Day 2 snorkeling - Rawa Islands

Monday, 30 July 2012

The alarm rang 8.30am. The agenda for today was a half-day snorkeling trip to Rawa, a few small uninhabited islands 30 minutes outside the Perhentians, and apparently one of the scuba diver instructor's favorite snorkeling places.

We had breakfast at our resort, Alan had french toast, I had a cheese omelet and Priscilla had peanut butter and jelly toast. We booked the snorkeling trip through our resort for 55 RM per person, not too bad for a 4 hour trip with 3 stops. The diving center at Flora Bay Resort is impressively modern and big compared to the other buildings on the beach, however seem to be just opened as the building itself is almost empty apart from the front desk in the first floor.

We showed up at 10am as requested. We were only five going out today, us and a french couple. The boat ride out to Rawa took about 20 min and was fairly comfortable despite the small size of the boat.

Getting closer to the islands I got the chills as I saw the dark waters creeping up on me. The islands were very small and lied there all by themselves in the middle of the ocean. However, as the boat approached the back of the island where the the snorkeling spot was the feeling went away as it wasn't that deep and there were corals everywhere. We jumped in, and again, it was just unbelievable, the same as swimming in a huge aquarium. We kept together and swam along the shore as the current was quite strong. Tons of different fish, including lots of Nemos, were all around us. Nevertheless, it was the huge coral formations that were the most impressive. We swam around for roughly half an hour. On the way back to the boat a HUGE school of sardines gathered around us and behind it a smaller school of needle fish were hunting them. The needles chased the sardines to the surface and until they jumped out of the water as they tried to catch the rather stressed out sardines. A pretty cool sight to follow the needles from below the surface and into the air. A couple of small barracudas were also swimming around the schools.

As we approached the boat I heard some talking noises coming out of l Priscilla's snorkel. I swam over and found that a tiny fish was attacking her mask! Being the gentleman that I am, I came to the rescue. The fish wasn't apparently frightened by my size and came straight up in my mask too. It looked like a tiny eel an was full of different colors. The problem with animals over here is that you have no idea whether they are poisonous or not. We decided to follow the general top traveling tips and walked away from the situation before he could call on his buddies. Apparently, as Priscilla turned around to check if he was following us she saw him being eaten by a bigger fish. Poor bastard...on second thought, maybe the tiny fish was looking more for shelter than attacking us. Oh well, poor bastard.

The next stop turned out to be my favorite snorkeling spot on the whole trip. This place was just a 5 min boat ride away from the other place and was amazing. Our boatman pulled the boat in on the white sandy beach. It was very shallow here and apparently a perfect place to spot both baby sharks and huge bumper fish. We hung out for a while on the beach before we swam out to check out the sharks. As soon as you put your head under water here there's tons of fish around you and big ones too! We swam along the corals and rocks for a while when I saw it, a SHARK!! I have always prepared myself for this moment but really never known how I will react. I always thought I would panic completely and start screaming SHARK, SHARK and just swim like crazy back to the shore. The opposite happened (of course the size of the shark might have something to do with it), I alerted the others and swam AFTER it! The shark was probably just below 1meter long and passed pretty close to me. It was crazy fast and I soon lost sight of it, so fast that the other apparently didn't see it. I turned around for some more action and saw two huge bumper fish! They were both probably 1m long and half a meter tall, pretty amazing to swim next to in very shallow waters. Priscilla had a problem spotting the sharks even though both Alan and I did. I was determined to show her so I held on to her (she has a tendency to swim pretty slow) and swam with her back to where I spotted it the first time. Lucky enough we saw two of them, both passing very close to us. Awesome!

Next stop was the Lighthouse, which we visited on our first snorkeling trip. Priscilla and I passed on this one. Alan jumped in and we snapped some photos of him and the fish. He also jumped one more time from the top of the lighthouse resulting in some loud chairs a group of Chinese life-vest-snorkeling tourists.

Priscilla really wanted to see a turtle again, so we asked the boatman if e could drop by turtle bay on the way back. He agreed to a ten minute stop. Amazing how these people can spot a turtle from afar. The turtle basically looks like a big black shadow below water on the sandy bottom and could just as easily be seaweed or rocks, anyhow the boatman spotted a turtle 2 min after we arrived at turtle bay. We jumped in but the visibility was terrible. We stayed in for 5 min and gave up.

We were all pretty excited about our day and Priscilla kept pushing us to sign up for an intro dive. I was pretty intrigued, so before we had lunch I went over to the German guy and signed the three of us up for a dive the next morning. ;-)

We decided to hike over to Tuna Bay for dinner and watch the sunset at this beach just across from Shark Point which the French guy on our snorkeling trip called "de most beautifullest bitch".

We dressed up for dinner and put on our flip flops for the 20 min journey. We went through the whole Ben's routine, meaning me spraying Priscilla and myself with bug repellant trying to avoid both of us looking like two 14 year olds with zits everywhere after the misquito infested jungle hike. It really works. The 20 min hike turned out to be quite a struggle. The hiking trail was overgrown and like Alan put it, we might just as well have packed the machete for this one. After 5 mins, we were all soaking wet after the crazy incline up the hill to the other side. To top it off, I was wearing a long sleeve shirt. Thank god that we brought beers for the journey. Some how we managed to not be bitten by snakes or anything only wearing thongs ;)

This beach was absolutely "the most beautifullest"! We stayed there for a while taking pictures with the sunset as the background. Priscilla takes forever taking photos, its always something wrong with the picture. Alan and I was quite annoyed after a while.

In the mist of me taking photos of Priscilla while she was walking in the water, she started to scream like crazy, giving Alan and myself a solid heart attack!! Still having images of sharks swimming around in our heads from our snorkeling trip I guess we were afraid they had followed us back or something. The thing with Priscilla is that she puts on the loudest scream whether it is a tiny ant in the bedroom or a dead rat in the road. Well, this was no exception, as it seemed like she stepped on some tiny fish that just moved away. We all counted our limbs after the incident and decided it wasn't too risky to continue the photoshoot.

When the session was finally over, we were ready for some cold Tigers and food. On the walk along the beach to Tuna Bay we saw a blue spotted sting ray and a couple of huge bats, we're talking the same size as seagulls. Nasty...

We decided to check how much the boat ride back to Flora Bay was before we sat down for dinner. We know that the price doubles after 7pm and triples after midnight. We asked around and found out that it was 30RM per person, pretty expensive for a 5 min boat ride. Anyways, it was after 7 so we decided to sit down and eat. We shared a squid, a red snapper and some shrimps. It was pretty good. The topic for dinner was where we wanted to retire. We got to watch some Olympics too, not bad. When the bill came it was less than I expected as we had several beers and the food itself was supposed to be 70RM. I'm tired of people giving us the wrong bill all the time so I just paid it without commenting. When we looked closer it seemed like they had forgotten the beers (40RM), well well, so the boat ride just became a bit cheeper ;)

The boat had to drop us off on the opposite side of the beach as the low tide made it impossible to drop us off outside our resort. It was ok, a good way to finnish a great day with a fullmoon walk along the beach before the early morning awakening tomorrow..