A bunch of us foreigners (8 Germans, 2 Canadians and 1 French) decided to work it up in Malayisa over the Singapore Labour Day long weekend. It's an island 32 km off the coast of Malaysia, and was featured in the 1958 movie 'South Pacific'. TIME picked Tioman Island as one of the world's most beautiful islands in 1970. In addition, it's 12,383 hectares of rainforest are protected by the Malaysian government. Thanks Wikipedia!
Normally people catch busses either from Singapore (expensive) or from Johor Bahru (the Malaysian town on the Malaysian-Singapore border) to the Malaysian town of Mersing, then catch a 2 hour ferry ride to Tioman Island. We decided to be a little bit different, in part because we're lazy and the buses were full. We ended up catching cabs from Johor Bahru to Mersing, which is a little over two hours. Now you may think that we got killed with charges by doing this, but we managed to organiz 2 cabs to Mersing for 260RM (about C$85). Divided by the 7 who initially went together, it was a bargain.
We stayed at Salang based on the recommendations of others who had gone before us; it was a great choice. The first day we chose hostels, and almost got screwed over because it's difficult finding places to stay for 10 people, then lounged on the beach, ate some excellent food and just relaxed. Sunday, our second day, was also spend lounging on the beach and messing around in the ocean. I say 'messing around' because I can't actually swim, so this consisted of my floating in the ocean, trying to tread water and swimming about 30 meters before exhaustion set in. One of my goals is to now learn how to swim! Monday we took a boat ride around the island, where we got to scuba dive a couple times, look at some pretty beaches, and went up to this nice, but small, waterfall. I'll throw up links at the end of the entry to my Tioman pics, the most of which are us at this waterfall. I think it's obvious to say that we drank beer at night at the few bars there are on Tioman, talked with all the friend's and got very little sleep. Tuesday we left around 2p.m., so we had breakfast, packed, chilled on the beach one last time, then popped on the ferry for our adventurous ride home.
A word about the ferry...
We started our journey on crystal clear waters, but after about an hour a storm started to brew. Initially the clouds came in and the sea got a bit rough, but we were okay. Sittin on the top meant that we were basically out in the open with a tarp over us. Needless to say, we got soaked. The weather continually got worse to the point where we couldn't see in front of us and the engines were working like made to propel us on. We finally made it into Mersing, soaking wet, where we found some 'private cabs' to take us back to Johor Bahru. This was an interesting choice, because we passed a bunch of police on our way to J.B., one of which saw my pretty white face and pointed to all his buddies. About 3 minutes after that we were stopped at the side of the road and our cabbie had to pay the officer 50MR as a bribe; apparently he did not have a cab license. The cabbie asked us if we'd pay the 50 Ringgit, but Krisin and I had nothing of that. It's not our fault we found illegal cabs! At any rate, we made it back to J.B., had some eats in their modern supermall, then walked accross the river-boarder to Singapore.
All in all, a great weekend where we got to bond with some of the new arrivals. I'll be travelling with a few of them at the end of the Month to Kuala Lumpur, my last long weekend in Singapore :(
Look out for a post about that
Here are links to my pictures, and to the videos I took of our ferry ride home:
Tioman Island Pictures: http://ualberta.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2042544&l=4ac93&id=120402234
Ferry Ride Home 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjZZpJcrGsk
Ferry Ride Home 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVAChgd-kmo
Enjoy!
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