How come we moved to Langkawi and teach yoga here?
This is the most common question that everyone asked us…
We didn’t choose Langkawi actually…
Either it was Langkawi that chose us or the universe wants us to be here…
We had no idea at all that we will be living in Langkawi one day, and teach yoga in this place. We went to Koh Lipe with our friends from Austria for holidays in January 2009.
The easiest way to get to Koh Lipe from Kuala Lumpur was to take the flight from KL to Langkawi and then take the speed boat from Langkawi to Koh Lipe. We didn’t plan to stay in Langkawi at all. We didn’t even think of to take a look at Langkawi either. We had no idea at all how Langkawi is, and had no interest to know about it either…
We wanted to stay in Koh Lipe for our entire holidays for 17 nights. And so we booked our return flight tickets to go back to KL 17 days later. Marc, my husband went to Bangkok before and he would get a 30 days tourist visa stamp. We thought that we would get a one month tourist visa upon arrival in Thailand.
As soon as we arrived in the Langkawi Airport, straightaway we took a taxi to bring us to the jetty at Telaga Habour where the speed boat will go from. About 90 minutes later we arrived in Koh Lipe, a very beautiful island with clear water and white sandy beach.
When we got to the immigration booth in Koh Lipe to get back our passports, the immigration officer gave my Malaysian’s passport a 30 days visa stamp and gave my husband’s Irish passport a 14 days visa stamp… We didn’t know that they had made a new regulation that coming into Thailand by land or by sea can only get a 14 days visa for foreigners, but Malaysian will still get a 30 days visa.
We asked the immigration officer on how could we extend his visa for another 3 days? They told us that the only way was to come back to Malaysia and go back to Thailand again… And this would cost a lot more than if we just stay in Langkawi for the last 3 days of our holiday, and then flew out from Langkawi on the day according to the flight tickets that we had booked… And thus, we decided to cut short our holidays in Koh Lipe and stay 3 days in Langkawi instead, unwittingly without any intention…
After spending 2 weeks in the beautiful clear water island of Koh Lipe, doing yoga asana practice on the beach everyday, snorkeling and collecting beautiful sea shells, and enjoying delicious Thai food on the island, we left Koh Lipe and came to Langkawi island… We didn’t really know where to head to…
We met some other tourists in koh Lipe said that Pantai Cenang is the most popular place in Langkawi and there are some budget guest-houses to choose from. We jumped on to a shared van taxi with some other tourists and they were heading to Pantai Cenang as well. Each of us paid 10 Ringgit for the 30 minutes ride…
The taxi driver let us out in front of AB Motel. But they had no room for us… We walked along the street carrying our backpack and looked at several places to stay, but they were either fully booked or they were too expensive for us.
At last, we found this Amzar Motel for 50 Ringgit a night… It’s a simple accommodation but we didn’t expect too much. But we had some noisy neighbours quarreling in the middle of the night… We didn’t sleep very well.
On the next day, we spent our time walking along the street of Pantai Cenang and strolled on the beach. The beach was nice but fulled of jet-skies, some motorbikes, cars and four wheeled drives (on the beach?), and tourists… The sea water was not as clear as in Koh Lipe… But it was very calm. We went for a swim in the sea… Well, we didn’t find the place any interesting.
On the second day, we decided to take a taxi to the town of Kuah… The taxi fare was not cheap. It was 24 Ringgit one way. We got down in front of a duty free shop. We were not really interested to do any shopping. And so, we walked around the shophouses and we came to Trimula. We saw there was a vegetarian restaurant and we went for a look at their menu, but it wasn’t appealing for us as the dishes were pre-cooked and already sitting out there for some time… They had other dishes that can be cooked fresh when you place order, but most of them were deep fried mock meat stuffs which we didn’t really want to eat…
The restaurant owner was a very friendly man. He has a touring company and car rental business as well just right next to the restaurant. We asked him what were the interesting things to do and places to visit in Langkawi. He said that the best way to get around Langkawi was to rent a car… He was right about that. Due to the expensive taxi fare in Langkawi and there were no public transport like buses, it would be cheaper to rent a car to explore the entire island.
He gave us some discount for a small car at 80 Ringgit a day. I think it was Suzuki Swift. And so, we went exploring the island with a guide map with us from him. We drove towards the highway (Yes, it was a very good highway on the island from Kuah town straight to the airport…), and turn into a side road which led us to the middle of the island. We saw the sign for Gunung Raya and drove up to Gunung Raya with a nearly empty fuel tank (Oops! We forgot to fill up the petrol tank before we went…). It was quite nice when we were up there because of the cooler temperature and the view from the top… That gave Langkawi some extra points… We managed to come back down to a petrol station to fill up some petrol.
We continued our journey and came to a waterfall, the Durian Perangin waterfall near the Air Hangat Village Hot Spring. We followed the path that led us up to the waterfall. Along the path was surrounded by rain forests. The air was so fresh and cooling. It was a small waterfall with very powerful water pressure coming down from the top. It has a big enough pool for dipping in. The energy there was really great! It had been a long time we had not experienced such an energetic waterfall and rain forest. We both liked this waterfall very much, especially my husband. He is a man of nature. He finds peace in the nature… This waterfall gave us a different impression on Langkawi.
After the waterfall, we continued exploring the island and came to the hot spring. It was nothing much there. It wasn’t renovated yet that time, and lack of maintenance. But now it is renovated and looks brand new with some hot spring Jacuzzi rooms. And from there we drove along the road passing by some villages and there was rain-forest as well as some rubber plantations along the road. This experience of driving on the road with the trees and mountains that we can see along the road and not high rise buildings, gave us great impression about Langkawi Island. We stopped by at the Black Sand Beach and the Craft Complex. That gave Langkawi another few more points.
That evening we went back to Pantai Cenang with complete different point of view about Langkawi. Langkawi was not just Pantai Cenang as what we (or some other tourists) thought it was. It has some other beautiful features, nature, waterfalls, rain forest, mountains, mangroves, river, nice beaches and mellow pace of lifestyle… It depends mostly on tourism. It is a touristic place but it is also suitable for living…
On the next day we came back to the city of Kuala Lumpur… We both had a strong feeling about Langkawi, and that led us to booked another return flight tickets to Langkawi due to AirAsia had great promotional air fare during that time. And so, we took 3 days off from our yoga classes in Kuala Lumpur and came back to Langkawi again in less than two months later. On this trip, we were mainly coming here to see if there was any suitable houses for us to stay and to teach yoga…
We told each other that if we could find a house that was suitable for us to live in and to teach yoga at the same time, then we would move up here… We believed that if we could find a house to rent, then it was meant for us to be here. It was not so easy to find a house to rent in Pantai Cenang area due to it is a popular location for foreigners to rent a house here for long stay. And if we couldn’t get a suitable house to rent, then it wasn’t meant for us to be here, and we would go back to Kuala Lumpur happily continued teaching yoga there to the regular daily drop in Malaysian students if that’s the case.
At that time and still is, most of the good condition houses here were occupied by foreigners already. What left were some half-built houses which need a lot of renovation works done before moving in…
We did think of wanting to move to some other places where we will be closer to the nature… I didn’t mind living in the city of Kuala Lumpur, I was contented living there for many years… But, if there is a choice I would prefer to live in a village near the nature just like when I was growing up… One day about one year ago before we moved to Langkawi, I painted a painting that was about a wooden house near the beach with mountains and coconut trees surrounding it… Actually since I was little, I always dreamed of living in a house by the seaside… And the house that I painted was similar to the house that we found in Langkawi later. Although Langkawi wasn’t in our plan at all in the first place.
There we were, in Langkawi again, looking for a house to rent which is not too close to the busy street of Pantai Cenang, but yet close enough for people to walk from Pantai Cenang… We wanted to look for a house that is surrounded with nature and not too close to other houses or the road… We also looked for a house that has a big enough living room that we can teach a few people in a yoga class… We also looking for a house that is within our budget… Under all these conditions that we requested, it wasn’t easy for us to find a suitable house…
We found another budget place to stay this time for 45 Ringgit a night at the Shirin Guest House… Again, we didn’t expect anything from this room. The lady owner was a very nice Japanese lady named Hiroko. She married to an Iranian man and had been living in Langkawi for many years… She also had been to India for two years studying Yoga… She is a very “strong” lady in her heart, even though from her appearance she is just a tiny skinny lady.
The best way to look for a suitable house, was to go around this area by feet. And so, we walked around the villages behind the Pantai Cenang street. It was hot and sunny, but we were determined. We asked a few villagers about vacant houses and told them our interest in looking for a house to rent. Some people asked why didn’t we buy a house instead? The truth is, we couldn’t buy any properties in that area because all the lands and houses here are Malay Reserved, and even though as a Malaysian citizen, I was not allowed to buy any of the properties here on the island except a few freeholds properties in Kuah town that were not Malay Reserved which the price is ridiculously expensive… Anyway, we wasn’t looking forward to buy any properties here… We don’t have much money and we don’t really have to own anything…
We looked and looked, and asked… Some people showed us some houses, but either they were near the noisy main road, or they were too close to some other houses, or they were too far to walk from the beach, or they were too small for teaching classes, or the rentals were out of our budget… We talked to a few people and gave them our contact numbers to call us if they heard there was any houses for rent… We left it for the universe to decide.
We were quite tired from walking for a few hours under the hot sun for two days, and decided to just take the rest of our last evening time to relax on the beach. We changed into our swimming attires and was about going to the beach… The phone rang… I answered the phone and the caller asked me in Malay if we were still interested to look for a house to rent? Why not? We told ourselves that this would be the last house that we looked… If it wasn’t the right one, then it meant that we were not meant to be here…
And so, we changed back into our clothings and went to meet up with these people that wanted to bring us to see a house… We came to a road where we had walked pass before in the afternoon. we arrived at a side road where there was a sign saying “Wrong Place”… We saw that sign earlier, and thought it was funny. Then we came to the end of the road with a little Malay wooden house standing there elegantly… The first thing we had in mind was, “Yes! A very beautiful wooden house surrounded by nature, away from the main road and other houses but yet close enough to walk from the beach…” But we still had not see the inside of the house yet and we didn’t know how much was the rental…
This house was about 150 years old. The owner bought it from somewhere else, took down the woods piece by piece with numbers written on it, and then brought it here to be resembled back into a house on this piece of land which belongs to the family. It had a small balcony to sit out looking over the garden and the rice padi fields…
They opened the door for us to get in… The living room was big enough to accommodate 6 – 8 people. Then they opened the windows on the three sides of the living room… The sunlight and the breeze rushed in… It was so beautiful!
There was a small kitchen that can only fit one person at a time, and a small bathroom that we couldn’t stretch out our arms… There was a medium sized bedroom and another small room which we could use as an office… It was almost perfect except that the kitchen was really small as my husband loves cooking and we were planning to do all the cooking ourselves for the yoga retreats beside teaching daily yoga classes…
And we discussed about the rental… It was great! the rental was within our budget although it was considered a very high price in the village for the locals… It was liked more than double the price of what it should be for a house like that. Due to the house, the location and the environment were exactly what we were looking for, we didn’t want to bother about it as it was still within our budget…
And so, we paid them one month deposit to reserve the house… We told them that we could only move in at least two months later for us to settle all our classes in Kuala Lumpur… They didn’t mind.
We came back to Kuala Lumpur the next day and were excited about our unexpected decision to move to Langkawi… At first, we thought that we could finish all our classes in two months time and move to Langkawi in June, but it wasn’t. We had to take another one month to settle everything… We called the owner’s brother who was the one in charge of the house, about our delay for moving to Langkawi… He told us that there was no problem at all… They didn’t charge us any extra rental either…
In less than two weeks time before we moved, my husband went for a 10 days Vipassana Meditation retreat in Malaysia. He came back on the day before we moved… And so, I was busy with packing our stuffs into boxes while he was gone… And when he came back from the retreat, we were ready to go. Since my husband loves to cycle but due to the heavy traffic and air pollution in Kuala Lumpur, he didn’t feel like want to do any cycling in the city… And so we thought that it would be great that he could do some cycling when we moved to Langkawi living in a village area with no heavy traffic or air pollution, we went to PJ Old Town and bought him a new bicycle on that day. But, as he cycled back to our condominium in Taman Sri Manja, one of the tyres got punctured… And so, we had to detached the wheel from the bicycle and brought it back to the shop to repair it… We were really busy that day! But we enjoyed every moment of it…
On the next day the 10th of July, we arranged a six wheeled lorry to bring our furnitures and stuffs… And we drove our little Kelisa towards Langkawi… We spent one night half way in Ipoh. On the next day, we arrived at Kuala Kedah and sent our car to the car ferry and we took the passenger ferry to Langkawi… We stayed overnight in a motel in Kuah town near the Jetty Points where the passenger ferries come in.
On the next morning we took a taxi to the car ferry at Dermaga Tanjung Lembung to collect our car and drove to our new home in Pantai Cenang… It was monsoon time and it rained all day when we were coming from Ipoh to Kuala Kedah… But it didn’t rain at the time we arrived at our new home and our lorry also had arrived soon after us… We moved all our furnitures and stuffs into the house just before it started to rain again…
And what we found out after that was, this wooden house was already been empty for six months when we saw it… It was strange that a good condition beautiful house like that would sit empty for six months because this area is a popular location for long stay tourists to rent a house… And the rental wasn’t too expensive. And another thing was, there were other people looked at the house before, and they wanted to rent the house but the owner declined to rent to them… And the owner did want to rent the house to a couple who were millionaires, but the couple didn’t take it as they said the kitchen was too small for them… And so, the house was sitting empty for six months until we saw it. And it was empty for a total of nine months before we moved in…
The house was there waiting for us to come, all that time…
Now, we had rented another house about 3 minutes walk from our yoga studio with bigger kitchen and dining hall to prepare the meals for our yoga retreats… We also had moved in to this house about three months ago, and let the wooden house just be the yoga studio for doing the yoga classes…
This was the story for the answer of the question that everyone asked us…
We didn’t choose Langkawi but Langkawi chose us…
We did make the effort to be here… And we spent quite a lot of money for moving and for getting the business license… We didn’t see teaching yoga as a business. We didn’t really need a business license to teach yoga to anyone… But when we went to the city hall to enquire about it, the head officer advised us to apply for a business license anyway… We wanted to do it the proper way legally, as it was quite a sensitive issue here about running yoga classes in a Muslims predominant village area…
The business license took more than a year for it to come through… What happened was, the business license department people were not very sure about what was going on with the yoga fatwa thing. They didn’t know whether they could give us the permission to teach yoga here. And so, they held our application for more than six months and then they sent our application to the mosques to get their advice whether we could teach yoga here… And after another few more months, the mosques finally gave us the permission with a special request that we cannot take any Muslims of any origins for attending any of our yoga classes and retreats activities… Or else our business license would be terminated, and we wouldn’t be allowed to teach yoga here on Langkawi anymore… Well, we still want to teach yoga to so many other people who come here to learn and practice yoga… And thus we respected and followed the rules and regulations that were applied to us.
For understanding more about the terms and conditions of our business license that forbids us from teaching yoga to Muslims, please click on this link to read about it… And for understanding more about yoga is unconditional and unlimited by any names and forms, please click on this link to read about it…
For applying the business license, we needed to apply for a temporary yearly renewal building permit for the house… And that also used up lots of money and took another few months before we could actually apply for the business license which took about a year altogether… We were living on my husband’s savings for many months before the classes and retreats taking off… We didn’t give up nor worried about it. I believe the universe will take care of everything… And it did.
We will continue to teach yoga here, unless the universe wants us to be at somewhere else…
Om shanti.
This video below was taken when we were in Koh Lipe
