I have decided to not post this part of the journey until we were home and everything was OK. Nigel’s fine and is completely on the mend. Rule for life, no point in worrying everyone while you are still overseas.

We had a jacuzzi in our room on Langkawi which is where the issue started. We had decided that the jacuzzi would make an awesome washing machine for our clothes. We’d done it before with jacuzzi’s and it works really well. Nigel was affixing the window magnetic mesh to the inlet using duct tape when he slipped and fell backwards onto a really horrific corner unit of the jacuzzi. He was in a lot of pain.

We made the call that we needed to go to have it seen to and make sure it wasn’t something spinal and so assumed we would need to go to hospital to have it checked out and so our first call was the insurance. Don’t worry we’re here to help. Call us if he gets admitted. Get receipts for anything else.

We then called reception: “we think we will need to go to a doctor or hospital” “leave it to us” they said. Next thing a team from the hotel turned up and advised they had called the ambulance. They gave an initial assessment and then waited until the ambulance arrived. They gave us a guy to accompany us to the hospital as an interpreter and the contact details of anyone else at the hotel if we needed them. When the ambulance arrived they strapped Nigel to a back board and put him in the ambulance, we then spent 50 minutes driving to the A&E. I kept telling Nigel that it was just around the next corner and that we were 10 minutes away, I’m not sure that it helped. It was an incredibly uncomfortable ride on bad roads in an old van with no suspension strapped to a backboard.

When we arrived the ambulance crew pulled the gurney out and promptly dropped Nigel down onto the ground. It was actually as horrific as it sounds. However Nigel felt that the drop put something back in place as he felt a bit better afterwards. We entered A&E and I was left to face the paperwork while Nigel was taken through the doors. The front office manager from the hotel was amazing and translated and made sure I was ok. He stayed with us every minute and helped to get me behind the doors to see Nigel. He also bought me a short customer service survey from the ambulance. Rating from 1-5 on the ambulance service? I said “I give it a 1, mainly on account that they dropped him!”

The hospital was basic, very basic. But the doctor spoke English and they sent Nigel for x rays to see if anything was broken. As it turned out there were no breaks and so he was sent on his way with a sprained muscle, 3 days of tramadol and a week of paracetamol. The whole experience cost us $80 NZD. Our front office manager organised our transfer back to the hotel and made sure we were ok. I have to absolutely take my hat off to the hotel Berjaya Langkawi Resort. They jumped into action, provided us with a full time support person. Organised transfers and food and breakfast and special pick up and delivery service. As we checked out they approached us to say “please let us know how you go, please message us, we really care”. That’s hotel service for you, the next day we were still receiving WhatsApp messages seeing how we were going and if they could be any help. We are so grateful for the help and support of the Malaysian people. Some genuinely good people at a time we needed them.

The next morning Nigel had decided that enough was enough and he just wanted to go home. I’d been thinking it too. We rang the insurance company and they needed the medical report to assess before determining the next steps for us. Key issue is the Langkawi hospital records department not open until Monday and it was Saturday. Our options were very limited and there were virtually no flights out of Asia to NZ. The insurance company also was concerned that the airlines wouldn’t let him on a flight and so their advice was to stay put. We knew that we couldn’t stay put in Langkawi as it was too remote. Literally no flights out of Asia for weeks (after our current return flight out of Bangkok). It was also very difficult to get from Langkawi to anywhere after all the ferries and most of the flights have not started back since covid.

We had a big talk, one of those you don’t often have to have talks. What do we do now? We both knew that the money didn’t matter we would pay whatever we needed to do to make the right decision for the circumstance. But there weren’t any options for us apart from the original flight. We both knew that covid would be a part of this trip we just didn’t know it was flight availability out of Asia that would be the issue. After googling all our options Nigel decided that he was making an executive decision that we would carry on with the original plans and go to Thailand where he would rest and recover on an island. When we knew we had no other option we both chose our attitude and made the decision. We would utilise all the hotel porters to carry the luggage and get the hotel transfer to meet us on arrival. Turns out it was the right decision. Nigel got gradually better every day on the island and we then took the original flight back. So off to Thailand we went. At least we had stocked up on cheap paracetamol in Vietnam.

Update: Nigel has been to the doctor in New Zealand who also said it was a sprained muscle and prescribed muscle relaxant’s, anti inflammatory’s and Physio. We are so lucky.

So we returned to Langkawi Malaysia for a second time since we left a baby Stefan with his grandparents so we could have a week off being parents. We had been working offshore for seven months and we just needed a break. We are forever grateful for our short respite and Stefan has no recollection or adverse affects from the short time away. Plus we bought him a giant Pooh Bear to make up for it so we get 10/10 for parenting.

Langkawi to us was mainly to enjoy the wildlife. Our first time we encountered so much natural wildlife in our resort and so we hoped to be able to see that again. We were not disappointed. Monkeys everywhere. The vicious macaque monkeys roamed the street but the adorable dusty faced monkey with their black faces and white eyes also loved the resort. We saw huge families taking over a hotel balcony and staying until the rain gave up. The hotel had signs saying keep your windows and door closed and locked so the monkeys don’t come in. The macaques have learned how to open sliding doors and are really cunning little shits! My immediate thought was to save the fruit from breakfast to then entice the monkeys to our balcony. I will befriend the monkeys and they will happily eat fruit from my hand. They will love and worship me and I will get a million cute photos with them. Perhaps a little grape trail from the main road?

Well that’s when Nigel completely put his foot down and unreservedly said that I was banned from tempting the monkeys. He cited a small incident in Bali years ago that we now refer to as the monkey debacle. “You cannot save the fruit from breakfast to feed to the monkeys and aside from that we did not pay to get the rabies shot”. So I did not leave a fruit trail but the monkeys came anyway. They would leap onto the balcony and violently shake the furniture to show their dominance. At breakfast after the torrential downpours the monkeys would run from the trees to the beach and off to who knows where. We saw long tailed squirrels as well dancing from tree to tree. We took a cable car to the top of the island and had some amazing views. While we were there we saw people going to buy bags of popcorn only to have a macaque leap on their head and steal it two minutes later. People would be screaming and popcorn would be flying but the macaque’s would always win.

We moved to a second resort for a couple of nights which had typical Malaysian houses for rooms. Completely open to the elements with small shutters on all the windows and a steep climb up the stairs into the room with mosquito nets and guerrilla warfare type mosquito advice. In the morning we found some massive teeth marks on our half eaten soap in the bathroom. I can only imagine what would have happened if I’d encountered whatever it was in the middle of the night. We love living with the wildlife and we’re happy to have once again been a part of it.