Pulau Payar Nature

Pulau Payar Marine Park is a magnificent piece of paradise off Langkawi.

There are a few stretches of white beach on Pulau Payar which you can have all to yourself, with a few friends.

The number of marine fish that swim up to you in the warm waters in Pulau Payar is simply astounding. The fish take tidbits readily from your hand but watch out for sharks and large fishes with powerful jaws that could seriously injure you finger during feeding times.

The fish being fed from the dock with bread and bisquits. In a short while, more will come to join in the crazy frenzy to the delight of onlookers.

The deeper waters is where the bigger fish come to play such as parrot fish, spotted cod, snappers and black-tipped sharks.

Islands ~ Pulau Payar

Pulau Payar is an little island 19 nautical miles off Langkawi. This tropical paradise is breath-takingly beautiful and despite its size, has more than ample stretches of beaches to explore and have all to yourself. The island is filled with lush greenery and the warm waters teeming with thousands of colourful marine fish that swim eagerly up to you, hoping for morsels of food.

Ferries provide daily trips to the island from Kuah in Langkawi. You can also visit the island from Penang or Kuala Kedah. A basic pacakge from any of the operators would be to bring you to Pulau Payar, a trip that takes around an hour by ferry, with lunch in the afternoon and back to Kuah by evening. While you're on the island, you can choose to explore the forest through a trail or just relax on the inviting beach.

Snorkeling gear is provided by the tour operators and you'll definitely want to get into the water to observe the marine life. The immediate waters around the beach are filled with corals, and consequently, thousands of small, colourful marine fish call this place home. A string of floats is placed about 60-meters from the beach as a safety boundary, for the waters drop in depth dramatically from that point onwards.

The average depth before the safety boundary is about 4-meters deep, shallow enough for you to see clearly the fish, shrimps and eels dancing around the corals with snorkeling goggles. A common practice is to feed the fish with bisquits and bread from the dock, or even from the beach. The fish will swarm the area in the thousands and take food right off your hand. Do watch out for the large fishes such as the parrot fish and snappers as they have powerful jaws and you do not want them to chomp on your hand!

Pulau Payar is also a popular place to swim with baby black-tipped sharks. These sharks will swim eagerly in the shallows but nobody feeds them due to a past incident where a visitor got a little part of his finger removed by a baby shark. The story goes that he was feeding the sharks with raw fish, and that's when the incident happened.

Amazingly, the beautiful forest on the island is quite pristine, yet seems to be missing an important element; snakes. A quick exploration of the island through the trail will show you just how empty this place is of snakes. Every rock and wood unturned, careful observation of tree trunks and branches and even rummaging through the bed of leaves will yield no snakes.

An investigation by interviewing the tour operators revealed that the authorities had removed all the snakes from the island over a certain time period in the past. How has this affected the ecology of the island? For starters, Pulau Payar is literally crawling with hundreds of skinks. The skinks are everywhere with no major predator to keep their populations in check. Also, the birds on the island seem to be few and far-between. A proper survey done by qualified researchers might turn up more results but one thing's for sure; the forest on the island just doesn't feel too right if you're into herpefauna.

It is unfortunate that ignorance has once again disturbed a precious ecosystem in the name of tourism. The snakes were removed because the commercial tour operators were afraid of tourists getting bitten. Rather than education, the authorities blindly removed an important part of the natural equation. Only time will tell how this plays out for Pulau Payar's ecological future. Meanwhile, you can just enjoy swimming with the fishes in Pulau Payar.

A juvenile black-tipped shark. This relatively docile shark species used to be abundant. Today, their numbers have dwindled though you can still swim with one or two that come by frequently to the shallows.