Another day has passed another beautiful experience has been added to memory lane. Today we did a mangrove forrest tour. Remember the resort is vast and contains a huge nature park. Part of the park is a amazing mangrove forrest with beautiful lime stone formations and LOADS of sea eagles and smaller eagles. Langkawi means something like limestone and eagles, the symbol is Langkawi is also an eagle. After yet another nice breakfast and swim we had a small storm which was rather cool. Finally the sea came alive with bigger waves and all that comes with it. We went over a little bit of a rough sea into the river delta where we picked up my mother (as she cannot stand waves and being on a boat, once inside the mangrove forrest the waves disappear). So what is a Mangrove forrest? Mangrove trees are trees that grow in shallow waters on high roots. They basically make their own land over time. The mangrove forrest overhere was one of the few salt water mangrove forrest. Normally nothing can survive in salty water so it is rather special that those trees are able to prosper there. To do so the tree is very ingeniously made like many things in nature. Basically the once we saw had an outer part of the roots that de-ionised the water so the salt would be filtered, the inner part transported the clean water upwards. Because the purification is not perfect the plant would slowly die...to prevent this it disposes the salt by getting all the water out of dying leaves and replacing it with salt....These leaves then fall of the tree and the salt is dumped. But in a warm climate like here the trees would loose too much water by breathing, (just like humans) so they have half of the roots under the soil and half of them above ground and they have less openings under the leaves. It is like breathing through one nose. Furthermore it drops very pointy ingenious beans that grow a plant in one day, it has sort of granade nuts that contain 6 big seeds, etc etc. So all in all the trees are very smart. Although they are all different species they all are about the same height. This is caused by the weight mud can carry, if they grow to big they will sink in the ground or fall. Which is also the reason why they grow so close together, to support each other. The green of the Mangrove forrest is very green and fresh all year around as it is not dependend upon rain overhere, just of the tides, and there is never a day without tide :) Furthermore the Mangrove forrest is a breeding chamber for fish that lay their eggs between the dense system of roots. Besides fishing for crabs the fish are left alone to grow big enough before the go towards the sea.
So that was it about the mangrove forrest. In the forrest we saw many monkeys, (longtail makaken). They used to make charcoal of the trees by a long process that took 7 weeks of heating etc. to make, but due to one of the factories cheating and undermining the future of the forrest they were all shut down. Charcoal is a product we use everyday I found out, to filter the water we drink, in airconditionings, in all confined spaces where we want to filter or get rid of a nasty smell. Our guide, a specialist in the nature overhere, had some good tips like putting charcoal in the fridge in order to prevent fish flavours for instance from penetrating other food etc. btw. something funny happened, we were watching a monkey but I had to hide under the roof as it started to piss right above my head hahaha.....it stinks ;) We also saw swimming monkeys....that is pretty rare, but it was provoked by giving them a few small pieces of food.....The guide told us that they do not do that too often as it spoils their natural ways of doing things which makes sense.
After that we went to feed eagles....loads of them!! This was also a thing that sort of got out of hand....before in the old days the eagles would fly behind the fishing boats as they threw the small fish out of the boat which were too small. The birds gotten to know that and everytime they heard a loud motorboat (fishing boats have a lawnmower engine as it is afordable for the locals) they went for it to eat the small fish that were thrown into the water.....Then tourist guides found out that by reving up their engines the birds would think it was a fishing boat and would come. Then they threw fish in the water and the tourist could see them fish it out of the water....after a while they thought fish is expensive...why not use chicken intestines.....which is completely not natural food for these birds.....and more and more tourist started to come....From 2 boats a day it now can be 15 boats a day and the young birds have become dependend upon this food.....Sad.....But the government and the resort are fighting to slowly go back to 2 trips a day so the birds won't die but they will get back to their natural behaviour again and will of course use only fish to feed them.....I hope they will manage soon, but I trust they will as the Malaysian government is more aware of ecology etc. Our guide was one of the good guys from the resort and he wanted to disturb nature as little as possible. Also by not speeding over the water etc etc. Anyway we were witnesses ourselves of the tremendous spectacular eagles. There were really so so so many it was super impressive!!
Our guide from the resort showed us many other interesting fish and crabs etc and told us a lot about it and I also was captain of our boat for a little while hehe...Tomorrow we want to do an early morning 2 hour nature walk in the same park, the backgarden of the resort. Looking forward to that!!
So see you then
Jody
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