Beach baby beach

The plot, as expected, was predictable. It starts off well, and as with all stories, something goes wrong. Obstacles are surmounted, it’s looking up, and then things look black – but the heroes always win in the end.


So there we were. 1:30 AM, we’re shuffling off the bus, bleary eyed and not entirely convinced we’re in the right city. We were at a roundabout. A TV flickered forlornly to our left, with a few lost souls still sitting and slurping beer out of plastic mugs. Now what? We had kind of expected to get in around 4 or so in the morning, which would put us not too far off from the first ferry at 7:30. We gathered our optimism and trundled off down the street in search of Omar’s hostel, expecting as per internet reviews that someone would be there to take us in. The place offered a stark contrast to Singapore: no spotless streets, the smell of garbage faintly and occasionally more presciently in the air, more Malay and less English, and the buttoned-down look of closed shops and empty windows. I half expected a tumbleweed to blow by.

It was hard to eat our French toast. A kitten was desperately trying to climb into B.’s bag, which I suppose you could see as a good thing if your view towards kittens was generally positive, but if you were anti-kitten or at least skeptical as to the cleanliness of said kittens, you’d probably rather prefer them not take up residence in your baggage. And aside from them trying to eat or play with anything they could find, they were absolutely adorable, small and furry and kitteny, still not weaned, quite friendly and rather clean. There were several, perhaps as many as six, with at least two mothers involved.

The bus ride had been a relative breeze, though one is required to pass immigration twice – once for Singapore, once for Malaysia. As well informed passangers who had thoroughly researched our rout, we were astounded to find our bus stopping and all of the passangers bolting off the bus at almost a run, up the escalators and through the counters, filing neatly into the proper lines. Our baggage continued with the bus, and we were to rejoin it later, only to repeat the process for the Malaysian immigration – this time with our baggage. Between the two posts, the bus snaked through an interminable hamster-cage labyrinth of concrete flyovers, accompanied by the two or three hundred motorcycles in the far lane. Despite the preposterousness of it all, this was the first time I at least had done a real border crossing by land. Despite living in Switzerland almost spitting distance from the French border, I had only once, in all of my numerous crossings, I had only once ever seen the border manned and there I was simply waved through. And in Europe, Schengen is responsible for my lack of passport stamps.



Anyways, we found Omar’s, or rather, Omar found us as we were explanatorily climbing the stairs. He regretted to inform us the hostel was full, and that we should have called to tell him we were getting in this late. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was turning away four young foreign women with the vague hope of another hotel being open. Closed, closed, full, closed. The prognosis didn’t look good for us. The minutes had slunk by and it was past two before we found the sleeping doorkeeper of what looked like a lone open hotel. He wanted to call a friend—everyone is a friend—to see if the rooms listed on the placard by the door were still available, but somehow it turned out he happened to have a room for us. We trooped upstairs to find a surprisingly clean but altogether soulless room, a useable toilet (in the Turkish style, no offense to Turks), no bugs that we could find. I’m sure our desperation was clearly evident, and yet he charged us only a moderate amount (it came to 3 euro per person) and promised to wake us at 7 the next morning. I wondered heartily if the poor man spent every night asleep in a plastic chair, waiting for hapless travelers to stumble by.

The hammock calls. It’s pretty hard to resist a hammock, situated, as it is, on the beach, between two palms and commanding an unparalleled view of the beach, the island, and the coast. Ensconced with a book, a coke, and a peaceful disposition, it wasn’t hard to spend much of an evening there reading, listening to the waves lap on the shore, feeling the rhythmic thumping as the pack of children thumped repeatedly on the strings holding up my hammock as if completely and utterly oblivious to my presence; for my part, I couldn’t muster enough Malay to say hello, much less request them to cease and desist.

Crawling out into the predawn light, confused and sleep deprived, we managed to construct what we hoped would be breakfast from a 7-11 and made our way in the direction in which we hoped the pier lay. The town was soon left behind and we were in a residential area. It wasn’t looking good for a pier, but by chance we stumbled on someone who pointed us along the right way. We found what looked like a ticket counter and an excitable man who practically dragged us to the wharf, where the ferry was about to leave. We managed to get both tickets and seats, and soon we were happily snoozing away and shivering under the air conditioning.



Disembarking at Tioman, at the main village, we were first greeted with a tree full of … bats. Large ones, nesting in daylight in a tree. Personally I prefer my bats glued to the Bacardi bottles, but I don’t really object to them – which was good, as these were pretty huge. As we gather our collective enthusiasm and set off towards our first potential lodging—as the clouds darkened and the rain started, thick droplets falling steadily, dampening our hair and our spirits. Onward we trudged.



Tioman is kind of a touristy place, if I may generalize. Though we were staying in the main village, tourists inevitably ended up in one of the beachfront resorts offering small cottages, an own restaurant and often a dive shop. Most any resort offers all services and similar prices, with extra added for those with particular features or luxury. It all looked like an overgrown tiki bar, and we could be happy in any of the little cottage bungalows we saw. Alas, they were all full. Full, full, full, full. Most of them didn’t bother to check their books, just shook their heads and sent us on. So with little left of our original optimism we approached the last little resort on the street, not really sure what our plan B would be if they turned us down. Tioman has several beaches, each with several resorts, but getting between them costs almost as much as the ferry over, and we would lose precious time as the new ferry arrivals got the first crack at the other lodgings. But we lucked out. The last resort on the street had one room left, its most expensive, but with the exchange rate in our favor and a bit of looking desperate, we managed to convince the manager to give us the room and put an extra double mattress in it to sleep four.

I’m pretty convinced the fish was still staring at me. My rule: I don’t eat anything with eyes or anything which moves of its own volition. I make exceptions for Spain, Sushi, and traveling, and for whenever I otherwise feel like eating fish. Here, on this little island, fish and seafood is unavoidable, and I just pray heartily that whatever I ordered is only flavored with surf and not turf. If you get my drift. And while I sometimes enjoy a fish filet, I prefer it without the head, as if I don’t want to be reminded of my transgression. Every time we tried to order something in almost any restaurant, the waiter would suddenly turn and walk off without explanation, invariably to return with someone who spoke better English than they to explain the unpronounceable and unexplained dishes on the menu. I’m surprised they don’t just send the English speakers for obvious white people such as ourselves. Eventually we work our way far enough up or down the command tree in order to get more or less what we wanted, but by the end of it all we established that fried Bee Hoon was some kind of noodle, though the result had considerably more ingredients, and most of the vegetable dishes were a more or less tasteless soup/stew of bok choy, carrots and chili peppers. Still, topped off with pineapple or lime juice, it made for delectable dinners.

Our room was one half of a standalone bungalow, with a front porch and veranda overlooking the beach, not 10 meters from the sea. It was gorgeous. Between us and the sea were three hammocks, and we could sit on the porch and watch the snorkelers bobbing around like disembodied heads and tubes in the shallow shoals. Once we rented gear and went out ourselves, we were treated to an underwater paradise of reefs and tropical fish. The reef seemed itself to be a mixture of alien landscape and organic creature; while the individual components of the reef were indeed living, much was immobile but interspersed with patches of waving tentacles or flaps that seemed to open and close as if with the rhythm of breathing. Schools of hundreds of finger-long silver fish would descend upon us, split and school around us. We saw all manner of tropical fish, the largest with the circumference of a human head or larger, a deep blue with darker spots, lurking in the depths. Sea urchins perched on many corners and in inopportune spots, just waiting for a stupid kid in a bikini to come too close. I was astounded how straight the spikes were, immobile, and when looking down at the urchin there were several white circles radially arranged around a glowing blue center. It had eyes and a mouth. Swimming over one reef I scared up a stingray, which unburied itself and fluttered away, a steely grey with light blue stops.



Once, while I was just swimming around in the shallow water, I picked up a friend. Sadly, not Dory, but close enough. The fish, the size of my fish, was following me. It’s possible the continued exposure to heat and sunshine has completely robbed me of my mental faculties, but I suspect the fish was not, in fact, a hallucination. I took a step backwards. The little fish, striped black and white, swam closer. I took another step back. The fish matched me. After a few cautious steps, continuously pursued by my fishy friend, I tried swimming a few strokes to see if the fish would follow – and indeed it did! But my fishy friend had to abandon me as I headed for shore, but to be honest – it kinda freaked me out after a minute, as I started seriously considering if these kind of fish might bite. But anyways, I found Nemo, so I guess it's alright.