April 19, 2006
Stingrays And Cuttlefish and Sandflies, Oh My!
Aside from blasted 
sandflies, I had a great time in Tioman over the long weekend.
The diving was great. Clear skies (though more sun would have been nice), calm waters, good visibility up to 30 feet underwater and good company. Best of all, the dive sites were teeming not with divers but with marine life.
We started the journey at 6am at Serangoon, and from there we took the Causeway into JB. It was the usual hassle of getting on and off the bus at various intervals, interspersed with a couple of traffic jams, and longish queues at the immigration checkpoints. After we finally made our way into M'sia, we headed to Mersing at breakneck speed - thankfully I slept through most of the journey, due to the fact that I only got home at 0430 on Friday morning, and had to wake up at 0515 to leave for the trip! From Mersing, we took a ferry over to Tioman that took another 2 hours, so it was about 1330 by the time we got to our little hut at Salang.
If you've ever been diving at Aur or Dayang, you'll know how uncivilised everything is. There's only 1 common eating area, and 1 strip of beach. There's a common dormitory and then some "private" huts for those who want their own rooms. At anytime there's clothes and dive gear hanging all over, so the place takes on the appearance of a refugee camp. All in all there's probably space for 30-40 people at any time. And once the sun goes down, everyone either hangs out at the common eating area or they go back to their rooms to sleep. There's nothing to do there if you're a non-diver.
Tioman's different. First of all, there's various 'resorts' all over the island, and there's even a hotel with a golf course. We stayed at Salang, and just there alone there were restaurants, pubs, shops and a mini-mart. And of course, the ubiquitous Ramly burger stalls. For RM 6 you can get a special burger: the works, with 2 beef/chicken patties wrapped in egg and topped with cheese, lettuce and 2 sauces which look like ketchup and mayonnaise. Mmm-hmmm. And the accomodation is much better too. We had a chalet all to ourselves, with room for 5 people, AC, a fridge and a TV. Outside the chalets there was a central garden with deck chairs for sunbathers to lounge in, which had to be shared with various monitor lizards, monkeys and cats that roamed the premises. I now know from first-hand experience that monitor lizards eat worms, and they use their front feet to dig for food.
Our first dive started at 3pm on Friday, at the house reef. For a house reef the quality of marine life was surprisingly good. We spotted a puffer fish lurking in an abandoned tire, a giant garoupa that was just under a metre long, a spotted moray eel, a Spanish dancer (a sea slug that has frills so when it floats in the water it looks like a dress), some nudibranches and of course, scores of fish and coral.
The second dive of the day (and also the second night dive of my diving career) also took place at the house reef at 7pm and it's amazing how different the site is at night. Armed with torches, we spotted some coral-banded cleaner shrimp, the same puffer fish still lurking around its tire, a very pretty blue starfish with 6 arms, some hermit crabs and a score of smaller shrimp hiding amongst the coral; you can tell where the shrimp are because their eyes are almost glowing. This night dive was a much better experience than my first night dive, where I didn't see shit and kept bumping into rocks.
The next day, the group did 3 more dives at various dive sites nearby. The more exotic things we saw were blue-spotted stingrays, a cuttlefish that kept changing colours on us and a huge moral eel that looked very dangerous. Aside from those there were the usual suspects of little Nemos in their anemone homes, sea urchins (my sister and I saw one shitting, which was kinda funny), sea slugs, damsel fish, angelfish... the list goes on.
But, the one bad thing about diving in M'sia is that sandflies tend to feast on your body. I now spot about 15 bites on my left arm, and another 12 bites on my left leg. After being kept awake all night last night by the itching, I saw my doctor today, who scoffed at the OTC medicated cream I had bought and proceeded to give me three types of pills AND another cream to apply.
I hate sandflies.
Anyhow, photos from the trip should be up soon and I'll probably take a shot of my bites as well. I've been told the scars last for a year! Crap.
Posted by scrabbyfoo at April 19, 2006 01:40 PM