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).

So I promised to add more about Kecil after my hurried previous post about this wonderful island.

So Perhentian Kecil is absolutely awesome. It is definitely a surreal feeling to get the speedboat from the mainland (which, every 10 seconds or so, lept into the air a couple of metres over the waves and assaulted my backside upon reconnection), then a water taxi (a mini-speedboat effectively) to the island. You get dropped off in the shallows and wade to shore with your backpacks.

Boom. Welcome to Perhentian Kecil.

The water is crystal clear, the sun is continuous. The sky is clear, the beaches are perfect and white, and there is very little building on the beach (something, regrettably, which is being rectified by the government). Nearly all the buildings are wooden huts, and there’s generally not a huge amount of people around. And those that are are, er, “very fine specimens” of humanity. I was drinking cold beer on a perfect beach whilst watching the waves lap by moonlight. It was bliss.

I still miss it. Even if none of the toilets flush. Even if you have to watch Geckos run around and catch cockroaches whilst you take a dump. Even if all the shops add about 15% onto the prices on the mainland. Even if our budget kind of went out the window for our time there. Even if, despite your best efforts, sand gets absolutely everywhere in your bed, in your room and in your… Even if, on the way back to mainland, in addition to the batty battering effects of the speedboat you have torrential rain whipping your face as YOU whip along at 60mph or so.

The biggest downside of all this remote bliss is that Kecil has no ATMs or banks at all, so you have to bring all your cash from the mainland. We thought that we would return and spend a few days in Cherating – a place described by the Lonely Planet as, “one of the best stop-overs along the east coast. Many arrive here and, taken in by it’s infectious relaxing vibe, stay for weeks or months at a time.”

Well, let me tell you, it couldn’t be further from the case. I don’t normally write off places entirely – you’re talking to the guy who can even find many good points for living in Stevenage, Hertfordshire! But here, I met my match.

Cherating is an empty, desolate, depressing, suicide-inducing hole of a dump.

I wouldn’t advise going there either. It’s quite clear that, although the Malaysia Lonely Planet was revised January 2007, they blatantly haven’t been there for at least 4 years or more (a local told me this is when it started to change). This is made all the more interesting when you read this story on the BBC website that my brother, by coincidence, sent me.

Lonely Plant, how I loath thee. Let me count the ways…..

It didn’t help that the only affordable hostel was dirty and run-down, run by a guy who was obviously tired and wanting to pack it all in. In fact, this hostel was a micro-cosm of Cherating as a whole. It DOES seem as though the place used to be great. The beach is actually pretty good (it’s difficult to be positive about this when you’ve been in Kecil, but I’m doing my best!), but it’s deserted. And the whole area is swamped in a thick air of sadness and despondency. We simple couldn’t wait to get out. Undoubtedly the worse place I have been so far.

Moving on then…

We’re now in Kuala Terrengenu, further up the east coast towards Perhentian Kecil (and, more importantly, further away from Cherating!). It’s quite nice and pleasant here, and we’ll see if there’s any sights tomorrow.

Sunday we plan to return to Perhentian Kecil for a week. Four of those days will be taken up with our Open Water Scuba Diver course which we’re both really looking forward to. How do you imagine being able to freely explore the sea and all it’s wildlife? I hope to be able to blog more about the past few days but, if I can’t, I won’t be able to in Kecil (internet access there is very limited and very expensive, so I’ll have to do without) and so you might not see something here for a week or so.

Just returned from Perhentian Kecial – an amazing tropical paradise island off the east coast of Malaysia.

For reasons that I’ll go into in a later post, I haven’t got much time now. But the island is so amazing – it looks like the set of the series ‘Lost’ on first impressions. Make-shift wooden shacks and bars along the beach, awesome white sand, clear water.

We’re going to be training and qualifying as PADI Open Water Scuba Divers here so that we can dive in other places that we visit around the world.

There is no internet on Kecil (well, there is just about but it’s VERY expensive, as are many other things, due to it being an island), so this is a brief entry in Kuantan. We’re going back there in a week or so for the diving course, and because it was so amazing that we didn’t really want to leave but there’s no ATMs and we didn’t take enough cash so we had to return to the mainland.

But hopefully I’ll get chance to make some more blog posts and bring y’all up to date before I head back.