the reception of this place was Kiev circa 1978, the accommodation was more Elephant and Castle. It was a vile concrete block of buildings, with a 'swimming pool' in the middle that looked like it hadn't been cleaned since the Berlin Wall came down. The rooms were tidy and relatively clean, but the furniture was battered and the carpet and curtains were a slime like green colour. In Laura's room the tv and safe didn't work. In my room there was no safe, and the tv only showed two channels with a poor reception!

Fortunately the weather was amazing, and we quickly became philosophical about our accommodation after a few cocktails by the stunningly beautiful beach. We decided that, despite having paid for three nights at our 'boutique' hotel, we would swallow the cost and try and find somewhere - anywhere - on the beach to stay. After a few enquiries, we both found beach huts with all the facilities we wanted and at a low cost. We would spend just the one night at our Moscow multi-storey car park and then we would be free...

panang curry

I left Phi Phi early on Monday morning and was absolutely dreading the boat over to Phuket. Sea sickness en route to an island full of prozzers and Germans.

My pessimism was well placed. The ferry journey was rougher than a docker's arse after 12 pints, and I thanked God that I had stayed sober the night before and avoided enduring this hungover. Fortunately, it only takes an hour and a half to get to Phuket, and upon arrival I was easily able to get a taxi to the airport.

The one hour flight down to the Malaysian island of Penang was, by contrast, comfortable and enjoyable. Our plane drew high above the clear blue skies, which afforded stunning views of the archepecho of islands that make this such a popular part of the world.

As we started to hover over Penang, I was struck my how incredibly modern it looked. Modern high rised buildings towered over the clear blue sea of the harbour, and it reminded me of Sydney from this position.

On the ground, the capital of Penang - Georgetown - appears very different. It is a fascinating ethic mix of Chinese and Indian - with a lot of old colonial British architecture thrown in to boot. After checking into my hotel, I meandered around the Chinatown area and did what the otherwise annoying Rick Stein recommended in his recent cookery tour of the far east, and visited a street stall for lunch. I ordered what looked like a kind of breaded chicken, which was covered for me in a rich curry sauce and served on a red plastic plate. It looked utterly uninviting, but I have to say it was absolutely delicious. The spices and tastes were unlike anything I had tasted before, and probably never will do in a restaurant in the UK.

Penang has quite a reputation for its food. It was the place from which spices were sent back to the East End docks of London in the days of Empire. Indeed the island thrived as a centre for international trade throughout the 19th century.

Keen to see more of the area's colonial heritage, I went for an afternoon drink in the famous Eastern & Oriental Hotel, which was a favourite haunt of Noel Coward and Rupyard Kipling. It is an incredible place boasting a vast marble reception hall, a garden that would not look out of place at Chequers and the opportunity to take traditional afternoon tea. I opted for a G&T, which was quite reasonably priced. Sadly a room for the night was not.

After my civilised drink, which was accompanied by a pretty uncivilised conversation with an American guy at the bar about whether or not I slept with Thai girls while I was on Phi Phi, I went for a walk round some of Georgetown's other colonial sights. Then I ventured into the city's Little India district in search of more gastronomic delights, and I was not to be disappointed. Street after street saw scores of little stalls all cooking up lovely looking meals there and then. I strolled around drinking mango juice before buying bag loads of samosas, rotis and the like to take back later.

After a quick few beers, I then headed back to my clean and pleasant hotel. It couldn't be a late one as I had to be up early to catch (another) boat to the island of Langkawi. However, it had still been a highly enjoyable day strolling round a place of such bustle and colour.

thoughts on the phi phi return

I think it's fair to say that my four days on Phi Phi Don did not reach the same heights as they did when I came last year.

Tired and ill upon arrival on Thursday, a tsunami scare on Friday night, viscous wind and rain all day on Saturday - and then I fell ill again on the Sunday.

It's always difficult to decide whether to go back to somewhere you've been to before and had an amazing time. There is a certain inevitability that it won't live up to the previous experience. Having said that, I could quite have easily gone to somewhere I'd never been to before and had crap weather and got the shits.

On Saturday night, I decided to book myself on a Thai cookery course. It's about time I learnt how to do these sorts of dishes without the help of sauces bought from supermarkets, and the incessant rain made it the perfect occasion to spend some time in a kitchen.

I went for my course at probably my favourite restaurant in the entire world - Pum's. Given that it was just me doing the cooking and that you eat it all afterwards, I decided that two dishes would suffice. I decided to make a green curry (because I have no idea how to) and chili chicken (as it's one of my favourite meals).

I had deliberately selected two dishes that contained no fish, but the trouble in Thailand is that they chuck loads of fish sauce in just about everything anyway. As we were making the curry , my instructor's eyes lit up when it got to the part where we added the minge juice:

'And now the fish sauce! Would you like to smell it?'
'No! Listen, I don't like fish. Do we have to put that in there?'
'Yes, yes, yes we must. If you want we put in one and a half teaspoons instead of two.'
'How about one?'

He did look at me as if I was mad. If I'm being totally honest, he probably isn't used to the students on these courses trying to alter his recipes, but this was a green chicken curry for fuck's sake and I was the fucker who was going to eat it and I don't like fucking fish! If I'd told him I had a nut allergy, would he have insisted on bunging as load of cashews in just because it was in the recipe?

Anyway, something must have gone wrong with the meal because on Sunday I was ill all day. It probably wasn't just the food - a 'perfect storm' of alcohol, the heat, changed sleep patterns and travel often combines at once to make me feel dreadful.

It was a shame I was ill on Sunday because the weather had returned to normal and it was lovely and sunny. This meant that the beach parties, which I enjoyed so much last year, started up after a two day break enforced by the dire conditions. Unfortunately, I felt to ill to stay for more than a couple of beers and retreated to my hotel for an early night.

As I said, these four days had not been the same as before. Too much time sheltering from the conditions or recovering from tiredness/illness in my room and not enough on the beach soaking up the glorious surroundings of this island. There will be other chances. Or will there? Maybe it's better to carry on trying new experiences rather than attempting to re-create previous ones...

tsunami?

At around 10pm on Friday, I was sat in one of the main backpacker bars, having a beer, updating this blog, watching the England v Australia one day game and generally chilling out.

A few moments later, the bar staff pulled white plastic sheets across the front of the bar in preparation for an impending rain storm. In true South Eastern fashion, it then absolutely fucked it down in quite incredible style.

I didn't think too much more about it, and carried on typing and supping away. Then a couple of minutes later, scores of people ran past the bar in the pissing rain screaming and looking terrified. This obviously disturbed everyone in the bar, who went outside to find out what on earth was happening. All sorts of things went through my head. Was there a lunatic on the loose with a machine gun? Had the group of fat beer swilling Geordies drinking from buckets of whisky and red bull in the Irish bar opposite exposed themselves?

In the general mayhem, I figured there could be a need to move quickly and bundled my netbook into my bag and made my own way outside. I asked a Thai girl what was going on, who replied in broken English: 'They think it could be tsunami. There been earthquake in Indonesia'. Fucking hell.

I'm not particularly well versed in dealing with extreme natural disasters, and my first reaction was that my hotel room on the top floor on the biggest building on the island was as good as place as any to head to. As I made my way through the sodden streets, I caught sight of the British owner of a nearby bar with a mobile held to his ear telling everyone around him to calm down. I stopped to listen more. It was a false alarm - a Thai guy on the beach had shouted the word 'tsunami' during the fierce rain storm, and everyone around him duly reacted like Freddy Kruger had just arrived on a boat with Myra Hindley.

Given that Phi Phi was totally devastated by the tsunami of 2004 and hundreds of people on the island were killed, I guess it would be unfair to describe the reaction of people to this mini scare as over the top. It was, as you would expect, something of a relief to discover that 12 foot waves were not about to engulf me.

How do you follow an event like that on a Friday night? You don't get that down the Prince of Wales Road in Norwich. I contemplated going back to my hotel room, but instead headed to a beach side bar where a DJ pumped out house music into the night and people merrily chatted away as if nothing had happened.

At around midnight, I went back to the hotel. The rain then started again - with fierce winds blowing so hard I thought the windows would be blown through. I looked out at the balcony and saw the shorts and t-shirt I had ironically put out earlier to dry had been swept away.

Perhaps unnecessarily, I contacted my parents to let them know that there had been fears of a tsunami here, but nothing happened - in case there was anything on the news about warnings of one. I then poured a large glass of Thai whisky, sat down on my bed and flicked on CNN. There were no weather warnings for the area - just predictions of more rain.

As I tried to sleep, the wind continued to batter the windows and I put a pillow over my head to try and block out the noise. Saturday was clearly not going to be a day for sitting on the beach, and I resolved to book myself on a Thai cooking course and spend the day in a kitchen...

phi phi

After that epic 24 hour trip across what seemed like almost every fucking mile of Malaysia, I'm pleased to be on the amazing island of Phi Phi Don - nestled between Krabi and Phuket on the west coast of Thailand, or, more famously, where The Beach was filmed all those years ago.

I came here f0r four days in June last year, and fell in love with the place from the moment I got off the boat. Whilst I'm not one for going back to places I've been to before, I just couldn't resist another trip to this infamous island while I was in the neighbourhood.

Phi Phi is a kind of marmite type of place - some love it, some hate it, but the latter are very much in a minority. Those who turn their noses up at Phi Phi tend to be those who regard it as over developed, over crowded and overly vulgar. The type of Thailand tourist that is looking for the kind of escapism Alex Garland encapsulated in his famous book.

In a way, the case for the prosecution has a point. The island was wiped to ground zero by the Tsunami in 2004, but the authorities definitely missed a trick with the way it was re-built. The streets are sprawling with many less than attractive shacks, and the tourist 'village' is a seemingly never ending stream of touts selling boat rides and dive trips, bars, ATMs, massage parlours, restaurants and shops flogging jewellery, buckets of cheap whiskey and the like. This place will never win any cultural awards.

In defence of Phi Phi, none of the above can detract from the absurdly stunning features of its landscape, the beauty of its beaches and the clearness of the sky blue sea. Also, while it can feel over developed and busy, it is a very small island. There are no roads, no cars, no motorbikes. Everything is clustered around a small stretch in between the two main bays. And, yes, there are lots of shops and bars in that area. But whether or not you think this is a bad or a good thing, simply depends on the type of holiday you're looking for. I would also stress that while Phi Phi is hardly unspoilt, it has escaped the likes of McDonalds and Starbucks while most parts of Thailand have not. Virtually all of the businesses here are locals trying to make a decent living on a paradise island - something I'm not going to criticise anyone for. Now, where's tonight's beach party?

you mean to say we've come all this way without aspirin?

At 4pm on Wednesday I splashed through the clear blue sea off Perhentian Kecil and onto a speed boat to take me back to the Malaysian mainland.

I'd had a great few days here of relaxation, and I was as bit daunted by the long journey to Thailand that now awaited me. Long distance travel is always much more fun at the beginning of the trip, and it's easy to start seeing it in a different light after a few days by a beach on a beautiful island.

After a breakneck journey on the speed boat in which I impressed myself by managing to drink a whole can of beer without spraying it over any other passengers, we moored up at the port of Kuala Besut. At the jetty there was a predictable plethora of taxi drivers and touts awaiting, and I duly agreed a reasonable price with one to take me to the train station in Tanah Merah.

The cab journey was bizarre beyond belief. My driver decided to put on some Malaysian pop music, which I didn't really care one way or the other about, and then also pulled down the passenger side mirror to reveal a small screen showing the videos of the music he was playing. These had the lyrics showing at the bottom, and as if by magic he then pulled a microphone from the glove box and asked if I wanted to sing karaoke. In a taxi. I politely declined on the grounds of being tired...

We arrived in Tanah Merah around two hours before my train was due to leave for Kuala Lumpur, which was far from ideal. Normally I'd view this as an opportunity to see a new place, but this is a small town in the middle of nowhere in a hardline Islamic part of Malaysia. I couldn't imagine there would be much that would keep me entertained...

Opposite Tanah Merah was a KFC, which the karaoke loving taxi driver had suggested as a suitable place for me to hang out while waiting, but I was not doing that. So I strolled around this baking hot and remote town, and was pleased to quickly realise from the smiles all the locals gave me that I would at least be welcome here. Eventually I even found a run down little restaurant that served bottles of beer, which was an unexpected bonus.

At 7.15pm I made my way over to the station, and stormy clouds were gathering overheard. I was glad to see the train arrive on time - not least because it was the only service of the day and I wasn't overly keen on spending a night in Tanah Merah.

With my feet being dirty and sandy, I felt distinctly less comfortable as I clambered onto my bed on the train than I had on Sunday when setting off from KL. I spent the rest of the evening reading, and after a couple of nightcap rum and cokes, I dozed off around midnight. My sleep was interrupted on several occasions either by the train shuddering its way through the jungle, or by some twat in the carriage deciding to have a loud telephone conversation at 3.30am...

The train pulled into KL just before 9am - an hour and a half late, but not something I was upset about as it meant more time in bed. I felt all right as I got my stuff together to leave, but then as I walked onto the train platform I was hit by the heat and humidity and felt very queasy. A few moments later I was rushing to find a toilet, the reasons for which I shall not reveal on a family web site...

I stumbled around KL Sentral station trying to work out how to get to the airport, and after buying a ticket for the express train I decided to get some grub as I still had a bit of time to spare. As much as I adore Asian food, I can rarely face it in the morning (particularly when feeling under the weather), so I ordered a cheese omlette, baked beans, toast and a cup of tea. After wolfing it all down, I caught the train to the airport, followed by a bus to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal where my flight was from.

As I sat yawning and generally feeling shite on the Air Asia service to Krabi, I cursed myself for attempting such an arduous journey just days after two other all night extravaganzas. This is a two week holiday - not a gap year going round the world, Matthew.

Got to Krabi Airport, then caught a taxi to a place where I could buy boat tickets and purchased my fare to Phi Phi Island for 350 bhat. I was then taken to the pier in the back of a dodgy old van with a group of other beer swelling travellers. As the dust and grit from the road blew in our faces as the driver attempted one reckless manoeuvre after an another, I knew I was back in Thailand...

At 1.30pm I boarded the boat to Phi Phi - the last leg of this rather absurd journey. Nothing had gone wrong as such, but it was just too much coming off the back of too much and I had spent a good proportion of the trip trying not to spew my guts up. At 3pm the boat gently pulled into the stunning surroundings of Koh Phi Phi, and now I could look forward to a few days of complete relaxation in one of the most amazing places in the whole world...