Breakfast Finale

We woke in time to catch sunrise this morning. Langkawi, due to its longitudinal position and timezone (GMT+08:00), sees the sunrise later than places in Thailand that are the same distance east of Greenwich. This means that the sun rose this morning at a very lazy 7:39 and took a good few minutes to scale the mountains on the horizon. We made our way up the hill to a good vantage point and enjoyed the gradual shift in the colour of the sky and of the jungle sounds signalling the dawn.

Langkawi sunrise

On returning, our host had been working tirelessly on breakfast since before we left.

Breakfast finale: Teochew porridge

He had prepared Teochew rice porridge, similar to congee, with no fewer than seven toppings. The toppings are salty and often spicy to counter the bland rice porridge. From front to back in the above photo, they comprised salted skin-on peanuts, fried tofu skin with ginger and shiitake mushrooms, salted omelette, okra in soy sauce, a salad of sliced red onions with crispy shallots and fresh red chillies in a vinegar dressing, salted hardboiled eggs, and cooked grated jícama (turnip).

We piled the toppings on and stirred them into the creamy rice, declaring it a "triumphant breakfast finale" and "the best yet". It was so good we had it for lunch too.

As the end of the day approached, our host took us to Cenang beach to see the sun go down.

Sunset on Pantai Cenang

We sat and ate at Yellow Café with a superb view of the orange sun silhouetting the revellers on the sand, and those still on jet-ski, banana boat or parasail.

Margarita and pizza (not margherita)

As befits the climate, the food was Mediterranean in nature. A green salad liberally doused in thousand-island dressing, and a vegetarian pizza was a perfect accompaniment to our final evening in Langkawi.

After dark, we followed dinner and wine with cocktails at nearby Ruang - a cheap and cheerful bar seemingly cobbled together from wooden packing crates outside a 7-Eleven. The bartenders know what they are doing, though, and we sipped a couple of drinks, including a fairly lethal long island iced tea, which barely saw any of the Coca-Cola mixer.

And that was where any sensible evening should have ended. However, our incorrigible host proposed we go to Sunba for a "quick drink".

The scene in the bar was similar to that which we had witnessed a week ago when visiting: TV screens showed football to glassy-eyed men and their apparently bored girlfriends while a live band played to apparently deaf ears. The atmosphere was friendly but stilted; nobody danced. We sipped a beer and watched the empty dance floor.

The following moments were like the viral video, Harlem Shake, that did the rounds on the internet a few years ago. At one moment, the room of immobile patrons sat, apparently unaware of the music playing, to which only a few lonely souls were moving. At an indistinguishable moment, the scene cut and suddenly everybody was dancing like their lives depended on it. Somehow we had joined (even instigated?) the fray and didn't stop until well gone 3AM  - a time I haven't seen from the sharp end for some years - when we left, having reached an advanced state of refreshment. It was a good night.