Survivor Island

      I know that I mentioned in another post that I felt like I was on a film set - well I was really staying on a film set! The TV series Survivors, which has many versions worldwide now, was orginally filmed on Pulau Tiga, a really beautiful island off the coast towards Brunei. The "resort" is what is left of the set and the accomodation is where the film crew stayed. It takes about 20 minutes by boat and it is much bigger than I first thought - apparently it takes 7-8 hours to walk around. It is the only island that was never logged so consequently it is virgin forest with huge trees and dense jungle. It has several areas of mud volcanoes and is surrounded by white sandy beaches. There are many monkeys, monitor lizards, snakes and much to our horror rats too which we were sharing our bathroom with!I went with Anne, who is a colleague, and we had a great time getting lost on a trail in the jungle, snorkelling and lying around in hammocks! The surprising thing to us was that there were just a couple of Malaysian families and no orang putihs apart from us. This is another place that I will be visiting again with visitors.
    My other news is that I successfully completed and passed my Open Water Scuba Diver Certificate. It was an intense 4 day course and my brain was overloaded and I can see why people might take longer to do it, however it was great fun. My fellow students were Jack from Wuhan and Leo from Sheffield and unfortunately Emily wasn't able to complete it as she had a cold and couldn't "equalise". Our instructor was Jason , a very experienced Sabahan diver, who was very patient with us all. I certainly could not be trusted in an emergency or in giving accurate compass readings but I'm going to dive as much as I can and hopefully will improve in the future. The temperature of the water was 31 degrees and that makes it very pleasant.

 I'm leaving KK on Friday morning and spending a day in Kuala Lumpur before I head home to the cold!