So touristic beach life

I: Getting to the east coast was very easy and it took us only seven hours by a nice bus with declining seats to sleep in. Everything in Malaysia seems so effortless! It really is a tourist paradise - but maybe not a backpacker country. Although, we didn't see anything else in Malaysia except KL and the Perhentian islands, so we can't say for sure.

Senja Bay

Kecil is the smaller island out of the two Perhentian islands and it's the less 'resorty' as the bigger island, Besar. Kecil is quite small and there's only two beaches on different sides of the island where there's a choice of accommodation. We stayed in Coral Bay, which is not so good for swimming because just off the beach there's a dead coral reef (yeay tourists :( So every day we crossed the island to the other side to Long beach, but it's less tha n10 minute walk -no big deal. Our place to stay was really nice, so we didn't want to move. The hut was quite big and clean and housekeeping worked :)

View

Long beach is a nice one with clear and clean water. But the big down side is that the island was full of tourists, mostly Swedes it felt like! In a few days I heard more Finnish than in two months! It felt quite strange. Anyway we spent a total of nine days in Perhentian, but we had a good reason for it. Now we are both certified PADI Open Water divers thanks to Maz, our instructor in Matahari divers. He did an excellent job and now we can't wait to do some more diving in Thailand. Maybe even do the more advanced course if we feel like it. Such an experience to get to know the under water world, but we spent four full days for the course, so it felt quite requiring now when we're on holiday mode ;) Fortunately the course wasn't very difficult and we both passed the final exam quite easily (so we're not completely brain dead after all :). We've seen the basic under water life, including Nemos (Cloudfish for real) which are my personal favourits -they carefully peak out of their anemones and protect their territory. Palo even got bitten by some nasty fish living under the sand at the bottom!

Palo's Johnson

Otherwise than the diving we did some snorkelling and saw a few very big turtles and some not so big sharks. Can't wait to see some while diving! We also explored the bigger island a little bit, and after that we were happy that we didn't stick to the original plan, which was to stay also there for a few days. It was too touristic for us.

Now Malaysia is behind us and Thailand is next. Can't wait to eat all those lovely coconut curries :)

Diving class

READY!