A stopover

We crossed the border at 4:30pm, and immediately found a taxi outside to take us to Kuala Besut, the estuary town where we would catch a boat to the Perhentian Islands. Our taxi driver called ahead to the ferry operator to let him know we were on our way; between them, they strung us along for almost an hour, suggesting that we would still make it to the jetty in time, but in the end we arrived at 6:30, an hour after the last boat had left.

Thus we found ourselves in Nan Hotel for the night - and the less said about that, the better. Suffice to say, expecting to awake with the sound of the sea in your ears, and instead looking out at 6:30am over a grim little street is not one of life's little pleasures.

Although our neighbours were interesting - it was a soup farm. A roosting spot for swiftlets, from whose nests Bird's Nest Soup is created. Fairly common in Malaysia - in Sabah, it's more likely to be an old cave than a house. In the peninsula, families build a double storey house and, keeping the ground floor to live in, turn the empty upper floor into a dark, safe place for birds. Well, at least safe until the nest is built - often in the haste to harvest these expensive bits of spit and mud, eggs and chicks are simply turned out onto the floor and left to die. Asia can be a hard place.

The following morning, we caught the earliest boat possible to the Perhentian Islands. There are five of them, and they have a more interesting history than present - their name means "Stopover", and they used to be a regular port of call for Chinese and Thai traders.

Now, though, the once numerous turtles are in decline, mainly due to the frequent oil spills from a nearby oil rig, and the supposedly gorgeous beaches are littered with backpackers in tiny bikinis. Actually, I think I would have preferred it if they had been the only occupants - it was the contrast between the nearly naked people and the fully clothed Muslims from the mainland that made it somehow worse. There were women swimming in full burkha, and men in Speedos, and it just didn't work!

Anyway, I think our beaches are better in Sabah.

So we had a halved stay on one of the islands; I went snorkelling a couple of times, and was lucky enough to see three black-tip sharks, which was pretty thrilling, plus a family of clownfish - I couldn't work out why they were so brown until I remembered my diving training: red is one of the first colours to disappear underwater.

The day after arriving, we were back on the boat to the mainland; we stayed overnight in Kota Bharu, the main town, and early the next morning were on our way to the railway station in Wakaf Bharu, for the final train south.