With inter-district now allowed, we set off for a 2.5 hr drive to Penyabong, just north of Mersing on the east coast of Johor. In addition to enjoying the sea breeze and the company of our friend Hanis and her family, Lawrence wanted to get some video using his drone and I wanted to test out the video capabilities of my new camera. We have explored this area many times before, and you can find links to these blogs by clicking here. We arrived at lunchtime, so met up with our friends at the Sukalayar Resort and headed up the coast to Tanjung Penyabong for lunch. It is rumoured that this area is being developed as the ferry port for boats to Tioman Island, as the coastline by the ferry terminal at Mersing is silting up. But who knows? Anyway, at least visitors now have easier dining options here and walking to the end of the pier is always a pleasure.
This is the view from Sukalayar Resort. Being able to walk straight out of your room and onto the beach is quite liberating. But no matter how hard I try, we always seem to have a fair bit of the beach in our room by the end of the stay!
For the afternoon, we drove a few minutes to Teluk Gorek to go coastering, as our good friend Hanis calls it. I found it a bit tricky climbing over the boulders around the coast so decided to stay put and play with my new camera instead. By the time my companions joined be again, the tide had come quite a way in but I still preferred to wade knee high in the sea than try and climb over the rocks.
I did get some interests shots of crabs, but you may need a magnifying glass to see these tiny creatures. When you look at the beach below, you can see that it is two-toned. The darker area is actually masses of tiny sand balls made by sand bubbler crabs. Their body width is less than 1 cm and they dart back into their burrows as soon as they sense your footsteps. But of you stand still they will reappear. There’s an excellent description of these creatures on this link.
Look carefully and you will sea a single crab in the centre of this photo.
Next I spotted a slightly larger burrow hole with two crabs heading inside. So I waited and waited for them to reappear. I originally thought they were fighting over the burrow but I now think they might have been up to no good as the larger crab is likely to be a male and the smaller crab (to its left) is a female!
This is one of the many pleasures of exploring a coast line because there really is life everywhere if you have the patience to look for it.
Because March is the end of the northeast monsoon season, the seas here on the east coast of Malaysia were still a bit rough and murky brown on this piece of the coastline. So we left Teluk Gorek and drove to the Hanis’s Secret Cove. Got a few scratches on the car in the process, but it was a lovely spot.
I continued to explore life on the sands, while Lawrence shot some film with his drone, and our friends frollicked in the warm sea. The rough seas bring in a lot of debris and I found a long piece of bamboo covered in tiny barnacles. And among the manmade rubbish, I noticed that barnacles had taken up residence on a plastic flipflop.
It was about 6 pm by now and time to head back along the coast and clean up before driving to the seafood restaurants along the coast road just north of Mersing.
The next day we set off early to do some filming at our most favourite stretch of beach near Pulau Mawar. For our next documentary ‘In the footsteps of Isabella Bird’, we needed some video of mangroves as these were sights that Isabella really did not like at all! Getting video of the mangroves at Pulau Mawar seems to be frought with problems as, back in October 2017, this is where Lawrence’s first drone simply fell out of the sky and into the sea, lost forever. So, this time Lawrence was taking extra care but he lost contact with his drone and that was the last we heard of it! And, at exactly the same place as before. One could use the local logic which would say it was the ghosts of the area, or one could speculate that the Sultan’s military base around the corner was jamming wifi signals, but we will never know.
We all scrambled around the coastline in the vain hope of finding the drone. It had some perfect footage from the day before and now that was lost too. Not a good day on the scale of things. So I took a few photos of the mangroves, we grabed some breakfast at Tanjung Penyabong (coconut pancakes and curry sauce) and then we drove home.
And here is Lawrence’s vlog of our first day at Penyabong. The vlog on losing his drone will come later.
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