The Perhentian Islands

We arrived in Kuala Lumpur early after catching the horrendous overnight train from Singapore, and made our way to Louise and Iain's house (Louise is an old friend of Jen's sister). They were extremely welcoming and we spent two days catching up over good food and proper English tea!

We then took another night bus from Kuala Lumpur to Kuala Besut, where we boarded the speed boat at 7.30am and made the short trip to Perhentian Besar. We had booked four nights at the Watercolours resort and planned to eat well, sleep well, and do our Advanced Open Water dive course.

The first day was spent recovering from lack of sleep (the night bus was just as bad as the night train) and swotting up on all the dive theory ready for the course. On day two we completed the navigation dive and the night dive. The navigation wasn't anything spectacular but taught us some key skills for finding our way around underwater (Jen is actually a better navigator underwater than she is on land!) In the evening we waited until dark and then ventured out for the night dive. It was an unreal experience and we managed to see loads of sea life that you struggle to see during the day - including the fish having a kip on the rocks! Our favourite sightings were the boxer shrimp, the coral catshark, the Jenkins stingray, and the plankton that illuminated when we turned off our torches!

On the third day we did the deep dive and the underwater photography dive. The deep dive was a great experience. We went down as far as 30m and it was again a completely different world. A lot more of the colours were lost at this depth and it was a lot cooler than on the surface. Here, we saw at least five bamboo sharks, a moray eel, two Jenkins stingrays, some porcupine fish, and many more. The photography dive was really cool too, as the visibility was perfect and it was a superb dive site. As we swam around we practised taking pictures of the fish, each other, and the coral. We soon found that underwater photography is a fine art and requires excellent buoyancy control to get the best results. However, we did get some really nice photos!

On our fourth and final day we completed the course with a wreck dive - a 92m cargo ship carrying sugar that sank in December 2002 called the Union Star - the dive site is known as the Sugar Shipwreck! Again, it was completely different to all the other dives, and it was really exciting and challenging to manoeuvre through the fallen masts and ropes whilst marvelling at the sheer abundance of fish. The pick of the bunch on this dive were the huge pufferfish, the giant blue trevally, the scorpionfish, and the lionfish.

After successfully completing the course (we are now Advanced Divers!) we went snorkeling for one last look at the fish. We realised that the island is fantastic for snorkeling as well as diving, and our whole experience of the Perhentians was topped off when we saw a 1.5m blacktip reef shark!

We now make our way back to Kuala Lumpur before flying to Chiang Mai...