Saturday, February 18, 2012

Feeding a sting ray

Langkawi, Malaysia, Saturday February 18 – Langkawi is a small island off the coast of Malaysia that is not used to a lot of cruise ship business. However, they did have a Star Lines ship docked there undergoing interior refurbishing.  Cheap labor. 
Our tour on Langkawi consisted of a bus ride through the countryside, past rubber plantations, to the Klim Geoforest Park, a UNESCO Heritage Site.  Here we boarded an outboard driven skiff with our Seattle friends. First we went to see a bat cave. The cave had been carved from the limestone by the water. We crawled through it to see the bats sleeping on the ceiling of the cave. Some of the passages were quite low and narrow.
On the way through the bat cave we encountered some of the local inhabitants, long tail monkeys. They came out of the trees to greet us looking for food obviously. Quite noisy.
Next stop on the boat tour was the fish farm, operated by a local fisherman. He would catch fish in the sea and keep some small ones in pens until they got large enough to send to market. One pen had four sting rays, which were quite gentle and would eat out of your hand. Another pen had an eel, and others had archer fish which would spit at potential food above the water to knock it down into the water to be eaten. The final stop was a cruise through the park, consisting of mangrove forests lining large limestone rock formations. We say a lot of brown eagles and white belly eagles that the boat guys fed. The area certainly is beautiful and well worth the efforts to preserve them.

No comments:

Post a Comment