Bernie and Graham's big adventure: Pentai Cenang

Langawki has taken a beating with international border closures during the Covid. Locals say visitor numbers have fallen by more than 70% , this has a significant impact as tourism accounts for almost 90% of the island's economy.

We are certainly seeing this as we walked to the little beach village to check out the shops and find some fresh fruit to buy. It is extremely quiet, the beach pretty much deserted and the usual jet ski and paragliding vendors nowhere to be seen as there's just no customers for them.

Very little traffic in a street that would normally be clogged with scooters, cars and shoppers.

Lots of shops shut.

How the shops selling beach balls and straw hats survive is beyond me.

Even the marketing strategy for this restaurant couldn't save them, see pic below.

It's so quiet the Langkawi dogs just lay down in the middle of the road and the odd car drives around the dogs.

The cat in the picture below sleeping on shop entrance mat was in cat dreamland - it's paws and whiskers were moving at a rate of knots while it was sound asleep in the heat.

We found fresh coconuts and melons for sale! Coconut about NZ$3.50 and melon about NZ$5.70 which is jolly good!

Construction sites that were put on hold are slowly cranking up. We saw the big Park Royal beachfront hotel complex site active while many of the smaller building sites we passed looked deserted and shut down. You have to hope they employ locals. I wonder if they will fill these mega hotels once completed? While international travel has only recently restarted there are few Western tourists that we can see. With cheap flights within Asia perhaps their target market is domestic tourisim?