Of Clownfish and Broken Cameras

Well it's Independence day over here in Malaysia. I'm back from the islands, I have a nice tan, a camera that doesn't work properly anymore and a hole in my thumb where a parrot-fish decided to take a chunk of skin off from. Yeah, there must be something about me that makes animals wanna take a piece of me home with them. First the squirrel, now the fish...

I regret to announce my old 2 Megapixel Fijifilm finally kicked the bucket on the island trip. It refuses to mount on my comp anymore, so my pictures are stuck in the camera with no way of getting them out :( So no piccys until I find a way to. Sorry.

But all in all, the trip was great, the company pleasant and wildlife fantastic. Perhentian is one of the more undeveloped islands in Malaysia, and the chalet we stayed in only had the basic essentials, but we never spent much time in the chalet anyway. Typically white coral beaches, (with lumps of coral that makes running around barefoot a bad idea), clear blue water and lots of lots of corals and fishes. We were lucky with the weather, during the day it was sunny and clear, but every night we'd get a full-blown tropical storm which, being on an island, was ten-times more powerful than if we had been on mainland.

I was lucky enough to get to dive with sea turtles (it's turtle season now) and a LOT of VERY colourful fish. Sea turtles are awesome! Luckily I could dive so I could see them up close without having to wait for them to surface and breathe, but we saw them do that anyway. The thing that stunned me were how HUGE they were. The only I followed must have had a shell at least 3 feet in diameter.

It was interesting to note Pixar has pretty much caused the clownfish to be practically renamed 'Nemo' now, because everytime someone spotted an anemone with clownfish in it, they'd yell out (once they got their snorkels out of their mouths) "NEMO! I found a Nemo!". But clownfish are adorable. There were two species of clownfish in Perhentian, the timid smaller species and the other, larger, and more agressive half-black one. But they're still cute, and I don't think there's anything cuter than a baby clownfish the size of the nail on your pinkie finger. You could hear the squeals from my sisters (and admittedly, myself) even underwater.

Plenty of birds too! Aside from the majestic sea-eagles, we spotted Brown Boobies (don't laugh) and Greater Crested Terns, which the locals called camar. I had a great view of them when we were diving at Shark Point; but we were unlucky and didn't see any sharks. Even my bleeding finger from where the parrot-fish bit me didn't help attract them any.

I think I want to get my PADI licence next year if I can. It's sure worth going back to Perhentian for. The best part is that the whole journey, including the 30-minute speedboat ride from mainaland, takes only 2 hours from my house.

God bless Malaysia.