Chilling on the Perthentian Islands, Malaysia

We get to the Perthentian islands mid-day after little sleep, both I and Edwina are grumpy, we are staying on big island at Tuna Bay resort with a bungalow on the beach, it's around 10 meters to the sea and a 5 meter swim to the coral bed with tropical fish, what a way to detox form our stressful day yesterday. I spend most of the afternoon sleeping, the kids in the sea and Edwina had a difficult time staying awake looking after the kids, she begrudged me for sleeping but I couldn't stay awake. Still tired we headed to the resorts restaurant for early dinner and a well-deserved long sleep. As we hit the beds, Arabella starts complaining about being cold and shivering, she soon throws up into Maddalena sarong and has a ridiculously high temperature, we give her paracetamol, apply a plastic bag of ice to her forehead and the temperature reduces and we decide she should sleep with mum tonight so she can monitor her.

We awoke the next day with a knock at the door from housekeeping they had cleaned the puke sarong and was returning it, I can't believe they cleaned it. We were all feeling refreshed and in better moods, Arabella had sweating most of the night but the temperature was gone. We hired snorkels masks for the day and Luca quickly wants to head out to the pontoon that he checked out yesterday, unbelievable the difference in him today swimming over the coral to the pontoon compare to the Komodo trip. We spent the day relaxing on the beach and snorkelling in the coral reef.

We got a message from Amanda and Raph who we met on the Komodo trip that they were also on the Perthentian islands as well and wanted to know if we wanted to meet up for a beer, so after lunch we headed over to Small Island to Coral Bay, it was great again spending time with like-minded individuals, we spent some time swimming with the kids in the sea and then headed over to Long Beach, the party beach. The waves were bigger this side and the kids loved playing in them with Amanda, several Tiger beers later we were keen to get a water taxi back before it got dark, we headed to the pier to get our water taxi and were met by a small motorised canoe not exactly what we expected and more suitable for a river than choppy seas. As we are saying goodbye to Amanda and Raph we hear Luca yelping as he falls into the sea as the canoe moved away from the jetty, Luca recovered from the sea and not too bothered by the ordeal, we head back to Tuna Bay, the canoe was very unstable in the choppy sea and waves were coming over the side soaking us, no lifejackets about, both Edwina and I had huge relief when we did eventually make it safely back to Tuna Bay all looking soaked.

The next 2 days were spent enjoying the beach and reef, Maddalena managed to lose her first tooth after we swam out to the pontoon, she decided to keep it until Hong Kong as Malaysian money wasn't much use as we were leaving and she hoped Tinker Bell from Hong Kong Disney might visit her. On the last day Luca and I swam the whole length of the reef a far cry from when Luca got here where he didn't want to get in the water because of the fish.

It was time to leave and we made our way to Kuala Lumpur, our flight had been delayed and we were put on standby for the earlier flight as we had a connection to Hong Kong, luckily we made it but it was a tense 20 mins standing in front of the Air Asia office.