Wonders and blissful beaches

Langkawi is an archipelago of exotic isles Malaysia - Arabstoday No one recognised Charlize Theron when she booked into the Langkawi Four Seasons hotel last year. It’s that kind of place. Megastars go off-duty, recharge and escape. Langkawi, part of Malaysia, is an archipelago of steamy crags 20 miles west of the Malay peninsula in the Straits of Malacca, roughly where Malaysia joins Thailand. A community of farmers and fishermen shares it with exotic fauna, fish and birdlife. Columns of limestone soar vertically from the sea. Wildlife gives Langkawi its name, which comes from the Malay word for eagle. It’s home to southeast Asia’s first Unesco ‘geo-park’, an area of prehistoric rock formations and was where scenes from Anna And The King were shot. The human side is devoted to padi fields and meadows grazed by mud-caked buffalo whose milk produces mozzarella. ‘Langkawi is what Phuket and Bali were like 40 years ago before the concrete mixers moved in,’ one local told me (although Lafarge does have a cement factory here). Protected by the Malay peninsula to the east and Sumatra to the west, the archipelago has a tropical climate that suits year-round tourism — about 30c by day and 28c by night. An island-hopper’s tour of the region would take in Phuket in Thailand for all-night parties; Penang for exotic food and architecture; and Singapore for a throbbing metropolis. These lie within a few hundred miles of Langkawi, yet it maintains an out-of-the-way feel and has been spared the great urban biomass. ‘Five cars is a traffic jam,’ one local told me. The Four Seasons gazes northwards across the Andaman Sea towards the Thai island of Ko Terutao. Its 48-acre grounds are Langkawi’s answer to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon: acre after acre of pool, lawn, incandescent flowerbed and an arboretum of palms, frangipani, tamarind and wild mango serve as playground and larder for squirrels, monkeys and fruit bats. A pair of friendly monitor lizards and several cats take care of pest control, while 70 gardeners look after the rest. Ninety-one ‘unique accommodations’ — 68 private pavilions, 23 villas — are strung out along one mile of beach. Unlike in the Caribbean, you never feel you’ve stumbled into a catwalk show or crashed a horrific cocktail party from Surrey. It takes time to acclimatise to the beauty of the place — and with 400 staff, you will want for nothing. You could easily feed a family on the fresh fruit and nibbles that kept appearing in my villa. However, even with the beach bar cocktails and the sublime Malaysian food, keeping in shape is not a problem: there is a gym and tennis court, and the grounds are so expansive and beautiful that you can keep fit and in shape simply by cycling around the tropical gardens. About the only drawback was the hello-fatigue from the continual smiling and nodding to the  gardeners who keep this paradise looking, well, paradisiacal. The best thing about my villa is the vast beach lapped by the dolphin-filled Andaman. After dark on the verandah, I sit out in the soft, balmy night. One morning, Aidi Abdullah, resident naturalist, taks me by boat to confront the bewildering wildlife of upriver Malaysia. ‘Nature-based tourism here is almost on a par with Borneo,’ he says, navigating into a narrow channel that marks the entry to Langkawi’s mangrove — a forest caught between land and sea. With roots exposed to air and tides, the trees filter out salt from seawater. As we sail deeper, it becomes a steaming, leech-haunted, cobra-infested nightmare. Macaques — small monkeys — play on the shoreline while kites and eagles circle overhead. ‘When the trees die,’ says Abdullah, ‘they sink into the mud, taking their carbon with them. A mangrove is a carbon bank, or tomorrow’s oil well.’