LondonBoy77's Qype profile

Me and Big Dave decided ‘doing a sunset’ was a must. It just seems to be the thing to do here – watch day turn to night and celebrate it. But we didn’t want to hit an over-trodden cliché like Café Del Mar, where sophisticated clubbers dressed in white linen applaud with hippy pretence as the sun hoists over the horizon. Leave it out. Not my cup of tea. I can’t imagine clapping a sunset as it sinks below the dog track sign in Walthamstow, and I’m not about to start doing it here now.

So, we drove across to the West End of the island – the side which geography dictates that sunsets like. To keep away from San Antonio’s endless happy hours and sports bars, we found ourselves hobbling across rocks to reach an outside shack in the distance, just as the sun started showing signs of deflating for the night.

Kumharas Bar is what I imagine when I hear one of those Ibiza Chill Out albums. Day beds, embarrassingly good looking waiting staff and a bamboo hut style bar waiting to throw Corona down our necks. We duly settled down to a DJ caressing tunes as the ensuing end of day carved him into an angelic silhouette glow in front of the horizon’s bruising. We sat in relative silence as that orangey blob hazed its way behind him through lazy cloud wisps, until the rocks out at sea blocked all the fairy light twinkles on the ocean’s ruffles, and foretold a warm dusk.

As we walked away, two Coronas to the wind, one of the waitresses gave me a tube of lip balm. I don’t know why.

With its broad pavements and shiny restaurants adorned with signs sponsored by Coca Cola, there’s nothing rustic or especially Spanish about Figueretas. But there’s good food to be had…Andalucian Gazpacho (at ‘ALL Restaurant’ on the beach front) is my pick of the bunch, with it’s fresh twang of the ripest tomatoes packed with a vitamin left hook…although Big Dave assured me the grilled fish is as close to Omega 3 heaven as you can get without burgling a Holland and Barrett warehouse.

As hi-octane it gets is a lazy-assed, flouncey volleyball game played by people who are quite possible still asleep, which makes the beach a good chill out option for getting away from the parched bustle of Ibiza town and notching up some decent, undisturbed flopping time in the powdery sand. Although for some, ‘flopping time’ is a bit too literal for comfort…

3.08pm. I’m sitting on the beach, minding everyone’s business, engaged in a slumbering bout of people watching - when something catches the corner of my eye. Please don’t do it. Please don’t do it. Please. Don’t. Do. It. Oh blimey, oh for the love of sweet baby…oh no, oh cripes, she’s done it. The lady must be in her seventies. It’s a sight that could be equated to being jabbed in the eyeballs with grissini. When she un-pops the fastener on that bra, out tumble two disparately proportioned piles of wrinkled leathery bosom matter; like a couple of those slinky things that go down the stairs, but made of elderly flesh - unraveling in rice puddingy lumps, down towards her knees.

On Figueretas beach, there are nudes. Antique nudes.

I’m sure for them and their over-burdened underwear, it’s delightfully liberating - to feel the wind aerating the innards and outards of their nethers - but for me it’s perturbing enough to put me off my ice cream. What you don’t want on a beach holiday is to be worried that your Solero is about to reappear all over the place. Poor Big Dave had to go up to the room to have a lay down, it affected him so badly. He said it’s his ‘Nam. (Or did he say it’s his Nan?)

If you can overt your eyes from Leather World, and think of anything but England, you’ll be just fine, squinting a relaxed eye on that yacht over there, or watching the gentle waves claw at the beach’s edge with a hissy drawl as gulls swoop and swoon in friendly gusts in a fresh blue backdrop of glorious summer sky. Breathe deeply, this is the life…

Lido Apartmentos by night looks like the entrance to a Soviet hospital block, amid the relatively desolate, restaurant-dominated chill-out zone of Figueretas on the southeast edge of Ibiza - a calm, if not tired and lumbering respite from the chavesty that is San Antonio et al.

We were greeted by a sweaty, defeated-looking receptionist - a bloke with a face baked into fault line cracks of public service despair. Some of the Spanish in this resort aren’t so fond of the English. This one wasn’t so fond of me.
‘Spencer Austin?’ he asked with suspicion, as though I was the only one to
check-in since the fall of the wall. At that moment, the sound of a packet of
Haribo being dropped down to the service bin of the lonely vending machine
echoed around a dark, characterless reception – and at exactly that point my
spirit plundered below expectation. ‘This looks a right S*hole’, I thought.

But despite the corridors looking like a prison hulk ship, with rows and rows of identical doors (each of which doubtlessly harboring similar stories within - of alcoholic ruin and chemical mash-up bound in a fog of fart), the self-catering apartment we discovered was surprisingly airy, bright and comfortable. If you particularly enjoy the 1990s style of pastel-shaded zig-zag print on your furniture and watercolour paintings of Victorian ladies perpetually either getting on or off a boat, then this is the number for you. With a balcony big enough for table and chairs and a small, practical kitchen with a fridge and freezer section, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t while away the late afternoon with a home made vodka- limon while pointing out German tourists in the twilight below donning hilariously tight Speedo swimming trunks regardless of the prowess or paltry state of their
package.

The pool is a typical affair, with balconies looming over it, strewn with beach
towels emblazoned with hilarious comic motifs (such as ‘Official Female Body
Inspector’) and containing spaced-out voyeurs using their ledge to edge
themselves with a paranoid grimace back into the real world after another epic night on the Ibizan tiles.

And it’s these very disco monsters that you’ll need to beware of at hotels around here. All is well until around 5am; when the clubbers, off their noodle on ecstasy pipes, coke tablets and acid cakes, return to continue their nocturnal knockings.

They make noise. And not just doors shutting and exuberant, flirty
goodnights…I’m talking guttural, gurning chatter of the volume and intensity I’d only ever imagined possible at a Women’s Institute sherry tasting event.

Overall, Lido is a perfectly fine, typical Ibiza hotel. No cockroaches, nothing
stolen and clean enough to eat off. Just expect to be awake early (or late,
depending on your orientation).

You arrive on the Perhentian Islands on a speedboat. Yeah baby. Ploughing through crystalline waters with foamy froth lobbing up into your eyeballs with a saline sting. Oh, that’s after taking the winding jungle train up through mainland Malaysia, and via a couple of nights in the Taman Negara National Park being chased by ants big enough to feature in a McGuiver episode.

Within minutes of arriving at Senja Bay Resort, bags have been lugged by someone else up to my hill-perched shack of a cabin that overlooks Coral Bay like the view from a Greek God’s cloud overseeing man. I perched on a chair, joined by a lizard that clearly hates me (it’s the look in it’s eyes), and we contemplate a beer. “A beer?” I think to myself. “Yes, a beer,” I think back to myself; concluding this would appropriately cleanse the rigours of a day’s travel and confirm that ‘beach holiday is go’.

The mid-afternoon haze wibbles long distances into white sandy oases; people bop volleyballs and laze like big basking white seals, and the smell of nasi goreng (fried rice) wafts comfortably into the realms of temptation. This is paradise. In a relatively untouched, anti-Samui sort of way.

But beer isn’t legal here. Unless…

…unless you traipse through the jungle behind the beach, right to the other side of the island. My feet oblige my tongue’s desire and traipse therewith. Suddenly, the glare of the sun on the sand and the lapping of waves are replaced by air that clings with damp, and a suspicious rustling; that of monitor lizards the size of Godzillas eyeing me snidely from bushes. Insects grab and thorns insist, and mud…but after 20 minutes, you’re out, on the other side of the small island.

Long Beach. Longer than the other one. As you’d expect. More food, more hotels, hammocks. “You want to go diving, man?” He asks, as Bob Marley underscores his Malaysian dreadlocks. “Oh, you want a beer?”…

It’s called ‘The Pitstop‘, and the beer is ‘Chang’. And what happened next can only be explained by the jungle. We (and by ‘we’ I mean the other newbies and sun-dodgers that had accumulated like an alcoholic school underneath the shade of Pitstop’s embrace), stood and watched a storm come and go; a fearsome collapse of clouds along with a tiny twister tickling the edges of the cove like a mosquito over my mojito. The sun gave up and deepened, and the sky soured and darkened, and I realised the jungle was still between me and my bed.

And there are no lights in the jungle. It’s the jungle.

I woke up the next morning in mud, strewn. Stil in the jungle. Totally jungled up. On a path just a few yards into the jungle between beaches, I must have given up the ghost; succumbed to the glut of Chang and the darkness, and decided to sit where I stood. My shoes had gone – no doubt stolen by a cheeky monkey or a fashion conscious monitor lizard.

Sweating and swearing and shoeless…I made it back to Coral Bay, and with a sharp intake of breathe, the reveal of the beach from the jungle eliminates all hangover and whispers a warm hello.

Maybe I learnt my lesson, that jungles are not to be drunk in (you’re bound to lose your shoes). But over the next week I also discovered that Malaysia’s Perhentian Islands are an adventure and a pleasure. I advise you to log directly into Air Asia, book the next flight to Kuala Lumpur and never look back.

But take spare shoes.

They are an absolute disgrace. As a landlord, the payments were always late, they had expensive repair work done that I now discover wasn’t completed (£700 to repair heating without telling me it was never repaired), the tennant hated them and they take ages to reply, if they ever do.

Please do not use this company, they are an utter rip off.