Advertisement
Published: September 16th 2009
Let us get one thing off our chest straight away, Perhentian Kecil has the worst value accommodation in our 3 years of travelling and the most expensive internet but conversely it had some of the best snorkelling we have done and some of the best beaches/cleanest water we have seen.
Our flight from Hong Kong got us to Kuala Lumpur’s Cheap Charlie Terminal at around midnight and our flight to Kota Bharu was at 7:30am so we roughed it and spent the night at the airport. We didn’t really get much sleep as the only seats available (it seems everyone and his wife had the same idea as us!) were some right next to a TV which blared out prayers at the Hajj full blast on repeat for 6 hours!
Arriving into Kota Bharu we were lucky enough to find another couple to share the taxi with...our destination of Long beach on Perhentian Kecil (the small island) was a one hour taxi ride away from the airport (60 ringgit) and a good value 40 minute speedboat ride (70 ringgit return) which was very fast and the driver took great delight in steering into the waves to soak us!
Coral Bay pier
what a monstrosity!As mentioned by other bloggers getting a room on the Perhentian islands is no easy task owing to most resorts not taking advance bookings, an explosion in popularity versus a low number of rooms and increasing greediness of resort owners. The first room we were fortunate to get was the last one available at Panorama and for 85 ringgit (£15) we got an air con room with a free evening dinner for one...good value you may think but the room had paper thin walls, black pillows and mattress and a very cold shower (more ice-like than cold!) with no electrical sockets. A fan room was the same price as this air con room and these rooms were even worse than the one we were in, being stuffy, mouldy and dark.
Panorama seems to be the best of a bad bunch of resorts on Long Beach, the premise of the business model of Panorama goes like this. Give guests one free dinner so that the guests will buy more dinners (as most people there were either in groups or couples). Don’t put electric sockets in the rooms so the guests have to power their items from reception and thus spend
more time in the restaurant to spend money (as people will not leave their valuables on charge alone). Don’t provide any free wi-fi to the guests so that they have to use the 15 ringgit/hour internet service and not only don’t provide the wi-fi but have a wi-fi signal which is heavily protected and don’t give even let your manager have access. Have power outages at the busiest times of the day (9am to 11am and 4pm to 6pm) so again, the guests are inclined to go and spend time (and money) in the restaurant. We wondered several times whether this was a very clever business practice or just plain crazy as not many people there had good things to say about Panorama and none of the money seemed to be reinvested back into the place.
It became apparent during our first meal that Panorama was THE restaurant everyone seemed to eat at...that doesn’t mean it’s good, at best it’s mediocre and very inconsistent with quality. On our first night we were the first people in the restaurant and we waited 2 hours for our meal...after reminding the staff over and over again about our order and watching everyone
else get the same food we had ordered. This happened 4 other times in our week’s stay and only on our last night we got our food within 1 hour of ordering...maybe they made a special effort because it was our last night?! Enough about Panorama for now as it makes our blood boil thinking about it!
We thought by visiting in the first week of September, there would be less tourists but it was obvious from when we arrived there were a huge amount of people on Kecil, mostly between the ages of 18-30 years old. This is the most tourists we have seen in our most recent year of travelling but we think we must have hit it at a busy time as over the week we were there the tourist numbers did decrease a little. It was an interesting social study for us - two tourists who haven’t been around other tourists for a long time and put them smack bang in the middle of partying 18-30 year olds and watch what happens! It was quite a strange experience for us being around so many tourists and made us realise a few things about our fellow
tourists...we will come to this a little later!
One day we did an amazing snorkelling trip to several spots around the two Perhentian islands. For 40 ringgit each (including our snorkelling gear and fins) we got a trip on a little speedboat to 6 places - the first place we stopped at was Shark Point and we were lucky enough to see 7 black tipped reef sharks (they were HUGE!) down among the corals along with so many other varieties of fish...were we scared of the sharks? Nope, our driver said they were vegetarians so we didn’t have to worry! Next we saw some of the most amazing and pristine coral gardens we have ever seen - again we will say the Malay government has great conservation policies - the fish were very curious and a few times they swam up to our masks and gave us a fishy-kiss. The driver then took us to Turtle Point - less of a point more of a place in between the two Perhentian islands where we had to look out for turtles and then dive in the water quick when we saw one. Sceptical about how we would see a turtle
from the boat, as the only turtle we had ever seen was about the size of our hand, we were both shocked and awed when one surfaced at the front of the boat...it was seriously huge, think the length of us! It dived down after taking a breath and we jumped in fast to take a look and it was fantastic just floating over the top of it while it was feeding on the sea floor...at this point it decided to surface again and it ended up swimming through Donna’s legs on it’s way up to the surface. We had a reasonable lunch at what is called the ‘Fishing Village’ and then pressed on with the snorkelling - the next place had bump head parrot fish which were about a metre in length...we had fun chasing them around the corals and admired the sea urchins, giant clams and sea cucumbers which were in abundance along with all the other types of fish we didn’t know the name of. Our last stop was on Turtle beach which was amazing...no wonder the turtles decide to lay their eggs here, it was so peaceful (we think we got this bonus stop because our
It's a jungle out there...
...Neil must have said this 100 times on the 15 minute walk through the jungle! driver was tired and wanted a kip!). At the end of the day we were left open mouthed and completely amazed at the quality of snorkelling here, it’s definitely a must do! It was only when we got back to Long beach that we realised one of the shops had underwater cameras for sale and we kicked ourselves for not buying one.
After our day of snorkelling we made it back to the room in time to have a shower before the power was turned off - by this point we had moved to another room with a hot shower and an electrical socket (95 ringgit - £17). The walls were still paper thin and it was still a dump but at least we had a hot shower...that was until Donna managed to pull the tap off the wall and cold water shot out everywhere. Cue a hilarious slapstick Laurel and Hardy moment of the two of us dodging freezing cold water trying to get the tap back into the hole it belonged to. After we had managed it, luckily the hot shower still worked but Donna was too scared to touch the shower in case it happened again
and made Neil turn it on (while she was safely out of the bathroom) every time she wanted a shower.
As we’ve already mentioned a couple of times, the walls to our room were so thin we could hear everything in the room next door to us, including the sex noises...luckily though they didn’t have much stamina because it only lasted 40 seconds a time but seriously our whole room shook for that 40 seconds and it felt like an earthquake (did the earth move for you honey?!). We didn’t seem to have much luck at all with our neighbours because over the 7 days we stayed our first neighbour was an annoying guitar strumming Irish guy who liked to sing (he couldn’t so we hope he wasn’t basing his future career plans on this!), a couple who like to argue when they were drunk and had full conversations with each other in their sleep throughout the night and our last set were the sex couple who also liked to drink, bang their door loudly and stomped like baby elephants at 4am.
It was after appraising these 3 different sets of people and doing a lot of people
watching that we realised that some people are basically oblivious to their behaviour...we witnessed several instances of complete rudeness (people walking into each other, forcing people off the only path into bushes, pushing in front of people in shops while they were waiting to pay) with no apologies. We came to the conclusion that some people (not all we hasten to add!) just live in their own little bubble thinking their actions don’t impact on anyone else. Many people were incredibly rude and dismissive of not only the other tourists there but of the Malays working on Long beach so it’s no wonder at times we got a hint of underlying contempt from the locals working in shops or restaurants. This place really was an interesting social experiment for us!
We took a walk a couple of times across the island to Coral Bay, the beach on the other side to Long beach...Coral Bay was a lot quieter but the beach wasn’t as nice as Long beach. On the walk through the jungle we encountered several huge monitor lizards (they were like mini-crocodiles!) and Donna unsuccessfully tried to scare Neil by saying they bite people but then ended up
scaring herself as she realised they are actually carnivorous...cue lots of feet stamping to scare the lizards away as we walked along the path!
We whiled away the rest of our time on Long beach sunning ourselves and basking in bath like water...a lot of people say that the Perhentians have been overdeveloped - we disagree that there is overdevelopment, but it has got to the point where these islands have built as much as they can and with no more competition opening it means that the places there can keep driving the prices up because people keep going there and paying the prices. The only bar here was charging 20 ringgit (£3.50) for a can of beer and not only were people buying them they were staying our drinking until 4am every morning (where do they get that sort of money from?) and getting legless...in the meantime we had bought a bottle of duty free vodka in Hong Kong and enjoyed cheap vodka sprites watching films at night! We don’t mind paying a lot of money to visit a beach as long as we get value for money...value for money here was a little in doubt for us
but it was more than outweighed by how stunning the beaches were. We've seen a lot of beaches in both Malaysia and neighbouring Thailand but what is very obvious is that the Malaysian sense of conservation really does seem to be paying off as their beaches and waters are consistently some of the cleanest and beautiful that we have seen if we are to compare both countries.
As you can probably tell Perhentian Kecil was a big, confusing contradiction for us - we loved the beach and snorkelling but didn’t particularly like the types of people who were there in the first part of our stay. We would go back but we’d be a lot more prepared with heavy duty ear plugs and mobile phone sim card for internet!!
We finished our trip with a couple of hectic but fun days of shopping in Kuala Lumpur...our favourite city in SE Asia. After 3 years on the road there isn’t an end in sight, the burning questions are...is there anywhere still left for us to see and...what is our next destination?
Answers on a postcard to...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.514s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 38; qc: 151; dbt: 0.3459s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.6mb
Darren and Vicki
non-member comment
where else to go...
Hey Donna and Neil Great blog - v jealous of the beaches, am not sure how much I would like to see sea cucumbers, urchins, have fishy kisses and giant turtles between my legs (eh um!) however it's clearly an amazing sight and we really enjoy reading about it. As for where next - well we thought you may like to take a trip to Bangor! Take care and keep smiling, Love Vicki and Darren xxx