Walking the Life of Mine

Day 1

Rise and shine at 4.30am. Met up at one of my colleague’s place before heading to the airport. My flight (MAS) was at 7.30am, 15 minutes later than my colleagues’ (AirAsia). Landed at Kuala Terengganu around 8.10am. The airport (Sultan Mahmud Airport) is a small one, accommodating to a maximum of 2 planes at a time. Well, the airport only caters for 7 return flights operated by MAS & AirAsia daily, and the planes stop for less than an hour before taking off again.

We were met by our travel agent on arrival. We then traveled to the Merang jetty on a van for 40 minutes. There wasn’t much to see along the way, just some kampong houses and cows and goats. It was another ½ hour of journey by sea to the resort. Gosh, the trip there was like sitting on a mad horse, bouncing up and down.

Finally reached the resort around 10.00 am. We were welcomed and briefed by the resort management, then proceeded to take a rest at our rooms. 3 single beds, air-conditioned and heater shower – not bad right? Hehehe.

After lunch, we all got ready for the snorkeling trip. I was quite excited since it was my first time snorkeling. The boat took us to the middle of the sea, and that was supposed to be our first snorkeling destination! One by one, everyone jumped into the open sea. Being the dumb one, I followed suit without really getting used to the snorkeling equipment yet. In fact, I’m not even a good swimmer. And I ended up drinking so much sea water. Boy, was it really salty.

The idea of snorkeling is to cover your eyes and nose with the mask so that you can see underwater. And you’re supposed to breathe through your mouth with the snorkel instead of your nose. I kept breathing with my nose, or stopped breathing with my mouth. I was struggling for the first 15 minutes. Slowly, I got used to it and started to enjoy the activity. There were a lot of fishes swimming around. There were corals as well, but due to the depth of the water, I couldn’t really figure out the real shape. Unfortunately we had to cut short our trip as the wave was too strong, and some of the people felt dizzy and started to throw up.

In the evening, we had a stroll on the beach, and then decided to walk over to Laguna Resort which is at the other side of the island. It took us about 20 minutes to reach the resort. The beach is more beautiful compared to ours. The place is much commercialized, but I prefer to have a quieter place just to relax. Anyway, Laguna is a good place to stay, provided you’re willing to fork out more money.