Tioman Island is completely different to Perhentian Islands. It’s a lot bigger and even has mountains more than 1000m high. When I arrived at the jetty in Mersing (that’s the town where ferries leave for Tioman), I was shocked by the huge number of people waiting there to get to the island. As a big surprise, the number of Westerners was very small. Someone told me that many locals and also people from Singapore go to Tioman for the weekend. Then I realized that it was Friday afternoon, a fact I haven’t paid any attention to before. I was really worried to arrive on the island and not finding any accommodation, all other Westerners had a reservation. Tioman is 40km off the shore and there is no boat returning in the evening.
I decided to go to the northernmost beach Salang, which is supposed to be most backpacker-friendly. At the end it was no problem finding a nice accommodation because the island is very big and has many different beaches with guest houses and resorts but seeing such a large number of people at the jetty made me feel a bit nervous.
As I hadn’t eaten anything during the whole trip from Kuantan to Tioman, I was very hungry on Friday evening. I went to a restaurant and ordered two different dishes. As I figured out later in the night the second of these two dishes was bad and I had to empty my whole stomach. Actually I didn’t like the food while eating but it wasn’t so bad at that moment that I felt like having to stop eating. On Saturday I felt really sick as you can imagine and I had to postpone the diving trip I already registered for on Friday afternoon. In the evening I still felt so weak that I told the dive master that I had to postpone it even until Monday. Yesterday I finally went diving but it wasn’t comparable to the underwater paradise of Perhentian Islands. It was still very nice but I didn’t see as much spectacular sea life.
I spent most of the time here relaxing, reading and swimming. The beaches are not as clean as on the Perhentians and there are a lot of rocks underwater, which make swimming more of a challenge. Life on this island is very relaxed (like on every island) and it isn’t very crowded. Actually it was hard to find any people to hang out with. I met some Westerners, mostly Scandinavians who were attracted by the duty-free alcohol, but I didn’t really have much in common with them so preferred to stay on my own. The locals and Singaporeans are normally travelling in large groups and families, so it’s hard to get in touch with them as a foreign traveller.
Yes, you won’t believe it, but a paradise can also be boring. That’s why I leave tomorrow. I will spend some few days in Melaka and maybe also in Kuala Lumpur before taking a flight to the Malaysian part of Borneo on Sunday.
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