Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

  Perhentian Islands, Malaysia
Saturday, September 13, 2008

After crossing the Thai/Malaysian border we caught a taxi down to the port of Kuala Besut. We could have taken two public buses down to the port but we probably would have missed the last ferry if we did that and we didn't want to have to stay in Kuala Besut for the night so we splashed out for the taxi and made the 3:30pm ferry. Ferry is probably the wrong word, nine of us squashed on to a speedboat, the "captain" hands us all our life jackets, tells 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 wasn't great at all so I set out on the regular accommodation search and quickly realised that the standard of accommodation was very poor and the prices they were asking for them were pretty high. We ended up getting a place with air conditioning for E20 and a free dinner but it wasn't great. I went to check in and when I came back Lydia was on the balcony looking a bit shocked. I asked what was wrong and she said she just saw the biggest lizard ever. Turns out it was a monitor lizard. They are all over the Perhentian Islands and it was the first of many that we saw while we were there. The can be anywhere from half a foot to seven foot long and the ones on the Perhentians are generally 3 to 4 feet long, quite big! It was getting dark by the time we had checked in and showered so we just had dinner, watched a DVD and played couple of games of darts in the guesthouse before going to bed. 

Monitor Lizard (from internet)

6-Dusk on the Perhentians

Something worth mentioning here is that Malaysia is a muslim country. We arrived on Friday 5th Sept and unfortunately for us Ramadan had started on the previous Wednesday. As muslims are not allowed to eat after sunrise and before sunset amongst other things, it meant a lot of shops and restaurants would only open late in the evening and be closed all day. This didn't really affect us on the islands as they are so touristy but it did when we got onto the mainland. Another thing, due to it being a muslim country, alcohol is not only hard to come by, but ridiculously expensive, at the time of writing this we've now been in Malaysia 12 days and had one drink each! Ah well, it'll do us good!  
On the second day on the islands we decided to walk to a place called Coral Bay to see what it was like and we struck gold. We found a brand new really plush looking resort and decided to go in for a look. We said we'd chance our arm and ask how much the rooms were. It turned out all rooms were half price as there was still some construction going on. We got a lovely log cabin, balcony, TV, air-con and fridge for E19, ten times better than the one on Long Beach and cheaper too. So we ran back over to Long Beach, checked out and hauled our bags over to Coral Bay - we were delighted! Only one setback, the beach on Long Beach was better than Coral Bay but its only a 10 minute walk so it was ok. It was on the night of the second day that we realised that the food on the Perhentians was crap. Expensive and crap. We both wanted to go back up to Thailand to get some decent food.

1-Lydia at Dusk

1-Scenery

We had booked a snorkeling trip for the Sunday but there was a big storm in the middle of the previous night and it roughed up the seas pretty bad so we couldn't go. I was really nervous anyway as I can't swim and had never done anything like it before. We re-booked the trip for the following day. The weather was actually really good so we went over to long Beach and snorkeled by ourselves. We must have been in the water for a few hours and saw eels and loads of different fish. I really enjoyed it and got more comfortable wearing the snorkel and realised I could swim and thread water easily once I've the mask and snorkel on. It made me look forward to the snorkeling trip the next day.
On the trip we had booked there were 5 sites on the itinerary, shark point, turtle point, coral garden, lighthouse and romantic beach with lunch halfway through in the fisherman's village. So we went out in the speedboat, about 8 of us, I was the only one in a life jacket but I didn't mind. When I jumped off the boat at our first stop, shark point I was really nervous and when I stuck my head under first I really freaked out. I found I was breathing really hard as if I thought I was drowning or something. It was such a weird feeling, like I was flying 10 metres above the ground, only pink and purple coral and thousands of fish below me. The water was so clear and we could see so much. I calmed down after a while and got used to the mask and snorkel and really started to enjoy it. There were so many fish, all shapes and sizes and every colour imaginable. We went looking for the sharks and finally Lydia found one but when she came up to tell me where it was she lost it when she looked under again. I was raging, would have been great to see it! But at the next stop, turtle point, it was amazing. We all hopped into the water hoping to see the turtles and after about 2 minutes I wasn't really looking for it but a massive turtle, well over a metre from head to tail, swam just under me, I shouted for Lydia and we swam with it for about 10 minutes - it was great! The coral garden was really nice too, thousands of fish again but the sea was starting to get rough so we didn't spend long there, instead we went for lunch in the fisherman's village. After lunch we went to the lighthouse which wasn't as good as any of the sites before lunch and the sea was getting really rough. We were both feeling sea-sick before lunch and even more so now. After the lighthouse we all voted to skip the Romantic Beach and head for home. We were all feeling so sick. Loved the snorkeling though and looking forward to doing it again in Borneo and Indonesia.

Karl going Snorkelling

1-Us at Sunset

The next morning we checked out of the resort and Lydia went for an afternoon dive to The Temple of the Seas. She saw more turtles and another shark amongst other things and when she finished we took the speedboat back to the mainland. We took a taxi to Kota Bharu, the driver was the village clown. He had a speaker attached to his taxi and would blast out police siren sounds randomly. Then he stuck on the television on some device on his dashboard, then stuck in a Bollywood DVD for us (???) then asked if we like karaoke and pulled out a mike and karaoke disk (I didn't give him the pleasure of a song!) he was crazy altogether!
Anyway he got us to Kota Bharu safely and we stayed there for the night ahead of our trip on the jungle railway to Jerantut at 6:30am the following morning.