Getting there is half the fun

Pulau Tioman - Day 3

We spent the weekend at a guest house called Moktar's Place. The best part was it was right beside the beach and we didn't have to share with other people. It didn't have airconditioning, which is sometimes a problem with a few people, but we were already used to just a fan. I guess it was fairly nice, at least I didn't mind at all, you just had to ignore all of the ants and cockroaches and the occasional lizard and using the bathroom floor as your sink. At least it didn't have one of the squat toilets found in every other bathroom in Malaysia!



There were these monitor lizards EVERYWHERE there. You couldn't walk anywhere without seeing one! The Malay kids would throw rocks at them though, along with the chickens. They looked harmless enough so I considered picking one up a few times but good thing I didn't because I later found out that they have a locking bite and release a poison that prevents your wound from healing for a veeery long time.


We both rented masks and spent the day snorkeling in the shallow waters in front of the guest house. The beaches all around the island have coral reefs lining them just a few meters from shore. This made swimming a little difficult but snorkeling superb. It was quite amazing to float around watching all the action going on down there. I floated face down for a couple of hours swimming along with schools of fish, watching them clean themselves on the coral. The reefs are just amazing, so many colours, shapes and action; I could have done it for hours but we had a boat to catch and my back was extremely burnt (should have remembered the sun screen).

After lying around in a hammock on the beach for an hour to dry off we had to catch out boat at 1:30. The hammock was oh so nice, I could have stayed there forever!


We were super lucky that we left from one of the first places of departure because the other southern beaches with the resorts had oodles of holiday traffic backlogged and waiting for a seat on our 20 seat boat.


Arriving in Mersing the tiny town was just buzzing with people trying to catch rides back to Johor Bahru and Singapore. We even had one guy "offer" us a ride in his car for 160RM - No Way! We didn't have to walk far though as some touts reeled us in with their offer of a 20RM bus ticket all the way to Singapore, we couldn't resist. When the bus pulled up it had only about 10 free seats and there were around 30 of us waiting. We eneded up waiting for almost an hour to sort the matter out but as always my good friend luck was there and I was the very LAST person on the bus!!

One of the lessons I learnt on this trip was to NEVER travel on a holiday in Asia. There are just so many people and they all decide to go someplace. This created a HUGE traffic jam at the border. I think we were parked outside of this one building for over an hour. And when we were actually moving the sea of people walking down the highway was still moving faster than us. Eventually our bus emptied and we got out to walk the rest of the way to the border. After another hour we cleared both of the checkpoints only to find that our bus had left us there! Good thing it wasn't our first time in the city, that would have been dreadful. So we waiting in the giant lineups for the transit buses and finally made it home, and before midnight too!

Posted by Evan at 6:08 AM