All of my pre-travelling research revealed the Perhenthian islands off of the coast of north eastern Malaysia to be your typical paradise: untouched desert island beaches, crystal clear water, palms trees just about everywhere and a few wooden shacks dotted along the sand serving as accommodation. The recommendations I'd had from friends who had the fortune to make it to these shores only backed up this description with enthusiasm and a touch of jealousy at hearing of my plans to make it my next stop.

After an uncomfortably humid, stormy Kuala Lumpur and my worst bout of homesickness yet, it made sense to suck up the expensive travel cost and head to Malaysian paradise to cheer myself up and get some diving in.

This has to be one of the first times I've not had the option of booking travel from any hostel or guesthouse, instead being given instructions to take the train to one of Kuala Lumpur's many bus stations to fend for myself. Walking to the train station (and getting lost on the side of a dual carriageway in the process), I am sent to another bigger station from where I can apparently buy a ticket to Putra, where I can then buy a ticket to my intended destinion - Kuala Besut, from where I will catch a speed boat to the Perhenthian islands. Phew. Of course after traipsing around KL in the sweltering heat for what feels like ages, the train I eventually catch to Putra stops at the the train station I was originally (and therefore correctly) sent to. When I actually get to Putra, a kind Malaysian girl with a pretty Muslim get up helps me find the bus station. I manage to get lost again as the bus station is essentially a small section of a multi storey car-park. After what feels like hours, I find the correct ticket booth and luckily they had space on the overnight bus that night, so I was finally able to get on my way to the near mythical Perhenthian islands.

And the islands are beautiful. I'm slightly worried I may be becoming complacent though - I wasn't as impressed as I should've been. I've been lucky enough to see so many interesting and beautiful places recently that sometimes it's easy to forget that travelling isn't every day normal life. The water was truly some of the clearest water I'd ever seen, and was as warm as bath water. The green hills of palm trees that framed the beach were beautiful. The rows of brightly coloured plastic parasols did kind of take away from the natural beauty of it all and inject a bit of Benidorm, which Long Beach could really do without.

I spent a lot of my time on the Perhenthians simply relaxing, sorting my life out a bit, starting 'Shantaram' (already fantastic) and detoxing after my crazy but brilliant month in Thailand. I booked in for a dive on my second day there and I'm gutted to say it was a nightmare. Having qualified for deep diving down to 30m in Koh Tao by doing my adventure deep dive after my Open Water course, I was really excited to do another dive, deep in particular. However, if it had been my first dive I would have never dived again. I'm fairly sure my guide wasn't properly qualified and he was more concerned with finding a three legged turtle (naturally christened Tripod) in the face of an incredibly strong current than with ensuring we were at the correct depth. The whole thing was a bit of a disaster - the current pushed me to the surface without a safety stop and the guide was oblivious. After he and the rest of the dive group finally surfaced, he agreed to go back down, having the wonderful idea of us being dragged along to the correct area by clinging onto a rope off of the back of the speed boat, leaving us gasping for breath and causing some of the regulators to go on freeflow and waste all of the remaining air of half the dive group. Stellar.

The snorkelling that I did a couple of days later definitely made up for the horrendous dive. I FINALLY saw a turtle (well, three...don't be jealous...), black tip sharks which were very graceful at about 6ft long, along with my favourite fish and nemo defending his anenome. Definitely the best snorkeling location I've been to so far.

After a few nights of golden sands I made my way back to KL for my flight to Indonesia. My rough guide had instructed me that the speed boat crossing over to the Perhenthians could get very wet and really choppy, so I had been braced for this on the incoming journey but pleasantly surprised by a smooth passage over from the mainland. The same cannot be said for the return journey. I did think at one point that there was potential for the speedboat to actually break up on the waves and I pretty much jarred my back constantly, whilst screaming. On the bright side I made a few friends on the way over, a teenage Malaysia boy who screamed just as loudly and as high as me and Christian, a Norweigan guy who shared the panic of 'is my bag still on board?' Another crazy South East Asian journey survived.