Alison: The journey to the Perhentian Islands was another uncomfortable affair. The tiny minibus came to collect us at 5am and we managed to squeeze on to what already appeared to be a full bus. Following our pick up though, the driver still managed to get another 2people on!! Luckily we weren't on the back row because these people had to ride with giant rucksacks rather unexpectedly falling on their head! We finally got to a small town called Kuala Besut after 6 hours and prepared for our speed boat ride over to the island. We all sat crammed on to a boat and it chugged off slowly at first. I was very underwhelmed with the 'speed' boat experience until the driver turned to us and shouted 'hold on tight!' Oh my god.....it was fast! The g-force on my face was incredible and my flimsy blouse almost tore right off! We absolutely loved it!

The Perhentian Island's is a very unusual place as it doesn't have any roads and it's only electricity supply is via generators. Most places only supply electricity between the hours of 7pm and 7am and the water supply is often quite limited. There are 2 islands which make up Perhentian. One is known as the big island and the other.......you guessed it, is known as the small island. The big island is made up of all the larger posher resorts and the smaller island is the backpackers party island with all the budget (crap) accommodation. We of course chose the budget island. We opted to go to the main beach which is called Long Beach. On arriving on the beach, we needed to find somewhere to stay. We got there about 2 ish so it was sweltering heat and very uncomfortable to walk in with all your worldly possessions on your back. We weren't concerned because it was low season and we thought there would be loads of livable rooms available....we were wrong. All the half decent places were full and the other places were really low in standard. We had seen some rough places before but these were beyond belief! My parents shed is like a 5 star luxury hotel compared to some of these places! After viewing many rooms we managed to find somewhere that would suffice for a night. It was still dire but it had 4 walls and a roof even if there were some gaping holes in the floor! After dumping our stuff in the room, we headed out to find something better. There is a second beach on the other side of the island which we heard had a reasonable amount of accommodation on so we went on a short walk through the jungle to come out at a smaller beach called Coral Beach. Long Beach was nice but in my opinion Coral Beach was much more attractive beach. The water looked different from the water we saw on the islands in Thailand. It was still as clear but it was a really dark turquoise instead....beautiful. Another thing we noticed on comparing beaches was that they were both very deserted and that a most of the restaurants were closed or weren't serving food. Many backpackers were sat about eating crisps and biscuits. We thought that perhaps it was to do with the electricity restrictions and they may be opened in the evening but we were in for a stomach rumbling shock............  

Nigel: As Alison mentioned we had ventured on to the other beach in search of better accommodation, which we did find but we were also in for some bad news. We got talking to an English lad who was working on the island and he explained that the big hotel at the of the beach did budget rooms but they didn't advertise the fact. We said we will have a look. We also asked where the best place was to eat on the island and this was where we would be disappointed. He explained that as Muslim festival of Ramadam was ending tomorrow, most locals had left the island and only 2 places were serving food. Hence why we saw lots of people eating crisps. We were also a little annoyed with the people that sold us the boat ticket, that they forgot to tell us this little minor point. Anyway we were determined not for this to spoil our time on the island and walked to the Shari-La Island Resort, which the lad had mentioned. He was right about the budget rooms, we manged to get them down from 90RM (16 pound) to 50RM about 10 pound a night. It was a lot more than we were expecting to pay but based on the standard it was well worth it. Also this was one of the places that was doing food and the hotel had a 24 hour supply of electricity. The room turned out to be ok, but it was nothing compared to the standard of the rest of the resort, which was very nice. The only thing that let the resort down was the restaurant, which was poorly managed and the service was comparable to Basil Faulty. We understood that they were understaffed but they were failing on basic restaurant services. The one that topped it off and we were not sure whether to laugh or cry was when they brought my food out and then came over when I had finished asking if we wanted the bill, even though Alison still hadn't had hers. In the evening the wait for food was over 2 hours and they had little to choose from, so we ended up having dry crisp sandwich's, so we didn't have to go back in there. The hotel did have one saving grace and dispite the aforementioned, I think it is a 5 star hotel. Reason being! They had the Man Utd v Man City game on telly, which as it happened turned out to be an amazing game. So no food, little electricity and no roads, they still had the football on. Paradise. Allison was ecstatic about it.

In the evening we took a walk down to the water front to try and capture the sunset. We did as it happened see more than we had bargained for. We were sitting on the rocks talking when a lizard which must have been about 2 meters in length came out from no where. It wasn't around long and it soon hurried in to the water. We manged to get a couple of pictures, but they don't do justice to the size it actually was. Later on we Googled what we saw and it turns out that it was a monitor lizard which are common on the island but the size we saw is very rare. The island does have its problems and especially with drugs. Not that we saw anything while we were there or experienced any trouble, but it is reported that the locals will hide in the trees and steal your bag from the beach if you leave it unattended. They will then sell anything valuable to get money. We did go on one walk on the island, and we came across a secluded beach. It had several bungalows there and what looked like a restaurant. We went over to see if we could get a drink only to be told by a Danish man that the owner had left the island for Ramadam and there was no food there. The nearest place you could get food was our beach which was a good 40 minutes walk away.