Sawadee!
We're back in Thailand for the last leg of our trip. We left the Cameron Highlands and travelled across to the Perhentian Islands where we met up with our good friend Jamie Oxley who had come out to meet us on holiday for 16 days. We spent 6 lovely, sunny days on the Perhentians, mainly just sunbathing by day and eating LOTS of BBQ by night. We hit the same place almost every night and gorged on huge prawns, lobster, shark, blue marlin and many other delights!! The sea is really clear and the beaches are really nice. Jamie had been there 2 years ago and had raved about how amazing the snorkelling and coral was, but unfortunately it has not been taken care of and some of the beaches now resemble a coral graveyard with incredible amounts of dead coral.

The island is also home to the monitor lizard, a local animal that can grow to up to about 2 metres. They were a little frightening when they shot out of the forest as we walked along the paths! We also had a small rodent friend join us in our room for a few days. We let the hotel staff know and they kindly covered our entire room with rat poison. Clare was positive that she would wake up to find whole families of dead rats in the room each morning!!
We left the Perhentians and flew up to the North Western corner of Malaysia, to Langkawi. We were actually quite disappointed by Langkawi as we had heard the beaches were supposed to be really nice, but they weren't really. We hired motorbikes one day and visited virtually every beach on the island. We found one that was nice but typically it started raining about 45 minutes after we arrived! At least we found a good restaurant to eat at though where we stuffed ourselves silly with delicious chicken satay.

We also went up the famous Langkawi cable car which was much better than we expected and the views were amazing. Clare thought she might be really scared but it turned out that Jamie was the scaredycat and Clare was fine!! We also met up with a friend of Clare's sister and a friend of Nicky's from Leeds. We had a bit of a boozy night making the most of the first cheap beer prices in Malaysia and raved it up at a reggae bar where an Indonesian Bob Marley wannabe sang his heart out to an '8-Mile' style crowd. It was very, very funny.

Here are our latest pictures from the Perhentians. The island is beautiful in places but the pictures make it look far more deserted than it is!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=403845&id=840245275&l=d4efc92396

Sorry that we're not responding to emails at the moment. The internet here is very expensive and we're saving our money a bit.

Hope you're well and look forward to seeing you very soon.
Much love,
Clare & Nicky
xxxx