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June 15 – 29, 2009
As we neared the end of our ten months' traipse around Southeast Asia, and perhaps more significantly, the end of two months of frequently challenging travel in southern China, we decided we needed a couple of weeks somewhere 'nice,' with GOOD FOOD, somewhere QUIET, somewhere PEACEFUL, somewhere warm and sunny, and somewhere where there were no particular sights we needed to see or things we needed to do. Somewhere we could just kick back and enjoy. Somewhere where we could rest up not only from our 'grand tour,' but also for our 'return home,' wherever that may be.
It didn't take us long to decide that paradisaical Tioman Island, the place where we spent the first three weeks of our trip, was that 'somewhere.' And once we'd made that decision, we beat a hasty retreat from China. We hopped over the border from Nanning, where the city was 'same same' as all the other Chinese cities we'd been in – busy, bold, loud and very Westernized – and where the food was again gruesome, after a few great meals in Guilin and Yangshuo, to relative sanity, and distinctly better food, of Vietnam and Hanoi.
We only stayed in Hanoi a couple of days, most of which we spent eating. From Hanoi we took our only flight of the entire ten months, to Bangkok. It was just a couple of hours. We arrived in Bangkok early enough to catch an overnight train down to Penang, and so again spent less than 24 hours in Thailand.
Although the Thai train was nowhere near as new as the trains we took in China (tourist trains?), it was a damn sight more comfortable. Not, I should add, in terms of the ride itself – Chinese trains are stunningly smooth, and very quiet (electric). But definitely in terms of creature comforts – there were only two berths where in China there'd been three, none with enough headroom to sit up (trains are for sleeping).
And it was so QUIET! - we actually heard people whispering on the train! We heard no one hawking and spitting, no one shouting down a cell phone in the middle of the night. No one mega-sneezing. And there was absolutely NO SMOKING! Not even in the space between the cars. The washrooms were clean, and there was actually toilet paper – how novel! And a porter who came round and made up the beds with crisp clean sheets that he took out of sealed plastic bags. And night lights.
But when we got to Butterworth in Malaysia we found that the trains south to Kuala Lumpur were fully booked for the next two nights. So we spent a couple of days and nights on Penang, doing something completely uncharacteristic for us – shopping. We had fun loading up on clothes, gifts and souvenirs. And we went to the Red Garden Night Market and gorged on more good food.We did a marathon stint from Penang by half-hour ferry to Butterworth, by overnight train to K.L., and by six bus through Johor Bahru to Mersing, where we arrived at 4:15, just in time to catch the 4:30 boat to Tioman, which didn't leave until 5, but got us there by 7. From the jetty at Air Batang, one of the half-dozen or so villages on Tioman, we walked to Mr. Tony's 'South Pacific Restaurant and Chalets,' wondering if by chance the bungalow we'd stayed in – the one right on the beach – might be available. It was.
Mr. Tony was glad to see us - “I have your bungalow! You can have. How long you stay?” Mrs. Tony's greeting was more taciturn. Where he is outgoing and ebullient, she is silent and impassive – impossible to read. She seldom talks, and I don't think we have ever seen her smile. But she makes a tasty vegetable omelette and some of the best Malaysian ice tea susus – hot black tea with sweetened condensed milk over ice – on Tioman.
We settled in. We rented snorkels and masks for the full two weeks so we could go snorkeling any time. We went to the book exchange and loaded up on new books. And then we kicked back.
Our days on Tioman went like this: wake up around 7:30 or 8 (old habits die hard) and sit on our little deck drinking coffee (Doug) and tea (me) and looking out at the beach, watching the boats coming and going from the jetty, watching schools of little fish jump. We imagine what might be chasing them.
We watch one of Mr. Tony's relatives – too thin to be a brother, but maybe a brother-in-law – as he makes a new breakwater in front of our bungalow. He mixes cement in an old wheelbarrow and begins the retaining wall. He works slowly, pausing frequently to assess his progress. Then he goes down to the beach and collects the biggest rocks he can carry. He staggers back to his wall and drops them on the 'land' side. He rubs his back. It's heavy work.But he is building his wall perilously close to the high-tide line. It will likely end up, along with its predecessors, in broken chunks on the beach (some of which he is incorporating into his new wall).
We go to Mr. Tony's restaurant for breakfast, and are served by the unsmiling Mrs. Tony. A stream of tourists come by, fresh off the first boat of the day. Mr. Tony beckons them in: “You want room? I have room! One double bed, one single. Very cheap.” Since we've been gone he's built two new chalets on the beach. They have air-conditioning and hot water showers. They're 150 Ringgit ($45) a night, and they're usually full. Mr. Tony tells us that he recovered his costs of building them – and five times more – in the first three months.
We go back to our fan-cooled cold water bungalow (35 Ringgits, or $10 a night) and sit on the deck, reading and waiting for our breakfasts to digest. Then it's time for our first swim of the day. We don our masks and snorkels and head out to the beach right in front of our chalet. There's a nice patch of sand that makes it easier to get in and out of the water, and the coral reefs along our bit of shoreline, while not as spectacular as in some other spots, support lots of friendly fish.Doug snorkels while I try to coax my body into a higher level of fitness by churning through the water in what I am sure is an ungainly and certainly not particularly effective, in terms of forward movement, front crawl. On the first day, I managed to do only 40 singular strokes at one go before I was fagged. (I know I should count only every other stroke, which would mean I've completed only 20 'real' strokes. But I count every one, like a mantra, to keep me going. It's a motivation thing.) I did four sets of forty and almost collapsed as I staggered out of the water.
Amazingly, by the 9th day, I was up to 200 singular strokes in one go, and managed a total of almost a thousand. Without staggering. I feel positively bouyant. I convince myself that I will keep it up when I get 'home'... .
It's generally too hot in the afternoon to do anything other than sit on the deck, or in the shade of one of the palm trees out front, and read, or play cards. Often there's a welcome afternoon breeze. We have a bird friend – we don't know what kin of bird he is. He looks like an emaciated robin, but slightly more colourful. He has a hurt foot, or maybe leg, so he limps a little. We call him 'Hoppy.' Hoppy visits us at least once a day, sometimes more often. He sits in the grass or on the picnic table, eying us – sizing us up? Sometimes he talks to us, but he soon becomes bored and flits up into one of the coconut palms in front of the bungalow.
We also have two monitor lizard friends who crawl down the path beside our bungalow every day. They're about three feet long, from snout to tail. They're scaly and ungainly, and look positively prehistoric. But they're cute in their own kind of way. Sometimes they hide in the shade of the flowers in the garden beside the carp pond. More often they head for Mr. Tony's greens patch, their long blue tongues flickering fast and furious as they search for succulent bugs.Hoppy and his mate hate the lizards and harass them mercilessly, squawking and screeching and dive-bombing them repeatedly. The monitors seem more or less oblivious to the birds – even when the birds go so far as to land on the lizards' backs or heads. The lizards remind me of Mrs. Tony – utterly impassive and humourless.
Sometimes, in the late afternoon, when the water's again calm and the tide is low – perfect conditions for a good snorkel, we saunter down to Nazri beach. To get there we walk along the 'main drag,' a cement pathway that runs the length of the beach. From one end of Air Batang to the other is around a kilometer. There are no cars in Air Batang – no proper roads, just this one cement sidewalk. The path is lined with coconut palms, hibiscus hedges and other exotic flowering foliage the names of which we don't know.
There are several small colourful cement bridges across little streams. At one in particular we always stop and look up into the tree that overhangs both river and bridge. A couple pythons hang out, coiled in high branches of the tree, almost, but not quite, invisible. Sometimes they go AWOL for a couple of days. When they come back we imagine that we can see lumps in their coils. We wonder if they gobble up some of the many kittens that are born on the island... .By the time we get to Nazri beach at the 'far end' of the walkway, we're hot and sweaty. We peel off our outer layer, grab our masks and snorkels, and leap into the water. It's only just slightly cooler than the air temperature, but it's enough to revive us. We gambol for an hour or more in the giant turquoise aquarium, gazing at many-coloured fishes.
When we get out we report to one another on what we've seen. The pink ones that zoom up at your mask in a threatening way (how do they know that that's where your eyes are?), but shrink back before you could touch them. The gangs of small purply black ones that nibble, and even bite, at your fingers and toes. And my favourites, the schools of electric-neon rainbow-coloured parrot fish, chomping noisily at the corals. We still haven't seen the turtles that apparently graze the corals along the beach every day (how can that be?!).Around five it's time for our ritual of evening drinks in front of our chalet. Doug goes to the 'Jet-ti mini-bar' up the way and buys himself a can of cold beer. (Mr. Tony is a strict Muslim – he neither serves nor sells alcohol, and none is allowed in his restaurant. He's even posted a sign declaring his restaurant an 'alcohol free zone. It's right beside his picture of Mecca. He's done the Haj twice, and plans to take his son there in 2011.) At Mr. Tony's he gets me a can of soda, and a big glass of ice.
Meanwhile, back at the shack, I mix up some lime juice and sugar. With the soda I make a mintless and alcohol-free 'nojito.' We play rummy. Doug wins almost every game. He gets so many twos I call him Desmond. In between rounds we talk about where we'll go for dinner, what we feel like eating... . This is our biggest decision of the day, and we take it seriously.
There are several pretty good places to eat in Air Batang, and one really good one, which predictably is where we often end up. We've usually already decided what we're going to order, but we peruse the menu just to be good sports. At Hijau's, where we sit high on a deck almost level with the tops of the palms, we order garlic fish and fried mixed vegetables, a chicken cutlet with mushroom sauce (Doug), curried vegetables (me). At ABCD, where we sit right at the water's edge, it's two roti canai and two mixed vegetable salads, with a sunset on the side.One night in particular the sunset is spectacular. I take scads of photos, glad of the freedom offered by digital photography – to delete the ones that don't turn out.
We stroll back to our bungalow, enjoying the warm soft evening breeze and the clear starry skies, undimmed by city lights. We sit on our balcony and gaze out at the inky ocean, the necklaces of little lights on the horizon – fishing boats that stay out all night. We read. We yawn. And then we go to bed. We sleep with the fan on full force, protected only by thin sheets, or none.
We did have one day of excitement on Tioman. We awoke to quite an overcast day. It looked like it might rain. Storms can come up quickly here. The clouds sail over the back of the island, or come at us from over the horizon in front, drop their load of water in great noisy (metal roofs) downpours, and move on just as quick.
We were having breakfast at Mr. Tony's when we noticed that people were looking out at the ocean and pointing. Some were taking photos. What were they looking at? We roused ourselves enough to walk over and saw, on the horizon, a waterspout. We also saw some very black, threatening clouds. We sat down to watch the show.The cyclone approached very quickly. Within minutes of starting our vigil we were being buffeted by strong winds. The branches of the palms were flying horizontal. We could feel sand, picked up by the wind, being driven into our faces. We retreated inside as the clouds let loose their load of rain. It was the heaviest downpour I've ever seen. Sheets of rain.
The pathway between our bungalow and the next one became a river flowing, of course, right into and over the new, and as yet unfinished, retaining wall. I wondered if it would survive. A few minutes later the little river that's mostly dry, but that runs on just the other side of the other bungalow, not 20 feet away, became a rushing torrent. It carved its way through the sand, sweeping much of it away.
Meanwhile the waves were crashing and buffeting up against the shore (and the retaining wall), sending great sprays up to the little grassy area. The noise was fearsome. Boats that had gone out earlier in the day beat a hasty retreat to the jetty, disgorged their occupants, and then headed back out to ride out the storm just slightly off-shore.The wind kept blowing and the rain kept coming. At one point we made a dash for Mr. Tony's restaurant for lunch. He'd lowered tarps over the open front side to keep the rain out. We huddled inside with a band of other shelter-seekers and listened to the constant drumming of the rain, now hard, now harder still.
By mid-afternoon it was all over. We went for a walk to survey the damage. Apparently the waterspout hit land just up the way. A couple of Australian girls, who had decided to go for a walk in the midst of the cyclone (not very brightly, but then they're young, and invincible), reported that they had watched the waterspout hit, that it lifted a couple of chairs into the air, and blew down a tree, and that they were just 5 metres away from it, and scared.
But apart from a good deal of debris – tree branches, coconuts, leaves and bits of wood, plastic bags and bottles – on the walkway and on the beach, there was little damage done. The beach in front of Mr. Tony's, though, was transformed. The river had cut a deep channel that we now had to cross in order to get to the beach, where before all had been sand. And where before there was an entirely rocky beach out front, now there was a big patch of sand, carried down and deposited, of course, by the river.Amazingly, the retaining wall survives.
