Langkawi is a duty free island which mainly attracts local tourists. We heard there was good diving, cheap beer, and excellent food so we thought we would absolutely love it.

Unfortunately, it was monsoon season so diving wasn’t possible but at least the duty free shops were still open to sell us beer at RM2.40 a can — that’s 50 cents!

Working from Langkawi was difficult though. The wifi was terrible almost everywhere and even our SIM card claiming 4G wasn’t good enough. We only found two places in Cenang to work from which were both the same company!

Here are the two places we worked from:

Smiling Buffalo

A cute little cafe surrounded by nature a RM5 (€1) Grab ride from Cenang beach. It was very relaxing to work here but there is no AC, no power plugs, and the wifi was super shaky.

Huggin Hippo

A nice place to work on Cenang beach with AC and good coffee. The wifi was stable and there were plenty of power outlets, but many of the seats are not suited to working for a long period of time.

Langkawi does have a co-working space — Jetpack Langkawi. Their prices were RM40 daily, RM240 weekly, and RM650 monthly. At €17 a day for us both it was too expensive and because we don’t usually like to work from the same place every day we didn’t want to commit to a longer period. That said, we ended up working from Huggin Hippo every day for a week it might have made sense to use a co-working space this time!

Even though the working situation wasn’t ideal we still managed to get lots of features for Leave Me Alone finished and on our days off we took advantage of a break in the monsoon rain to take the Langkawi SkyCab to visit the SkyBridge!

Overall Langkawi was not our favourite place. There were limited cheap food places — most of the restaurants were live seafood places, Cenang beach was crowded and dirty, and even though the duty free beer prices are super low we didn’t find any drinking culture.

We are sad we didn’t get to dive here but we are heading towards Indonesia for lots of that soon!

Originally published at travel.squarecat.io on 17 Aug 2019