World Traveler

Langkawi is another one of Malaysia’s beautiful islands, Langkawi itself is a huge island but it has loads of smaller islands just off the coast to the south east that are protected Marine National Parks. You can’t stay on the islands but you can take day drips across.

I was travelling with my mum, who is scared of a lot of things, snorkelling being one of them and I was attempting to help her through her fears one by one by forcing her into doing things and so far it was working. She agreed to come with me on the snorkelling trip, even though the thought of swimming with a goldfish freaked her out – she was in for a big surprise!

We arrived at the marine national park and were provided with snorkelling gear, we both entered the water from the beach and even a metre from the beach there were fish galore of all different shaped and sizes and amazing colours. I have been snorkelling in a lot of places but I have never seen such amazing fish, and there were loads of them too.

My mum was doing well and stayed in the water a good ten minutes, that was until a five foot long reef shark swam up to her! She obviously freaked out and made a swifty exit from the water and refused to get back in! Reef sharks generally don’t attack humans and were fairly happy for me to swim with them so I wasn’t scared, that was until I cut my leg on some barnacles under the pier. The barnacles ripped through my leg in four different places and looked like I had been slashed by ‘Freddy Kruger’ and I was surrounded by a cloud of blood. I knew that Reef sharks don’t usually attack but I also know that sharks are attacked by blood so I swam as quickly as I could to shore.

When the other swimmers saw the blood pouring from my leg the water cleared pretty quickly as I guess most of them presumed I had been attacked by a shark (there was enough blood for it!) Despite my gashes it was an amazing day and I am definitely going back for more!

Read about more animal encounters……