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Published: September 15th 2010
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Getting there… Due to the train out of Thailand running three hours late we were almost resigned to having to spend a night in the Malaysian border town of Khota Bharu and then getting to the Perhentian islands a day later than originally planned. Luckily, however, we found a taxi driver who some say, is the Stigs’ Malaysian brother, and assured us he could do the seventy miles to the speedboat jetty in time for the last boat of the day! He was true to his word… Liz and I both held on for dear life! Thirty hours, five forms of transport (ferry, bus, train, speed-taxi, speedboat) and one border crossing after leaving Koh Tao in Thailand we arrived at the Perhentian islands in Malaysia.
The Perhentian Islands The Perhentians’ are a couple of small tropical islands located just off the northeast coast of Malaysia. Most of the land on each island is covered in rainforest and the whole area sits within a coral reef marine park. Due to being off the main SE Asian backpacker trail the islands remain relatively unvisited (compared to Thailand’s islands) and for the next week we would be staying at
Petani Beach on the smaller and less developed island of Perhentian Kecil.
The resort is run by a South African family and consists of only five very basic wooden bungalows and a small beachfront restaurant. There is no air-con, no television, no electricity during the day and no hot water. We must be mad?! However, we have an almost private palm tree lined beach right in front of our door, a coral reef we can easily swim out to and the rainforest begins right behind us. Awesome. Our days here have consisted of reading books, snorkelling around the reef, eating in the restaurant (the fish has been amazing), strolling along the beach and lazing in the sun.
With the sandy beach, blue water and lush rainforest it makes for a pretty photogenic setting. However, all of these habitats are also well known for supporting various forms of wildlife and our bungalow sits right in the middle! Being this close to nature has been both good and bad….
Good Wildlife Without having to stray very far away from our bungalow we’ve seen…
Large Monitor Lizard (approx 2m long!) and a smaller Monitor lizard (only 1m
long)
Green crested Lizard (30cm long but amazing bright green colour)
Tokay Geckos (we have a family of them living in the roof of our bungalow, eating all the bugs!)
Lots of squirrels running about in the palm trees
Lots of small crabs on the beach
Fruit bats
Also whilst snorkelling on the reef we’ve seen…
Black Tip Reef Shark (60cm long)
Lots of Clown fish (Nemo’s) living in their anemones
Blue Spotted Stingray
Bumphead Parrotfish (1m long)
Hermit crabs
Angelfish, Batfish, Parrotfish, Triggerfish, Damsel fish
Giant Clams
Table coral, Staghorn coral, Boulder coral
Bad Wildlife Whilst our bungalow has doors which can be closed at night, it also has large air vents and other cracks between the wooden panals… which cannot. Therefore, anything up to the diameter of approximately my hand that wishes to enter our bungalow can freely do so at any point.
Night one - we here some rustling near our bags. I switch the torch on, nothing there, torch off. Rustling noise again, torch on, nothing there, torch off. After ten minutes of this I get fed up*, get out of bed, wrap a towel around and start looking for
the perpetrator of the noise. Whatever it was obviously made its escape so I never found it; however, this was very amusing for Liz who has now coined the phrase “Luke Brown - Mouse Hunter”. It could be a new TV series?
*Liz notes: For ‘fed up’ the reader should insert ‘Luke rolled over and tried to go back to sleep hoping that it would go away. It didn’t and then…’
Night two - same again but much louder. This time it turns out to be a giant rat that has come into our room and was now running around in a panic as it couldn’t find its way out again. This time, “Luke Brown - Rat Hunter”, again armed with only a towel and an empty drinks bottle manages to get the big fella out. Nothing to do with my skill, more just a law of averages that if the rat runs around enough it’ll eventually find a way out. Neither of us slept too well after that little episode!
Whilst those were the highlights (!) we’ve also had to deal with some highly ravenous mosquitoes. I ended up with twelve bites on just one foot
and now sleep with socks on and Liz has an equally bad area of bites but I can’t print where that is. The islands also seem prone to large thunderstorms during the night; the sort that wake you up and make the whole room shake. All of this is exciting yes, but sleep inducing, no.
Scuba Diving Now that we’ve got our PADI qualifications we thought it would be good to put into practice what we’ve learnt and do some diving around the islands. We signed up for three dives each with Universal Divers which we would highly recommended - a bit more expensive than other places but good quality kit and very friendly/knowledgeable staff. To be honest though we didn’t really see much more than we’ve seen just snorkelling on the reef in front of our bungalow. That’s not to say the diving was bad, just that the snorkelling here is so good! The highlight of the diving was seeing a school of huge Bumphead Parrotfish (adults are about 2m long) and also a large stingray. The visibility was generally quite poor, often only a couple of meters, and occasionally there was also a strong current
which for us as inexperienced divers made it quite tricky diving. It was all good experience though and with 30 degree water temperature we certainly never got cold!
Countdown to Sydney... Can’t believe we’ve only got three weeks until we arrive in Sydney (6th October)!
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