We are back on the mainland, staying for one night in the small(ish) city of Kota Bahru, which is approximately 45km from the Thai border. At around 7am tomorrow, we cross over into Thailand, headed for Ko Pha Ngan and the full moon party at Hat Rin on 28th September. After over a week of busy days diving and (mostly) chilled out nights, I'm looking forward to getting my rocks off.
The Pehrentian Islands were utterly amazing. I wish I had the time to write more now about the time we spent there, but I've been in this internet cafe for two hours, reading emails and mucking about with photographs, and I'm tired. Also, this plastic chair is bloody uncomfortable.
For the time being you'll have to make do with some more excerpts from my journal.
Thursday 16th September, 5.30am
Location: The port of Kuala Besut
Sitting at a table made of a thick cross-section of tree trunk, which is on the dock at the small port town of Kuala Besut. This is the jumping off station for the Pehrentian Islands. We've been here since 4am, drinking tea and playing cards. The first fast boat to the islands leaves at 7am. I've had no sleep tonight but nonetheless am feeling suprisingly perky.
The sound of the Qu'ran being read during the first prayer of the day drifts across the harbour. It's a beautiful and evocative sound of 'singing' that we've heard everywhere in Malaysia. I'm feeling excited and alive, looking forward to the sun coming up in a few minutes, looking forward to the crossing to the islands. Strangely, I feel more at peace with myself and my situation than I have during my travels up to this point. This is perhaps because I know that this leg of the journey will be much more like the 'proper' travelling that I've been looking forward to.
The journey to this place, which started at 7pm yesterday evening, has been very easy for me, despite the absence of sleep. Our coach left Georgetown at 8.30pm, and we arrived at Johti, a town 5km from here at 3.30am. We were dropped off, seemingly at random, at the roadside, and were picked up by a taxi that we didn't organise. It could have been taking us anywhere! The taxi driver drove us here and called his boss, who promptly arrived with his wife and opened up his shop. It was so easy! I can barely believe it! We set out from Penang on a journey into the relative unknown and have found our way here with absolutely no problem.
Hermes was the Greek god of travellers.
Friday 17th September, 9pm
Location: Long Beach, Kecil (small) Pehrentian Island
Yet another tropical storm rages outside the restaurant, which is open to the elements, so the frequent gusts of wind blow through it, displacing anything not heavy enough to stand its ground. Everywhere around us pools of rain water are forming in places where the roof is not quite water tight. Vicious stabs of lightning illuminate tall palm trees on the horizon, followed ten or fifteen seconds later by vast rolls of thunder. Fuzzy (the main man here at Mohsin) has replaced the K&D Sessions, which was totally drowned out by the sound of the rain, with some house music on a latin tip. Steve has cancelled his trip to the fiendishly expensive internet cafe. We're going to have to sit this one out.
In October the monsoon will arrive, and the island will pretty much close down for the winter.
I've had another good day. It was, however, spent predominantly in the classroom. Unfortunately, due to logistical reasons, we did not have the opportunity to try any scuba gear on , but we were assured that tomorrow we will be fully compensated by a full day in the 'Spice Pool', an area of sea adjacent to the beach marked by a semi-circle of buoys. That's where we'll be doing our basic skills. Then we're going on four dives in two days. After that, I'll be a fully qualified open water diver. Whoopee!
So we got all the classroom stuff out of the way today - all the videos, all the interim written tests and 'Knowledge Reviews', and there was a short, satisfying jaunt into the Spice pool so that we could be assessed on our swimming ability.
I'm in a group of five. There's me, Rebecca and Danielle (Canadians), Paddy (Mancunian) and Jeff (Kiwi). They're a good bunch. Pat, our instructor, is a forty-something Canadian in the classic 'out-doorsey' mould. By summer, a dive instructor. By winter, he's on the Snow Patrol.
After school finished for the day (at 5.45pm - a full day of work! See, I'm not just lazing on the beach out here!) I jumped straight into the sea. Then Steve andI kicked off a game of beach volleyball. We were soon joined by various backpackers of assorted nationality and low-to-intermediary volleyball skill (anyone who could actually play the game wouldn't have bothered to join in). It was brilliant. This is what it's all about. Swimming, diving, chilling, beach volleyball, and meeting so many different people from so many different places.
Sunday 19th September, 11.15pm
So our dive group, now reduced in number to four, proceeded with our first practical skills session. There's not much to say about it, except that it was fun to see and breathe underwater. On the negative side, it was all done in a bit of a rush, and also my latent congestion issues resulted in me needing to exude a shitload of mucus every five minutes. That, combined with the difficulty I was having equalising in my left ear, got me a bit worried as we climbed onto the boat that was to take us out on our first dive.
The dive was INTENSE. My memory of it: a whirlwind of new experiences, all crashing on top of each other, creating a chaotic collection of snapshots of a dive. Mostly, I existed in a perpetual state of near panic for the 40 minutes that the dive lasted for. 10 metres underwater, I sat there thinking to myself, "You can't be doing this." Some primal voice kept telling me that it was unnatural, that I should swin immediately and as quickly as possible to the surface. A conflicting voice, the voice of reason, was telling me that the repercussions of giving into the id would be worse than simply sitting there on the bottom and breathing. So breathe I did. A lot of breathing. As we swam along the reef, our instructor Pat pointing out various fishes of note, I existed in a secret world of inner shock, locked up withing myself, breathing, breathing, breathing.
There were moments when I was able to exit this deplorable mentality, to relax a bit and appreciate the beauty of the marine landscape ranged before me. Looking back at what I've just written, it seems that I've started to paint a pretty bleak picture of my first dive. I did get a kick out of it, enjoy it, was purely pumped up by it. But you will not be suprised to hear that when the time came to return to the surface, I was quite relieved. You will also surely be unsuprised to learn that I was the reason we returned to the surface as soon as we did: I had used up almost twice as much air as the others. A lot of breathing.
