In Search of White Sand
After a few days of Pangkor Island I really wasn’t expecting much from Tioman. But Pulau Tioman, on the other side of Malaysia, was a world apart from that other place. I only went there to kill a few days while waiting for my flight to India (for which I finally have a visa). I stepped off the ferry at ABC, and it was completely silent. One other guy got off with me and zoomed off somewhere on his moped. Walking down the jetty I was a little nervous about walking around, in the dark on what seemed a deserted island. I saw a sign saying that if a muslim is caught drinking alcohol on the island they are liable to “3 years imprisonment, RM5000 (€1000) fine or a flogging of no more that 6 strokes”. Happy that I was born a Christian I proceeded to try and find a bed for the night.
There’s no road on that part of the island, only a little path between the beach and the jungle. Every few hundred feet there is a small restaurant or a few chalets people can stay in. With no one approaching me I eventually had to ask a guy how I could get to a hostel. He just said follow the path and I should find something. And sure enough I did. This being a couples place I had the dorm to myself. Smelled funnier than the last place on Pangkor but after flushing the toilet a few times and drowning the place in perfume it was just fine.
With not much else to do I spent my first full day on the island looking for a scuba diving course to take. I was soon signed up for a PADI course with Rob, a Dutch guy who had just arrived. I was sure because I had once been a competitive swimmer that it would be no trouble to learn how to breathe underwater. But oh hell was it hard! Rob took to it immediately. I was secretly hoping the instructor, Emi, would tell me about a special class for people who were slow learners. On our first trip to the ocean she had to hold on to me to keep me down, seems I’m a natual floater. Rob swam about doing loop-the-loops while I tried to stop my head exploding. The pressure is incredible down there. A few times Emi let me swim alone, but I was doing a perfect impression of a helium balloon. As I was floating up I could see her looking beside her to check I was still around. A few seconds later she’d think to look up and there I was, panicked as always, wildly flailing my arms around. She just casually reached up, grabbed me and on we went. The worst thing about those incidents was that it made me laugh, which can be terribly painful for an untrained diver. I quickly learned how to clear water from my lungs.
When I finally thought to look around me the place was unreal. I think I should add ‘under the sea’ to the list of places I’ve visited so far, because it really is like a whole other planet. It’s like a scene from Finding Nemo. All the fish go about their daily lives, the shoals moving together look like traffic, there’s some young ones chasing each other (could have been old ones trying to eat each other), and there’s even real Nemos! These clown fish are an underwater photographers’ nightmare. A few of them told me how they fly to far out places and dive really deep to get photos of unusual fish, but all anyone ever wants to see are photos of Nemo. That film could have been based on a real life story. They really do live in the type of coral they did in the movie, and if anyone goes near, the biggest one comes out with an angry fish face while the little ones stay behind. They never seem to leave their home, which made them easy to find when I was finally let loose with a camera.
By the end of the course I had finally figured out how to keep myself under the water. I had a nasty hic-cupping incident but lived to write a blog about it. I was even convinced to sign up for the advanced course. For that I had to do a deep dive to a ship wreck 100 foot underwater, a night dive in the dark (which was cool!), a navigational course, photography course and a buoyancy one.
Life on the boat was great; we went out in the morning, spent about an hour underwater, then we anchored at some white sandy beach and alternated between eating noodles and jumping off the side of the boat foor a while, and then did a second dive before heading home. On one such trip we were attacked by a trigger fish (a fish that bites). All the way through our course we were taught that our instruments were never to be used as weapons. But once those fish came upon us, our dive-master, Anna, used everything she had to fend them off.
A few days on the island turned into two weeks. Island life suited me; on the days we weren’t diving our biggest stresses were deciding where to eat and where to swim. Luckily I had Anna and Rob to share the burden of those decisions with.
Tags: Malaysia, scuba diving, Tioman
cybersusst
Hey Claire….sounds like a crazy world under water….do post some snaps that you managed to take!