Arrived in KL at 12ish as experienced the very swish skyrail system- 10x nicer than the 'met' back in the old uk it was clean and everyone was nice and friendly!! Checked into a very random hostel! the reception area had fish tanks everywhere and there were some very disturbing creatures swimming around! One was a snake turtle which had a really long neck- pretty ugly to be honest. Anyway we were only here for one night before making our way down to the Perhentian Islands to do some diving!!!! Yippeeee Finally got to do my PADI. After experiencing the most uncomfortable boat ride over (very sore bottom after hitting the waves so hard) We began our walk over the white sands to find ourselves a place to kip. This may sound like i enjoyed the walk however i had my backpack (with wheels on) which up until this point had been brilliant as i could drag it around on the nice pavements, sand on the other hand was a different story and at one point i was dragging with both hands- looking pretty special. Eventually made it to the wooden huts we were to call our homes for the next 5 days. Went off and booked onto a PADI course with turtle bay who threw in a few dive at the end of my course. The following day i had to pop in and watch a 2hr video which i should have paid attention to but was too busy filling in the questions i had to answer for the following day so that i didn't have to do any homework! We had bumped into Stevie, Darcey and Lucinda (the guys were traveled with in Laos and part of Vietnam) so we had arranged a big night out starting at the restaurant attached to our chalet's. We all had the BBQ which was fantastic!!!! so tastie, after desert of ice cream and pancakes we headed down to the beach bar which had a massive fire going. It was really chilled out, sat on the mats watching the crazy drunk fire dancer doing his thing. The next day i started the PADI with a bit of theory in the morning (snore!!!) then we hit the sea and went diving, well we only went to 3 metres on the first go as there were loads of skills to pass before we were aloud any deeper. With all the skills done we went out later that afternoon and got to explore some of the coral. There were so many different kinds of fish is was brilliant. Over the next two days we did four more deep dives reaching 18 metres. They were all brilliant!!!! i saw two turtles which really took me by surprise, i was so lucky as one of the turtles decided to swim along with us right next to me- it was fantastic. Also saw loads of Nemo's, barracudas, 3 stingray-one of them was huge!!!!! our dive master took us right up to where he was chilling out. The first thing i saw was its tail which was over a metre long!!! There were also these real cool parrot fish all different colours.

With the PADI i now had my free dive to do. I chose to go to sugar wreck which is a sunken cargo ship. it was a fantastic experience-nothing like the diving we had done the previous days as the current was really strong and viability was quite low as well as the fact that there was ship to steer around. We weren't allowed to touch the wreck as it has thousands of scorpion fish which pack a deadly sting on it. At one point my so called buddy (you have to dive in twos) knocked me into the side of the boat as he was too busy taking photos and i though i had been stung but it was just a clam shell which i scraped my leg over. We got to swim inside the cargo hold which was really cool and saw loads of barracuda chilling out it there. Because everything is so close you end up swimming right in the middle of all the fish which was great.

Great Barrier reef here i come!!!!