Our travels to find the flip side.....

We made it to Malaysia after the longest stint of travel that we've done to find ourselves in desperate need of REST! We opted for East coast as on the West coast it is the start of Monsoon season. We had a really easy border crossing, made slightly more stressful by the Germanator who did not believe the local taxi men and has a little stress fit. A nice portrayal of tourists for the locals! On to Kota Bharu that afternoon where we were greeted by our worst ever accomodation, literally a prison cell with two lumpy beds, very icky! Plus Andy was suffering from all sorts so he slept and left me to sort our stuff out!
The next morning everything looked much better, bar the Germanator and off we went to catch our boat to the Perhentains. The Perhentians are two islands north east of Malaysia, we went to the smallest one Kecil and managed to bag ourselves some amazing accomodation, which was extra lucky as it is school holidays in Malaysia so everywhere is super busy! It was a little wooden hut on a beautiful beach with amazing views from our sexy little balcolny! We ended up staying for 5 nights and had a well deserved rest. The island was awesome, quite small with two main beaches, one side quiet and one a bit more developed. We stayed on the chilled out side and you could walk through the jungle to the other side, only 15 mins, all very well till you take a moment to look around you and check out the enormous spiders that are literally everywhere! Quite scary and caused me to duck for most of the walk so I did not walk into the webs and become spider food! We also saw Monitor Lizards which are crazy huge, I thought Andy was exaggerating till I saw one for myself, more liike dinosaurs! Bring on the Komodo dragon I say! We also thought we would check out some underwater wildlife as there are supposed to be sharks, turtles, moray eels in abundance, 2 dives later we had seen trigger fish and some more trigger fish (which bite if you enter their territory). Not our luck, the dives were excellent though, we saw loads of cool fishies and got to practice our skills. You could snorkell around the island too and see loads of parrot fish.
So, we dragged ourselves away from the island and went off to experience some real Malaysia, we caught the bus from under the Mango tree to Terengganu with our lovely Irish friend Jo. Terengganu is the state capital and rather wealthy due to the oil production, there wasnt too much to see and it was ridiculously hot but we indulged in some cakes and internet time!
Next stop Cherating, a old time backpaker beach which is now something that resembles a ghost town! A really huge beach and a strip of guesthouses and resorts and mainly Malaysian tourists. There was shark fin soup on the menu in the Chinese and a monkey chained up outside a shop. We spent one day here and decided it was time to move on. There was nothing specifically wrong with Cherating it was just very odd.
So we are about to head inland to go to some lakes and get some city action in KL.