Where Land meets the Sea.

With every frig­gin Kuch­ing­nite I know head­ing for a beach resort in the vicin­ity of the city this hol­i­day / post-exams sea­son, how could I not?

I’ve always won­dered why would we humans find solace in that strip of sand where land and water meet, even when it is a 45-minute drive away. You see, we humans are a rather pecu­liar species.

I bet if we were fish, there would be sand resorts built on that same strip where we would flock to flip around in the sand. =\ And of course, we would call our­selves humans despite hav­ing gills and fins and what­not.. and those dumb two-legged crea­tures wan­der­ing around on land would be called.. fish. Blah.

Humans being fish aside, a few form 5 class­mates and I went for a three-day-two-night stay at the Per­mai Rain­for­est Resort in Damai. Orig­i­nally meant to be a full-scale Form 5 reunion, the girls couldn’t make it and so they all bailed out, leav­ing a bunch of us guys.

The hor­mone imbal­ance didn’t spoil the fun tough, for it became an all boys trip (save for Zhi Xian and his girl­friend) armed with boys toys — four lap­tops, PSPs, games and what­not. Armed also with five whole kilos of mar­i­nated chicken wings for BBQ, beef pat­ties, hot­dogs, snacks and instant noo­dles, 10 of us set for Damai in two cars.

We checked into Cabin 4, a single-storey two-room cabin with a capac­ity of six. It wasn’t long before all of us were on our way to the pool for a dip before we headed to the sea. We came back all wet and soggy only to find out that appar­ently, the Resort had this pol­icy of charg­ing 10 bucks per head to those who brought in out­side food for BBQ if you don’t opt to get your chicken wings from the Resort cafeteria.

So we had to pay up RM100 extra just for that. We spent 15 bucks a per­son for our own BBQ food and now we have to pay 10 bucks extra per per­son for not get­ting food from the Resort. Awesome.

Not want­ing to fork out a 100 bucks extra, Ah Bin demanded that the man­ager call us back, who 5 min­utes later came knock­ing on our cabin door. We tried to rea­son with him and threw every­thing onto the table but he didn’t budge with the extra charge, adding, “I know that there are more than six of you stay­ing in this cabin, the extra four of you would have to be charged RM20 per head and will have to leave immediately”

Dou­ble whammy.

We froze and decided to buy time to extend the manager’s ulti­ma­tum for the extra of us to leave to 30 min­utes later. We almost decided to call the whole trip off when weigh­ing our options. We headed for the check-in counter and dis­cussed our options with the man­ager, this time, rationally.

In the end, we returned to the cabin with an upgrade to a 9-person capac­ity two-storey cabin and 50 bucks cut off from the BBQ food fee.

That night, we had a bloody good BBQ din­ner despite being a tad bit more expen­sive hav­ing to pay an extra of 5 bucks each.

The break­fast could be bet­ter though. But because of the com­pli­ca­tions regard­ing the room arrange­ments, we exploited the extra break­fast coupons and had extra help­ings of omelets. =P

And so we spent much of the time there down at the beach where the waves were humongous-ly fun. The waves were so huge they lit­er­ally sweep you off your feet.

We took pre­cau­tions though and didn’t go far out. And no, there were no sharks. =D

The weather through­out our three-day stay was per­fect — cloudy. Which meant zero sun burns. =)

Bay­watch Per­mai Version.

We had din­ner the sec­ond day at Buntal’s Lim Hock Ann Seafood Restau­rant. Nothing’s bet­ter than seri­ously good seafood fresh from the sea.

The food was so good, the bunch of us must’ve looked like cave­men when we wiped freshly served dishes sparkling clean in 5 min­utes tops.

After a buf­fet break­fast the morn­ing of the last day, we took another group photo cour­tesy of a waiter. It might not appear to you so but we were actu­ally look­ing up from the bal­cony a floor below where the waiter took this photo. =D

By 12pm, we checked out and headed back to Kuch­ing in Dennis’s car at 90km/h windows-down.

It was def­i­nitely a fun three-day stay despite the scare on the first day. Per­haps that’s what that make trips to the beach fun.

We humans, after all are a pecu­liar species.