Burps, Beaches and Burns

The eight hour bus journey went by relatively smoothly, aided no doubt by the fact that we didn't get a wink of sleep the night before. I say relatively as the man sat to our left seemed to have serious indigestion issues and belched loudly every ten minutes or so. We arrived in Kuala Besut which is a little fishing village on the northeast coast of Malaysia. People only tend to pass through here on their way to the Perhentian islands, but we had to stay over until morning as we had missed the last boat. So we headed over to 'Nan's hostel' and due to a lack of rooms we offered Art - an American guy we had met on the coach - the spare bed in our room (we will stand shoulder to shoulder and all that!). The three of us went out for dinner and drinks and got to know each other - Art's a PhD student researching into a cure for ovarian cancer - at last it was great to meet someone with a job as important as ours! As we had to get up at 6am to get the boat we decided to call it a night and headed back to the hostel. Tired and still suffering from jetlag we were looking forward to a good night's sleep. All was going swimmingly until in the early hours Art started murmuring/screaming something in Japanese in his sleep which freaked Matt and i out so much that we huddled together on our side of the room wondering why we'd allowed a 6'4 stranger to sleep with us (thanks for the penknife Jake). In the morning we headed off to the boat with the very lovely Art and, being very British, told him what a great night's sleep we got.

So we arrived on Perhentian Kecil Island on Saturday morning and checked in to the first available accommodation. We dumped our bags and headed straight to the beach - beautiful soft white sand and water as warm as a bath - bliss. It was about 9am and probably 35 degrees so we decided to get a parasol and lie in the shade - that'll stop us from burning won't it....NO! I've done my usual trick and once again Matt is dating a human crab stick- a red back and white front, so appealing. Feeling a bit sorry for myself I decided to head back to our hut only to discover that in our rush to get to the beach we hadn't noticed what an awful pit it was. However, it was cheap and we're hardy travellers on a budget, so I thought I'd just be brave and put up with it rather than move somewhere more expensive. That was until I decided to have a shower and noticed a frog, randomly on top of the bathroom door, waiting to shower with me. This was the final straw and in my burnt, sleep-deprived state I had a hissy fit and told Matt that I couldn't live like this and couldn't spend a second longer in the room. We eventually moved to a lovely, clean, air-conditioned bungalow which we stayed in for the night.

Yesterday morning we moved to a different hut which was just as nice but cheaper and moved next door to a British Couple we had met on the boat trip across to the island. We went out for dinner and drinks with them last night and polished off a bottle of Monkey Juice (a local drink for local people) together. Tom's a medical student and Jude's a law graduate, which gave us the opportunity to have some stimulating and intellectual conversation about the state of the national health service and.... Big Brother. After a bit of a boogie and a couple of vodka's we headed home at about 3am. And so it's monday afternoon and we have another day on the beach to contend with, ho hum. Think we might do our PADI course here which takes 4 days so we'll update you soon on how that's going. Hope you are all enjoying the bank holiday and that your weather's as good as ours. Love Edx