Under the Sea: Tioman Island Diving

From KL, we grabbed a bus to the coast and then a ferry (the next day, as Malaysian transport rarely lines up properly) to Pulau Tioman, an island in the South China Sea well known as a diving hub. This is where I'd be doing my PADI Open Water Diver certification.

After a full day of scuba theory, cheesy PADI videos, and anticipation, it was finally time to go underwater. I pulled on the wet suit  ignoring the pungent smell of old sweat and salt water. On went the weight-belt, the inflatable vest (called a BCD), the tank, and the breathing regulator, with its four hoses that snaked along my body to poke into various bits of the vest, like the arms of Shiva going in for a feel.

Despite the wet suit, scuba equipment does not as such make one feel svelte.

My classmates, two Danish girls, our instructor, Rosie, and I began shuffling down into the waves, fins in hand. We plopped into the sea, yanked on our fins and face masks, and swam away from shore. And, with the BCD inflated, the cumbersome equipment and I floated easily. Sneaky.

The first time we descended was only into two metres of water to land on the sandy bottom. Despite the many hours of theory and the regulator in my mouth, I forgot to breathe for a good fifteen seconds.

We did a few dives like this, in the sandy shallows, to practice our buoyancy and learn emergency procedures, and then finally it was time to go on a real dive.

We rolled backwards off the boat and descended into the stunningly turquoise waters of the South China Sea, through schools of bright fish. We stopped just above the reef and swam forward over coral of every shape and colour and size, swarming with fish and covered with plants.

What a strange feeling, to breathe effortlessly in this brilliantly-coloured new world, to look up to see the pale plane of the surface stretched over the water above us, undulating gently in waves that, at ten metres deep, we could no longer feel.

By the end of our nearly two weeks on Tioman, I'd taken seven dives at different locations around island: four for my certification  one to certify me for deep diving and two for fun. We'd seen Hawksbill turtles, stingrays, cuttlefish (a small, colour-changing squid), baracuda, pufferfish, two huge napoleon wrasse and a number of triggerfish, who eyed us suspiciously - not to mention the clouds of colourful fish and the stunning coral we encountered on each dive. Big thanks to Rosie and the ladies at the Tioman Dive Centre for taking excellent care of us!

We didn't do a lot else on Tioman. In the second week, we took a rainy trek across the steep hills to Juara, a quiet town on a stunning beach, where we spent a night before trekking back - no rain on the way back, and we saw some long-tailed macaques playing (fighting?) in the trees on the Juara side.

Despite the encroaching monsoon season, our weather held out pretty well - although its hard to be upset with the weather in a place where even the rainy days are warm and beautiful.

S.

Kuala Lumpur: the Asian Adventure Begins.

Our flight from Rome to Kuala Lumpur via Kuwait City was a long ordeal, but went smoothly. We settled into our Chinatown guesthouse and discovered that, for the first time in six months, we were really and truly jet-lagged. For four nights, we were up until 5 am, rising at 1 or 2 pm and patronizing a conveniently located Seven-Eleven for our 3 am snack runs.

Jet lag SUCKS.

So our four nights in KL turned into six, and even then we didn't do much sightseeing outside of Chinatown and the malls we were scouring for new trekking shoes.

We DID spend an afternoon at the Batu Caves, a Hindu shrine set in an enormous limestone cavern just north of the city. After scaling two hundred-some-odd steps and evading the dirty-looking monkeys perched on the railings, we emerged into the cavern. We spent a half hour exploring the temples and the little shrines tucked into the corners of the cave, followed by a keening, clarinet-esque music and a funky drum-beat courtesy of a pair of musicians in the main temple.

At the base of the cliff are more caves, these with an admission fee, containing sculpted depictions of Hindu stories and more shrines, all painted in bright (sometimes psychedelic  colours. To the side is a reptile sanctuary housing a huge monitor lizard, a turtle and all sorts of creepy and slithery things. Super cool, but not where you'd want to be caught in an earthquake!

S.

Southern Italy (or, 'The Cheese Binge')

Our second week in Italy, we spent two nights in the southern town of Sorrento, renowned for its pretty cliff-top views of the Bay of Naples, and for its alarming lack of traffic lights.

We spent a day wandering the ruins of resurrected Pompeii, in the shadow of Vesuvius (which is, by the way, still very much active), hopping across the stepping stones in ancient streets that spent more than a millennium and a half suffocated beneath ten metres of ash. Remarkably, some of the frescoes inside the houses survived.

We had two fantastic meals in Sorrento: gnocchi alla Sorrentina at a cute little restaurant, and take-away pizza on the roof of our hotel, from which we could see the whole bay, as well as the volcano's bare slopes.

From Sorrento, we hopped aboard a train to Rome. I'd worried that I would find the Italian capital to be too flashy, too aggressive - maybe it was because we'd rolled in during the off-season, but I was pleased to find it relaxed, a confident seductress.

La famille Hartholt explores the Colosseum

Now, it was time for a history blitz. We roamed the battered Colosseum, its pock-marked shell covered in opportunistic plants. The underground chambers have been excavated and you can see right into the labyrinth of rooms and passages in which animals and people waited out the final moments of their lives.

We wandered the Palatine, where the red-brick remains of Roman palaces are scattered on the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus racetrack.

We spent a day between St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican museums, both of which are dripping with wealth beyond comprehension. St. Peter's, built on the site where Roman Emperor Nero had Saints Peter and Paul crucified around AD 67, is stunning. The pink marble walls are decorated with lavish amounts of gold leaf, stunning frescoes, and masterful sculptures. The place is so large, so enveloping, that the crowds weren't even a hindrance.

Me and St Peter's - for Gran!

The collections in the museums are also astounding. The Vatican owns heaps and heaps of priceless ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, paintings, Renaissance-era sculptures... and that's before you even discuss the frescoes by Renaissance masters like Michelangelo and Raphael, which are in themselves priceless. The sheer volume of the collection rivals the British Museum, and exploring it took the whole afternoon. Obviously the Sistine Chapel, where each new pope is elected, is the star of the show, where Michelangelo's frescoes of muscular men and women show the creation of the universe and of man, but I found Raphael's frescoes to be just as beautiful - maybe more so.

All that said, it's hard to know that a state run by a religious organization that preaches charity has untold masses of wealth hoarded within its walls. How many Greek statues would buy food for a starving village, or a whole country? There are some very poor people out there who need the wealth more than the Vatican needs to store it.

Our remaining days in Rome were spent walking the medieval centre, enjoying the fresh air at the delightfully green Villa Borghese, eating all of the pasta and pizza and cheese I could get my hands on, and of course, enjoying each other's company - because at the airport, we left John and Val for another six months. It was fantastic to spend the two weeks with you two - thank you for everything! We miss you!

And finally, leaving Rome for Malaysia, it was time to find some new adventures.

S.

Tuscany

Although I would love to write a pile of posts about our two weeks in Italy, I'm going to try to keep it to one for each week so that I can start getting caught up with myself.

We took a night ferry loaded with large, loud Italian families and jovial, guitar-strumming monks from Split, in Croatia to Ancona in Italy. Despite all our worry over the Schengen Area visas, the Italian border guard barely glanced at our passports. So maybe counting out exactly ninety days wasn't entirely necessary.

We met Dan's parents, Val and John, just up the coast in Rimini, spent a night there sharing stories and catching up, and set off the next morning for Tuscany.

Although it doesn't look all that far on the map, the drive through the mountains to Tuscany's rolling hills took all day. And as it was Sunday, all the shops were closed out in the country. (Who knew you could get so hungry in Italy?!) But finally, we made it to San Gimignano.


We were perched on the side of a valley of grape vines, lit bright in the late afternoon sun. A kilometre off, on the crown of the nearest hill, was the silhouette of a perfectly preserved medieval city, its skyline sprinkled with tall, square towers and ringed by thick stone walls. Although our apartment for the week was nearer to the walls, but it was worth a drive out to the main guesthouse for the view (and the pool and the wifi).

Over the course of the week, in addition to exploring the cobbled streets of San Gimignano, we went on day trips to Pisa where the leaning tower is much larger and at much more of an angle than I'd anticipated, to Cinque Terre, to Siena and to a small winery.

At Cinque Terre, we hiked along the number two trail, down the Via dell'Amoure (Lovers Lane) from Riomaggiore To Manarola, a pretty and very flat stroll along the cliff side and then Dan and I hiked the more rolling stretch from Corniglia to Vernazza, where we met back up with Val and John for drinks and foccacia. The views from the cliffs over the ocean are stunning, and the trail led us through olive groves and gardens that cling to the rocks, steeped in the salty breeze. Unfortunately, even in late September, the trails were busy. About half the walk, we were stuck in an ant trail behind meandering tour groups.

In Siena, the enormous cathedral took my breath away - and at this point, I've seen my share of European churches. The walls, inside and out, are striped white and deep green marble; the floor is rife with biblical depictions in carved marble; the hymnals in the library are two feet tall, their verses painted in vivid colours and gold leaf. Really, really beautiful.

We spent a morning at the Casa Emma, where big, sweet grapes grow up to become Chianti wine, the regional specialty. The tour was informative, and the tasting was a yummy breakfast (also informative. I love having wine explained because I can never decode it myself. Thank you to Carlos!)

And of course, we spent lots of time drinking wine by the guesthouse pool, looking down at the vineyards and up at the town, lots of time eating rich and hearty Tuscan food, and lots of time chatting and playing cards. Because that's what is best about Italy: wine, food and family.

S.

The Dalmatian Islands

On leaving Dubrovnik, we spent eight days lounging about on the Dalmatian Islands, off the mainland coast of Croatia near Split. The ferries were easy to arrange and reasonably priced - although annoyingly, we had to go all the way back to Split to hop from island to island.

Bol - You can see the beach extending into the ocean.

We halved our week between two islands: Brac, the nearest to the mainland, where we settled into the touristy-cute town of Bol, and Vis, farther into the Adriatic, undeveloped until Croatia's departure from the Yugoslavian Federation twenty years ago.

As with most visitors to Bol, we spent a lot of our visit on the gorgeous Zlatni Rat beach, known in English as the 'Golden Horn.' The beach spikes out into the sea towards neighbouring Hvar Island, thus forming the horn, both sides dotted with big beach umbrellas and covered with tanned bodies. (Except for me... Dan told me that while he was swimming, I was easy to pick out back on the shore. It didn't help that most of the tourists seemed to be either Italians or Croatians on holiday in the September 'slow' season.)

So for three days, we lay snuggled into the grey pebbles of the beach and swam in the unbelievably clear Adriatic. Our little apartment had a kitchen, so we could cook for the first time in several months, but we did go out for a meal of salted, fried sardines. Which are served with all the bones - thankfully no head. Crunch, crunch, nom nom nom.


After a brief return to Split, we grabbed the two hour ferry to Vis Island, the farthest and least developed of the mid-Dalmatian Islands. We stayed in Komiza, across the island - a pretty little town, set in a wide-mouthed bay, where every house has tourist apartments and restaurants line the harbour, but where even the moderate crowds of Bol had dissipated  to leave us with space to breathe.

Our landlady, on finding that our Croat was very limited, decided it was best to speak to us in Italian... also very limited. Lots and lots of nodding and gesturing.

We spent four days on the rocky beach outside our window, where the fishies developed a strange affection for Dan, following him in clouds as he swam; we rented a two-person sea kayak for a day on the water, and we spent a day hiking out to the end of the bay (past a garbage dump... yum). But mostly, we lounged in happy laziness and swam.

S.

Dubrovnik

We arrived in Dubrovnik on a Monday evening coach and after some minor directional problems, hauled ourselves and our backpacks up a few billion steps to our hostel, near the top of the hill. We sat for an hour in the terrace garden - grape vines hanging overhead, lime and pomegranate trees around us, and then explored the old city.






Dubrovnik’s old town literally sparkles like the ‘Jewel of the Adriatic’ it's claimed to be. It’s made of marble - entirely made of marble. The streets, the walls, the towers, gleam white under the moon and the streetlights. The streets are the cleanest I think I have ever seen - it looks like the whole city is swept and polished every night. The whole place felt like a fairy tale as we wandered the little alleyways and strolled the main boulevard, perusing menus we knew were too expensive for our budget.

(Tragically, it’s spoiled by the tourists. And I know that I am being entirely hypocritical because I AM a tourist, but it’s a well-known fact that tourists dislike other tourists. Especially ones who stand dead-centre on a busy street, gawking and taking photos and blocking those of us who are strolling along. I know it's pretty. Stand on the side of the street please. Rant over.)

As Dubrovnik is a must-see on the itineraries of everyone from cruise-shippers to backpackers to holiday-makers, it’s busy busy busy, all the time. I’m glad we saw it, but two nights was certainly enough.

So, having seen the city on the first night, and having no desire to visit museums, what do we do in Dubrovnik?

Along the side of the tall, looming wall, away from the little harbour, there’s a swimming spot with a couple sets of stone steps, rocks to leap off of and space to sit in the sun. So we picked up a two-litre bottle of beer (yes that is a thing) as we walked through the city that afternoon , and with a couple swigs inside us, we jumped from the jagged rocks into the salty Adriatic. We splashed around, hauled ourselves back up the slippery, algae-covered steps, retired to our beer bottle and repeated the whole thing when the sun became too intense.

Not a bad life, drinking beer and swimming under a magnificent city wall. There were other people there, but it wasn't nearly as crowded as the inside of the walls.

Eventually, many litres later, we decided it was time to be good tourists, so we abandoned the swimming hole, grabbed some pizza to sober up, and bought tickets to walk the walls. It’s better than it might sound - it makes for several kilometres of walking, the walls are kept in fantastic condition, and the views over the city both inside and outside the wall, and of the sea as the sun was setting, were beautiful.

And if you just looked at the sea, you couldn't even see the crowds.

S.

War Tour: Sarajevo

High upon a mountain overlooking Sarajevo, our tour guide stepped gingerly off of the wide pathway and began to climb up a slope, eight cameras dangling from his arm and slung across his torso. Our group, ten travelers in all, waited at the bottom, awestruck by this risky move. We watched his careful foot placement, on tree roots and exposed rock - less likely to be hiding a landmine. Although he had climbed this hill many times, there was always still a very serious chance that a false step would set off one of the millions of mines scattered all over this mountain.

When he reached the ruins of a Serbian bunker at the top, Jasmin snapped a picture with each of our cameras. He'd found two mines a few weeks back, unearthed them carefully, and he wanted to show us what they look like. In a month or two, a mine expert he knows will come and diffuse them.

Jasmin fought in the siege of Sarajevo, which began nearly twenty years ago when the Serbian army surrounded the capital of the fledgling Bosnia and Herzegovina nation. For nearly four years, the front line wavered within a few hundred yards of its original position on the hilltop, encircling the city. The Sarajevans were unable to break the Serbian noose, while the Serbs unable to break the wills of the Sarajevans who fought on empty stomachs and smuggled weapons to evade the promise of genocide.

We walked around the mountain were Jasmin fought, a mere four kilometres from his home, where he lived with his wife and five-month-old son and where today, he runs a hostel. We saw the former observatory, now a pair of destroyed buildings covered in shell-marks and broken glass, where his thigh was ripped open by shrapnel. We found shell clips, rusting in the dirt below old bunkers, and the shelled-out cable car station, where a whole mortar shell is still embedded high up in the wall.

He showed us the hollow where he spent many nights in a tent, and then walks us uphill, a hundred yards on a thin dirt path, across no-man's land to the Serbian line.

"Don't step off the path," says his son, now a grown man, before we begin, "it was cleared by a professional. There are thousands of mines around us - do not step off the path."

And yet, as we walked, all around us lay gorgeous forest, green and untouched, spilling down the mountainside to the valley where Sarajevo stretches out, red roofs lining the shallow, bubbling river. We saw the grafittied remains of the bobsled track that was used for the 1984 Olympic Games, its concrete expanse winding down the mountain (still used today for extreme rollerblading competitions, although chunks of it were torn off to become barricades).

It is so hard to believe that something so beautiful still contains so much danger. Landmines in Bosnia are harder to find, and thus more expensive to remove, than in most other areas in the world. The thick forest, now dense with twenty years of undisturbed growth, obscures the explosives. And as in the business of mine removal, complications mean an increased chance of death, these mines will probably be here for a while yet.

Walking around the streets of Sarajevo, there are pockmarks in the pavement, sunshine-shaped indents left by falling shells and flying shrapnel. There isn't enough money in Bosnia right now to fix every damaged building, so the reminders are everywhere.

At the outskirts of the city is the Tunnel Museum, the preserved end of the tunnel into Sarajevo through which food, arms, electricity and soldiers crept for years for the salvation of the city. Here, there is a shell embedded into the cement less than two metres from the entrance.

How does a person survive such a destructive siege? When we asked Jasmin how he'd found the strength to climb the hill day after day, the answer was easy: he looked at his son. When your family, your home, and your life are threatened, sometimes there's no other answer.

S.