October 2007 - Singapore & Langkawi

Let’s start by describing the room: Glass sliding doors, walkin wardrobe, bathroom almost as big as the room in Sydney. Outdoor shower/bath area, two huge basins in the middle of the bathroom on a quasi circular table and two sun lounges on the balcony. All the lights are operated by remote control, only problem is I keep forgetting where I left it. Yes indeed, this will do nicely for five nights. I went out in my bikini in search of the beach and finally after a little walk I found what I was looking for (see picture).

I walked along the beach, familiarising myself with the resort layout and found myself being drawn to the lap pool with it’s own private sun lounge areas. I was the first one there to start soaking up the sun so it was just me, my book, a huge 55m pool and an esky with cold water. 3 hours later I thought I should have lunch, so I reluctantly left.

I have to make comment on a group of Arab men that came to the lap pool. They took up two private areas (of 8) were quite loud, setup all their things, jumped into the pool and no sooner did they do this that I turned around and they had left! I felt sorry for the staff that made all this effort to setup only to clear it all 5 minutes later.

One thing that I like about travelling on my own, you have a certain air of mystery about you, people wonder why you are on your own like you have this amazingly cool story. All the people here are either couples, groups of couples, families of four or sometimes what seems like the entire family. It’s rather fascinating and the conversations, it’s almost as good as being a fly on the wall.

This brings me to lunch in the Kalapa Kafe, nothing too fancy, just a club sandwich but there was a table across from was a table of 10 with 3 kids. The father, in an oversized white billabong rashi (apologies for the spelling) was talking about how much his shares in a company were (I missed the company name).

”1.2 million dollars, I call my stockbroker every week and joke with him, how much has it gone down this week?”

And then he was talking about buying a private island, saying that he wouldn’t because of the cost of the upkeep (notice it wasn’t the price of the island itself).

I lazed in my room for a bit before going to the Spa for a Urut Melayu massage, it was very nice, until she hit the shoulders. I’m sure it did me some good, but I’m all sore from it today. Clearly because of dancing I should be having massages more frequently to prevent this tension build up :) The Spa itself was beautiful, I had my own private treatment area, with room, shower, steam room, change room, bathroom etc.etc. Probably better than Chaing Mai’s Spa.

Eventually I went for dinner at the Mediterranean restaurant where they had this one song on repeat from the time I sat down to the time I finished my main. I think I almost learnt the words. My buffalo mozzarella with tomato was very nice however when it came to the chicken I was already half full and it was rather unremarkable, even a little dry. I made a decent dent, but still there was a lot leftover.

I went to the bar for a drink that turned into a few. I was talking to one of the assistant managers and she said that there are plans to expand the resort. There are plans to demolish the current Royal Villa and rebuild from scratch. Who owns this property? Kingdom... That explains a lot.