At the end of the day its fucking cheep...

13/6/11

Rising early I had to the sea for another swim followed by some pilates. Breakfast is sweet bread and crisp brought from the mainland. The bread is sweet not by our choosing but by the fact that it appears to be almost imposable to get any bread in Malaysia where the third ingredient isn’t sugar. The only benefit is that it negates the need for jam which is a nice cost saving!

Once James has roused himself (the early starts did not rally take off) we head along the jungle path to find a more populous beech and to investing the options for diving. Along the way we see a huge monitor lizard about 3meters long. Fortunately they are fairly timid and don’t want to interact with humans. We also see a number of fallen down beech chalets that if the planning was left up to me we would probably be staying in. That said I doubt we would have left the mainland to get to the island if I was in charge! We also encounter a hippy of sorts emerging from one of the dialect chalets who is interested in engaging us in conversation. He looks odd we are sweating lots and really just want to keep going on our way. Being British and polite we answer his questions but keep moving along. As we get to the end of hippy territory he turns and leaves us whilst saying peace man. Once out of earshot James said I didn’t like him to begin with but certainly don’t like anyone who says peace man!

Once at the more populous beech we have some lunch and explore the dive shops. Our second diver shop is Panorama where we are greeted by a friendly crew of 25-30 year olds who run the shop. The packages are very good value and come with discounted accommodation. We were thinking about our options but whilst doing this CeeCee one of the dive leaders walks over and gives us her version of a sales pitch. “listen you get a free tee-shirt, cheep accommodation and popcorn when your watching the diving DVD’s and at the end of the days its fucking cheep so stop talking about it and book on.” Normally we would have been shocked but CeeCee delivered it with such a smile and was so engaging we decided to sign up.

I enrolled on the four day open water dive course and James on the advanced diver course. The only problem being that James had booked accommodation at the other end of the island for the rest of our stay. Upon returning to our rooms James scurred inside and I was dispatched to sort out the accommodation problem… tell them that we were leaving. Never being involved in the planning is a bonus for me but James only keeps me around for dealing with the more difficult situations! Fortunately I noticed that the white board behind the bar only had us staying for two nights as opposed to the week James had thought we had booked. As such there was no problem. Phew!