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Come Fly With Me
Losing hearts, hats and hearing -
Paradise is the Perhentians. We meant to spend about 5 days here - enough so those of us doing the Open Water course could do that, then fit in a bit more diving. Somehow we stayed...and stayed...and stayed. It's a bit hard to leave. The beach is incredible - Long Beach on Perhentian Kecil - and we have a little bungalow at one end, tucked away below the forest of palm trees. There are no roads and electricity only comes on at about 6.30 or 7pm. There's one bar and it's just heavenly - complete bliss. At night there are few lights to obstruct the stars and you can see galaxies far far away (if you talk yourself into it) and sometimes shooting stars like mini meteor showers. I've done so much diving, and it's pretty awesome (although visibility hasn't been much more than about 15m maximum - typically, this is very rare!). Caroline, Chris, James (our Irish neighbour from Taman Negara) and Roal (a Dutch guy Chris met in the Cameron Highlands) have done their Open Water course and sadly moved on, but Caro and I are still here and have done a bit more diving. I did one site called the Sugar Wreck, a wreck dive on a boat that sank in the monsoon in 1998. There's a bit of a ghost story about it (apparently someone wasn't rescued and has never been found, and his ghost haunts the ship) and visibility was about 3 or 4m, so it felt very spooky. But WOW what a dive! I've seen so much - a huge (1.5m span) stingray, a 2m shark, many many beautiful fishies and corals...leaves me very much looking forward to Koh Tao! A few ear problems have left me unable to dive as much as I'd wanted, but you deal with these things and get on with it - I've been wobbling around a bit because my balance was shot after one ear became so painful I couldn't even move my jaw! Must start cleaning them...
Chris and Caroline have been very happy (it's very romantic here - a place for couples or divers, so it's a good job I love diving!) and I think she was sad to see him go, but who knows where we'll bump into him next. He was sad to leave behind his favourite baseball cap (nicked by the CHEEKIEST 14 year old I've ever known) and his flipflops - he has clothing amnesia. At least Caro managed to locate his 'flops so we'll have to meet up to deliver them!
Our plan from the Perhentians had been to head to Penang on the west coast of Malaysia...but when we got to the mainland (Kota Bharu) we found there were no buses until the next day. Faced with the prospect of either staying in Kota Bharu til the morning or jumping on the local bus up to a random town on the Thai border and doing god-knows-what from there...we of course chose the latter! So here we are in Sungai Kolok, a back-of-beyond border town with the best food I've tasted in a while (mainly because all the restaurants in the Perhentians have the same menus, so not much variety!) and a bus station that can deliver us to Krabi tomorrow. Here's to Thailand (but not the 4.30am wake-up call we're facing)...
Will add more from further north!
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