I’ve already mentioned the cable car. I wanted to do something touristy while we were on Langkawi and the one thing that the Teenager and I could agree on was the cable car. Now, I am a fairly sensible and intelligent person. I can find things out and I can make informed decisions. I have been known, however, to end up doing unwise things as a result of some sort of mental block, or persistent and even perhaps deliberate misunderstanding. I understood this clearly when I rode on a roller coaster, having decided in advance what the experience would be like and then finding that it was much less comfortable and less fun than I expected!
So I should I have known. I really should have. Somehow, I heard the words ‘cable car’, and I had even read that the cable car in Langkawi is one of the steepest in the world, but I had a picture in my mind that was much more similar to the funicular railway in Penang. OK, I know now that they are not the same thing. I even knew that then, but there was some sort of mental block telling me that the cable car would be fine. You know what’s coming, don’t you?
We booked a taxi to take us to the cable car and then to some waterfalls nearby. The drive was enjoyable, showing us more of the island and taking us closer to the rainforest-clad hills above which the cable car soars. We found the ticket office and bought ‘express’ tickets, which, like most things in Malaysia, seemed very cheap to us. This meant we bypassed the short queue and were ushered towards the first ‘car’ swinging into the bottom station. Always keen to follow instructions without question, I jumped in, along with the Teenager and three other people.
Then it happened. This tiny, fragile-seeming capsule was launched out into nothingness. It swung about. On a cable. I know, I know, the clue is in the term ‘cable car’ but my brain had not processed the concept of hanging from a cable, suspended from bolts in the roof of the car, being slowly pulled along and up, hundreds of feet above the forest. With absolutely no control over what was happening. No way of stopping or getting out and no staff or officials in there with us. We could see the gap between ourselves and the tops of the trees growing moment by moment. We could see the other cars, some on their way up and others coming down, all swaying and moving so very slowly. I noticed how happy everyone looked. I began to realise how extremely unhappy I was feeling.
I looked at the Teenager opposite me, sitting beside our fellow passengers who were clearly having a great time. The Teenager doesn’t mind heights. He was the one who coached me through my High Ropes adventure. For him, a few years ago I gritted my teeth and endured an eight minute helicopter ride over the Essex countryside just for the experience. Now, he said, ‘this is not fun for me.’ This is a frank admission for an eighteen year-old in public. I knew he was feeling as bad as I was. There was absolutely nothing we could do. The other passengers looked sympathetic and I could not understand why they weren’t suffering like we did. The picture was taken before I decided to close my eyes and pretend I was somewhere else.
Then the steepest part came. ‘One of the steepest cable cars in the world.’ Oh yes, I felt the steepness. It was as if we were being hauled upwards, very slowly, on a pulley. Horrendous. Finally, after a lifetime, we arrived at the ‘middle station.’ This is the half way point where you can get off to look at the view before piling back in to another car to go up to the top. And when it is open, which it wasn’t when we were there, you can go across the ‘sky bridge’ which is just what it says, a structure suspended over nothingness affording, I expect, an amazing view. Neither of us had any intention of going up to the next stage.
We climbed out. My legs were like jelly and I stopped and leaned against the first solid structure I could find. I was so very grateful to be on solid ground, but all too aware that the solid ground I was standing on was at the top of a huge hill, and the only way down was by cable car. Remember that this was in tropical heat, and the hill was covered in thick vegetation and forest. There was no path. I looked at the ‘way down’ and calculated that it would take us about five hours to hike our way down. We would probably need medical attention by that time and what about our taxi driver waiting for us?
We looked at the view which was indeed awe inspiring but awe is also part of awful. One half of me was admiring the landscape, the coast and the extent of the panorama while the other half could only relate the vastness of it all to the fact that the only way down was the same way we had come up. When we weren’t looking at the view, we examined the cable cars soaring past, both going up and coming down. Most of the passengers looked happy and relaxed, even excited. We looked at the outside of the cars. At the bolts attached to the roof, at the cable. We watched the way they swung about and got smaller and smaller against the landscape as they moved further away.
Eventually I agreed to get ready to go back down. We waited as several cars went past. We needed one with spare seats and I scrutinised the passengers for sympathetic-looking ones. At last we saw a car with a couple sitting in it and climbed in. It must have been obvious from the very beginning that I was having a really bad time. I said to the Teenager, ‘shut your eyes!’ He replied that it didn’t work for him. At first, as we edged back down the steepest part, it felt as if we weren’t moving at all. I squinted at the cable and it took me a while to realise that the cable moves with you. Or at least it looks as if it does.
What I did realise, all too vividly, was that solid ground was way, way below us, covered with trees which looked pretty small from where we were. As we moved so very slowly back down, swaying, in the middle of nothingness, all I could do was wait for it to be over. I wasn’t brave; I just sat there and waited in that tiny, helpless capsule, longing for solid ground again.
Eventually it was over. The feeling of relief was wonderful. I bought a gaudy fridge magnet depicting one of the cars so that I could be reminded on a daily basis that I had survived the ordeal. I had learned some things that I probably ought to have known before:
1. Check very carefully that you know what you are letting yourself in for.
2. If you know you are nervous of heights then you probably won’t like swinging about hundreds of feet up in the air.
3. I like to be in control.
I’ve never been skiing because…well…have you seen all that snow? Do you know how cold snow is? And now I think that is probably a good thing because they use those things to get up mountains don’t they?
And when I told my mother about it she said, ‘oh Harriet I wish you had told me you were thinking of doing that! Don’t you remember the terrible experience I had on the cable car to Sentoza [off Singapore] in a storm?’ Ah yes, now I remembered……
