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Published: June 17th 2008
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First ferry to the islands
The sun is still coming up as we speed towards the islands on the ferry we nearly missed. After a good nights sleep at Anands family home, we were up and showered and ready to leave at 6am as planned. We quietly called Ananad who stumbled out of his room, fag in mouth, looking distinctly like he just woke up although he claimed to have been awake for ages (yeah, right). We finally left the house at around 6.20 which was going to mean we would be lucky to make the 7am ferry as planned. We also had to do a pit stop at 7-11 to pick up batteries, iced nescafe to wake us up and 200 Dunhills for Anand to get him through the 4 day weekend!
We then headed for Kuala Besut in Anands big, and as we found out extremely fast, 4wd. There was not much traffic on the road and Anand floored it, over taking anything in his path and only slowing down at red lights to check nothing was coming before zooming through them. He called the lady who did the boat tickets when we were about 10 mins away and she told him to get a move on as if we missed the 7am boat, the next one with spaces was midday!
Joe chilling
On the balcony at Panarama We arrived at the jetty and Anand dropped us with the bags (our packs, his dive gear and boxes full of bottles of Jack Daniels and Vodka - Anand is the islands unofficial off-license) so we could get tickets and get the stuff aboard while he parked up. We were soon all on our way to the island.
We arrived back on Long Beach to find a big ugly barge abandoned on the beach right outside the dive shop. A complete eye sore and not very good for business! We walked into the shop and were greeted by a shop full of people we had never or barely met before all walking around like the owned the place... Which effectively, they did... But it was weird as it was OUR dive shop last season but now we felt like visitors. Unusually, virtually none of the old diveshop crew from last year had returned. Most of them had been coming for 4 or more seasons and had all decided enough was enough at the same time. We were introduced to the new crew by Anand and put our bags down to go and try and sort out some accommodation and
say hello to all the old faces who were back on the island. We tried the last resort first (Symphony next door) and they were full up... Uh-oh! Then we tried Panarama, our first choice and they were full up too. We said hello to a few old friends and then worked our way along the beach trying all the little resorts along the way. By the end of the beach, the best we had managed was 2 tents for 10 ringitt a night each (less than 2 quid each!) but we didn't much fancy camping on the beach. The actual camping at night would have been great, but having all our stuff in a tent in the baking sun all day would not have been great. We headed back to Panarama to have some lunch and one of the guys remembered us from last year and mentioned there was now a family room and an air con room available as people had checked out. They were both expensive (more than twice what we had in mind) but we were happy to have a roof which was not made of canvas over our heads and agreed to take the family
room which we shared with Anand so it worked out OK.
Once we had sorted out a bed, we dug out our boardies, masks and dive computers and headed off for a dive to one of Joe's favourite sites from last year Terumba Tiga or T3 to its friends. Us two and Anand went off on our own and found a nice big swim through (a cave or hole you can swim through, the name says it all really) at the bottom of the swim through was a large Jenkins whip tail ray partially buried in sand. Nice. Anand had his camera with him so stopped and took about a million photos of the ray and then we were off again. Mon then spotted some weird fish hiding in some coral which nobody really recognised although Joe thought it was some kind of file fish, which a number of people in the know who have seen the photos Anand took agree with him about. We were soon encountering the age old problem of people diving without cameras getting bored of waiting for people with cameras to take a hundred different pictures of each thing they see. Combine this with
Flaming Lamborghinis!
This was the beginning of the end... The nice bar (karims) closed not long after this and we ended up at the shitty bar (safety stop) at the other end of the beach. Not long after this Mons camera was soaked in Jack Daniels... bad visibility and it was not long before we had lost Anand. We spent a while looking then decided to go on without him. Joe found some of his old favourite swim throughs and caves and took Mon for an underwater tour. It was a fun dive and the icing on the cake was when we spotted about 10 or 15 BIG Bumphead Parrot Fish. Mons favourite which she had only ever seen in ones or twos and had been dying to see a big herd of. They are big ugly fish which crunch away on the coral. You always hear them crunching before you see them. We were reunited with Anand at the boat and headed back to long beach for a shower then a beer or 10. Oli, one of the few people who had returned from last year was there and we hugged and said hello. As Anand was on a long weekend he was determined to consume as much Jack Daniels possible and the next few days are a blur of drinking, diving, eating, sleeping and so on. When Anand left, we moved to a smaller room and calmed down a bit... By that time Mon
Joe going down
A rare photo... had lost her mask and snorkel and Joe had flooded Mons camera with Jack Daniels. The camera refused to turn on and just made weird noises. It had been an expensive weekend!!!
On the day before we were supposed to leave, the boss Yaakuub asked us if we could work the next day (leaving day!) as guides as someone was out of the water with a cold and they had suddenly got busy. He also tried to talk us into working for the season and we suspected the working that day might just be a ruse to stop us leaving. We said we would help him out for the day but we were still leaving as planned the following afternoon. We also mentioned that there was a possibility we might return later in the season.
Mon guided at site called Sea Bell in the morning and had a bit of a nightmare as there was strong current and shit vis and she couldn't find the reef. In the end she borrowed a compass from a customer, went up to the surface and popped her head out the water, took a quick compass bearing then went back down and
Swim through!
Joe disapearing out the other side. THere is a Jenkins ray in there but dont think you can see it in this shot guided them to the reef! The guy Mon borrowed the compass from was a dive master from nearby Koh Tao in Thailand who had one arm. Top geezer for getting on with things! Joe did a site known as Pinnacle in the morning which is a big pinnacle of rock starting at 24m down on the sand and just poking out the surface of the water and saw a Black Tip Reef shark a well as loads of other stuff. In the afternoon, Mon was back to Pinnacle and there was a ripping surface current to contend with! She managed not to lose any of her divers, which is always a bonus. Joe did T3 (his request). The vis was bad there and the current was strong but he took his 2 divers through some nice swimthroughs including a couple of “tank scrapers” (tight ones) and they both came up with big smiles. When we got back it was a rush to get changed and say goodbye to everyone and then get our asses on the 4 o'clock boat back to the main land, which we managed by the skin of our teeth.
While in Perhentians we agreed to
Bumphead Parrot Fish
This was one of a big school of them. It seems more right to think of them as a heard as you see them swimming along the reef and munching on the corals like little blue swimming cows with bumps on their heads... Or is that just me? meet up with Anand again down on Borneo, a town called Miri which supposedly had some nice diving on reefs which had only been discovered 8 years ago so have not been dived out. There was only one small dive shop there so not many divers. We couldn't resist... We caught an overnight bus down to KL (which was like a refrigerated lorry it was so fucking cold) and then stayed a few days in KL to stock up on lost and broken equipment and chill for a while, then it was a flight down to Miri.
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Borneo
Waiting for pictures of that secret diving spot in Borneo! And don't be too hard on Anand with JD next time you meet :-)