Perhentian (2)

I have never seen water this blue. The isolated bay was entirely ours, and the small resort was manned by not more then 10 people, 5 of which were the dive instructors themselves. We headed into the water straight away. Over the next 4 days we dived in 7 locations around the island, from breath-taking coral gardens to an underwater peak who's summit tapered to a small, wave-tossed rock on the surface.


We squeezed through crannies for giant morays and ghostly albino anemones. We parted a silver curtain of anchovies as a pack of trevally rushed in overhead for the kill. Gliding along-side pufferfish, wrasse and monos, we steered clear of the vicious beaks of huge, territorial triggerfish. Scorpionfish walked the seabed on feet-like fins. A great barracuda cruised lazily above, inspecting these intruders of its realm. And all around, the forests of coral, teeming and noisy with life.


We fine-tuned our buoyancy control by hovering on our stomachs in a circle inches from the sand, hands outstreched around a single blossom of anemone. The transparent cleaner shrimp that lived among its stings only dared venture onto our fingers when we had learnt to keep completely still, because movement is just a matter of breathing, and too much breath can send you floating uncontrollably upwards.


We saw a huge green turtle, and waited at the surface for 20 minutes for it to come up for air. On the last day, I snorkelled out across the bay with Ed, and felt a chilling instant of panic when a 3 metre long black-tip materialized from the blue. It was merely curious, and as we swam back we saw 2 more baby sharks foraging just metres from the beach.

At night, the forest was alive with fireflies and large crabs, and the constellations blazed ever so brightly. I saw Scorpio for the first time. We slept to the lull of waves, and woke in the dead of night to a thunderstorm. By morning the weather and sea was clear again.

On Sunday we boarded the ferry as our new friends stood at the beach to see us off. We waved goodbye to the cook, the receptionist, the instructors we had come to know: Paul the lanky blonde Briton who looked like a high-jumper, Pei See the stout Master Diver with an octopus tatoo on her shin, Eric the 50 year-old long-haired surfer who smoked like a chimney and dived like Zen.