Resort Name: Paya Beach Spa & Dive Resort
Name: Grace Chua
Mobile: 8113 1830
Email: dive@payabeach.com
Date: 29/4/06 to 1/5/06 (3 days 2 nights)
Price: $420 (non-peak rate)
Includes: Equipment, course materials, application forms, breakfast and accomodation
Excludes: Lunch and dinner, leisure dives
Dive covered: 5 dives. Compulsory - Multilevel diving, deep diving, underwater navigation diving. Choose 2 out of 3 - Wreck Diving, Night Diving, Drift Diving.
Journey: Coach departs from opposite far east plaza early in the morning. About 2.5hours bus ride to Mersing Jetty. Ferry departs around 12pm from Mersing Jetty. 2hours ferry to Paya Beach jetty. Of course if jam/peak season can expect jams/longer waiting hours.
My Dive details: We did the 3 compulsory dives plus night and wreck diving. Was recommended by friends to do night diving to get the experience so that in future if you want to do night diving, at least you have done it before. For wreck diving we just went to see a wreck but realised we already see wrecks during other dives (e.g. deep diving). So i think it may be a better choice to do drift diving as there are more techniques to learn.
Accomodation details: If there are vacancies, ask for the huts (4 to a room with 1 queen size bed and a single bed with a lower pulled-out bed). When we went, huts were full so we had to take the lodge (4 to a room with two double-decker beds). Both the huts and lodge have attached bathrooms hot water and air conditioned. But the lodge doesn't provide a kettle for boiling water. The huts are definitely more spacious and comfortable.
Meals details: The resort has a restaurant. The food is good, variety wide but the price is expensive. One plate of fried rice is about RM 8 and one plate of beef horfun is RM12. One small pizza (4-slices) is RM16 and one chicken chop maybe RM22.
Outside the resort are 2 other zi-cha places (all walkable distances). You can get cheaper food from these places which are nice. For the one just outside the resort, you can try the maggie goreng (it is really maggie mee). There's another one nearer to the jetty which is supposedly better for the zi-cha dishes. It also has very good satay and stingray. Eric and his friend fav is the Ramly burger selling at the zi-cha place near the jetty. It's RM3, so buy 2 still cheaper than the fried rice at the resort.
They have two mama shops there. The water and snacks are also slightly more expensive than Singapore's NTUC. But still bearable since you don't spend a lot on them anyway. One 1.5 ltr bottle of water is RM3.
There's a beach pub at the opposite end from the jetty. Calsburg selling at RM3.50, hot milo is nice. Quite a cosy place.
Others: Although we booked with Grace, we were eventually taught by another dive instructor called Funny who is a Japanese. She is also not bad but Grace is better because her English is better.
If you want to do additional leisure dives in-between, I think they charge $100-120 for 2 dives. Ask for this dive master called Emi (pronounced as Amy).