The next morning I took a small road turn off and started cycling up a steep hill into the jungle, just to see what it was like. The general flatness of Thailand meant that I hadn’t done many steep hills recently and my legs soon convinced me against progressing further. So I settled for stopping and eating breakfast whilst watching monkeys swinging high up in the canopy. I also saw a racket-tailed drongo fly over and considered my jungle expedition well and truly successful, congratulated myself, and headed back down the steep hill as soon as breakfast was over.

Next I headed to the south of the island, and had to make a brief detour into town to find an ATM and get some cash. Langkawi is Malaysia’s number one holiday destination and I’d heard that the whole of the south of the island is built up and busy with tourism, which was basically the reason why I’d curved up around to the north. I got my cash and then headed for the ferry terminal in the south-east corner. Nearing it I found an interesting and empty park and my bird spotting reached new heights when I saw a giant eagle. It was absolutely huge.

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The hour-long ferry ride to the mainland was horrendous. The boat was packed to the rafters and I was squeezed in between two fat men who spent the entire time competing to see who could make the most disgusting body noises. It was one to forget, and certainly by the time I collapsed out onto the dock on the other side I was happy to return to the roads. Sure, boats had proved useful in moving me quite a way south, showing me tropical islands along the way and giving my legs a rest, but you can’t beat the freedom and unsinkability of the bicycle.

I emerged by the city of Alor Sitar, affectionately referred to by everyone as Alor Star (Malaysians have a habit of shortening words.) Traffic was a bit hectic, and there were certainly motorcycles going the wrong way, but at least there wasn’t much horn beeping. I stopped to try and use wifi at a gas station, and one of the attendants, a Bangladeshi man named Oman, was very keen to help me. He ran around trying to get my two-pin plug in the three-hole Malaysian electrical sockets, without success. I had to walk quite a long way to find a store that had an adaptor, an ambitious trek that tested my worn-out five-dollar shoes to their limits. Still, having a hole in the bottom of my shoe was nothing new to me, and I decided they would be fine for a bit longer. I returned to the gas station and used the wifi, decided I liked Oman a lot less when he started telling me that I must have lots of money (look at my shoes, dude), and then cycled out of town to the east. I was soon out into wide open farmland. I was able to use small roads here and they were quite pleasant to cycle on, but I’d also heard that cycling in Malaysia was generally difficult and that in much of the country it was hard to find good roads to ride on. Greater challenges lay ahead.