Tawau/Semporna - Day 3 (Pom Pom Island Resort)
Waking up in a hot room is worse than waking up in a cold room! There's a 5 minute black out around 6.25am and the AC automatically turns off. I have no other option but to force myself to wake up and turn on the AC since the room is getting warm and stuffy. It's still too early for breakfast so I went back to sleep until 8am. Breakfast starts from 7am to 9am. There's 2 types of breakfast for you to choose from. I chose American breakfast comes with sausages, nuggets, ham, coleslaw, mashed potatoes and fried egg. As usual my partner prefers Asian breakfast and he chose fried noodles. There's 4 types of Asian breakfast for you to choose from - fried noodles, kueh teow, mee hoon soup or chicken porridge.
Sad to say that my breakfast doesn't taste good at all. I only had fried egg, coleslaw and mashed potatoes. Whereas for my partner's fried noodles, it's a bit hard for my liking. Since the front desk is located at the restaurant, we requested them to check on our room AC. While waiting for the maintenance team to check out the problem, we just relax in the shade and enjoy the sea breeze.
That's when I saw two guys, one poking his stick through the sand while the other guy holding an empty bucket. I was curious to find out what they're doing and decided to approach them. Seems that they are searching for turtle eggs! One of the guy is from the TRACC (The Tropical Research and Conservation Centre), a marine conservation organization located on Pom Pom Island. Their daily activity is to look for turtle eggs by walking around the island. Yesterday itself they found 102 turtle eggs. They offered us to follow them for turtle egg hunting and how can we reject such a great opportunity! Feeling excited, we followed them around the island but sadly we found none. They showed us their TRACC turtle hatchery with the aim to help save sea turtles from extinction. It's estimated that only 1 in 1,000 hatchlings will survive to adulthood. It's truly an honor to meet them.
We left the TRACC conservation centre and started to explore Pom Pom island by foot. It's a small island and it takes about 1 hour to walk around the entire island. There's few other resorts but the beach is very quiet. We walked back to the front desk to check on our room AC status and the resort staff told us that it needs servicing. They are currently preparing another chalet for us. Since it's still too early for lunch, we headed back to our room and pack our things. Lunch starts from 12pm to 2pm and when we reached the restaurant, we were directed by the resort staff to a different seats. Our usual dining table has been reserved for the new guests that's checking in today. I have no idea why they made such arrangement because there's plenty of seats available in the restaurant. In fact, on that day itself there's only 6 guests in the resort including us!
We had ABC chicken soup, chicken curry, mixed seafood with tofu, fried fish with mayonnaise, omelette, stir fried vegetables and a plate of local fruits for lunch. ABC chicken soup taste bland and their fried fish is tough and dry. I guess this is their style of cooking fried fish because the day before they served the same fried fish but with different style. After lunch, there's still no update on our room. We're getting a little impatient and walked over to the front desk again. It was only then they gave us the new room key. They didn't even offer to help us with our luggage. Luckily the new room is not too far away from the previous room. We're expecting a better condition room but sadly it's not getting any better.
We had our tea break at 4pm and it's the same menu that we had yesterday which is the fried donuts. After tea break, my partner went for snorkeling. I was hoping to capture a good sunset photo but to no avail as there's cloud blocking the sun. We had our dinner around 7pm and this is by far the worst dinner that we had. Their French beans are undercooked. Not to mention the fish and chicken are dry. Pastry on the other hand is too flaky and taste buttery. I prefer a savoury puff pastry but it turned out to be sweet pastry.
After our dinner we decided to hang around the jetty and while talking to my partner about shooting star we actually saw one bright orange fireball tumbling down. An old superstition suggests that if you wish upon a shooting star, your wish will be granted but in reality you have no more than a few seconds to make a wish...
Comments
Post a Comment