Thursday 24 September 2015

Sawadeeka Thailand!

We are finally in Thailand.

We first arrived in Koh Samui, but the weather was a bit pants so did not get up to much... Just getting massages (one hour for less than £3), phad thai (tasty noodles with tofu, peanuts and chilli) and some local beers (Chang!).

We then moved on to Koh Tao. This turtle island (Tao means turtle in Thai) has got everything you need: lovely beaches during the day, some nice food and parties at night (I also got dragged to the pub to watch a Liverpool game...) We rented a quad one day to travel around the island and hit some pretty nice beaches.






We are currently in Koh Lanta. This island is in the Andaman sea, on the other side from the previous two. We had to take a night boat, surprisingly comfortable with double beds and A/C as well as two minivans and a couple of small ferries. It took us a while but we got here in the end, after a mere 17hours...


Night boat

It is 'low season' on this side of Thailand so the place is very quiet which means nice beaches with very few people.

We were welcomed by a lovely sunset and today we rented some bikes to go explore a little bit. We went to Phra Ae beach (or long beach) - it's so long you cannot even see the end of it and for a while we were the only ones there!

Now off for some more curry :-)


Sunset at Klong Khong beach



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Friday 11 September 2015

Do yu spik Englisc?

H. Jackson Brown, Jr said "Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language" and far from me to do so... but  I will admit I had a good giggle at some of the writings I have seen so far. Some human error, some weird spellings, some copyright issues (?) and some just English influences, but funny anyways. Hope you enjoy!

Eggs buld you up in the morning
Maybe you can have them on the balcony?

Once you have these, you dinner can only be finished

exxxxxxxtraberry

Late night 7/11 snack

I would go in, if it weren't so rude

Would be hard to call your last card

Wednesday 9 September 2015

Relaxing on Pulau Tioman

Another island off the west coast of Malaysia is Pulau Tioman, it is a lot bigger than the Perhentians and very different. We had to take a night bus and a 2hr ferry to get there (if a 4am drop off in front of a Chinese temple is to be considered a night bus). Tioman is like a "Pocket Coffee", the Italian chocolate with real coffee inside, one of my favourites...  it has got hot sticky jungle on the inside and lush beaches on the outside.

We stayed in a village called ABC (it is really called Air Batang, but I like ABC!)... walked around for a bit and got ourselves a little hut 1min walk from the beach - and that is pretty much it! You could hear the sea at night and the jungle during the day, something I have never experienced before.

The weather was not the best as it is coming into monsoon season, so the beach and the sea were not as good either. We just spend a few days not doing much: reading on the balcony, observing the monkeys that were coming from the jungle to look for food (or to explore my bag when I left the door of the room open!), playing cards with other travellers, eating nasi goreng (fried rice), drinking kopi ais (cold coffee) and having a few beers on the beach... Very relaxing.

Now onto the last few days to be spent in Melaka and back to KL, before our Thai adventures start.

Gotta love a beach swing!

View from the beach

Friday 4 September 2015

Diving in the Perhentians


We came to these islands (one of my favourite places in the world!) to do some diving as we knew it was going to be really good. 

I had dived here before but this time it was even more enjoyable: first, we did a quick refresher course as we both had not dived for years - for Ben it was 15 years this month, to be precise!

We were quite lucky as it was the end of the season so we had a dive master all to ourselves and had a lot more time/attention than usual: we went for 4 dives altogether and saw a lot of different types of fish, the first and the second dives were on sandy patches with reefs - we saw loads of clown fish (Nemos!) and a blue-spotted stingray. The third one was called "Temple of the Sea" as it was a pinnacle, we swam around it and saw some nudibranches (little sea worms), some very colourful purple angel fish, a big puffer fish and a poisonous stone fish... Guess what? It looked like a stone!

My favourite dive was the last one: in 2012, three police boats were sank by the local authority to create an artificial reef - that is now known as the 'Polis Wreck' dive site. We were able to swim between the boats, with massive schools of barracuda all around us: it really felt like being in a Nat Geo documentary, when they were circling around us in huge numbers. There was a big grouper fish that lives inside the top of the boat, lots of catfish hiding underneath the wreck and a lionfish was seen next to them. We also saw some jenkins stingray sleeping and covered in sand with only the eyes and the tail sticking out. 
The three boats are connected by a rope you can walk on... I took my fins off and "walked the line", it is a lot harder than you think, 18mts deep and with all the equipment on!!

View from Long Beach
Let's go diving!