Coral Redang Beach Resort

With Tasha's arrival on Sunday, June 15th from Oregon, little time was wasted before we flew (Mon., 9:30 a.m.) to Kuala Terengganu prior to a 1 1/2 hour ferry ride to Redang Island so that Tasha, Doug and Tracy could take a 4-day Padi Dive Course. (Of course Grandpa and Grandma were along to watch the kids.) The dive course turned out to exceed expectations, with an excellent teacher (pictured with his class of 3!), a good textbook, a bunch of videos and only one session in the swimming pool before being taught in the waters close-by. Some "deep water dives" as part of the course afforded excellent opportunities to see tropical fish, a large ray and a shark (sighted by Tasha).

We flew to Terengganu on a Firefly prop-jet, a subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines. No problems on the flight, however, the airline never notified us that they had changed the departure time from 7:00 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Fortunately, we were "saved" by our travel agent who notified us late in the game about the switch. The later departure (& arrival) caused us to miss the morning ferry and have to kill several hours in Terengganu before the 3:00 p.m. ferry. But we arrived in good shape after being transferred to a smaller boat (pictured) and then wading to shore! While Doug, Tracy and Tasha were occupied with morning and afternoon dive training, Nancy and I put the pool to great use -- a source of great entertainment for all three kids. One morning Reeve and I signed-up for a snorkeling trip to Turtle Bay (lots of tropical fish but no turtles sighted by either of us while snorkeling), with Nancy and Gabi going on the following day.
The whole experience was greatly enhanced by a full moon during the latter part of the week. It was literally awesome to see the red-orange moon rise out of the South China Sea a couple nights in a row. The first night of our "astronomical observation" all of us had walked quite a ways down the beach for a delicious dinner at another resort. On the way back Doug and Tasha made made many attempts to capture a digital image of the spectacular scene on Doug's camera. Unfortunately, those images are not yet on our computer! (In the picture below, who knows whether Reeve is contemplating the beauty of the scene!)- rw