Perdana Resort Kota Bharu

... our tickets for tomorrow....4am start in the morning......blimey!!<br> <br>We have loaded some new pictures on mainly of the town so you have see where we have stayed...the McDonald's here is 24hour and show premiership football on a big screen...heaven.<br>Off to have some liver on a stick and blue rice at the food market. Next update might be in about a week when we come back from the deepest darkest jungles.<br> <br><br>

... of hours later I pick up the bags and head back to the beach to meet Carolyn of her diving crew boat on hop on the sea taxi to the ferry!! Half an hour passes and she still isn't back...just as thoughts start running through my head as to what I would do if she wasn't back and the ferry came, not that there was ever any question I would stay...I'm going to KL and then onto Singapore meaning 24 hours on a bus instead of going straight there just ...

... aftur fullkominn dag a strondinni og vorum ad vesenast allan daginn til ad fara ekki aftur i husid okkar.. Seinna um daginn komum vid i husid, tad atti ekki ad vera neinn matur tannig ad allt atti ad vera i lagi, vid vorum farnar ad hafa ta hefd ad BANKA til ad gestir hefdu tok a ad forda ser adur en vid kaemum inn. I tetta skiptid voru tvilik umhlaup og okkur syndist vid sja 2 rottuskott hlaupa ut og edlan aftur maett a svaedid, vid vorum samt allan timan ad vona ad okkur hafdi bara ...

... all the visitors. I've heard its quite common for people to sleep on the beach after giving up on room hunting. <br><br><br><br>After a short nap, I woke up and went to a nearby dive shop to book a dive. We dove at a shipwreck called the Sugar Wreck. The boat had sank in 2000 so it was a relatively new dive site. Despite being a recent wreck it thrived with sea life. We actually got ...

... to my seat...... concentration to try and make it the rest of the journey! Which I did you must all be happy to hear. We arrived at the bus station which is around 10 minutes out of Krabi Town and had to bargain hard to get into town... eventually we just sat there, refusing to pay their inflated prices.... one guy was very insistent about the price... the other guy quietly came over, silently wrote down on a piece of paper a much more reasonable price... so we followed him! Once in ...

... us the sea is a bit rough and put the thing on full throttle - we spend the majority of the next 25 minutes in the air just touching down onto the water the odd time, it was crazy stuff and not for the faint hearted or those with bad backs! If I hadn't got the safety of a life jacket on me I'd have been a nervous wreck. We had decided to stay on Perhentian Kecil (small island) on Long Beach. We had a guesthouse in mind but when we got there the room ...

... What's Not: my new waterproof camera getting water inside, ants eating the turtle eggs, the mama turtle trying to bury herself, the atmosphere on long beach, price collusion for washing/kilo. Traveller's Tip: having a mosquito net to stop the rat **** falling on your face at night does not make the place higenic, despite what the owner claims.

... sea, panicking when she finally came up and couldn't see anyone else or the boat! We were all waiting on the boat when our driver finally emerged from around the rocks to our wolf-whistles, the girl coming back 30 seconds later to throw us off! Funny stuff. The day before we reluctantly left we walked through the jungle, amidst more huge spiders, and looking out for the python Yohanna had photographed here the week before, to Long Beach ...

... found another bank, and after waiting for the lady in front of us to withdraw money from 3 different cards, we finally got some cash. We quickly found the bus to Kota Bharu and hopped on board. It was only 40km to the town but the ride took 1 and 1/2 hours. Kota Bharu markets itself as "The Islamic Town". And true to it's description, everyone in the city is visably Islamic, women covered in colorful burkas and covering their head with veils and men wearing hats ...

The journey to the Perhentian Islands was quite an ordeal. I can reveal this now without worrying the parentals as I sit safely in mid- Malaysia. To cut a long story short the south of Thailand is not a happy place right now. It has a large Muslim population who would ideally like a separate state. This uprising has met a pretty heavy handed and often (unnecessarily)brutal response from the Thai Govt. I had taken the odd glance at the Bangkok News ...