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description= If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home. /James Michener/;

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s air con set to freezing and we had seats at the back of the bus that didn t recline much what an unforgettable bus ride we arrived in kl at 5 30am so i headed for a hostel i had booked in advance very welcoming indeed i could check in at 6 30am and get a bed already after the night in the fridge i mean the bus i was too happy to get a bed with a blanket over the weekend my depression about returning back home started kicking in so i didn t do much some shopping for sweets and spices some indian food some sightseeing of kl tower and petronas towers and a visit to batu caves parks orchid gardens and chinatown was all i had energy left for the batu caves are old hindu temples built in caves amazing how such a place can be reached in a matter of minutes with a train from kl coincidently on my last day in asia i was finishing it with what i had started with more than a year ago an india experience crowds of indians ladies dressed in saris masala in the air and food and indian sweets being sold at the stalls people spitting monkeys chasing each other and looking for goodies girls doing hanna paintings and again people people people it was a bittersweet feeling seeing all this and realizing it is over for me at least this time the lake gardens are a perfect place for a stroll in kl that s a well maintained and beautiful park botanical garden and it was empty on a sunday afternoon i guess the heat keeps people in air con indoors but this place was so lovely that i expected it to be full of locals picknicking and lazing around i was aiming for the islamic art museum but while i was getting lost with my lousy map i found myself in the orchid gardens which had a free entrance a nice change in a city where most attractions have a hefty 10 20 dollar entrance fee and when i finally made it to the museum i was too tired to actually go in then my last quest for a veggie meal among fishhead curries and pig intestine soups my last batch of tropical fruits and my last taste of sweet mangoes and pineapples these months in asia went by way too fast until next time then my dear asia this slideshow requires javascript share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x like loading posted in backpacking in southeast asia tagged batu caves hitchhiking kuala lumpur kuala terengganu malaysia perhentian islands travel leave a comment ok let s go diving posted on 09 07 2012 by ginger day 88 day 97 16 25 5 2012 if i really liked diving after the experience in thailand and cambodia then i fell in love with it in perhentians over the course of 9 days i spent in perhnetians i finished the advanced open water course 5 dives and did 7 fun dives so now i have 20 dives under my belt ok let s go diving is my favourite phrase of this week i had a spanish clown i mean diving instructor and there were 2 other people in my course a funny bloke from london and a girl from malaysia i was diving with turtle bay divers yes i chose them because they had a turtle in their name and that was a 5 star service there the instructor even corrected some of the things we had learnt wrongly or just forgotten about in thailand everytime when one of us was saying but in thailand they told us he would respond with then go back to thailand and dive wrongly there a clown i m telling you the padi advanced open water course consists of 5 dives the first dive we did was a buoyancy workshop only for me and the english guy he became my diving buddy in the rest of the dives too my buoyancy was bad before this and it usually went especially bad at the 5 metre safety stop when the tank is rather empty thanks to the workshop i became better at controlling my buoyancy even at the 5 metres we were practicing hovering and swimming through a hula hoop we practiced backflips and frontflips i had no idea you could do these in the water then failed at backflipping through the hulahoop but nevertheless it was fun trying we even had an underwater race running without fins on the bottom quite difficult and kung fu fighting there as well that was too entertaining and our instructor made it almost impossible to stay serious and not laugh but as you start laughing you start getting water in your mask not my favourite thing the equipment was good and new but the boats they were fine for everyone of course it s just me who had problems with them first i had gotten used to the big dive boats in thailand where you enter in the water with a giant stride and perform buddy check on the boat but from the small ones they use in perhentians you have to do a backroll entry and the buddy check is done in the water too once i got over the fright of rolling backwards in the water and it happened as soon as i tried it it proved to be a rather fun entry but getting back in the boat damn no ladder they could get those it s not that difficult so i was crawling back in the boat as a beached whale by the end of my stay i had learnt how to get in the boat more or less gracefully but the beginning was too funny and frustrating the second dive of my course was a navigation dive which was fine well i didn t get lost when i had to orientate myself using natural references and i knew how to use a compass while we were waiting for the others to complete the tasks my buddy and i were doing backflips it was just so fun and then we were wondering where did our air go so quickly one of the main reasons for getting the advanced open water certification is that it allows you to dive to 30 metres instead of 18m while other adventure dives you can choose according to your interests a navigation dive and a deep dive are compulsory on our 3rd dive the deep dive we dived to 25m and our instructor demonstrated some effects of the high pressure under the water he smashed an egg and the yolk stayed in a ball which we could pass on to each other then a plastic bottle got pretty squeezed from the pressure but after there was some air added in it and we surfaced the bottle had become rock hard and once opened it popped like champagne from the pressure that s what could happen to your lungs if surfacing incorrectly in the evening we were having a night dive a dive you do in the dark using a flashlight this would let you see some things you cannot see in daytime as the nocturnal fishes come out to hunt i didn t see any big fish eating small fish but we had a squid that left a cloud of ink behind it and some more eels the best part about this dive was the bioluminescence the algae in the water were shining as we switched off our flashlights and were moving our arms around thanks to the new moon for not spoiling this pleasure awesome it is quite common that people get claustrophobic or disoriented during the night dive as it s all dark around you but i liked the darkness even more because then you could really focus on what s in the spotlight of the flashlight our last dive to get our certification was a fish id photography dive with my buddy we decided to rent a camera and split the cost between the 2 of us and switch with the camera use in the middle of the dive we met a turtle right then when i had a camera and we saw a small school of fishes that i nicknamed mini whales because to me they looked like mini sperm whales they were so cute if a bit odd turned out they are called humphead parrotfish and they are about 1 metre long impressive and beautiful they come in top 5 of my favourite fish now along with boxfish lionfish angelfish and bluespotted stingrays t 3 the divesite has quite distinct thermoclines layers of water with different temperatures once you are used to diving in water with temperature 31 c getting in the cold thermocline gets you covered with goosebumps and makes you convinced that the temperature must be below 20 but no computers don t lie when they say it is only 28 c this is what getting spoilt in 31 c means from now on i could enjoy fundiving without the limit of 18 metres so my first dive was with an australian divemaster and we went down to 29m we saw everything on this dive my miniwhale bumbhead parrotfishes a shark and a turtle i was trying to learn the breathing technique from the divemaster as his air consumption was ridiculously low but there did not seem to be any bubbles coming out of him so for me partly because we went very deep in the beginning partly as i was overexcited because of the parrotfishes and turtle and partly thanks to trying to follow his breathing i had 30 bar of air when we surfaced but we had spent an hour underwater on the next dive we headed for a wreck dive with a german divemaster there s a wreck of a ship that was transporting sugar that s why it is called the sugar wreck and it s been under there for about 10 years i had no idea that marine life can transform a ship so much in such a short time i was very impressed with the wreck and with the galore of the poisonous lionfishes and scorpionfishes and i even managed to get disoriented at one point as we were exiting the wreck it was darker inside but not as dark as to need a flashlight i was stunned by how light it was in the open water and then i looked down and all i could see were schools of fish that never ended it seemed there was no bottom i thought we must be at the very surface but no we were at 13 metres so it was only 5 metres from the bottom but it seemed there is no bottom my confusion lasted a few seconds but i got what i missed out on the night dive on another day i had a private dive with my german divemaster i was the only one diving in that spot the divespot had a pretty strong current which i was fighting with throughout the dive but everytime when the divemaster was asking is the current ok i was answering that it was fine i figured if i want to learn how to dive in stronger currents i might as well start learning now at one point we had a shark a cute baby bluespotted stingray a huge great barracuda and a huge pufferfish all at the same time each in a different direction from me i heard the divemaster screaming and pointing at the shark behind me so i looked at the shark thought meh and continued admiring the baby stingray that was slowly swimming away later as we surfaced she told me so i guess you are not into sharks are you i m shouting there at the shark and you are not even looking at it well what can i say other fish seem to be more interesting i wouldn t say this if i saw a whale shark or if i d be in a cage diving among the great whites of course as the amount of dive sites in not infinite here i started going back to places where i had been so we returned to t 3 where we had done the fish id dive this time our divemaster took us through all the swimthroughs during the training dive our instructor was not allowed to take us there well i think i hit all of the swimthroughs with my tank because i had left my buoyancy on the shore my hair kept getting stuck with the tank water kept coming into my mask and suddenly one of the fins gave me a blister so all these tiny things made the dive quite uncomfortable surprise i consumed my air as quickly as my buddy and i usually had 20 30 bar more left at the end of the dive than my buddy the small things really matter but i saw a baby yellow boxfish and that s one of the prettiest fishes i ve seen here it indeed looks like a little yellow box with black dots i went back to sugar wreck on another private dive with the australian divemaster because in the first dive we were not taken in the air pocket this time the current was stronger and the viz not so good but i saw a coral catshark the only place you see them here and plenty of scorpionfishes and lionfishes as i later put it the dive atmosphere was like a badly made horror movie with the bottom covered in sea urchins poisonous fish and sharks around you fighting a current and diving in a rusted wreck and then you surface in the airpocket the airpocket was a bit of a disappointment i had expected it to be bigger but in the end the only thing i could think of was how not to crash into something but i enjoyed it very much anyway i went back for a second dive to the temple of the sea as well with another australian divemaster the temple is full of fish but i only wanted to see the baby yellow boxfish and this is a good place for them usually you can find one or two and my divemaster promised he would find me a boxfish we found sharks a whole family living under rocks and a seasnake i only found out afterwards that that snake is the most poisonous creature they have in the seas here and my divemaster was looking for my boxfish he was looking and looking and looking and i was trying to figure out an underwater signal for forget it but he wouldn t give up and he found me not one but two of the cute yellow boxes why i wanted the baby boxfish because the juveniles are yellow but when they grow up they are still cute but in a brown colour i didn t even notice how my stay on the islands had come to an end so for my last dive i wanted only to see a turtle i went for the last dive in the d lagoon in general it s a rather boring divesite but good for beginners and refreshers however it s the only place where you can see panda clownfish so i opted for it plus i was begging for that one last turtle to finish on a high note the panda clownfish were amazing it s similar to nemo but in a different colour there s this field of sand without anything interesting and in the middle of it stands a lone anemone with a family of panda clownfish living in it a papa panda clownfish a mama clownfish and 3 baby clownfish while i was hovering over them and admiring their expressions the papa clownfish decided he doesn t enjoy the intrusion into his home so he swam up and crashed right into my mask yes i was attacked in my face by a panda clownfish an 8 cm long clownfish we did see another turtle at the end so brining my total amount of turtles up to 7 see the turtle bay divers give what you ask for you ask for a turtle they find it you ask for a baby boxfish they get it overall i saw a lot underwater of course during the dive when we had a camera we didn t see all this plus most of the photos were bad enough as it was our first time with the camera underwater yes yes bubbles and buoyancy play their role here but what i saw during the dives were courtesy of my fancy diving logbook hawksbill sea turtles blacktip reefsharks bamboo sharks coral catshark banded sea krait snake white and neon damselfish brown pipefish clownfish panda and nemo black clark s and pink anemonefish jawmullet yellowback gold banded and lunar fusiliers silver and tall fin batfish bluespotted stingray bluespotted fantail ray jenkins stingray titan and yellow margin triggerfish bartail goatfish cleaner and moon wrasse scorpionfish lionfish rainbow greenthroat and humphead parrotfish squirrelfish one spot two spot and blue stripped snappers blue ringed and six banded angelfish gold spotted t...