Perhentian Islands

In the morning, we caught a bus to Kuala Terengganu on the main road, and before we knew it, we'd arrived at the bus station and been ushered into a share taxi with a French couple bound for Kuala Besut.

The share taxis in Malaysia were just one more reason why getting around could be such a joy compared to other Asian countries. You could get them just about anywhere, but it was easiest to go to the local bus terminal or train station to catch a share taxi. After telling the driver where you wanted to go and how many people you needed to share the taxi with you, they would do the rest. Depending on the destination, it usually didn’t take long before the requisite numbers of tourists were hustled into the cab. The prices were fixed and usually posted somewhere, so you didn’t have to worry about haggling or getting scammed.

We travelled from Kuala Terengganu to Kuala Besut carrying on broken conversations with the elderly couple from France - they with their limited, badly accented English vocabulary, and us with our even more limited, ugly French. It took just under an hour and a half for RM 5 each. That was under $2.00 each - Beth and I were almost sorry we had "discovered" share taxi's so late into our Malaysian leg of the trip

Kuala Besut was teeming with shops selling ferry tickets to the Perhenthian Islands, and it didn’t really matter where we bought the RM 30 return ticket - they all used the same boats. But when we went to the information center/travel shop near the jetty where the taxi dropped us off, we were stunned by the amount of information available. They had every guest house cross-referenced by price, room type and amenities. There were details on every dive center and just about anything else you needed to know.

For some reason there was a lot of hype about the lack of drinking water and food available on the islands - the owners of the small convenience stores near the jetty probably started this! Every single backpacker was loaded down with bottled water, crackers and bread - OK, maybe they saved a couple of ringgit but you could buy anything you wanted on the islands.

Our ferry left at 1:00pm and as most boat rides we took, it was a great ride. We were dropped off by request in a shallow area in Coral Bay (I could see sand patches everywhere and every boat predictably got stuck while leaving the harbour). The length of the trip depended on where you're staying. The ferry would drop you off wherever you wanted to stay - the quickest being Coral Bay on Kecil Island at about an hour and a half. When we were about a half hour away from the smaller island's west coast (Kecil Islan - Coral Bay), we realized how beautiful the island was. Without having stepped foot on land, we were already completely satisfied.

We'd heard that Rajawali, at the north end of Coral Bay, was a good place to stay, but it was full. Most of the places at the north end were little RM 15 A-frame bungalows with mosquito nets, mattresses on the floors and shared outdoor toilets and showers. To the south, where we stayed, (Sunse - RM 35 for a double with bath and fan) the places were a little more upscale, with beachside bungalows with attached bathroom & shower - but there actually wasn’t much running water. Kecil had water shortage problems in the fall, and we ended up drawing water from the well for a one-bucket sponge shower!

Coral beach wasn’t great for swimming - it simply lived up to its name too well - but the view was the best with some of the most spectacular sunsets I'd ever seen. It was also a little quieter than Long Beach (on the eastern side of Kecil) and had great snorkeling. One day we were snorkeling with two turtles that were cruising just fifteen meters off shore.

If you wanted a great beach for swimming, you took a 10-minute walk through the jungle over to Long Beach - a 3/4 kilometer long pure white sand beach with calm waters and views of the big island. One morning we were met by a two meter long monitor lizard relaxing on the path. The monitor lizards were all over the island and ran crashing into the jungle when they heard someone coming. At the restaurant by our bungalow, the woman chef fed a huge lizard every evening around 5:00pm, and that usually drew a bit of a crowd.

Long Beach was the place to organize snorkeling trips, kayak & boat rentals and snorkeling equipment rentals. It was also where we found the best dive shop we had ever been to - Turtle Bay Divers. We shopped around at most of the dive shops on Kecil Island and most of the prices were the same - RM 120 for 2 dives. The minute we walked into Turtle Bay and didn't get the "we're too cool for you" look, but instead were greeted by one of the friendly owners, we decided to go with them. The shop is owned by two Malay-Indian brothers who'd been educated in England, and they ran a tight ship. We ended up doing 4 dives there with an English guy named Peter who had done all 200 of his dives there, and was unbelievably still pumped every dive. He was a forty-year-old former bricklayer who decided to make a big change in his life, and clearly he'd been successful! The diving was all done by speedboat, so you could come back between dives and grab a good lunch - which beat 2-dive trips any day.

The food was predictably great. Most of the restaurants were attached to bungalows and had special set meals (RM 6 or 7) every night depending on the catch of the day. We had a lot of great seafood and vegetable curries - Rajawali was consistently better than other places. Our usual breakfast was muesli with fruit for about RM 2. The best lunches we had were at the restaurant beside and behind Turtle Bay Divers - they had huge chicken baguette sandwiches, which hit the spot between dives.

By chance, the day after getting there, we met up with Kylie and Andrew who we'd travelled with in Java. They chartered a boat to go fishing one day and managed to haul in a fair amount of small fish, which Rajawali barbequed for us at no charge.

One day we signed up for a snorkeling trip which everyone raved about. We signed up with "Rosie,", a jolly fat guy that operated a little shop on Long Beach (Kylie and Andrew had gone fishing with Rosie). He was s a great guy, and he took us to 4 or 5 places in his speedboat, as well as lunch for RM 15 each. We had bought an AS800 speed 5-meter underwater disposable Kodak camera and brought it along - it worked really well. It gave us a chance to have some pictures to remember the underwater portion of our journey. The final stop on the snorkeling trip was to a freshwater spring on the big island. After drinking bottled water for two months and showering from a well for a few days, the spring water was like our own little oasis in the middle of paradise.

After almost a week on Perhenthian Kecil, we had to leave in order to meet up with our friends in Thailand, but I vowed to come back. I’m hoping that the “non-development” policy on the islands will endure, and that some day I can come back to this hidden paradise with Beth and the girls.