MALAYSIAN PARADISE AT THE END OF THE ROAD
The final stop before we head to Australia was Malaysia – first a brief stop in Kuala Lumpur to see some old friends, and then the beaches of Perhentian Kecil island, the “Malaysian Paradise” and it’s called informally, to wrap up our trip in style.
Malaysia has a tumultuous history with Portuguese, Dutch and British occupation, and it has become independent only after WWII. As also in other former British colonies, the level of English spoken is quite high. Today the country has an interesting combination of Malay, Chinese and Indian inhabitants, which brings with it the fusion of culture, like religion, architecture and cuisine, but also some tensions among people and a challenge to the government to create harmony. Kuala Lumpur (KL) is probably the best place to experience this exciting fusion, which is the main thing to see in the city, apart from, of course, the famous Petronas Towers . At the same time, surprisingly to us, KL seems to be very developed, from many perspectives it resembles to Singapore with multicultural environment and modern skyscrapers used for office buildings and condos for expats. We enjoyed the well-known street food life here, and tried local and Indian specialties with some Chinese old-time favourites.
Meeting Old Friends in Kuala Lumpur
We scheduled our short stopover in Kuala Lumpur to catch up with two friends from Europe whom the winds had blown to this corner of the world.
Alfonso is an ex-colleague of Renata who moved to Kuala Lumpur recently, he and his girlfriend showed us the night food street and the cool bar area where expats hang out to watch the European Championships until early morning. The +6-hour time difference compared to France leads to some games starting at 03:00am, which requires very dedicated supporters and substantial amounts of beer to overcome! As Hungary wasn’t playing that day (or dawn rather), we didn’t stick around for a drink or two (or a dozen), but instead went for a drive to see the city views by night. This mainly consisted of the famous Petronas towers, which were the highest building in the world for quite some time before being eclipsed by Dubai (they are still the highest dual-tower building though).
We had a great evening catching up and didn’t notice the time flying, until all of a sudden it was midnight – which was a problem as we had a shared room with our other friend, Julia, who was arriving on a later flight, and who didn’t have a key to enter! By stroke of amazing coincidence, we arrived back at our hostel at the same time Julia’s taxi was pulling up – we were afraid we’d find her sleeping on the floor outside our room… Julia was also at the end of her 6-month trip in Southeast Asia, and our itineraries kept missing each other so far, so we were glad we finally managed to meet! We had a lot of stories to swap (it seems that no matter where you are travelling, you will eventually come across the same situations) but also tips to exchange for our respective next trips. We spent the next day sightseeing around KL (it was a short list) – but mainly catching up.
Azure Blue Sea, Corals and Magical Jungle Wildlife on the Perhentians
We all had an early morning after our day of sightseeing. Julia’s flight back to Europe was even earlier than ours, so she sneaked out of the room before 6am in the dark. We had only half an hour more before starting our journey to the national airport by public transportation, and take our flight to Kota Bharu in the North of the country. It’s only a 45-minute flight, mainly over palm oil plantations to reach this town. At this point it’s worth adding that in the past few decades the country cut out most of the jungle on the peninsular Malaysia to replace it with palm oil and rubber plantations at the demand of international companies. A few areas got under the protection of national parks to save the remaining habitat for indigenous species of animals, but there’s a constant battle between economic interest and environmental considerations. Luckily, Borneo, the natural gem of Malaysia, preserved much of its jungle due to the different government that ruled the island from the mainland, which did not support this way of achieving economic growth. Environmental pollution and exploitation is a massive problem these days too, where rivers at many corners of the country don’t even reach the level of being “acceptable quality for human contact”.
We landed in Kota Bharu, the centre of the Northern region which has a few flights to Kuala Lumpur each day and some to Borneo too. From here there are two ways to get to the port in Kuala Besut, where boats take people to the Perhentian islands, our destination.
Straight at arriving to the airport we found an agency selling the combination of taxi and boat tickets to the island, who collected people to share the direct taxi ride. We decided to go with them instead of public transportation involving a change in the city, as this option cost only slightly more than and was much more convenient. Taxi drivers seem to worry though that their passengers don’t make it to their boat as they drive at a crazy speed, certainly above 120 km/hour. We had to ask ours to slow down a bit as we all reached our tolerance limits. Szilveszter’s taxi (we joined separate groups of 3 in the cars) even overtook a monkey travelling in a cage fixed to the side of a motorbike, which the driver explained is probably one of those monkeys that are employed to climb up coconut trees to get the fruits down! Never heard of this before…
The boat ride took about an hour, including around 20 minutes when we stopped at each beach dropping off passengers. It was a quite rough ride (so prepare your stomach) with a half-closed boat and the temperature rising high inside. The windows couldn’t close properly so those sitting close to them got some fresh air but paid the cost of getting some sea water with it. A couple sitting close to the front windows got a constant flow of water on them, due to some fault, and got completely soaked by the end of other trip. We were all glad to reach ground.
We had heard great things about the Perhentians which is why it obtained the final spot in our travels. We were slightly apprehensive about visiting during Ramadan, a month of holy fasting for Muslims, when they can’t eat, drink or smoke from sunrise to sundown. Accordingly, it can be difficult for non-fasting tourists to find a place that is open for lunch, although we were assured that this wouldn’t be an issue in the biggest cities and main tourist spots (like the Perhentians). The atmosphere on the islands was decidedly subdued compared to the fact that it was high-season, but we did always find somewhere to sate our hunger.
The Perhentians are made up of two islands, “Kecil” (or “Small”) is more backpacker-oriented, while Besar (or “Large”) is more for families and a bit more upscale. Accordingly, we made our base on Kecil, where there are two main beaches, Long Beach and Coral Beach, separated by a 10-minute semi-paved walk through the jungle, and the rest of the island is covered in thick jungle. Long Beach is slightly more developed and normally has more of a party atmosphere, but (probably due to the absence of local tourists during Ramadan) there really was only one restaurant that was packed and had a great atmosphere at night, called Oh La La. Coral Beach felt more intimate and had great spots of shade from the palm trees, but there was also a huge drawback: none of the shops there seemed to sell ice cream – unbelievable!
Long Beach:
Coral Beach (in the sun and before a tropical storm):
Most of the days we did quite a lot of nothing, the troubles of the world seemed so far away – not even the unfortunate Brexit referendum could put a damper on our spirits for long. Slightly incredibly our accommodation was also showing the European Championships on a large projector, so we lent our support to the Hungarian team who managed a draw against Portugal. The spectatorship for the midnight kick-off consisted of a Portuguese couple and the entire male staff of our hostel. Actually, watching football all night, and then sleeping / or at least drowsing during the day seems to be the local strategy for making the fasting hours pass as quickly as possible. It slightly impacts the level of service you receive, when the first part of checking in to a hostel or ordering food involves waking up the receptionist or waiter – but it’s all part of the experience!
Being spoiled by our experiences in Bali and Vietnam, we were disappointed in general with the quality of accommodation and food on the island (or rather the value for money that was on offer), but the white beaches and emerald green ocean made up for the deficiencies elsewhere. Some of the better food options we located were the aforementioned Oh La La (where they served the best pizza we’ve had on the road, except for our stopover in Milan, even if it was a tad expensive) and Ewan’s Café. Accommodation-wise we would recommend Ombak on Coral Beach that doesn’t break the bank, but Matahari on Long Beach is a passable option too. The upside with Matahari is that you can see 2-meter long dragon-like monitor lizards from your balcony, the downside is that your heart breaks when you see that they are crawling through a swamp of stinking trash. In general, on the island, but especially around Matahari’s entrance to the garden area you see piles of garbage everywhere! It seems that the locals don’t find this unpleasant. Our hut in Matahari was also home to a “small” 30cm lizard who kept our bungalow clean of cockroaches (literally, I saw him eat one), along with a significant number of mosquitos who entered through the finger-sized cracks in the floorboards – and this was one of the best huts on the island!
We also went diving to the Pinnacle and Police Wreck dive sites and saw some barracudas, moray eels, loads of shoals of colourful fish and smaller things. Overall, it was a pleasant experience and it was great that the sites were a 10-15-minute boat ride from the shore, but we couldn’t help feeling that the visibility was below what we had experienced elsewhere.
Besides diving, the other activity which is advertised everywhere on the island is to join a snorkelling trip. We stopped at a total of 5 different spots around the island, including at magnificent coral gardens of all colours of the rainbow and at points where there were practically guaranteed turtle and shark sightings – quite an impressive selling point! We did see both turtles and black-tip reef sharks as promised, although it was surprising that these areas are not protected as natural sites, so some tourists harass the marine life by swimming down and taking close-up go-pro pictures of them. With time the wildlife will surely react to this. Our pictures are not too expressive as we did not go too close to the shark and the turtle, and only some of the fish were close enough to take fine pictures of them., so I'm afraid you need to go and see this all for yourself! We also saw plenty of jellyfish in the water, whole groups of them at some sites, which was somewhat of a damper on this otherwise fantastic excursion.
Being a remote island the internet connection is very sensitive to storms and whenever there is one it takes some time to recover it. Also, as the connection is provided by satellite dishes, if the sky is cloudier, the connection worsens. For all these reasons we constantly had problems to find appropriate network to write the blog (not even mentioning the upload of pictures which requires a bit more bandwidth) and to start the online flat hunt in Sydney, so that once we are there we can have some viewing appointments arranged. It seemed that we were the only ones on the island being so desperate about Wi-Fi though. due to our approaching move. If you don’t have anything like this on your plate, it’s an even more fantastic place to relax far away from civilisation and very close to nature with unbelievably turquoise water all around you.
As the time flew by we felt more and more excited about the approaching continuation of our journey to our final destination, Sydney! We realised that if the trip had finished with a return to our original life we would have felt upset about the end of a fantastic 6-month break full of adventures. However, now that we start a new life on another continent with so much to discover we did not feel sad about the end of this period at all! In the end it only means that we can start yet another adventure that might be just as exciting if we make it so! With this in mind we started our last day of travel, which included a ferry and 3 flights, over a total of 24 hours, arriving to Oz in style on the wings of a kangaroo!
(Picture borrowed from Qantas for good use)