01 02 03 My Personal Sailing Adventures - with land trips on the side: Holed up at the Hole in Wall 04 05 15 16 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 31 32 33

Holed up at the Hole in Wall

The Hole in the Wall seen from the Kilim River.
The entrance is almost impossible to spot from the ocean.

Kilim River

Trees grow horizontally here

Yana de Lys at anchor in the Kilim River

Yana de Lys close up

The other captain, driving the dingy

Continuing on we rounded the eastern corner of Langkawi to arrive at the Hole in the Wall anchorage on the north coast, at the mouth of the Kilim River. Apparently this is where the pirates used to hide out before Langkawi was settled.

There are monkeys in the mangroves and lots of monitors swimming in the river. Around one bend I counted 14 sea eagles feeding.

We visited the Gua Kelawar (Bat Cave). At the end we realised we hadn’t seen any bats though, so we started again from the beginning, and there they were, hundreds, maybe thousands of the cute little critters hanging up right at the entrance. We’d been too busy marvelling at the stalactites and stalagmites to notice them before LOL.

There are a couple of fish farms and a floating restaurant just round the corner from our anchorage. When we dropped in to the restaurant for refreshments, Rod asked for a couple of Tiger beers to begin with. “No thank you sir, we only have Skol” was the waitress’s terminally polite reply.

Electricity wires going to the fish farms

Those places get their electricity via cables which snake through the mangroves and over the limestone karsts to a jetty about 20 minutes by tender down the river. At high tide some of the lines hang in the water.

Oh, and now it’s started raining again. We could be here a while…

35 36 37 38