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Published: October 29th 2006
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Kat writes: So up nice and early we catch a bus in
Singapore at 6.30am (my dad would be proud!) to take us back into Malaysia. The border crossing this time was very different. Unlike Singapore's huge modern border control, the Malaysia one was a little string of what looked like a row of down trodden shops. I thought I had taken a trip down Shirley High Street in Southampton by accident! Surprising actually as Malaysia is a relatively prosperous country compared to some of its neighbours. People are less interested in giving us the hard sell and many can speak at least some English, getting chatting to the locals is easy. They really are a friendly bunch.
Back in Malaysia we start travel up the east coast. It is much less built up than the west coast - and also less traveled - so we thought we would prefer to start there. Our bus from Singapore reaches Mersing 5 hours later, in time for us to make a quick trip to an ATM in town before jumping on the 10:30am boat over to the
Tioman Islands - obviously no banks there. It was so nice to be on a
Little jungle island
Tioman Island. View from our walk from out hut to the beach. beautiful little island again.
Tioman Islands
We found some digs - a basic little hut looking out to the jungle where we could watch the cheeky little monkeys playing on the grass. Only a short walk and we were on the beach front having walked over a waterhole that contained loads of huge cat eating monitor lizards!
Here we relaxed for a couple of days in the sun, snorkeled our hearts out looking at great corals, giant clams and the occasional black tip reef shark as well as enjoying lush Mackerel steaks for dinner.
Back on the East Coast
Forcing ourselves to move on we headed back to the main land and caught the bus up the coast to
Cherating. Not a bad place but nothing there for us really so after one night we were flagging down another bus to go right to the top of the coast to visit the apparent 'jewel in the crown' of Peninsular Malaysia's islands -
The Perhentian Islands.
Perhentian Islands
Another early morning boat ride and we were there. Long Beach, on the smaller of the two Perhentian Islands. We were not disappointed with what we saw
Huge cat eating monitor lizards
Tioman Island. Loads and load of these huge monitors lived in a small waterhole between our hut and the beach. They were huge! either. A few little wooden restaurants and accommodations lining the beach. Our plan of a couple of nights turned into five! Just couldn't bring ourselves to leave.
Massive storms The island was pretty quiet as the season is almost over. The monsoon season starts shortly. However, every night we were there it did storm and one night was so dramatic. The rain was hammering down on our little wooden shack, the lightening bolts were producing more light in the room than our 40 watt bulb ever could and the thunder was tremendous. It cracked and echoed all around us. Literally the buildings were shacking with the noise. It was awesome (and perhaps a little unnerving! The girls next door to us were a little scared and tried to drown out the sound with a bit of Tina Turner. Well she can belt out a fair tune but she had no chance against this! 😊)
Diving in the Perhentian Islands The water was crystal clear and still 28 degrees Celsius so we thought it was rude not to invest in some more diving. Well, it is one for the cheapest places in the world for it. So with our
guide, Shane, from Quiver Dive Team (Hi Shane!) we headed out on the boat and saw some amazing coral gardens, the usual tropical fish, Turtles, blue spotted sting rays, triggerfish, Bumped head Parrotfish - well the list goes on and on.
Jelly fish horror!
We did have to abandon one dive though. We went out to a wreck in the middle of no where and had a bit of a yellow jelly fish issue. There were stingers everywhere with loads of tentacles about 3 meters long! The current was strong and we were all descending down an anchor line with these jelly fish just being pushed, one after the other, straight for us. We were dodging all over the place - one got wrapped on the line right by me, another got wrapped around an instructor's head! Ouch! It was like something out of a horror movie - no escape. Well, it was spectacular to see them but not i'm glad we abandoned it for a gentler location that didn't require gallons of vinegar afterwards.
Proper R&R
When we weren't diving we were snorkeling off the beach which also had a pretty descent reef. We learnt to
Perhentian Island
Off Long Beach where we stayed on the small island keep moving though as Scott seemed to be a tasty morsel - whenever he hung around for too long the little fish would start nibbling him - one even drew a tiny bit of blood. He shouted out
Ouch. It bit me. It bit me. You can see the teeth marks!
I think the people around us thought a shark was on the rampage! I laughed so much.
Through diving we meet a bunch of good people (some from neighboring Portsmouth!) and partied a bit too. Up in the Blue Roof Gardens we ate lush fish from the bbq and discovered they sold buckets of Samsong (Thai Whiskey - having spent some time in Thailand we had become quite fond of this). Well, after a very healthy spell in New Zealand we did indulge a bit and crawled home about 4.30am.
Time to leave
It was hard to drag ourselves away from this lovely little paradise but we wanted to carry on seeing the country. So after a boat back to the mainland we faced an 8hr bus journey back to
KL. The scenery through the jungle was great but 8hrs! It was a killer. At one point it got a little hairy because our 'Nigel Mansell' wannabe driver was
New friend
A little orphaned monkey. Ah! Tioman Island. speeding along through heavy rain. Now we don't know exactly what happened but we do know that the coach started skidding around and was going pretty much sideways down the road, then it snaked around as 'Nigel' over steered to gain control and then we were back in our lane safe and still rolling on. While this was going on the group of Chinese foreign exchange students were shrieking and wailing in the back. After this episode, you would think 'Nige' would slow down a touch, you know, think about his actions. Did he heck, he kept his pedal to the metal just as before and only 6 more hours of grand prix driving to go!!
Also it's Ramadan here so those of the Muslim faith are fasting and that is about 70% of the people in Malaysia. This means that as soon as the sun goes down, understandably, they want to eat something. The driver must stop and find a cafe for food and a mosque for praying, which all takes time but is very interesting at the same time. The call to pray after the sun goes down is very relaxing even if we don't have a
clue what is being said! One nice old lady tried to explain but between her non existent English and my non existent Malay we didn't get very far - just lots of pointing and smiling!
Back in KL we decided to change tack and rather than look at the West coast, fly to mysterious
Borneo instead. So we have got ourselves a 'cheap as rice' with Air Asia and will shortly arrive in Sabah.
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Alan
non-member comment
I'm mean enough.
Nice leopard-print speedos, when are you having the rest of the operation?