Swam for about 2 hours with Turtles but I found one old timer who let me a bit into his World and I filmed him for nearly 45mins.
Here’s what I edited.
Watch in HD.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=736231906408828&set=vb.360156644016358&type=3&theater
Just a short quick video of some of the fun stuff and other out of the ordinary moments so far.
Enjoy!
As always watch in HD.
We left Ipoh at 10pm, and after a dragging 10 hour journey, including a bus, a dodgy black taxi with tinted windows and an early ferry, we arrived at our destination: the Perhentian islands. We had heard a lot of amazing things about these islands, but they were supposed to be in monsoon season up until March, only apparently monsoon season finished early this year.
There are two islands, Besar and Kecil, which basically mean big or small. We opted to stay on the small island as we had heard that it is more for backpackers. We arrived at a jetty on Coral beach and set out for a 10 minute trek to Long beach which was on the other side of the island, as we had read that it is the nicest, but unfortunately we had read wrong. The beach was quite long but stacked with resort after resort. And when I say resort I don’t mean some 5 class luxury beach resort but I mean simple, old and extremely run down wooden beach huts. Most of them were closed as it was technically still monsoon season. The few that were open seemed deserted. Besides this, the beach was full of rubbish lined up along the shore and there was a massive standstill barge right in the middle of the beach. After Inga and I went along the whole beach in search of a decent place to stay, we decided to head back to Coral Bay as even with the jetty and overcrowedness, it was still much better than Long Beach.
We spent a night in a room just off Coral bay and enjoyed an amazing barbequed fish meal. Marc tried sting ray and I had Blue Marlin. Marc and Inga set off the next day in search of a better beach. Thankfully, they came across a gorgeous white empty beach with one resort consisting of around 6 huts and a restaurant. This was called Mira Bay and was run by a local family. Luckily they had a basic but massive family hut available so we immediately took it for the next 4 days. These 4 days passed too quickly, although they were very lazy days. All we did was lie on the beach or in the hammock reading, swimming, or else eating in the restaurant or playing cards. We made friends with some of the people working there and on one of the nights we built a fire on the beach and sat around it drinking local dark rum. On another night we decided to walk back to Coral Bay to eat at that amazing seafood place that we had eaten at on our first night. This meant a 40 minute walk on a paved pathway through the jungle. Quite scary doing it at night but luckily we didn’t come across any snakes. After the meal, Marc decided to go back to Mira as he was tired while Inga and I went to meet some German people she had previosuly met. We spent a few hours drinking vodka on the beach and then walked over to Long Beach. We were hoping that it might be busy (as it was supposed to be the ‘party beach’ afterall) but by the time we arrived at 1am there was just one bar with music and everyone chilling drinking beer on the beach. We bought some beer and chilled here chatting the night away. At 3am everyone said they were ready to walk back to Coral beach which was where they were staying. Since getting a taxi boat from there so late at night was too exoensive, Ing and I decided to brave it and walk with the others back to Coral and then trek through the jungle to Mira. Only when we arrived by ourselves at the entrance to the pathway we chickened out and decided to sleep for a couple of hours until the sun was up. We saw two guys outside their hut and asked if we could borrow a towel to sleep on the sand. We actually slept quite comfortably and woke up at 7am with the staff of the nearby resort staring at us. After our walk of shame to return the towels to their owners, we decided to just get a taxi boat back to Mira.
After our 4 days at Mira were up, we moved to the next beach called Petani. This beach was smaller and full of coconut trees and hammocks giving it a really exotic feel. It was actually fully booked until April, but we got lucky that one hut was a no show and so we took their place. The three people running the place, Rylan, a South African guy, Kerry, a South African girl and Vanessa, a German girl, were all really awesome people and we immediately got along. They even had a cute dog, 2 cats and one adorable kitten that Marc and I fell in love with.
Our stay here was bliss. Such an amazing, beautiful place with such a great atmosphere. With jungle as our garden and the shoreline just a few metres away from our door, this place couldn’t have been any better. In fact, Marc and I had only planned to stay about a week in the Perhentians but we actually ended up staying a total of 16 days, 11 of them at Petani resort. Inga had to leave after 2 days so the day before she left we decided to go on a snorkelling trip to some of the other uninhabited islands further north. I don’t do much snorkelling, but I can honestly say this was and will probably remain for a while, the best snorkelling experience of my life. There were so many fish and so much coral, it was breathtaking. We were surrounded by fish, including angel fish, parrot fish, trigger fish, sting rays, scorpian fish, puffer fish, barracuda, the massive giant bumphead parrotfish and several small reef sharks. That day I only spotted baby sharks which wasn’t enough to freak me out, but a couple of days before, when we had first visited Petani beach, Kerry had told us that they had a 2 metre blacktip reef shark living near the rocks right infront of the huts. So Marc and I went in search of this shark. As we were snorkelling around the 2 metre deep water, I couldn’t help imagining the Jaws song and just picturing a massive shark swimming towards me. When I spotted the shark I had a mix of emotions. For the first second it was pure amazement. After about 2 seconds reality hit me and my natural reaction was to swim over Marc so that we would be closer to the shark than me (so that in the unlikely case that the shark was hungry for some human flesh, he would be the first to be eaten). When the shark went out of sight, fear suddenly struck me. Just knowing that I am in the water with such a large and potentially dangerous creature, and more scarily, I couldn’t see where it was, was enough to freak me out and I made Marc swim back with me to the shore.
Anyway, after Inga left Marc and I spent our time well: doing absolutely nothing. The island life is so amazing. Again: sunbathing, reading, sleeping on a hammock, playing with the kitten, playing cards and eating were all apart of our daily routine. We even got a little drunk on vodka and rum while playing Ring of Fire with the crew of Petani and a few other guests. We tried to be a bit more pro-active during the day so one day we went off to the Turtle Bay on the other island and snorkelled with massive turtles. Such beautiful creatures, I honestly think this was the highlight of my stay at Perhentians. Marc managed to snorkel and freedive with one for alomst 45 minutes and got some pretty amazing footage on the goPro. Unfortunately, on one of the days, a dead turtle washed up on shore at Petani beach. It was a horrible sight, with its shell broken and intestines coming out, and the smell it released was insane. Thankfully, Rylan and some others removed it after a while.
After all the amazing marine life we saw while snorkelling, we decided to go on a dive to an old wreck that was used in the 1800s to transport sugar cane. We saw some cool fish including barracuda, bamboo sharks and cuttle fish, but unfortunately visability wasn’t great that day.
Our final two days of the stay were actually stormy, so we spent a lot of the time in the restaurant or in the hut. At night, the wind was so strong we actually thought our flimsy roof might fly off. Thankfully it didn’t. On our 16th day in the Perhentians we said farewell to Rylan, Kerry and Van and set off for Singapore. It was quite sad for us though, as the resort was actually going to close down in April (some local politician had bought the beach for himself) so we knew we would never be able to visit this perfect little getaway again.
Anyway, our sad thoughts about leaving Petani were quickly transformed to fear as our 15 year old speed boat driver sped our clearly overweight old speedboat over 3 metre high swells in the sea on towards mainland. Well as you can see I survived to tell the story, but it is not an experience I would like to have twice. Luckily, our thoughts soon went back to our amazing stay at the Perhentian islands and our excitement at our next destination: Singapore.
– Vanessa-
Marc, Inga, Hendirck, Roman and I made our three hour journey towards Ipoh and Bella picked us up from the bus station. The five of us were going to stay at Bella’s, which was quite funny considering that there already were three people staying at hers. Marc and I were lucky enough to have one of the spare bedrooms, while another German couple took the other bedroom and Inga, Hendrick, Roman and a French guy we met on the Belum trip, slept on matresses on the floor in the living room. Her house looked like a refugee camp, nonetheless it was fun living altogether for a few days.
The first day everyone went out for the day but Marc and I remained at Bellas to catch up on some sleep and to update the blog. In the evening we all went to a Chinese food court for a delicious meal. The others had bought some alcohol from Tesco earlier in the day so after dinner we remained at the food court drinking and playing a drinking game. Afterwards we went to see a fountain show but made it there just 2 minutes before it stopped at midnight. We then went to a park by the river were we just strolled along the river front, drank some more and chatted.
The next day Inga and I went to a theme park called the Lost World of Tambum. The park was basically a water park, adventure park, zoo and spa all in one. We went there mainly for the water slides which were really fun. Believe it or not, we actually had to swim with our tops on as bikinis weren’t allowed (first time I’ve experienced this after travelling in a Muslim country for two months). We went up and down the slides several times before checking out the adventure part of the park, which we then discovered actually lacked any “adventure”. The rides were really slow and boring, we weren’t impressed at all. However, we did go into a “haunted house” which did really freak me out. We basically walked through small, dark scary rooms with dummies of dead people and in some cases real people dressed up in scary costumes that come behind you and grab you and scream. Really freaky, I spent the whole time walking directly behind Inga and grabbing here waist really tightly, screaming at every fright I get, while she just laughed it off. Luckily it didnt’t last long enough for me to have a heart attack.
We then passed by an area called “Tiger Valley” where they had two beautiful Siberian tigers in a really small confinement of about 15 metres squared. It was so sad, watching one tiger go round in circles, into the little pond, swim to the end, out of the pond, round over the grass and back into the pond again. He repeated this circuit around 5 times in the 10 minutes we were there. We stayed to watch the tiger feeding show which was more of a funny parrot show, where another guy and myself volunteered to hold hoola hoops while a parrot flew threw them. Anyway they eventually fed the tigers by holding up meat high on a tree and we could watch how well they could climb and jump.
We then made our way further into the section called “Tin Valley” which was like an outdoor walkthrough with banners explaining the history of the tin mining industry in Malaysia. One guy that worked there actually gave us a really interesting and informative guided tour, culminating in our own attempt at extracting tin. After putting our minds to good use we decided it was time for some relaxation, and ventured into the spa area that had natural hot springs. The water tempertaure – at around 42 degrees – was far too hot for me to relax so we actually didn’t last longer than 20 minutes in this area. We decided to finish the day with another round of fun waterslides, definitely the highlight of the park. We met the others at an Indian restaurant near Bella’s place and had an early night.
The following morning Bella’srefugee camp became much less crowded as most left to continue their journey. Only Marc, Inga and I remained, as we had decided to travel together that evening to the Perhentian islands.
The day was spent with a local friend Adrian whom we had met on our previous visit to Ipoh before Belum. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t exactly a fun trip as we started off by visiting the doctor at the hospital Adrian works at. Basically, if you remember, when we were in Koh Lipe, Thailand, I had accidentally bashed my toe into the bed and ended up at a probably illegitimate clinic with a doctor who simply bandaged it up and said it would heal in a few days. While the pain and discoloration had subsided after a few days, the swelling never actually did and after 4 weeks I decided it was time to see another doctor. Through an examination and an X ray the doctor determined that my toe was actually dislocated at a slignt angle and needed to be put back in place and kept in place with a metal pin through the bone. He claimed that recovery would involve a cast for around 4 weeks, meaning no swimming, trekking and so on. By leaving it out of place I ran the risk of getting artrithus and other complications. After some contemplating I decided to leave it as it was for two main reasons. Firstly, we had our bus ticket to the Perhentian islands booked for that evening and I knew that I would not want to spend our time there just staring out at the sea, not able to dive, snorkel or even swim. Secondly, I thought the doctor was a bit over dramatic and after my first experience with doctors in South East Asia, I decided I will try and get yet a third opinion from a doctor in Singapore when we are there. So, I signed a disclaimer stating that I was going against the doctor’s orders and left the hospital with my dislocated toe.
The rest of the day was spent wandering around, visiting another beautiful Buddhist temple and enjoying a walk in the park beneath it. The best part of the day was when we stopped in the Old Town at a really amazing cafe called the Bougainvillea City Cafe. The owner, a young Chinese guy who spent several years living in America, was really friendly and sat with us for a chat. The cafe was really originally decorated, with one wall completely covered in a painting of a street, and the food (Inga had a chicken sandwich, Marc had a duck wrap, and I had duck Quesadilla) was absolutely fantastic. Definitely a recommendation if you are ever in the area.
We then said our goodbyes to Adrian and went back to Bella’s to pack and prepare for our night bus to Kota Bharu and then ferry to the Perhentian islands. It was really sad saying bye to Bella as we didn’t really know when or even if we will ever see her again. She was an amazing host and has become a good friend and we were very grateful for her hospitality.
The bus ride was spent dreaming of white sands and crystal clear water, which is exactly what we got in the Perhentians. Will tell you all about it soon 🙂
-Vanessa-
We were all so excited for our trip to the jungle. The trip had all been organised by a guy called Hisham who worked for Belum Outdoor Adventures. The plan was for us together with a group of almost 40, to ride on a houseboat, stopping once or twice for a short trek, before berthing at a local tribe’s village for the night. The day started off really well. Our group of 28 all met in the early morning at Bella’s house before we squeezed into 3 cars and set off at around 8am. Marc and I rode with Jay (the owner of our hostel at Cameron Highlands and a “deer” friend of Bella). She had a really cool classic Landrover, and we managed to fit 8 people into that so it was quite a fun two hour journey. We first stopped for Indian breakfast and after stopped in the town called Gerik to pick up Inga and her two German friends, Roman and Henrik and squeezed another two into the jeep and one more in a car.
We arrived at the jetty at around noon. The houseboat looked exactly like its name. It was literally like a wooden house with a few rooms at the back and a massive patio, all floating on the lake. We all boarded and got comfortable sitting on the wooden floor of the upper deck. We started making our way down the lake, further south from the jetty. Our surroundings were breathtaking. The lake is relatively large and on each side you can see high dense jungle and a few isolated islands. Hashim explained to us that the lake is basically man-made as they built a dam to generate electricity and so flooded a percentage of the forest.
We stopped for a short 10 minute trek to see the Rafflesa flower which is the world’s largest flower and is prevalent in Malaysia. Unfortunately, the flower wasn’t blooming. After that we made our way to the local tribal village. Indigenous Malays are called Orang Asli- Orang meaning ‘people’ and Asli meaning ‘original’. The village consisted of some bamboo huts scattered around on the edge of the lake in a flattened area. The villagers were different to what I had expected. They were wearing normal clothes, which apparently is donated to them by the tourists that visit them. This community consisted of around 46 villagers, over half of them children.
When we arrived the children were all sitting on a bamboo platform and the tourists were handing out sweets and taking photographs. I felt as though we were at some Zoo, watching these people like we were seeing some creature for the very first time. I guess that is what happens when tourism manages to infiltrate into these indigenous people’s lives. According to Jay, this tribe actually still possessed some of its identity, whereas a lot of other Orang Asli tribes throughout Peninsular Malaysia were actually becoming more and more civilised.
After this exhibition, most people retreated back to the house boat and had a swim in the lake, while myself and a few others took a ride on a smaller boat to try a see sunset, although we realised only after that the densly green mountain tops were blocking our view. Dinner on board the boat was actually amazing. We had a buffet BBQ consisting of lamb, chicken, beef and various equally delicious side dishes.
After dinner everyone started setting up for the night. Most people were sleeping on matresses in the houseboats itself, while a few others set up tent just outside the village and others simply took a matress on a flat surface at the water’s edge. Marc and I joined this group to gaze at the sky, and the sight that struck me was breathtaking. Never in my entire life have I seen so many stars. The sky seemed to have more stars than blank space. Just gazing up at this was like watching a show, never once did it get boring. We stared up at the sky for about two hours, identifying the different constellations, and counting the many shooting starts we saw. At about midnight we started to hear noises coming from the jungle about 50 metres across the water. They sounded like thick branches breaking suddenly. We were told it could have been elephants walking through, however, even with nightvision binoculars, we couldn’t see anything interesting on the other side.
That night, Marc slept on a hammock while Inga and I shared a tent as we were a little concerned about snakes and insects. However it was a peaceful and uninterrupted sleep.
The next morning we woke up to a sumptuous breakfast on board the houseboat. Bella had told me that she was about to start writing a coffee table boom on Belum and had asked if I would like to contribute. For this reason I was lucky enough to be able to speak to (with the help of a friend who was my interpreter) the Head villager, who was in his 80s and suffering from what seemed like rickets to me
He told me that he was the first villager to live in this area around 45 years back, moving from another village in Belum. When I asked about the wild animals, he said that he has seen elephants, tigers and boars, but always deep in the jungle and never in the village itself.
With this in mind we set off at around 11am with the houseboat that was to take us on our next trek to a waterfall. Plagued by the fear of leeches, I wore knee high tights, doused my feet in a herbal remedy that Bella said would keep leeches away and also sprayed all exposed areas with insect repellent. Paranoid as I may seem, I was adament on not getting any of those blood sucking creatures stuck to me, and had been warned by many that Belum rainforest was a haven for these ceatures. It turned out to be a wasted effort as we later discovered that the weather had been far too dry for any leeches to come out.
The trek was about 20 minutes, arriving at a few empty abandoned huts that had apparently once been a resort. A bit further beyond we followed a stream that led to a waterfall. It was quite a beautiful sight, however being part of a group of about 50 people made the experience feel a lot more commercial and much less exclusive than we had hoped for. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful sight and we enjoyed a swim in a refreshingly cold pool of water and also a natural neck massage thanks to the strong flow of water down the rocks.
After that we set off with the rest of the group back to the jetty. Marc and I had planned to stay an extra one or two nights without the group and Inga, Hendrick and Roman had decided to join. We had to hassle a little at the jetty as, although Hisham was supposed to have organised a boat and guide for us, he hadn’t actually done anything. He was also trying to charge us more than he had originally said. Eventually he managed to get us a guy who would take us back in to find a camp spot for the night, and said he would organise a guide to pick us up in the morning. So we set back down the lake and decided to camp at the same village as the previous night as camping in the middle of the forest would prove to be dangerous with all the wildlife and our other option of showing up uninvited at another village might seem rude to the villagers.
When we arrived we noticed that a new group had arrived to stay at the village (talk about an invasion of tourists that these villagrs get). We discovered that they were a University group trying to help the children of the village by cooking for them and showing the children Dispicable Me on a projector. The night was again spent gazing at the wonderful sky this time drinking the bottles of wine we had brought along. Good wine is hard to find in Asia so we enjoyed every single sip of it that night. We eventually cooked some pot noodles in a kettle (we didn’t have a pot) over our stove and enjoyed eating them back to the basics way, i.e. with our hands as we had no cutlery.
The next morning we were picked up by our young “guide” called Fucka (I kid you not). He was in his early twenties and could barely speak a word of English except the words “elephant” and “waterfall”. We told him to take us to see elephants and he took us to a place, about another 15 minute trek from the lake, where the elephants go to get their minerals. We saw a lot of elephant poo, but unfortunately no actual elephants. Several trees had cameras stuck on that we understood from Fucka’s limited English were there to protect the elephants from poachers.
We then went on a bit further with the boat and Fucka showed us a massive bat cave high up in a limestone rock, unfortunately too high to actually go in, and also showed us the dam at the far south of the lake. We asked Fucka for our final stop to be at a stream and so he took us to a really pretty area. We trekked upstream until we reached a base camp and some guys in army uniform. We were told we weren’t allowed to go further, and the soldiers later explained that they were there to protect the area, especially the sandalwood tree which is valued for its essential oil often used in perfume. However, I got the feeling that they weren’t being completely honest, and Inga and I came up with a theory that they were actually protecting an area rich with gold (Belum is known for its lush resources such as tin and gold).
Anyway,we spent the afternoon there swimming, relaxing and chatting away before making our way back to the jetty to get the evening bus to Ipoh. We all were slightly disappointed by our trip. Don’t get me wrong, the place is beautiful, majestic and rich with flora and fauna, and there is a lot to do and explore. However our personal experience wasn’t so great mainly because we left all the organising up to Hisham who proved to be extremely disorganised and completely unprofessional. I would definitely recommend checking Belum out but just make sure you go for a least a few days and plan it well, get yourself a good, English speaking guide and no matter what you do, don’t go with Belum Outdoor Adventures.
– Vanessa –
Marc and Van Explore 