REVIEW: Tenggol Coral Beach Resort

If you guys read my post about my scuba diving experience, you probably know about my stay at Tenggol Island.

Tenggol Island is situated off the coast of Terengganu. To get there, you need to take a 45-minute boat from the Dungun jetty. There are only two resorts in Tenggol - we stayed at Tenggol Coral Beach Resort.

Source: Tenggol Coral Beach Resort Facebook page

We took the full board diving package inclusive of:

• 3 nights accommodation
• Boat transfers
• Meals: 3x breakfast, 3x lunch, 3x dinner
• Open water diving course
• Diving equipment
• Unlimited coffee & tea at the diving center

We also upgraded our stay to the beach front view because.. why not?

Total: RM 1,988 (weekend, non-peak season) 

Beach view from chalet

Alamak ter-enter frame 

Bungalow chalet next to ours

Current rates

Overall Rating: 4.5/5.0

Pros:

• Comfortable and clean
• Chalet not far from diving centre
• Food was good. There's all-day toast if you ever get hungry after diving
• Diving equipment in good condition
• Beautiful diving sites (we went to Tanjung Api, Turtle Point)
• Clean beach
• Swings!
• FOC diving equipment for 12 months!
• Free t-shirt

Cons:

• WATER TASTE HORRIBLE!
• No wifi, no phone service (except Celcom & RedOne. Tapi tu pun macam biskut. Sekejap ada sekejap tak ada)
• Water heater installed in chalet, but no hot water
• Packages quite pricey
• Rats, rats everywhere
• HAZE! (not the resort's fault though it kinda affected our mood) #terimakasihindonesia

So before you come here, get ready a big bottle of mineral water. Seriously the water doesn't taste filtered at all. I'm often OK with weird tasting water but THIS! I can't swallow at all. I think the resort tried to tone down the salty taste by adding LOADS of flavoured water but then it ended up tasting super sweet + super salty. The filtered water at the diving center was still drinkable to me (not to Yasmin though). She read reviews about the water problem (so it's not us yang mengada ok?!) and so we stopped at a petrol station in Dungun to buy a 6L water. It lasted throughout our stay but that prolly was because I didn't drink much plus I refilled my bottle at the centre. So if you are a heavy H2O drinker, you probably need to bring more.

Also before you come to Tenggol, try to ask the resort to reserve you a chalet away from the big trees. Ours was right below I-don't-know-what-tree-was-it-but-you-can-see-from-the-pictures-above and each time the wind blows, big seeds came falling on the zinc roof. The first time it happened gave a huge scare to us.

The culprit

The culprit's sidekick

The culprit's sidekick's sidekicks

But overall, I must say this is a diving heaven for all divers. Loads of nudibranch for you nudibranch lovers! Nothing much to do in the island so if you're not into diving or snorkeling, you'd probably bore yourself to death (did I tell you there's no wifi and phone service here?).

Swing!

For me, I will definitely come here again! Still haven't cross out whale sharks sighting from my bucket list yet!

Whale Shark Sighting #jealous
Source: Tenggol Coral Beach Resort Facebook page 

Must remember to buy a Celcom/RedOne simcard before I come! Hahaha...

EXTRA! On our last night, a huge storm came to visit. I was bored so decided to take a video. Kinda cool sighting tbh.

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Tenggol Island: Diving Heaven

After all those years of doing Discover Divings, I can proudly say I'm finally a certified PADI open water diver!

Tak, ni bukan terjun dalam sawah padi ye... Read HERE if you don't know what I'm talking about...

My family (except Mum) enjoys activities like this. But because most of our trips were short, we couldn't get the chance to attend the scuba classes. Dad did his in KK. I aaaalmost did mine on my trip to Maldives last year with a bunch of colleagues but had to cancel it and do Discover instead because we had to fit in other activities as well.

You see, to be a certified open water diver, you have to have at least 3 days of your vacation time solely dedicated to the diving classes, both morning and afternoon. There's a 4-day option as well but not sure how they fit in though.

So, dingdongdingdong my sister and I finally took our open water diving course at Pulau Tenggol, Terengganu. At first we wanted to go in April, then postponed to May then June then finally September a few weeks after passing my professional exam.

Tenggol Island. Taken from my camera phone.

Frankly speaking, I've never heard of that place. I've heard of many under-commercialized islands in the east coast like Pulau Sibu and Pulau Rawa but I definitely haven't heard of Pulau Tenggol before.

Until Yasmin mentioned it.

"Hey, do you wanna go get the scuba license?" 

"HELL YEAH! Where?" 

"I don't know. Sipadan?" 

"Chi Sin! There're pirates there!" 

"So where do you wanna go?" 

"I don't know, where do you wanna go?" 

"Let's go Tenggol" 

"Tenggol where?" 

... krik krik...

Something along that line lah.

PSA: don't do your OWD in Sipadan. Sipadan is waaay too beautiful. You do there, other sites will look mediocre. Dive at Sipadan once you've seen all, trust me.

So anyway, here we are in Tenggol Island, off coast Terengganu. To get here, you have to take a 45-minute boat ride from Dungun jetty and tadaaa! resort right in yo face yo. We stayed at Tenggol Coral Beach Resort for 3D2N.

We arrived about 11-ish on Saturday morning. After getting our keys and moved our bags in our chalet, we went to the diving centre to meet our instructor.

Beach view from our room. Relaxing, isn't it?

Instructor's name is Andy. We chatted for a while before agreeing on a time to meet that afternoon for our first class.

Andy's a funny guy which is awesome 'coz he makes the classes a little less mundane. We had 3 classroom courses, 1 shallow water course, and 3 open water dives. There were 5 modules we had to learn and each of them we practiced near the beach. I enjoyed all the water classes -- not much of the classroom ones though coz we had to watch some videos for an hour or so.

Preach it, gurl!

*clears throat* So anyway...

The second day, the haze managed to catch up! Grr...

Jebubu. Eh.. Jerebu

We finally completed all courses and passed our final exam with diving flying colours! Andy discouraged us to bring our sports cameras to our dives for safety reasons and offered to take his underwater camera instead. So yeah, still waiting for the pictures Andy took of us on our final dive. Will update here once he sends them to me!

While waiting, let me feed you with some pictures we took onshore ait??

Haze. No sun. No shadow to see the awesome wordings on the sand :(

With our instructor

*Update: Andy sent the pictures to the email I gave him but then I realized I gave him the wrong address. BAHAHAHA PODAAAHHH AIDAAAAA MMG KENA HEMPUK DENGAN REGULATOR SEKETUL

Oh well, you guys have to wait longer lah then. AMPUNNN

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