ON THE ROAD AGAIN

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We woke early this morning and said goodbye to the island of Kecil. We are enroute to Thailand, Bangkok via KL again. The sun was coming up as in the photo above when the water taxi turned up to take our bags accross to the ferry terminal where the dreaded speedboat was waiting. This time the journey was slower and we were soon back on the mainland. As I write we are sitting in departures at KL airport and our flight is boarding so the next missive will be from Bangkok where the temperature on arrival is expected to be in the high 30's. Tomorrrow...plus 42. A far cry from home. And I think I might be crying for home soon!

PEDAS-MORNING NOON AND NIGHT

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The Pedas Man

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The food here on the island is what you would expect for a location not only in Malaysia but in The South China Sea (and that's definitely what it is). For every meal it is possible to have hot spicy food. There is no real milk to speak of because of the lactose intolerant East Asian peoples but there is a seemingly endless variety of sea food. At about six every evening the beach side restaurants fire up their barbies and as the sun goes down the meat and fish go on. It's not long before the delicious smells of seafood cooking amongst the herbs and spices gently waft up to our treetop 'apartment' where we are sitting having our sunset aperitif which now, due to the volume of duty free liquor now consumed, is reduced to local moonshine vodka and coke.
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Ali is a connoisseur of hot, spicy food. For every meal, including breakfast he likes nothing better than to indulge in a spicy cocktail of something or other. To start the day he will have Roti Chani. This is a flat pancake type thing but made out of a sort of puff pastry. It comes with a curry sauce and I tried it. Not bad but not as good as Fruit and Fibre. Trish of course has joined in with this culinary deviation. Proclaiming Roti Chani 'too fattening' her breakfast consists of a plate of anchovy noodles with lashings of hot chilli sauce. She has well and truly gone over to the dark side.

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In the evenings Ali comes into his own. He stalks the beach hunting down the restaurant that will make him sweat. However, his search has been fruitless. No matter how much 'pedas' he asks for (spicy) I have yet to see him actually perspire. The night before last we ate at Mama's. When the food arrived on the table Ali went through his usual ritual of sticking his nose centimeters from his fare and inhaled to test it's aroma. Proclaiming it as 'smelling good' he proceeded to tuck in. I had ordered squid curry 'pedas' so as not to seem chicken and like a errant schoolboy anxious to please the class bully for fear of exclusion from the gang I shovelled the dome of rice into the curry bowl and started eating. Very soon I was feeling like Tom in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, when sneaking past the massive, cat hating, ferocious bulldog, sleeping in his kennel, Jerry hits his foot with a claw hammer. The cat then has to stifle cry of pain for fear of waking the dog and gives the impression of a valve on a boiler fit to burst. My boiler was beyond bursting point as the spices began to do their best to rip off my head by way of exploding in my mouth. I gulped down a glass of water. 'Not a good idea to do that' informed The Expert 'it just cools down your mouth ready for the next mouthful and you'll go through it over again' Terrifying logic indeed. I glanced over at Trish happily spooning down another 'pedas' worth of noodle. Not a bead in sight, Annabel too looked as cool as a cucumber. Somewhere in the rainforest a small creature died.
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Local hooch with stuck on label

CORAL BEACH

A short video of Coral Beach

One of two beaches, the beach we are staying on is about 300 metres long, has two hotels, beach resaurants, some huts, numerous snorkel stalls, not many people and two small shops. One sells moonshine vodka. We are customers.

WONDERFUL WILDLIFE

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Of course no trip to this side of the world would be complete without a good look at the wildlife. As the island is covered by rainforest there are plenty of opportunities to study from the smallest to the largest creatures in the region. In fact our study started by default on the very first night in our treetop lodgings. Ali had told us about a cry we would here at dusk every night and sure enough on the evening number one we heard it right on time. Sorry folks but it goes like this..........'fuck you' It's the mating call of the ferocious tokay ghecko that patrol our balcony looking for insects and small vertebrates to devour. You might think this rather frightening but they cling skillfully only to walls and ceilings hunting


their prey. These little heroes are most welcome, for one of their yummiest meals is any mosquito that carelessly flies past. This keeps the little bloodsuckers to a minimum. Not sure about the moths though. We watched the other night as a ghecko stalked, then pounced on a large moth which had come to rest near our balcony light. The moth was then devoured whole.
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Then there are the monitor lizards, giant prehistoric beasts that stalk the undergrowth. But the best has to be The Blue Planet, the underwater universe easily accessible by boat to any one of five points around the island. Indeed we took one such trip yesterday, to snorkel off Shark Point, Turtle Point, Fish Point, The Lighthouse and Romantic Beach. A little less used to the sport of snorkeling, I was a bit nervous at first but with Ali and Annabel both experienced in the art, I was soon in my element gawping in wonder at shoals of brightly coloured fish of all sizes flitting through the equally colourful coral, turtles, barracuda, clown 'Nemo' fish, stingray and most impressive of all, one and a half metre white tipped sharks going about their business in the deep, like sleek torpedoes the perfect killing machine. Luckily they are only interested in eating other fish. But they certainly made you gasp as they swam effortlessly past just metres away.
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What really is amazing about all this is just how much it costs. For example, our snorkel trip, complete with dinner, hire of equipment, transport and guide was about £9. Malaysia is top value for money and then there's the food! More on that next time.

ROOM AT THE TOP

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Annabel and Ali have been coming to this island paradise in the middle of the Indian Ocean for many years. There are two small beaches and no hotels such as one would imagine a hotel to be. In fact there are more dive kiosks on the beaches than hotels. We are staying on the incredibly beautiful Coral Beach, so named because once upon a time it was all coral and no beach. In fact no one even came here unless it was to dive amongst the coral. Everyone went to Long Beach on the other side of the island. The something terrible happened in another part of the area which created Coral Beach by dumping tons of sand from the ocean floor on top of the coral. The 2006 Tsunami.
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Our hotel, one of only two, is built entirely of wood. Our room is accessed by a flight of winding stairs which climb precariously up the hillside. Each stair is different to the one before and by the time the last flight is reached, the builders must have run short of wood, because where there should be two steps there is only one, leaving a rather large gap for the careless climber to fall down. You need to imagine an adventure trail walkway at a children's activity camp. By the time Ali and I had reached our room with our suitcases a stiff drink was needed.

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Our rooms at altitude

And that's the second strange thing about The Senya Bay Hotel, no booze. Run by the Malaysian branch of Islam, the demon drink is forbidden. Well I suppose that's a bit of an exaggeration, it's just that they don't sell it. Ali's advice to purchase as much booze as we could duty free was sound .So on our first night we were to be found on the balcony of our tree top residence knocking back Absolut Vodka and orange courtesy of Air Asia and wondering whether installing a zip line would be a good idea for the guest at our altitude to gain access to the restaurant and beach!

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But the view is worth it!

FERRY TERRIFYING MR BOND

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Ferry across the???????

Hunched over the throttle control the Malaysian driver, with a passing resemblance to Goldfinger's 'Oddjob' had a crazed expression on his face. He seemed determined to make our ride across to the Parhentian island of Kecil as uncomfortable as possible. However he wasn't in the Vincy van on St. Vincent last summer. Now that was the ride from hell.

The day had started in KL as we emerged fairly bleary eyed from our overnight cell at Tune Hotel. We were soon checked in at the airport for our short flight to Kota Bahru from where we would make the 20 mile hop across the sea (that Ali does not know the name of) to our ultimate destination for the first week of our holiday. We were soon looking for somewhere to eat breakfast. Alli, as cultured as ever, suggested we make our way to McDonalds. Incredible don't you think, here we are with Mr. Gastro himself, and he is suggesting we eat at one of the world's most common restaurants. We were soon sitting in his second choice, the almost equally disgusting Marry Browns where we ate a breakfast which tasted like it had been made from Lego. This over, we boarded the 11 am flight to Kota Bahru.

Mmmmmmm...our first meal in Malaysia

Arriving some 40 minutes later, Mr Fixit Hearn negotiated a 'special' price for the taxi drive of one hour to the port from where we were to take the 'ferry' Upon arrival there he was soon at it again. Now he had, to be fair, us that the 'ferry' to the island was in fact a speedboat which carried 12 people and their bags. I had not expected what was to come. Firstly, we were taken to the boarding area where small boats with makeshift awnings scuttled around on the water taking on those wishing to make the trip to Kecil. They actually looked like the sort of craft that would take tourists pootling around a secluded bay.

I can make you afraid.....

To board the boat a steep flight of concrete stairs was negotiated complete with suitcases. The intrepid traveler then had to complete the operation by squeezing through the small gap between the side of the boat and the awning. As I was doing this I glanced to my left and noticed the size of the outboard motor which was clamped onto the back of the boat. I thought momentarily of my old mate Gary, who in the early 70's, being a car nut, had bought a mark one Ford Cortina. Underneath the bonnet of this monster lurked a pretty ferocious Lotus engine!

We soon found out just how powerful. Our driver, the mean looking Malaysian jammed the throttle forward and the prow fair rose out of the water and we were off at breakneck and to me, seemingly break boat speed across the sea with no name. In actual fact there were two 'officials' on this craft. In addition to the driver was a short, thin, wiry looking oriental, whose job it was to sit in the front and look out for obstacles such as marker boys and worryingly, any vessel, including those such as we were in, coming our way. Our driver also accelerated and deaccelerated sharply at regular intervals, attempting, I am sure, to throw his mate off into the water. But he was an old hand, as he like the rest of us, clung on desperately to avoid being pitched, head first over the side into the clear blue water.