Honeymoon report (diving activities only!!)
The Perhentian Islands consist of two islands Kecil and Besar (small and big) with a small strait between them. Caroline and I stayed on Perhentian Besar the big island at a place called Coral View Island Resort. There are no roads on the islands only a few jungle tracks and so all the places to stay are ringed around the coast, with transport largely by boat. Getting to the Islands is done exclusively by boat too. It’s about 9miles off the North East coast of Malaysia, in the South China Sea. We got their via Kuala Lumpur, a short internal flight to Kota Bharu then an hour long taxi ride to the coast at Kola Besut and a boat from there.
Coral View Island resort is well named, a fully fledged coral ‘house’ reef sits just metres off the sandy beach, featuring superb snorkeling opportunities with the outside edge of the reef suitable for shallow 4-6m dives. The resort has its own dive centre ‘Pro Diver’s World’ who are one of the better outfits on the islands. Others were cheaper but ran decidedly shabbier operations. Dives varied in price depending on whether you used any of their good quality kit and how many dives you did. Prices ranged roughly from 70 – 90 RM (Malaysian Riggit) per dive – at the time of writing this equates to approx £10-£12 per dive.
The quality of the diving was great. On the first two days we dived on the islands the visibility was a disappointing 4-6m, but still with some wonderful sights and animals to be seen. On the third day that changed dramatically with vis of 15m+. This seemed to be more normal and I guess anyone coming ought to be aware that it isn’t guaranteed to be gin clear.
Well what did we see you ask? Trust me the full list would be very, very long, but the highlights for me include: black tip reef sharks on the house reef, huge bumphead parrotfish, bannerfish, moray eel’s, beautiful blue spotted stingrays, massive barrel sponges, whip corals, and table corals plus the largest and most colourful sea cucumbers I’ve ever seen – I’m afraid they put the drab native UK ones to shame! But best of all were the huge profusion of anemone fish. We saw at least 5 different types, all on colourful anemones. There was a true smorgasbord of nemo’s.
All the dives we did were on reef structures, although there is the odd wreck dive available too. Depths are to a maximum of 25m, with most somewhere around the 12-20m range.
Apart from the house reef all the sites were accessed by speedboat. The farthest away sites are no more than 30mins travel and so each dive is done as an individual trip out. The dive guides were locals, and were very good, they pointed out some of the harder to spot things such as the odd stonefish, and flatfish, and used a pointing stick to indicate where to look.
I took all my own kit apart from a BCD, cylinder and weights. The centres kit was well looked after, but divers were expected to have there own dive watch or computer to monitor their dive, otherwise you were reliant on the dive guide. This is something I am not keen on, I was OK with my computer but Caroline had to rely on her tables. With the depth’s being shallow the diving was relatively safe. However this also allowed for long dive times – every one of my dives was over an hour long, the longest being 71 mins.
After we had finished diving for the day, the owner’s wife would greet us all with a cup of tea and a cake (sometimes homemade) once we had landed. Commonly we would then go 20m or so onto the beach and relax in the shade for the rest of the day. Our accommodation was some of the best on the Islands, with aircon and good size rooms. However it wasn’t pampered luxury and power cuts were quite common.
All in all some of the best foreign diving I’ve done, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone as a pure diving holiday destination.
Stuart Wilson
This article first appeared in the June 2005 edition of Billericay Diver
