20th – 23rd September

The night bus was fine, I’m pretty good at sleeping in vehicles (as Tom will testify). The only thing that bothered me was waking up in the night to the torrential downpour going on outside still. I was sat there thinking, great a few days on the beach in the rain…… 😒. Luckily it had stopped when we got to Kuala Besut and as the sun rose I was happy to see a nice sunny day was ahead.

Before the sun rose, however, we were dropped off at some tiny non-looking bus stop, around 5am. There were a few other tourists that got off the bus along with myself. A lady sat in what looked like a launderette starting quickly saying something about a ferry ticket. As Kuala Besut is the ferry port for the Perhentian Islands and very popular with tourists we assumed this would be correct! We all bought our tickets, but then had to wait until 7am for the first boat to go. It wasn’t so a ferry, but more of a speed boat with everyone & they’re luggage packed in, dropping us off at our various beaches on the 2 main islands, Perhentian Besar & Perhentian Kecil. I was pretty nervous by this point with no accommodation, but I’d read Long Beach on Perhentian Kecil was the place for backpackers to dive and party so I went for it.

Carrying all my stuff across the sand I walked into the first dive place, there were 3 other doing the same as me, trying to find a place to dive & stay so I stuck with them to have other to help me think aloud! The accommodation left at Panorama dive centre was really awful (since I’ve heard people say they had a rat run over them in the night 🐀 🤢). So we carried on to a couple more and settled on Oh La La dive centre. Ignoring the name, the dive instructors sounded professional and the accommodation waaaaaaaaay better! Although, don’t get me wrong it was still basic as hell. The rooms were fine and upstairs, but the cold showers & no flush toilets were all downstairs. Still, I was there to get back into diving, so it was all good. Plus everyone’s happy on a sunny island! 🏝

TIP: DIVING IN THE PERHENTIANS IS CHEAP!! One of the cheapest places in the world, so thinking of getting qualified, here’s a great place to learn. I paid 420 MYR – which is about £78 – for my refresher course including a dive, 4 more fun dives and as long as you do 2 dives a day you get your accommodation for free!! This dive school were one of the newer ones and I found them great, there’s many other good ones that offer similar deals – check out tripadvisor.

Swimming with the fishes!

I hadn’t been since I did my PADI open water and advanced courses back in 2010! So as you can imagine I no longer had any clue what I’m doing, but as your dive accreditation never runs out I have 2 cards that say that I did! So I opted to do a refresher course. This turned out to be the basics of getting you back in the water – a quiz to test what you know, an hour going over some of the basic and safety stuff, learning how to check the equipment and a shallow water dive.

I did my refresher with a Dutch girl, Annelise, who was there with her Indian friend Deep – they were lovely and I hung out with them for a couple of days. So feeling still unconvinced that I was really ready to dive again, I followed the instructor under the water, first thing I had a mask panic, but once that was swapped it was all good! And do AMAZING! Such a different world down there.

Over the next few day I did 5 dives and they were all incredible! Even the Police Wreck dive, which we did in a the middle of stormy wind & rain. The visibility wasn’t too bad so not too much of a big deal when you’re under the water, but the boat to the dive site and back was frickin freezin!! We saw loads of fishes, from clown fish & angel fish to big scary trigger fish (known to be a little aggressive). Also saw sting rays and a weird Moray eel!

Perhentian Parties

In the evenings we pretty much ate at the same one restaurant that had quite nice food and went to the 2 party bars. They had crazy fire shows on until around 11pm, then dancing, which was great fun.

Cruising out of Kecil

Feeling a little ropey on my last day, I hung around trying to stay out the sun and at 4pm got the boat back to Kuala Besut. On a smaller speed boat this time all the people on it got splashed several times, I actually found it pretty refreshing!

I got a grab to my accommodation, which actually turned out to be a little bit out of the town in a local Malay Muslim community, grabbed an early dinner and took advantage of having my own room & space to spread out. Having my own bathroom with a flushing toilet and toilet paper for the night was amazing!