Chilling in Penang

So I haven’t updated people like I should have done. Sorry about that.

I’ve basically been chilling in Penang with our friends Sam, Neeltje and thier new arrival – Jonas Chin-Jo, who at the time of writing is a grand old age of 3 months old!

So what have I done this week? Not a lot. I’ve sat, I’ve slept, I’ve ate. Bernice and I have both been VERY lazy. I’ve watched a lot of T.V. and played a lot of Advance Wars on my Nintendo DS. We’ve also spent time just hanging out with our friends and playing with the baby. Along the way our friends kindly took us to the restaurant they run in the marina called the Q.E.2. Very nice if you’re in the area. 

Previously on my travels? Ah yes, I’ve been so lazy that I’ve neglected to update anyone on what we got up to on Perhentian. Well, I’m now qualified to dive to 18 metres underwater using SCUBA gear. I did a 4 day PADI Open Water SCUBA diver course and went from knowing nothing about diving to where I am now.

I would strongly recommend trying diving to anyone and everyone! There’s no real describing the feeling of breathing underwater and floating along (you learn how to float in the middle of the water without major effort) with the current. Apart from the fact that you just see so much wildlife when you’re doing a dive. You see more wildlife in a 1 hour dive than you would in a day at the zoo!

We also stayed in some different chalets this time, and got the chance to see a lot more wildlife due to it’s position a bit further back from the beach. Although the sight of 2/3 Geckos greeting you outside your chalet when you go home for the night and watching 2 metre Monitor Lizards walk by and underneath your room might not be to everyone’s taste, it certainly amused us and kept us interested.

Perhentian is a great place to meet people and it nice to experience the backpacker/traveller friendly atmosphere, even from the moment you set foot on the speedboat over there. All this has led to want to go back there already, and so we are!

Tonight we get the overnight coach from Penang to Kuala Besut – the jetty where you get the boat to Perhentian Kecil. We enjoyed our diving so much that we wanted to go back for another course each – Advanced Open Water Diver – which allows us to dive to 30m and further develop other skills such as navigation and wreck diving. We hope that the extra tuition and experience that this gives us will make us more confident when we go and dive around Australia when we’re there from June onwards. On that note, if any of you go to Perhentian Kecil, I strongly recommend that if you’re ever going to dive or even vaguely thinking of it, do it there, and do it with Sea Dragons – they’re a fantastic small and intimate dive shop with some great instructors.

Regretabbly the decision to return to Perhentian Kecil a third time has also meant that with the cost of the course and getting there, as well as the extra time on the island, we have had to drop a lot of the places we were originally planning to visit. However, we think it’s worth it because of the opportunity of diving some more and going back to Kecil again. Once you find something you like doing and a place you really like we feel it’s worth hanging there for a while. Anyway, we can always come back and do the stuff we missed another time.

So, again, see you all in a week or so (very little internet access on Perhentian).

~ by thesynapse on 18 May, 2008.