Perhentian Islands, Malaysia

What can I say about the Perhentian islands? Imagine the perfect, secluded island with the clearest waters. That about sums it up. Secluded, paradise, beautiful. And while the journey to get there and back was about as fun as a trip to the dentist, it was well worth the 3 days we spent there.

There are 2 islands, the small and large island. We opted for the larger one, even though we rarely left our beach. Plus, the smaller one that is closer to the mainland often gets booked up. There are numerous places that offer basic chalets on the beach. Quite a few have dive centres and a restaurant. All we did for 3 days was snorkle, go on a couple of walks and read. The snorkling off the beach was fantastic. I realized on this trip that I've never really snorkled before. This was a great place to start. Not far from the shore there were huge reefs with tons of cool fish. There was no need to take a boat anyway, just walk about 50 meters off shore and you were at a reef. I've never seen such brillant colored fish before, some quite large. We also saw plenty on Nemo fishies - baby nemos too. We saw quite a few cool things, such as a sting ray, crabs, and sea cucumbers. I know for some people it's probably not that exciting, but for me it was fantastic. We snorkled almost the entire day on our last day there.

Not as thrilling was the journey to and from the islands. While there is plenty of accomodation on the islands, it's still not that built up and hasn't really been taken over by large hotels and resorts. To get there, we had to take an overnight train from KL, then a 2 hour taxi ride from the train station to the port and then a 2 hour boat ride on a junk boat to the island, then a quick ride on a small boat to get to our place. It was interesting to say the least. All of the touts kept warning us that the boat left at 9:30. Well, the boat doesn't leave until it's full and that's not necessarily at 9:30. But, part of the adventure is getting to these destinations.
We are back in Thailand now and heading up to some islands, hopefully. It's monsoon season on one side over here so we don't really know how we will fare. But we figured we'd check it out. Despite my feeings about Bangkok, it's nice to be back in Thailand. We've already had some great meals here and last night I ate way more fruit than I should have :)

We got our Chinese visas in KL and are set to leave at the end of the month before the school holidays make it difficult to find a place to stay. It's hard to imagine that we'll be home in a little over 1 month. I'm sure June 28th will come very quickly!

That's all for now! Take care.
Love,Nicole