kez & hay travels 06

And we thought we had this travelling lark sorted by now!!!  Turns out travelling to Malaysia means you need to book, which meant our trip down to Malaysia took a day longer than we planned.  From taxi-van, to boat, to bus, to another bus, to taxi-van, to yet another bus, to taxi, to boat, we arrived at our long-awaited destination - the Perhentian Islands.  These 2 islands on the eastern coast of peninsular Malaysia are textbook tropical paradises - so say no more!

We did a couple of fun dives and we saw beautiful sea life, including the huge scary Trigger fish (Our dive instructor happily conferred to us just before our dive that he had been knocked unconscious by one of these scoudrels!)  Again life was very hard with a lot of sun-bathing and swimming.  Do you all hate us?!!!  We also made friends with a couple of baby orphan turtles being looked after by our guesthouse until they were old enough to fend for themselves in the big wide world. 

We finally had to say a sad farewell to our new paradise and move on to Kuala Lumpur - again a one day delay awaited us!.

Now nicely settled in Koh Tao, a small island in southern Thailands gulf coast, we booked a 4 day course in scuba-diving.  After a couple of hours in the "classroom" learning about water and air density and nitorgen intake...we progressed into the swimming pool and before we could put any of the diving equipment on we had to proove we could swim by doing 20 (Yes TWENTY) laps of the pool - more than i've done in my lifetime!  Slowly but surely we passed the course 4 days later and saw lots of fantastic sea-life including a gorgeous little yellow box-fish (true to its name).

Now that the hard work was over it was time for some serious relaxing...and for that we popped over to Ko Pha Ngan.  We found a gorgeous secluded beach with only a few other tourists.  We packed a lot in to those days: from eating to sun-bathing to swimming to sun-bathing again.  It was quite tough really, not sure how we coped!!!

We stopped off for a couple of nights at the second largest city in Cambodia before reaching the border.  We met up with a moto taxi driver recommended to us by a friend and he drove us around the surrounding area of the city.  We went to the Killing Caves - in similar morbid style to the Killing Fields, these were caves where the Khmer Rouge threw Cambodian civilians into the caves and left them to die, if they had not already died from the fall.  The rock is actually still stained from all the blood shed at the time.

We moved on to visit surrounding villages and saw fruit bats as big as dogs.  They are apparently a delicacy in Cambodia but these particulary ones had found safe-haven in a tree in the back garden of a monk's abode.  We then visited an orphanage run by a monk who welcomed us in and told us about his charity.   Run for the past 12 years a lot of the children were HIV sufferers, he spends a lot of time educating the surrounding community about the illness and to try and get past the stigma.  There is also a big drug problem with children from primary schools falling victim.   

The next day we left for Bangkok on the bumpiest roads ever - breaking down didn't help either!  At Thailand's capital we visited the Royal Palace where every building is decorated with such vibrant colours and with such intricate detail.  The reclining Buddha was built before the building that holds it, because it is so big.  Each foot measures 3 metres each!

After our quick visit to Bangkok we journeyed down to the east coast islands.