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Posts tagged langkawi
Goodbye Tanjung Sanctuary Langkawi
2It’s our last night here at Tanjung Sanctuary in Langkawi. As I sit here writing this to you, with the birds chirping and the water washing up onto the beach it reinforces my opinion on just why they call this place a sanctuary.
I’m not a particularly well travelled person – this is my first trip outside of Australia – but I have seen enough of Australia to know when something is extraordinary. Tanjung Sanctuary is exactly that.
From our window, the water below is perfectly blue, the trees and plants surrounding are healthy and green, and the temperature is an almost constant 30 degrees.
I am impressed by the planting that has been done on site here. It is obvious that the owners and managers of Tanjung Sanctuary want to not only maintain, but improve upon the health of the local habitat. The number of staff maintaining the gardens shows just how much they care.
Our time here has been perfect. Granted we are fairly “easy to please” people, but the staff have been extremely helpful, welcoming and flexible, and the quality of our room (and everything in it) is at a standard that we will no doubt be missing during the rest of our trip.
Ultimately, our goals have been met. We intended on our honeymoon being nothing more than a relaxing catch up between the two of us, and that is exactly what we have had.
If you are looking for a relaxing getaway, I could not recommend a better place. Their website is located at www.tanjungsanctuary.com.my.
Love in Langkawi: Tanjung Sanctuary
8It is day three of the official “honeymoon leg” of our trip and Jase and I are completely and constantly blown away by all that Langkawi and Tanjung Sanctuary have to offer.
As the complimentary airport transfer van took us to our resort I was feeling the mixed emotions that I’m sure many tourist feel, seeing the impoverished conditions of some of the locals and feeling as those holidaying westerners are exploiting these people and their beautiful island home. However, on the flip side I feel that it is the tourism that is providing their main source of income. Irrespective of my concerns, I have absolutely loved every minute of our stay here.
Tanjung Sanctuary is an amazing resort. I know that while Jase was researching where to stay he had several, simple criteria that we wanted our accommodation to meet. It wasn’t much, just things like complimentary breakfast and airport transfers, private bungalows and a private beach, in a great environment – and all for a reasonable price. Tanjung Sanctuary certainly fulfills all of that.
The staff have made us feel very welcome and we are definitely getting special treatment. Upon arrival we were told we had been upgraded to a beach view room as it was our honeymoon, and when we arrived at our room after dinner at the restaurant we found a bouquet of roses and a candlelit bathroom scattered with rose petals and smelling of scented oil awaiting us.
Over the last three days we have enjoyed relaxing in our beautiful room or on our balcony, using the gym, laying on the beach lounges and swimming in the clear and calm waters of the private beach. Most recently, we have been kayaking around the coastline – which I really enjoyed. The view from our room is simply breathtaking. Even now as I sit on our bed my eyes cast through the lush greenery of the rainforest trees to the crystal blue waters of the beach, all the while listening to the calming sounds of the waves gently crashing on the shore.
The food has been delicious, with a wide variety to choose from – both from room service and at the restaurant, and I loved the cocktails we sipped on last night while watching the sun set. The prices have been quite reasonable in our opinion (after all, we are at a resort) with meals typically between 30-60MYR.
Quite simply, we are loving it here.
Langkawi Honeymoon
0822 days
Well our week of relaxing is booked. Almost a week anyway – 5 nights. As I’ve mentioned in my flights post, we have a ten day layover in Singapore. At the time of booking the flights we had no idea where we were honeymooning yet, so we just booked for a decent layover to give us some time to rest and relax before the big trip really began.
When looking for accommodation, our prerequisites were:
- Clear, warm water to swim in
- Private villa with nice surrounds
- Reasonably priced food
- Near Kuala Lumpur or Singapore (for convenience)
- Semi affordable
We had no idea how much it was going to cost us, but it was what we wanted. We rarely blow cash on what we want so while we wanted to keep it reasonable, we were happy to spend what we had to get something nice. After all, you only have one honeymoon, right?
After spending literally months trawling through Tripadvisor pages, and searching the net for information on weather and other information, I decided that Langkawi was the place for us to go. The east coast of Malaysia can experience some pretty rough weather through January, so that limited our options a bit.
From there we had plenty of options, but all of them seemed to have a trade off here or there. The service got bad reviews. The rooms weren’t up to standard. The beach wasn’t any good. There was always one thing wrong with it, while everything else about the accomodation was great. I was about to settle for one place that seemed like “the best of the average”..
Tanjung Sanctuary
Then I luckily stumbled across some information about a place called Tanjung Sanctuary. It had bad reviews from the past – the quality of the rooms were average and the service was below par. It has however, recently been refurbished, and from the reviews I have read and the photos I have seen it looks as though it’s done the trick.
I’ve since booked us a “Hilltop Villa”, the least expensive of the three. I wanted to give Jess the best we could get but she reminded me that money saved would help us out later and she’s right. Not to mention there is no difference between all three of the villas, and the beachside villas don’t actually have direct access to the beach. We don’t want to spend the whole time in the villa anyway, so it doesn’t really matter where it is. The Hilltop Villa’s are MYR1200 a night, including breakfast and airport transfers, which works out to roughly AUD$400 with the current exchange rate. So for 5 nights it will be around the $2000 mark. Could be worse..
Tanjung Sanctuary
On 62 acres, with a private beach and only 32 villas to share that all with, I think we should be able to “get away from it all” there. I’m as confident as I’ll ever be that this resort will tick all of our boxes, but only time will tell. Can’t wait!
Tanjung Sanctuary
Booking some cheap flights
0824 days
We booked our flights a little while back. Being the “safe” people that we are, we decided to book early, rather than wait for a killer deal. Because of the uncertainty of the trip, we ended up just booking one way tickets – From Adelaide to Athens via Singapore, flying Singapore Airlines.
It ended up costing us AUD$1050 each. Considering they are one way flights, we were pretty happy for the price. We have a ten day stopover in Singapore.
We booked the flights through Jetabroad. I’ve found them to be the cheapest website for an Australian person to book international flights through, however other people rave about Best Flights too. I think the best idea is to find a few “cheap flights” websites, and just go from there. Search them all regularly until you find what you need, then book. Watch out for hidden fees though, as they can bump up the cost of your once cheap flight.
Since we are getting married in early January, a few weeks before leaving on this trip, we will be taking a week for ourselves before actually backpacking. After flying into Singapore, we will stay two nights, then fly out to Langkawi, in Malaysia for 5 nights, then fly back to Singapore before heading off to Athens.
To get to Langkawi we are flying with Air Asia. Return it is costing us SGD$166.80, which at the time was around AUD$135. Booking directly with Air Asia was the go – it was considerably cheaper booking through them rather than any of the “cheap flights” websites. I’ve heard mixed reviews about Air Asia, but the next cheapest option was Malaysian Airlines for around $440 EACH! We’re going to spend up big on the accommodation for the “honeymoon” part of the trip, so we both decided the cheaper flights were the go. They are only 40 minutes or so anyway, and our connecting flights are days apart, so they shouldn’t be able to screw us over that badly.
So that’s where the flights are at. Once we are in Europe and we know when we want to fly to Canada we’ll start looking for cheap flights to Toronto. I’ve heard that it’s a lot cheaper to fly to somewhere in the US, although I don’t really want to go there. That said, if it’s going to save us a wad of cash I’ll go..
It’s happening!
0826 days
by Jase
in Preparation
We’ve already done some preparation, but I’ve only just organised the website. I’ll try and cover what we have already bought/organised/planned in the next few days. There’s still so much to do!
To set the scene, our current “plans” (we don’t really have any plans, just happy to see where it takes us and happy to change our mind mid-trip) are to fly out to Singapore, then to Langkawi (Malaysia) to honeymoon for a week or so. After that we will fly to Athens in Greece, do some sightseeing, maybe some snowboarding in Greece, and then catch a ferry across to Brindisi in Italy. From there we will make our way up to Udine to meet Jess’ family in Italy and see how they live, eat their food and so forth. After that we will just try and see what we want to see, and go where we want to go.
Europe has some pretty popular tourist destinations but we aren’t real “touristy” people. We will see some of the sights just because we are there at the time but I doubt we will really be going from landmark to landmark. I’m happy to be proven wrong though, so long as we enjoy it.
After we are done spending our money in Europe, we will then head across to Canada to work for the rest of the year. I’d love to live and work in Whistler, so I can ride bikes day in day out but we’ll see. It’s not my trip, it’s our trip. With that said though, Jess seems pretty keen to live the “village life” for a while so it could work.
Who knows though, we might be home a month after we leave!
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