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.