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Published: August 10th 2007
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I wanted to thank whoever's recovered most of my blog entries for me - I really appreciate it. Thanks to Gemma too for the kind offer about the emails, but they're mostly all retrieved now.
I wrote the below entry onto Hotmail when Travelblog was first down, to paste it on asap. Has been longer than anticipated though!
31/7/07 - 3/8/07 We woke and had breakfast at the hostel, packed our bags and then checked out. We went to the nice old ladies we'd left our washing with - and it had all been cleaned to perfection, ironed and folded. They seemed shocked when we tipped them (no idea why, it all only came to about 3GBP anyway) The taxi came at 12pm to take us to Kuala Besut - where you have to catch the boat to the Perhentian Islands.
We had to wait in a travel agent's office for a while once we'd arrived, as the boat departed at 2pm - so I got chatting to a girl about travelling, and we went out and bought some local fruit. (as an aside, the fruit was lovely, but we lost some of it to cheeky squirrels from
our hut and the rest seemed to be infected with different kinds of insects) The girl (Polly) enlightened us about some border problems with the crossing we were going to use into Thailand (to get to Laos) so after doing some research ourselves we're playing it safe and flying to Chiang Mai from KL on Sunday.
The boat that took us to the island was the most uncomfortable journey we've had so far. It was very fast and very bumpy (I was wondering why all of the locals chose to sit at the back near the driver - it soon became very clear!) Even Aaron didn't like this journey, and he has a much stronger stomach for travel than me.
We stayed on the smaller but more populated island called Perhentian Kecil on a secluded beach called 'Mira Beach'. Our hut was right on the end and basically in the forest, but after the first night we managed to arrange changing to one on the beach. As our room on the first night was a haven for nocturnal wildlife we were very relieved (mice and squirels nibbled on our biscuits, apples, crackers and Mentos!) We quickly learnt to keep everything as packed away as possible - and also not to buy any more food. The food at the resort was served in the cafe and you just wrote down what you wanted in your hut's book, and they made it as theey worked through all of the books. I now have a taste for nescafe and milo (hot coffee mixed with a hot chocolate/malty drink)
We swam in the water each day we were there - the first day we stuck to the local beach, on the second we walked to Long Beach on the opposite side of the island and on the third we went snorkeling. The South China sea is really warm, and we could see right to the bottom. That was a relief after all of the nasty things I usually manage to get embedded in my feet! I bought some goggles on the first day to ease the pain from the salt water - Aaron had some fun with those and followed some fish around.
The snorkeling was amazing - we were both sunburnt from Long Beach (somehow - we had been really careful with suncream, but it must have been more intense sun than we realised) and it was overcast, but by spending most of the day in the water we saved our skin more abuse. I'm not a big fan of sealife - I have an aversion to fish and many other things make me shudder. Despite my initial aprehension, however, I was deternimed to try it and I'm really glad that I did. I spotted two Nemos (Clown fish I think?) and they're the cutest things ever! Darting around in the coral - it was nice just to watch them for a while. Aaron stressed me out after the first snorkel saying that he was impressed with himself for not pointing out the sea slugs to me - I spotted them on the next three goes! We also saw a turtle crawling on the bottom of the water, and lots of jellyfish (harmless here, but very annoying!) It was just us and a German couple, and it was really nice to get to know them as the day went on. Everyone else staying at Mira seemed to be French - so we felt alone together.
We saw lots of wildlife on the land including a giant lizard which we can't remember the name of (similar looking to a Komodo Dragon - but harmless), loads of smaller lizards, mice, squirrels, bats, insects (far too many nasty mosquitos - you could see them biting you, they lingered!) and sand crabs. We were very glad to have a mosquito net over the beds.
This morning we caught the 8am boat (much nicer this time, I think the first one was a mean driver) and then got a taxi back to Kota Bharu. Tomorrow night (at 9pm) we're getting the bus to Kuala Lumpur then flying to Chiang Mai.
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