End of Malaysia (at long last)

I think we said something in the last post about the next one not being so long coming... turns out we were a little wrong in that prediction... but better late than never =)

So we left off just as we were leaving Kuala Lumpur - we'd done a real mean zigzag across the country and faced a really long journey diagonally back across the entire width of Malaysia to hit the east coast. The plan was to try and do some diving in the Perhentian Islands, and relax a bit after a reasonable stint of city living. The bus journey was pretty long but uneventful, Alex started the day as usual with a Nasi Lemak (coconut rice with anchovies in spicy tomato sauce, not my cup of tea in the mornings but Alex is great with the local food) and her current favourite tea in the world - Teh Tarik. Apparently this just about beats the Indian sweet tea - its even sweeter, thicker and frothier than anything else she'd tried so far. My slightly narrower tastes struggle in the mornings, especially at the small places in the bus stations, I can't face curry in the mornings so end up with cold fried chicken or something similar... not ideal but at least we aren't going to starve any time soon.

The bus dropped us off quite late in Khota Besut, which was still a little trip away from the ferry, so we stayed over and made the trip the following morning. The boat out to the islands was great fun in itself; instead of ferries they use small speedboats to make the crossing. We arrived on the smaller of the two islands and found out that it was the final week of the season and that most places were closing up that week. But despite our lack of planning it worked out quite well, because you could name whatever price you wanted in the hotels because they were pretty much deserted, apart from a smattering of other backpackers. We ended up in a lovely little cabin for a few nights for a bargain price.

The resort was really small, no more than five or six shacks and a jetty, all along the beautiful beach.



The season was coming to an end because our old friend the monsoon was heading south from China (apparently the local fishermen shut up shop a few days after they start seeing rubbish with Chinese lettering washing up.) This didn't affect us much during the day, but the evenings brought in pretty epic rainstorms. We thought we had the measure of it after the first night, so the next evening we ventured through the jungle to the slightly larger resort across the island on Long Beach (the lets-come-up-with-clever-names-for-the-beaches committee had skipped the Perhentian islands as well as Thailand it would seem.)

We had a lovely dinner on the other side of the island, and maybe enjoyed one beer too many because before we knew it the rain clouds had sprung up and proceeded to tip it down relentlessly for the rest of the night. We figured it would let up, so dodged into another bar but it still wouldn't let up. It slowly dawned on us that we faced the trip back through the jungle in the pitch black night in the middle of a tropical storm, with no umbrellas and only my iPhone for illumination. Yet another quality misadventure we'd managed to get ourselves into... this time there were no leeches thank god, but there were enough scary noises coming from the undergrowth that we practically flew back down the track.

As luck would have it the iPhone Flashlight app performed admirably under pressure, but the same couldn't be said for my flip-flops, which chose an ideal time to come to pieces. Oh how I laughed at the time... (fortunately no-one was stupid enough to be around to hear my tirade.)

After a good 30 minutes slog we made it - soaked, muddy and stumbling out from the jungle onto our home beach. We resolved not to go exploring in the evenings so much after that.

The following day we stuck to our side of the island and rented some snorkeling gear and hit the beach. The snorkling was absolutely amazing in Malaysia, quite often you'd see just as much stuff in the shallows as you would diving, so it was a great way to spend an afternoon. We had a small isolated cove inside the hotel grounds, so we went out and started kicking around to see what we could see. Before too long I noticed Alex gesticulating wildly and pointing out into the distance... with my eyesight not being what it used to be it took a while to peer through the gloom, but sure enough the shape that emerged looked a lot like a shark. We both stared a bit longer before we noticed another shape, and sure enough that turned into another shark. Fortunately for our growing sense of panic they were holding their ground about 20 metres away, and as we got a better look we could see they were only small ones and had black tips - our small amount of shark knowledge was enough to know they were black tipped reef sharks, and no threat to us. Still quite an exciting event, it was the first shark I'd ever seen in the wild.

There wasn't really enough going on to keep us on the smaller island any longer, so we grabbed a taxi boat over to the larger island, hoping for some more action. We were also hoping to find a dive shop that one of the (now ex-) CMC guys owned, and maybe do our advanced diving course there. After checking out a couple of the resorts along the coast we decided their wasn't much to do there and headed directly for the bay on the other side where the locals had pointed us towards the dive shop. Unfortunately when we got there the dive shop and accommodation were fully booked up, and with the bad weather moving on we decided not to stick around. We did a single night in another deserted decent hotel, before heading back to the mainland.

So after the abortive diving trip we had about 10 days left in Malaysia before we had to head south across the border to Singapore to catch our flight to Oz. On the boat back from the islands we got chatting to a local couple who turned out to be heading in the same direction as us, and offered us a lift. This was the first time any sort of hitching-style transport had offered itself up, so we didn't really know what to make of it. The couple seemed nice enough and it was going to save us a lot of hassle with taxis and buses down to the next town, so we accepted their offer. We were a bit worried we were going to be squashed into a tiny car with our bags, but when the guy turned up in this beast we were pleasantly surprised.



It turned out to be a good call, we had a good journey peppered with conversation in broken English down the coast. We made it to the regional bus station at Terengganu and made it just in time to jump on the bus down the coast. We must have mentioned it before, but the buses in Malaysia are brilliant - massive seats, good aircon, and still really cheap. So we settled in for another 5 hourish bus trip south towards a place called Cherating - or as the guide book would have it "the chilled out backpacker hangout of Cherating".

How a town could be so horribly over hyped in one sentence we'll never know. Cherating turned out to be a total dead end dump of a town. The usual excuses could be applied - we were right at the end of the holiday season blah blah - but if this place was ever a chilled out backpacker hangout there were was no sign of it when we arrived. We faced an accommodation choice between an assortment of run down shacks, all with damp, so we opted for the one with fewest holes in the walls and least creatures roaming free in the bathroom. Almost all of the restaurant had fundamental reasons why they couldn't feed us - ranging from "the chef can only make spaghetti" to "our kitchen closed down last March". Thankfully we managed to find a bar to grab a much needed Tiger, and ended up hitting the locals place for some food, so it wasn't all bad.

The next day we hit the one travel office (normally you can't move for travel agents in these places) and sorted out a taxi down to the next bus terminal town. We were so happy to leave the stinking hovel (the jury is still out on whether this was actually worse than the place we stayed on our first night in Malaysia...) we took a photo to celebrate.



It turned out to be a bit of a groundhog day; the car took us a fair way down the coast, we arrived at the bus station in Kuantan intending to hop on another bus to take us all the way down south towards Mersing, the port where we could catch a ferry over to the Tioman Islands - our next best hope of getting some diving in. With our luck already pretty much at rock bottom we found all the buses heading south were full, so we had no option but to stay over in this industrial bus town until the next morning. Against all odds Alex managed to find a lovely little hotel for us to stay in, wonderfully clean and with wifi and everything - this was heaven after the previous night so we had a chilled out day relaxing and watching TV. We went out for dinner and had a massive sushi feast at a nearby shopping centre, which succeeded in cheering us all the way back up again.

We'd booked the bus for 9am the next day, so we arrived at Mersing around lunchtime, and by 3pm we'd made the boat hop over to Tioman - heading for a placed called Salang Bay. This turned out to be much more what we were looking for in terms of island retreats - there was enough stuff going on to keep you occupied for more than a couple of nights. We hit the Tiger beers that night in a beach restaurant happy we'd found somewhere we could call home for the next few days. As luck would have it the restaurant did a mean fish BBQ and amazingly tasty grilled chicken, so we feasted as the sun set and retired to our lovely little bungalow really quite happy indeed.

Here is a photo from outside when we woke up the next day - it was a great spot, a few minutes walk from the town and beach, but set back in a small grassy clearing.



We set off from there to canvas the local dive shops and see what we could get up to during our stay. Before we'd gone 100 metres from our bungalow we were confronted by an enormous lizard strolling along the path in front of us. It took one look at us and headed back to the stagnant pool/river that ran behind the town. We quickly realised there were two or three of the massive beasts in the water.



(After doing some research at Singapore Zoo, it turns out these are Malayan water monitor lizards. They became known as "The Beasts", and no walk through the town would be complete without at least one sighting... fortunately none after dark however. Strangely, at night the entire place was taken over by kittens, go figure.)

There were four dive shops in the small town (it takes about about 5 minutes to walk from one end of the small strip of buildings along the coast) and unfortunately the best looking place was fully booked, so we had to go with a place called Fisherman Divers. We decided to try and get our Padi Advanced qualifications sorted so we would have a greater choice of fun dives in future - the regular qualification limits you to a maximum depth of 18m. Some dive sites, quite often wrecks or good spots far out from the cost, go down to 30m so the advanced course means we can join trips to these sites as well.

The instructor was a local chap with a tough to follow accent, but he seemed to know his stuff so we stumped up the 300 quid and signed on to the two day course. The Padi course is either good or annoying (depending on your point of view) because you have to complete "Knowledge Reviews" as homework before the course starts. The advanced course is broken down into five separate dives, 2 compulsory and 3 optional ones - you basically pick the 3 options that will advance you into a variety of diving specialities (to use the hopelessly patronising Padi schpiel) whilst the 2 compulsory cover the important bits.

We were due to do Peak Performance Buoyancy first (option 1, but they made us choose this one :p), then Navigation (compulsory 1), followed by a Night Dive (option 2) in the evening. The second day would be the Deep Dive (compulsory 2) and end with a nice relaxing Wreck Dive (option 3). That meant quite a bit of homework, so we had to lay off the beers that night and hit the books.

Thankfully the questions are all trivial things a 10 year old could do, but the annoying thing is you have to use the exact Padi-Approved TM phrases from the book. Heaven forbid you should use the wrong term, or else the instructor will have explain the gospel according to Padi for another 20 minutes before you actually get to dive. Very annoying...

The dives were really straight forwards; all the entries were done from the jetty on the first day so we just had put all the gear on and lug ourselves 5 minutes past all the chuckling tourists in the town. The first dive was intended to improve all aspects of our buoyancy control and positioning in the water, so it was all about getting the perfect weighting and weight distribution, breathing patterns and that kind of stuff.

All good stuff to start with, apart from the bit where the instructor grabs Alex's wrist underwater and drags her off randomly. It turns out that we wanted her to see the local Titan Trigger fish because she'd been making jokes about them earlier on. Every dive resort in Asia seems to have a local trigger fish or two, and they are infamous creatures for chasing divers during certain seasons. And they aren't small things either (about as big as a decent sized dog) and if they bite you they can take a far chunk of flesh with them.

So it was with some mild panic the rest of us set off after the instructor with Alex in tow. Fortunately the fish was too busy nest building to come after us, although as the instructor (who has a long pointy mental stick - officially a tank-banger for getting attention underwater, but it doubles as a pretty effective fish poking device) swam away it did make towards Alex and me as we backed off carefully. Hours of fun =)

The other dives that day were good - I made a totally embarrassing mess of the navigation dive after being really cocky about using the compass on land. The hardest thing you have to do is swim in a square, about 20 seconds along then turn either left or right, repeated until you arrive back within one metre of the instructor who is waiting where you started from. I took me 6 attempts to get this even vaguely right, seriously I blame the compass sticking but even once I'd borrowed Alex's it turns out I couldn't measure the distance well enough (you are supposed to count your fin kicks - in the test you swim along a 30 metre long rope and count your kicks; I counted 52 on the way and 31 on the way back... not good, hopelessly inconsistent.) Fortunately I fluked the last trip around and the instructor let me have it - which was good because everyone's air was starting to get a bit low by this point.

The night dive was a real adventure, its a completely different world underwater when you can only see things directly in the beam of the torches. If you let your imagination go crazy there are all sorts of nasty creatures lurking just 10cm away from the edges of the beam, but its kind of the whole point of diving to keep your head clear and not panic so its quite good fun just to let your mind wander for a second or so The only exercise you have to do in the darkness is a simple navigation test, you swim out for 20 seconds by yourself, turn around and head back. The rest of the group hide their torches whilst you do it so you really do have to make sure you get the reciprocal heading right or its easy to miss the group. Fortunately everyone made it back ok, and it was pretty exciting going out into the pitch darkness by yourself for a bit.

Having spent so long running through the extra safety precautions you have to take on a night dive it was almost inevitable that the instructors high powered light would fail during the dive. But no worries, he carries the required backup light... which failed as well. So he had to fall back onto one of our backup torches - as with everything on these courses you get given such useless equipment when you are learning compared to what you'd actually use for real - and these torches were so small it was funny. So we picked our way back to the jetty with just these tiny little torches which was quite funny.

This was the first time we'd ever done three dives in one day - two is much more common - so by the time we cleaned up our kit and hung it for the next day we were shattered. But oh joy! we still had some homework to do for the deep and wreck dives the next day. Having read through the deep dive (which really is the main thing you are doing the course for really...) we were both quite excited and keen to see how we'd get on so deep underwater.

There isn't really any trick to diving deep, but you have to take all the safety issues doubly seriously because if anything goes wrong that far down you can be looking at a pretty serious case of decompression sickness. All the problems stem from small bubbles of nitrogen forming inside your blood when you get so deep, due to the pressure of the water above you. These bubbles can cause all sorts of scary things (like the bends) if you don't let them escape by really ascending really slowly. One of the other things the extra nitrogen causes is called "Nitrogen Narcosis", which can cause all sorts of wacky symptoms under water. The book describes these along the lines of "general feelings of unreasonable safety underwater", like you are suddenly free from all of the general stresses of scuba diving (like making sure you breathe through the regulator, basic stuff like that.)

So the purpose of the deep dive is to go over the safety stuff again, and to give you a controlled taste of being "narc-ed up". The instructor got us to do a simple mental test on the surface, and then again at 30 metres. The idea is that you appreciate that your decision making and thought processes are significantly hampered down there, so you take a lot longer to do even simple things. By this point we were equal measures excited and nervous about the dive, but we all packed up our stuff and headed out to the dive boat to find out.

I say dive boat, but it was more like a rowing boat by the time we'd squeezed the 4 people on our course and another 10 people onto the tiny thing. Getting our gear on was a game of poking other people in the ribs and banging tanks, but this is downside to doing the course on the cheap. Once everyone had untangled themselves it was time for buddy checks ("Bangkok Woman Really Are Fellas" - buoyancy, weights, releases, air, final checks :p) and then into the water.

The dive was quite pleasant through the usual myriad of fish, rocks and corals, and before we knew it the instructor was signalling to come in close and it turned out we'd already hit the magical 30 metre depth. When we talked about it afterwards, both Alex and I hadn't really noticed anything weird going, and sure enough we did the test in roughly the same time we did it on the surface. This was good, because it meant we weren't going to go bonkers at depths, but we both kind of wanted to feel the effects so we knew what to expect. I guess it must be quite a subtle thing, and we'll learn to recognise the signs as we become more experienced divers. Anyway, not going crazy was enough to earn us the congratulatory handshake from the instructor to indicated we passed that bit of the course.

The afternoon dive was a real walk in the park after all this - the wreck diving speciality dive was a bit of a joke compared to the other more technical dives. We basically had to swim around a lovely shipwreck for 20 minutes noting down points of interest and potential hazards. You drum into you the hazards of actually going inside the wreck, so you just stick around the outside and peer in. The dive went down to 24 metres, so this was already a good return on doing the advanced course as we would have only been able to swim over it before. This was a great end to the course, and everyone came back happy that we'd completely everything and had a great time to boot.



We were genuinely shattered after two days of activity - despite being pretty easy going at the time, Scuba diving has an uncanny way of tiring you out completely after you've finished. After some more tasty beer and BBQ fish/chicken, we hit the sack quite pleased we'd achieved something productive for the first time in a while.

Time was starting to get short before we had to leave for Singapore, so we managed one more day on the beach before we booked our ferry back to the mainland and the connecting bus to Singapore. That night I managed to sneak out and watch a Man United game with the locals - they are massively into English Premier League football out there, and Man U and Liverpool (boooo, hiss) have a huge following. I watched it at our favourite fish/chicken restaurant, as I'd noticed their TV was decked out with United flags and banners - sure enough it was a great choice as the owner was a big United fan. I can't remember exactly which game it was (Blackburn maybe?) but each time we scored they played Glory Glory Man United really loudly on their music system - quality =)

That'll do for now, next stop Singapore...