Random! (part one)

Being an avid scuba diver like the rest of my family, it’s only natural for me to constantly yearn for my family’s annual holiday trip to Pulau Redang, a local island approximately 45 minutes off the coast of Terengganu which is renowned for its white sandy beaches along with its phenomenal underwater flora and fauna.

It has been more than a decade since this peculiar family tradition has been ongoing and for 4 years, I had the privilege to feed the need of mine to venture into the deep to witness first hand God’s marvelous underwater ecosystem at work.

As a matter of fact, we’ve been staying in the same old resort for the past few years to the extent that our family has managed to get to know the people working there because surprisingly, they’ve never seen a family that has returned to the island so regularly despite all the economic chaos going on. Not to imply that my family is loaded or anything, it’s just that every year we would make it an effort to save up so that we can splurge on a greatly needed holiday like this. This impersonal relationship between the staff of the resort and us also means that we get special room rates for our stay and not to mention, priority treatment! Oh it’s so good living the good life.

During the length of our stay, our itinerary is as simple as it can possibly get. This is how my family’s specially catered itinerary for 5 days and 4 nights stay looks like: Wake up – breakfast - scuba diving – back to the resort – lunch - scuba diving – back to the resort – dinner - leisure time - sleep. And that routine repeats throughout the 4 days of our trip (short of time to dive on the 5^th day).

But here’s the fun part; even though we’re dead tired by lunch, we have the tendency to still force ourselves to continue on with the next dive because to us, scuba diving is our ecstasy; without it we’d suffer and start catching seizures. Just kidding; but seriously, it literally is that addictive. We’d then just drop dead after dinner and wake up in the morning to start the whole process all over again. But what’s strange is this; we enjoy the hectic schedule although we’re on a self-proclaimed ‘holiday’.

But like all good things, they have to come to an end. On one atrocious day three years ago, my flaming passion and the ability to scuba dive has been put to a halt and came to an abrupt end, literally almost taking along my life with it.

And this is what happened…