Visit Beautiful Terengganu 2017: Pulau Kapas, Pulau Perhentian and Pulau Redang in a Year

Yesterday marks the 90th day of unemployment since I came back from Japan. Or if you want to include Japan trip, the 100th day. So I am celebrating this by writing a recap of 2017. I can only write down bits and pieces from my memory though!

Last year was full of events for me. From day trip to Pulau Kapas (Kapas Island), spontaneous trip to Pulau Perhentian (Perhentian Island), graduation trip to Pulau Redang (Redang Island), dinosaurs' retreat to Tadom Hill Resort, road trip up north along the west coast of Malaysia all the way to Penang, and finally another graduation trip to Japan.

In this post, I'll tell our stories in Terengganu. It was our final year and we just grabbed every opportunity we had to visit the islands and beaches because for the record, Terengganu is a state blessed with scenic coastlines and beautiful islands! :)

Pulau Kapas is a small island about half an hour's boat ride from Marang, Terengganu. It's beautiful, and the best part about it is that it's less crowded with tourists. We snorkeled in the morning and wanted to hike in the afternoon, but we were unprepared for it - wearing slippers and not having mosquito repellent with us, so the plan was called off even though we had braved the scorching hot weather to the foothill. Seriously, the unrelenting sun made that 15-minute distance felt like forever. But you know what, it's also because of the sun that the sea was stunningly beautiful!

Clear, blue sky and the clear, blue sea! :)

Gem Island seen from Kapas Island

Shimmering waters :)

See what my friends did to hide from the heat :p One wearing a scarf and the other wearing my shorts on her head hahaha.

Me trying to get an Instagram-worthy shot :p

So now, the spontaneous trip to Pulau Perhentian. It was the end of our O&G posting, we finished a few days earlier and had a few days off. I remember we planned for an island trip that weekend but eventually SY and I decided not to join for some reasons I can't recall. I was on the 宅女 mode already thinking of just staying back to relax, and out of the blue SY asked if I'd like to join QY and Nic to Pulau Perhentian. Seriously... Please understand that it actually-usually-normally takes me some time to adapt to sudden changes -.- I was still thinking about it and the next moment, SY told me that they had booked a room. Oh well... Might as well join them even though it felt like I ffk-ed the other side to go for this. But really, trust me, though a tiny mini little bit reluctant to go in the beginning, that trip gave me the best snorkeling experience I ever had! We went on weekdays and there weren't many people on the island. We rented a mini boat just enough to take the four of us. And if I may say so, it felt as if we booked the sea when we arrived at the snorkeling spots! There wasn't anyone else, except for a few other visitors who came later. Plunge into the sea and it's a whole new world. And at that moment, it felt like there was just me, the sea, the fishes and the warm sunlight. I can never, ever forget that feeling. Enchanting is not even enough to describe it. This time round, we managed to hike (still wearing slippers)! And my goodness... That view - I never knew Malaysia could have such a view!

L.O.V.E. from us!

The amazing view from the hill on Pulau Perhentian Kecil :)

Starry, starry night

And then to Pulau Redang! This time I went with Amanda, Karen, KC, Jack and Jon. We stayed at Pelangi Resort. It belonged to Jack's landlord and we got a discount because they said that Jack was "aunty's favourite" hahaha. Honestly, the snorkeling experience wasn't that great for me because there were too many people floating around and we frequently bumped into each other. One of us didn't feel well and skipped the snorkeling session scheduled that second afternoon, and the rest of us thought we might as well ponteng too. But thinking it would be a waste to just stay in, we snorkeled on our own in shallow waters. And we found that just quietly floating on the sea is actually a bliss. We got a few shades darker as a result but that's fine because we enjoyed that moment. This one friend M, who can be quite annoying on land but not so annoying underwater (you can guess why), took Amanda and I on a tour to see "a school of fish". It was a grand sight to see thousands of them swirling in a circle. M dived into the school of fish, and I honestly never seen him so graceful before haha! One of the highlights of the trip, was that I finally got to shoot the galactic core of the milky way! M told me that it could be seen with naked eyes on the island. I didn't believe him at first, until when I set my eyes on a cluster of stars that seemed to take the shape of the core, I wanted to scream my lungs out! I had always wanted to shoot that but I never expected that I would do it on this trip! It was really like a dream come true :)

Isn't it beautiful? :) 

Us kids who ponteng (played truant)! 

Failed jump shot :p 

Thought we might as well tried to pose 

"Aunty's favourite" :p

A dream come true! :))

I'll definitely miss Terengganu in all its beauty!

Hello 2018!

Hello (*echoes* hellowh hellowh hellowh)

Gosh what's with the echo, so creepy. Oh what? This place has been abandoned for more than a year? My goodness, you'd better be kidding me.

Alright enough drama haha! Yes I have abandoned this blog for almost two years! What had I been doing in 2017?! Ahh yes final year with final exam, good excuse.

I just remembered I started having this blog because it was an assignment by a lecturer. I forgot what she said exactly to encourage us to write, but if you had read my first post you'd probably wonder what nonsense was that. That's evidence haha! My coursemate and I, not knowing what to write, wrote to each other, that was what the nonsense was about! :p She called herself the Supreme Highness of 23rd century (what gibberish talk is that) and so I said I was the pioneer of 21st century (nonsense begets nonsense).

Okay, so why am I here now. I am here now because I regret not recording in words what happened in 2017 (which was supposed to be an exciting year) and I just want to tell myself it's too late to apologize.

Some time ago I promised a throwback post but oops... Lesson of the day, don't make promises you can't keep. Maybe I'll dedicate a post to summarize 2017. Maybe, no promises! Haha!

I'm having an important examination in 7 weeks' time. Such a stressful situation. And I miss home so much :(

So I was feeling rather down these few days because the only weekend that I thought of going back, will be occupied by classes which are not supposed to be then and there :( That's actually a long weekend from Friday to Sunday, but our lecturer wanted to shift some classes from that following week earlier to Saturday and Sunday, so we're left with only one day. I'm not blaming anyone, it's just that I can't help feeling sad about it.

Last night, before going to bed, I was scrolling through my gallery, watching some videos I'd taken of my friends at their funny moments. I was smiling and laughing all the way hahaha. I must say that I really have lively friends who do amusing stuff. At the end of it, I was feeling fine and I realized just how much difference my friends made. Days are brighter here with them around! It's only one more year here and these are the moments that I'm going to miss some day later. So hmm, I just wanna say that I'm grateful for my friends here.

But uh, I still cannot get over the fact that I won't be able to go back that weekend.

Adventure to the North on the East Coast!

Honestly speaking, there isn't much entertainment here in Terengganu. BUT! There is quite a handful of beautiful places if you'd look out for them :p So I'm going to share about my trip to Bukit Keluang with my Zimbabwe friends!

My hometown friend/classmate, Amanda and I have been here for more than a year, and we have been asking our friends to come Terengganu even before we came. After more than a year of waiting, we finally had visitors! Whoo-hoo!

So our Zimbabwe friends, Francis and Trymoe arrived before 10pm, and because of the landslide that happened a day before, the bus I took from KL had to make a detour and that caused me to reach Terengganu so much later than expected and I was only able to meet them after 11pm. I suggested that we could go hiking up Bukit Keluang but told them that they had to wake up as early as 3am to catch the sunrise. I thought they wouldn't want to, but maybe they loved nature enough too to be willing to sacrifice some of their sleep. Haha!

I had never been to this place, and my classmates' description of the route was sooo vague we really had to depend on using a navigator. "Start climbing when you see a flight of stairs." Goodness. How to find this flight of stairs was more of what I was asking about -.- Never mind. So it was a midnight driving without the windows down but with two navigating systems up! Waze lead us onto a route on which we hardly saw any cars around. For me, it was a pleasant drive! Hehe.

So what happened was, Waze lead us to this MARA campus as our destination for "Bukit Keluang". We asked the security guard for directions but didn't quite understand the directions given and so we decided to ask for directions at Bukit Keluang Resort which we passed by earlier on. We went to the reception and saw this guy who had fallen asleep, lying on some chairs. We didn't really want to disturb him but we had no choice because we couldn't see a single soul around. So this poor guy got all startled by us and woke up with red eyes looking as though he had conjunctivitis hahaha. He told us to go straight and turn right at a junction, then we would see a "wakaf", from where we could start hiking up Bukit Keluang. I didn't know what a "wakaf" was, not to mention my African friends here, so I thought I'd just look out for something that was human-made haha.

We came to a place where we spotted a shelter on a small piece of empty land that opens out by the road. "Maybe that's the human-made thing that guy mentioned," I thought. We stopped our car in front of the shelter and came down to have a look around and see if we could find "a flight of stairs". It was very dark. I looked up, and whoaaaa, the sky was clear and I could see stars spread across the sky, sparkling! That was really beautiful! If we had not come for the sunrise, I could just sit there and stare at them until daylight haha!

Shining our way with our phone torches, we walked a few steps and found a road that winds down and behind the shelter, so we got back into the car and drove down that road. Well apparently the car lights were so much brighter that as we drove down, we realized that the road was just alongside waters on our left! That really scared me a bit. We saw a flight of stairs ahead the road and that got me excited, "We found the place!" I thought. There was no place for parking so I had to make a three-point-turn, a careful one so that we wouldn't fall into the water, and drove back to the shelter to park our car. We walked to the stairs and started climbing, thrilled. The stairs ended after a few steps, and you know where? Back up to the empty land where the shelter is. Haha! Whaaaat! We just made a marry-go-round... That felt stupid hahaha.

Sigh, the wrong place, Oh wait, we saw a path further straight up from the shelter, we could try that, we said. So we walked down that path with our torches. We were walking alongside waters on our right (this path is in the opposite direction of the road behind the shelter just now), and on our left was a hill which we were quite sure was Bukit Keluang, we just had to find the stairs to climb up. We couldn't see any stairs, but came to a part of the hill where there was a big, dark cave carved into it. "Err... I think we have to go," Francis said. Haha okay! It seemed like the path wasn't right anyway.

So we went back to the car and drove back. Back at the junction, we saw some human souls in a car! I flashed at them and asked if they knew how to get to Bukit Keluang, they said they were heading there too so I asked if we could just follow them. Hahaha well finally! Thank God!

The hike up Bukit Keluang didn't take quite a long time. But because we lost some time earlier on and I always had this "mountain sickness" sort of issue, the sun began to rise as we were halfway up.

Halfway, the sky started to light up.

Francis reached the top before us, and called us saying that the view was amazing and hurried us. So I pushed on! After all, we came all the way for this!

 Tranquility :)

Here we are!

Hello from us! :D

Hello from the other side :p

I'm thankful for the safe trip there, especially when I thought of how quiet the road we took was and how dark the place we wrongly went to had been that there could be some bad guys hiding somewhere waiting to pounce on anyone who comes by. And I thank God for the fine weather! The sky was so blue so pretty! I would have stayed longer if not for my friends who probably were already hungry xD

Fourth Month of Fourth Year, Fourth Posting

Looking back my blog posts this year, I regret for not writing anything when I was on my end-of-year 3 break. There were two highlights of my holidays that time:

1. Taiwan trip with my friends
2. SWEEP (Social Work Exposure and Embracement Programme) by FES

Why didn't I write anythinggg T.T For SWEEP alright I can understand myself because right after SWEEP was the beginning of year 4 and my first posting was superrrrr hectic I didn't have enough sleep most of the time. But why not for my Taiwan trip?! LAZY, HUHHH. What a waste of the 2000 over photos my camera so beautifully captured! Terrible! Okay I'm gonna find time one of these days and write a throwback post about it!

By the way, I'll take this opportunity to update a little bit about my "life circumstance" right now. Well apparently I'm now into my fourth posting, the end of second week of it, to be precise. All the postings we had gone through since year 4 began were major postings, even now - Psychiatry. This is so different from previous postings goshh. When you talk to the patients, it's almost totally dependent on your knowledge and judgement because many of the patients are either going to tell you their hallucinations (which they don't recognize as false perceptions, of course, in the unstable state) as part of their lives, or they may make up a little bit of stories in denial of what really happened. I'll honestly say that I had difficulty for the past 2 weeks getting reliable history from patients, and because of that I was rather in low spirits especially this week. It's my turn to present a case for the next clinical teaching in 2 days' time, and I have a case write-up due in one weeks' time, and I haven't got a single proper case!

Whyyy

Why do I have to be so far away that it's so difficult for me to attend my friends' convocations :( And I have a friend who's going to be the valedictorian. Looks like I'm going to miss out 2 convocations in a week :(