Perhentians islands

2 small islands north of Malaysia, nearly at the Thai border. It's a little flash back for me as I used this same route a year and an half ago when I took the jungle train on the east coast of Malaysia before heading to Bangkok.

Anyway this time we are going by bus, an overnight bus to be exact. We had high expectation after taking a real nice bus to Malacca, unfortunately, this is not the case this time :-(

It's a very old bus, blankets are provided to offer a tiny protection against the freezing blizzard coming from the AC, unfortunately (again), they haven't been washed  for a very long time...
Anyway, 14h in a bus (when we thought it was 10) and we get to Jerteh. Another 20 minutes in a taxi and we are at Besut where we can take a boat! (it's a bit of a transport marathon to do this journey up and down in 3 days...)
By midday we are on a white sand beach with one of the best lime juice in SE Asia planning our dives. That's how your forget all about the journey! :-)

Indeed it's another diving WE, we have 6 dives scheduled so not that much time left to explore the island. Thinking about it retrospectively, we should have dived less and explored more. Never mind, as soon as we find an easier way of going back we'll do the exploration.
The big island doesn't have a village or a proper centre; just a jungle centre with hotels on a few beaches that can either be connected by jungle walks or by taxi-boat.

The small island seems to be the party island with all the backpackers.

Dives are easy, very shallow, no current, but not brilliant visibility.
We still manage to see turtles, plenty of coral cat sharks (like 20 at least in one dive!) including a dead one, cuttlefish and plenty of colourful fish!
But the most memorable moment will definitely be when R got attacked by a trigger fish. The nasty beast had a go at his head and cut clean the elastic of the mask! Bravely R still managed to finish the dive with 2 big bumps on the head, a bleeding cut and a broken mask.

One afternoon, once the diving over, we did use one of the jungle walk to connect to another paradise white sand beach where we found the malaysian army playing beach volley (hard core assignement...) and this cutty. Carrying on with the walk, we discovered desert beaches after desert beaches.

That was enough to give us the will to explore these islands a bit more!