Hello again. Now that we are back on mainland Malaysia (currently hanging out in Kota Bahru for the next couple of days before heading down the east coast) I thought it was time to do a summary on our 10 nights on Perenthian Island.
One of the major highlights of our time at Perenthian was doing the scuba diving course - we are now both licensed open water divers which allows us to go diving by ourselves to a depth of 18m! The course took us 4 days with a total of 8 dives and a small exam at the end (which of course we nailed - hello 100%!!!)Cheers to Tanja our excellent instructor (pictured above with us) who got us through the course alive and was a load of fun. Although too many to list them all, we saw sharks, eels, stingrays, batfish, barracuda and loads of amazing coral. It was a great experience and we can't wait to go diving again (hopefully further down the east coast of Malaysia or in Thailand).
For the first 7 nights we stayed on Long Beach (which isn't particularly long - probably 15om or so...but that gives you an indication of how small the whole island is). After I succumbed to the first case of bed bugs on our trip, we decided to jump ship and we spent the next couple of nights on the other side of the island at Coral Bay (not as nice beach, but quieter, cheaper and no sightings of bed bugs!). You have to do a 15 minute jungle trek across the island to get from one beach to the other - loads of fun with our backpacks - oh, and watch out for the lizards (did I mention that we saw 2 of them that were about 1.5m long!!!).
It was at our cute little beach side hut on Coral Bay that we celebrated Brendan's 26th birthday. After a couple of quiet drinks on our balcony (we had a bottle of local rum called "Monkey juice" - went pretty well with Coke) we had a beautiful dinner on the beach, birthday cake and all (ok well it wasn't really cake, but a lame muffin I managed to track down and a single candle...but it did the trick).We left Perenthian on Monday morning with a bit of strange feeling - on one hand this island was absolutely gorgeous - picture perfect really and we had a great time scuba diving and meeting loads of backpackers. However, the island really was very small, quite expensive and I think after 10 days it was time to move on - ready to start on our next adventure.
Anyway, that's all for now. Hope you are all happy and well. Miss you all.
//Kate
Brendan I am sure there is a cream or lotion that you could put on the fungus that is appearing on your face. Island look lovely. Have fun on the next leg.
ReplyDeletelove Mil and Fil
No, that's actually what he looks like.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you're having fun. But so am I - work! Woo! Hope you had a good birthday Brendan. All the best guys - keep up the blogs.