Sunday, July 29, 2007

Perhentian Islands - back into the water: lots of turtles


We have been recommended, throughout our trip, to go to the Perhentian islands in Malaysia as a beautiful spot to chill out, and also a great place to dive. Our flight took us to the nearby town and after an hour's taxi ride, and an hour's boat ride we arrived at the twin islands, just off the north east coast.

We stayed at the smaller island, on the smaller beach - Coral beach - on recommendation of Carolin, and went straight to the nicest resort. It had chalet-style rooms which were quite nice, although the whole place was rather marred by the unearthly stink of raw sewage. Mmmm, nice: reminds us of India.

The diving was really cool, especially the wreck dive that we did. There's something amazingly cool about swimming around a sunken ship (sunk in 2000) and looking up to see sunlight streaming through the mast...very eerie, but also very cool. A momentary panic when we swam on the deck (the boat was on it's side so the sides overhung the deck) - we've watched too many James Bond movies - but it was very cool and there was even an air pocket left over from when the boat sank. We also saw some great fish life including very close contact with a turtle, Lionfish, and Humphead Parrotfish: really amazing (and the snorkelling was good too).

The beach and bay were also very pretty, although for some unknown reason the Malaysian Government had decided to build a Godforsaken, butt-ugly concrete jetty right across the bay, utterly spoiling the view and was currently a noisy building site from dawn until well after dusk. Even the locals were disgusted!!


The beautiful new jetty...nice

Also sadly the food on offer was frankly rubbish. You'd think that fried rice is pretty hard to make awful, but believe me, there are 5 kinds of ways it can be rubbish - each worse than the one before. You may detect a hint of obsession about the food but in the week so far the most edible thing we've had is Mac-D's - SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE! With a culture made of Malay, Chinese, Indian, plus Indonesian and Thai thrown in for good measure, you'd think the cuisine would be fantastic. We've obviously been looking in the wrong place!!!

But the diving was amazing and we met some lovely people who gave us some good recommendations for New Zealand (thanks Helen and Jamie, plus some great underwater photos of our dives), and the Malaysian Jungle (the 2 Jo's). We were kinda rested by the time we left although El caught a horrid cold just before we left.

No comments: