Catch up #1 - Beach and scuba

It's been a while since I posted, so I'm not even sure if anyone is reading this anymore. But I feel like I left things a little bit unfinished, esp. since it wasn't easy to post pictures at the end, so I'm going to include a few more posts that are retroactively going back in time to the tail end of the honeymoon.

We spent a while (a bit more than a week I think) in the Perhentian Islands. On Long Beach at Pulau Perhentian Kecil (Kecil means the small island; contrasted to Besar, the big island). Long Beach is the most developed area of the small island, with the most to do, but that's really not saying much. Most of the people are on the island to dive, and there's really not much of a late night party scene. Which was fine with us. (Are we getting old?)

We did a bunch of scuba diving, with Coral Sky Divers. Sometimes the visibility was awesome, sometimes it was less than spectacular. The dive sites are very close to the islands compared to Koh Tao, where they were still fairly close. It's easy to get two dives in a day and still have plenty of other time. Our favorite dive spot was Temple of the Sea, which we ended up diving at twice.

The island has no roads. There's just a number of beaches, some connected by paths through the jungle. The only other way to get around is by boat. It's the kind of place where you can take off your shoes when you get there and keep them off for a week. Which is basically what we did, with two exceptions -- one time when we talk a walk to the other side of the island, and the other time when we decided our initial accomodations (at Panorama) weren't quite good enough, and we packed up our belongings and moved to the north end of the beach, to Moonlight.

One somewhat downside of the island was the food. There's not a lot of places to eat besides the guest houses, and they generally serve up the same monotonous variety of both Malay and Western food, but most of it not very imaginative or all that great. Although there is plenty of fresh fish (the nightly BBQ is a decent deal), and the mangos were plentiful and quite sweet and juicy. And various places seem to be able to make decent french fries, if that's what you have in mind.

We were complaining about the food to Trish, one of the divemasters at Coral Sky, and she clued us in. She recommended a place for us to go, Aziela Cafe. We had actually already been there and weren't too impressed. But the key is to not order anything that's on the menu. She gave us a bunch of recommendations for other things to order. Which is the kind of thing that we could have been able to do in Thailand, but not having enough familiarity with Malay food, we weren't really capable of doing something like that without assistance. Anyway, we went there, and kept going back repeatedly over the next few days, and tried everything she recommended, and it was all quite good. I don't understand why they don't just put the good stuff on the menu so that enough people can have it. They seem to be quite happy to make it when you ask for it. And not all travelers want crappy Western or Westernized food.

We ended up getting to be a bit friendly with the people there. I had been looking for durian (the spiky fruit with a bad reputation), but nobody had it for sale on our part of the island, since it's not something a lot of Westerners want. I had even been considering taking a boat to the village to see if I could get some myself at the market. I asked them at Aziela if they had any, and the answer was no, but they volunteered to get some for me the next time they went to the market. Which they did. And the next day, when we had the durian, we ended up eating with a bunch of other people, and sharing a bunch of dishes, and I got a bunch of people to try durian that never had had it before. It's funny -- everyone seems to have their own opinion of what it tastes like, and everyone describes it as something totally different than what everyone else says. Including brie, honey-garlic, and jackfruit. My recommendation is to definitely try it if you're traveling in Southeast Asia and get the chance. But you probably don't want to give it a go in North America -- I'll let Lorien tell you why.

As in many other places along these travels, we encountered plenty of cats. Well, more specifically, plenty of kittens. Really an overabundance of kittens, which isn't actually a good thing, if you think about it. But many of them are incredibly cute, so I couldn't resist posting at least one photo.

All in all we had a pretty good time there, the biggest downside being that we both got ear infections, which ended our diving a little bit early.

That's about all for now. I'll continue playing catchup with reportings on our journeys, and some more photos, on another night.