Return from Paradise

After you've been living out of a guidebook for a while, you start finding its descriptions of places etched in your brain. So the Rough Guide describes Malaysia's Perhentian Islands as "textbook tropical paradises," and that's exactly what they are. Accomodation is basic, and electricity is only available at night, but the sand is blazing white, the water is turquoise, the hills are emerald green and there isn't a single road. The snorkelling is world-class: we followed a giant sea turtle, swam with (smallish) sharks, nosed around various shapes and shades of coral, and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of brightly colored fish.

It's the beginning of the season at Perhentian, with a few lingering tropical downpours as the east-coast monsoon fades. The scene at Long Beach on the small island (Perhentian Kecil) is young, backpackery, and verging on claustrophobic. It's not a party place - the locals are Muslim and there are very few places to get alcohol - but you see everyone by day on the smallish beach, and by night in the one happening bar. We came to the islands with ready-made friends: our co-conspirators in a passenger mutiny against the minibus driver who was tearing along winding mountain roads in the early morning fog at literally double the speed limit until our repeated and increasingly strident complaints got him to ease off a little (just a little, though). We survived the journey from Penang and made it to the islands, and now, back on the mainland in Kota Bharu, we miss the beach already (Kota Bharu, incidently, is known as one of the most Islamic towns in Malaysia, though the atmosphere here is still appealingly laid-back).

Tomorrow we're hopping on the so-called 'jungle railway' for the day-long trip to Jerantut, gateway town to Teman Negara national park. This computer is having no part of Flickr, so any more picture updates are going to have to wait a few more days.