Sunday, July 16, 2006
Time For A Swim
After the 'excitement' of Kota Bharu we headed south to Kuala Terengganu, which turned out to be so fascinating that I later realised that we have no photos of the town whatsoever! There were a few day trips to the surrounding area, so we took a trip to the Kenyir lake and dam.The main reason for being here was as a stopover on the way to Redang Island where we had planned to get in our last bit of snorkelling. There are any number of islands off the coast of Malaysia where you can go for a little 'Robinson Crusoe' experience, or as close as the 21st century comes to recreating total isolation, so the jetty where we caught the ferry was packed with coach loads of tourists on the way to various islands (this, by the way, is not the jetty in the photo!).. The boat to Redang only comes and goes once a day, there are no phones (for public use, although naturally there is a mobile signal for those who just can't be out of contact!) and no internet (OK, now that's taking it a bit far!).
We had a great time snorkeling around the island, and the place we had chosen to stay was pretty good. It was kind of an 'all inclusive' resort but at a budget price. So there was as much tea, coffee, juice and water as you could drink, and free toast all day long! There was quite a wide range of fish to see around the island, but a lot of the coral seems to have seen better days. There is a 'Marine Park' area, but this doesn't appear to be particularly conservation oriented as they allow hundreds of tourists at a time into a fairly small area and also allow them to feed the fish with lots of bread! We saw a couple of very small Reef Sharks here (don't get too excited Andrea, they were only about 18 inches long!) as well as some larger fish. There were also a few jellyfish around. We had no idea whether they were particularly dangerous but we opted to avoid them just in case. The resort also had a digital camera with a proper underwater case that you could rent for the day, so we finally managed to get some half decent snorkelling photos. You can judge for yourself here.
Planning our trip away from the island proved to be a little difficult. Our plan was to get a bus directly to Singapore after being ferried back to the mainland, but there seemed to be a little problem. After the return ferry there was a 45 minute minibus ride back to Kuala Terengganu, which would get us to the bus station about 15 minutes after the daytime buses left for Singapore. This would mean that we had to hang around town for about 11 hours, before catching the night bus to Singapore which would take about another 10 hours. Strangely this didn't appeal to either of us. There were buses direct to Singapore from the jetty, but they were aimed at Singaporeans who had booked return journeys from Singapore to the island, and we were told that they were full.
The resort staff were actually really helpful with everything, except for our attempts to get back to town in time for the morning buses. We tried numerous attempts at arranging an earlier ferry, even offering to pay extra if they found us someone (anyone) with a vaguely seaworthy boat. So we had no choice but to buy tickets for the overnight bus and look forwards to 11 hours waiting around in a town that had so far turned up nothing worthy of even being photographed. Our last hope was that we could jump off the return ferry and run around all the buses looking for spare seats to Singapore, and as it happened that was exactly what we did. The minibus driver, having been tipped off to our plight, had already spoken to all the bus drivers and found that there were indeed a few spare seats, so after a brief pause to hand over the cash we were on our way.
One thing we can say is that the bus journey down the east coast of Malaysia is unlikely to qualify for any 'Great Bus Journeys of the World' competition. Highlight of the afternoon was the lunch stop, which turned out to be at a service station of sorts where there was a Chinese restaurant. Except that this was quite literally a Chinese restaurant, not a word of English on the menu, with no photos, and not a single piece of plastic food in sight! At this point we were exceedingly pleased to have been chatting with the Chinese speaking Singaporean couple in the seats next to us, as it prevented is from either purchasing completely blindly or dining at the fish cracker emporium next door!
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