28th July - Perhentian Island

We had another awesome day diving today. In the morning we went to the 'Temple' dive site. You can see the pinnacle above the water and it widens as you go deeper. We had a great time exploring the reefs and fishes with Rick and I could list all the stuff we saw but it'll probably be boring and I don't recognise most of them so I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to. With the exception of clownfish of course! There's must be very few people who wouldn't be able to identify Nemo.  Actually, dive-Holly says that Finding Nemo is pretty accurate so there's an excuse to finally get round to watching it.

At midday we had a quick lunch of super-spicy fried rice. It wasn't supposed to be but when we asked for it to be just a little spicy, I wonder if they misunderstood and thought we asked for really tiny chillies because I only picked half out and there were still at least 8 chillies on the side of my plate!

We also said our goodbyes to girl Holly who had made a spur-of-the moment decision to go to Siem Reap again.

The afternoon dive we went to the lighthouse. It was absolutely stunning and hard to beieve that so many amazing things were living so close to the surface. We had to be a little careful and keep close to the coral because people jump from the lighthouse and we didn't want them to land on our heads. Matt ran out of air earlier than us but we got to drop him off at the surface, see him to the boat and then continue diving for a little longer. We've mainly dived for around 40 minutes before but it was really great to be able to stay down for a whole hour. It still didn't feel like any time at all though!

When we got back, we filled in our log-books, chatted to everyone for a while and then went with Johan to look into snorkelling tomorrow. We've loved diving but even though it's cheap here, it still starts to stack up, and it's meant to be easier to see sharks and turtles on the snorkelling trips so we're looking forward to that!
Our evening was spent sitting on the beach eating a tasty (fish!) BBQ and chatting to Johan. Walking back along the beach to the sound of violins from Shari-La hotel was rather a pleasant change from the usual island soundtrack of thumping music.