All of my colleagues who made it to this Island said, that it would be one of the most if not the most beautiful Islands they have ever been to. Unluckily it took me until this weekend to finally get there. On Thursday night we (Madlen, Matthias and me) started with the night bus from Hentian Bus Station (next to the PWTC). On the bus drive out of KL I had the chance to talk to Lars on the phone about our upcoming ventures next week (Lars will hit KL on Wednesday evening), but somewhere in the forests after KL the mobile network denied its services. So I took the opportunity to get some sleep.
We arrived at the Kuala Besut Jetty at 5 in the morning. And as the early bird catches the worm, a local ferry-salesman was already waiting there and was very eager to sell us some tickets to Perhentian. Our Speedboat left at 7am and we arrived at our hotel on Perhentian shortly after 8am. We couldn't get our room immediately, but we were offered a smaller room for the time being to settle down, and keep our luggage. After having some breakfast (pineapple pancake and te tarik for me), we headed for the beach. The weather was really beautiful and we had some fun with the fish in the water - even without snorkeling gear. 
Since the bus trip was tiring and hadn't provided too much time to sleep for me, I made this up at the beach. (Since I did this in the hot sun, I had to be a little more careful the next days - at least my sun screener with LSF20 helped to avoid sun burn.) I spent a lot of time reading in the afternoon, and my brother and me engaged in a little jungle trekking to another bay. Chilling out in the evening sun, we were disturbed by a short but decisive rain shower.
In the evening we enjoyed some food from our hotels BBQ - my Tandoori Beef was quite a delight. But it took some time until I could enjoy it, since the service was not one of the fasted, and they had forgotten to serve my meal at first. After a night at the bus we were quite happy to have a real bed to relax, and so we didn't do too much after dinner.
You can honestly say the next morning our trip changed to a siemens interns-team building. Mathias, Christian, Sebastian and Philipp joined us, arriving exactly the same way we did before - only with one day delay. Our plans for this day were very similar to the day before - enjoy the beach! We got us some snorkeling gear and admired the beautiful corals which were available direct at our beach.
For late afternoon we had some sportive activity planed by challenging some locals in playing beach volleyball. After the sun disappeared behind the sister island Perhentian Kecil we started our match. Luckily our teams were mixed with locals and our crew - so we had almost equal strength and playing was real fun. BBQ-Dinner at our place was good as the day before - although the flexibility in combining dishes with different side orders could need some improvement. Really annoying was the lack of available beer, so we had to change our restaurant after dinner. At the next restaurant there was both Tiger and Chang bear available, and I got us some Coke and Ice to mix with our imported Havana Rum - really tasty!
The next morning Madlen was the early bird in getting up: she, my brother and me made it to join a snorkeling trip at 10am. We were taken to 3 different points:
- Turtle bay, which appeared to be basically the same beach we had spent most of our time before - but only a little more outside.
- a place with a beautiful colorful coral reef
- shark point another reef at the south of the island, where sharks occasional appear.
At the Coral Reef we saw a lot of colorful fish and sea life - at turtle point we managed to see a really big turtle, and I gained a glimpse on a small shark at the shark point. The trip was a real enrichment and I wouldn't want to miss it. When we were back at around 1pm, our colleagues were already toasting at the sun again. We checked that there was only the chance to get back to the main land with the last boat at 4pm, so there was only time for a short nap at the beach, and some late lunch afterwards.
The fully loaded speed boat took us back to Kuala Besut very fast, and when we reached the jetty there we were received by some lovely rain.. A little soaked we left the in a old Mercedes cab for Kota Bharu Airport. There we had to kill a few hours of time, because our Air-Asia flight was a delayed by almost an hour. So we had plenty of time to drink coffee there, enjoy some dinner at KFC, or for Mathias, Madlen, Sebastian and Christian to play Skat.
Posted by Jürgen Hösch
in Travel
at
11:17
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So we were really relaxed, when we went for some final shopping at the MBK. Around 5pm we headed to the airport, and immediately got annoyed by Airasia, when we arrived there – it took them another 45 minutes to open their check-in counters – although already a huge queue of Chinese Malay people with tons of luggage had formed. Later the plane arrived with a delay (as usual) and when we were finally ready to take off, we had to roll back to the gate cause some system needed checking -> 1hour delay upon our arrival in KL. At least we got one of the “private taxi drivers” who didn’t charge us a midnight surcharge.
