14th year anniversary

 Shu and I had been needing an island getaway for sometime now. The school holidays were never a good time for us to go anywhere because there are people everywhere. We like less people and less hectic coz we just wanna play in the sea and enjoy the beach. As soon as the school holidays were over, we packed up our kids and headed out.

The kids enjoy open air boats now as opposed to being on closed up ferries and our drive makes the boat ride quicker to the island by about an hour. We've been doing this quite a bit lately. Also, all 3 of our kids are now able to go snorkeling so our island trips are a whole lot funner now. We spent most of our time in the water fish watching. 

Our trip this time around was fun because the beach was right at our doorstep. The corals were close and we spotted a lot of anemones with clownfish in them. There were other coral reef fish too. We even spotted a couple of baby black tip coral reef sharks. We are all super burnt now 😂 The sunblock lotion couldn't save us no matter how much we use.

I got a lot of bug bites. For some reason, sandflies really like me. There were also tiny, green caterpillars that would drop down from this huge tree near the restaurant area. I was screaming so much coz that mofo fell onto my arm and I was getting sick 🤢 Not from the bugs but I think it was something I ate........

Anywho, our next door neighbour was a Japanese lady. She was travelling alone. Next to her chalet was a chinese couple. Shu said that guy was super excited to get into the water that he was up all night waiting for the right time to go snorkeling. It was so funny. On the other side was an old chinese lady and her daughter. They were headed to Penang after the island.

It was fun. We ended up helping the Japanese lady named Miho get her bus tickets sorted out. Shu thinks she may have gotten her plan mixed up so instead of heading to the Besut Jetty, she ended up back at Merang Jetty. She was trying to get to the airport in Kota Bharu coz she was gonna catch a flight to Kota Kinabalu the next day.

It was so funny. She can hardly speak English and her accent made it very difficult for people to understand. We communicated mostly using Google Translate. We took her out to lunch coz we were all starving and the bus ticketing counter wasn't gonna open till about 2:30pm-ish so we had time. She ended up taking my phone number and I took hers in case she ever was back here and needed help with anything. We got her a bus ticket for 4pm. Hopefully, she made it to the airport tonight.

I think we had so much fun this time around. Ali Imran didn't wanna leave but we had to coz the weekend was coming and people were starting to come in. It would have been too crowded for our liking. We're already planning our next island trip in this next month ^_^ 

Happy 13th Year Together ❤️

 It's been a while and we had been sticking to routines a little too much coz Yusuf is 10 which means he has a lot more school activities to do. That also means that we as parents have to take school a little more seriously than how we've been doing all this while. Also, we try to avoid crowd as much as we can which is almost impossible considering the endless amount of holidays this country has in a year.

Anywho, Shu decided to do what we usually do which is last minute change in plans and we ended up on the island where we'd usually celebrate our anniversary at.

There were some things that we had to consider coz our kids are bigger now. We can't really fit into a one bedroom hotel room anymore. We also needed to make sure Ali Imran and Safiyya were able to get used to snorkeling before heading to the marine park straight away. Good thing they got the hang of it in no time at all.

Going along the lines of avoiding crowd and people, we've discovered that taking a boat from a jetty a bit further up from our house cuts the travel time by like an hour. And the kids enjoy speed boat rides too these days which is a plus point.

We had a blast eventhough it was a shorter trip than usual. We explored almost every place there was along the beach we could for food and hangout. The kids had fun 😊

Happy 13 years to us being together, baby! 

Islander

Shu's original plan was to go away on our anniversary but since weather was an issue,the hotel contacted him to have the trip postponed. His next best shot was our usual local island retreat. It was fun ^_^

The wisdom behind not going overseas was definitely the kids going a bit nuts :p