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Yeah, We Were Weird Kids ...
cappy lannoire's life in photographs
By: Caprigrrl Lannoire
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| Thursday, 22-Dec-2005 00:00 |
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Cherating Holiday
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Fairuz and a bucketful of baby turtles about to be released
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a tubful of 2 day-old baby green sea turtles
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Dad building sandcastles! LOL
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Khaled and Fairuz vs. the Ocean =P
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Mimi, the Turtle sanctuary's "mascot"
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Yay, I'm back from my holiday! =D I had an unexpectedly great time at Cherating, and of course, dilligently took photos of the whole adventure. =P
We set off around 12AM on the 19th, and after about a 3-4 hour drive, we arrived at The Legend Hotel, Cherating. We booked two adjoining rooms.
The good thing about this hotel is that their room service food actually tastes GREAT. They have some of the best vanilla milkshakes I've tasted in a while, and their portions are huge for low prices. =D I love their Oriental Chicken Chop, and am craving it right now, heheh! 
They also had one of those 'old skool' type of arcades, where you're supposed to insert ¥100 tokens, and press those round, puffy-looking plastic buttons and move around the tiny joystick to play -- they even had those Street Fighter games I hadn't seen since I was like, 11 years old. =D
The bad? Their "Internet Zone" is only one dinky little computer in a glass room, which acted up everytime I opened Firefox. Which was sucky.
But the best thing was, it was right on the waters' edge so we went down to the beach everytime we could.
On the 20th, my Dad, my kid brother, my maid and I went out (leaving Mum and my kid sis in the hotel room, because sis was cranky and sleepy), and after driving around (going across the Pahang-Terengganu border like, twice) and having lunch, we made a rather surprising and delighting discovery.
My Dad, wanting to see exactly what the hype about Club Med was about, drove into a small, branching dirt road which a blue sign marked, 'Club Med' was pointing at.
The Club itself was closed until January (so there was nothing to see there), but nearby was this Sea Turtle Conservation Sanctuary, where they hatched baby sea turtles and released them to the ocean. It was also a sea turtle study facility and museum, and thus opened to the public. But it looked pretty deserted at its entrance, and I originally thought it was closed/not open to the public/a secret government facility in disguise. But Dad marched straight in.
We walked around the museum, and my kid bro and I actually got to feed their captive sea turtle swimming around in a seawater pool, whose name was 'Mimi' (although they have no idea if it's female or male -- that can only be determined when the turtle is like, 20 years old, and the one they had was merely 3). All the while we were whisperingly making these insensitive jokes and threats about wanting to make turtle soup and combs and cradles out of the shell ("Oh, c'mon, it's not as if they're endangered or anything"; "Yup, we eat her and be wanted in seventeen different countries!"), but fortunately no one heard us. =P
When we were leaving, the caretaker informed us that they were scheduled to release a few baby turtles at 10pm that night. We thought it would be great to come again and bring Mum and my kid sis.
So that night, after a lovely dinner (omg, I don't think I've ever craved seafood so much before), we got to the turtle sanctuary at 9.30pm and took photos while we waited for 10pm.
The night was very dark and moonless, and hardly lit at all by light, so we all saw the stars quite clearly.
The caretaker then took us down to the beach, with a bucketful of 15 tiny, utterly cute, 2 day-old baby green sea-turtles. =D He gave each of us one baby turtle (mine is named 'Cloud'. Don't ask! =P) and drew a line in the sand where we should set them down. After the intial countdown, we released them, and after that it was a race to the ocean's edge. I shouted a series of encouragements in Japanese, much to the confuzzlement of many. Heheh! =D
A few baby turtles accidentally went the wrong way, and a few were less enthusiastic than their brothers/sisters to swim to the ocean. It took about half an hour for all of them to get to the ocean -- one baby in particular took five minutes alone to 'escort' to the ocean by torchlight.
After that we all headed home. I would've preferred it of they would at least give a short briefing before/after the release of the turtles about conservation efforts (the eco-nut Ravenclaw in me was raving, "So it's just a silly tourist attraction -- there's nothing educational about it!"), but another family brought a crowd of little, below-10 kids and they could have got awfully cranky if kept waiting there any longer (it was already about 11pm).
So I'm glad we discovered the turtle sanctuary, because the whole thing wasn't planned at all. =D Made our holiday a lot more eventful and memorable and unique than I thought it would be.
Twas a good holiday. =D
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