Bali-hai

Just spent a week learning to scuba dive on Tioman. Considering several people had moaned about how touristy Tioman is supposed to be, I really loved the place. We were staying near Tekek which hardly had anyone there, just a couple of little dive shops and hut-on-a-beach places to stay. We spent four days with the Tioman Dive center learning to dive (we are now PADI open water divers). Our instuctor Kaj was fantastic and managed to coax us through all the tedious theory (v.bad DVDs) and we were in the water in no time. After two days of splashing around in the shallows (which is way better than a pool) we did 4 real dives.


Diving is absolutely amazing.... Ok, so I've always been hooked on the freedom of swimming, but floating several meters under water is like nothing else.

I'm sorry, I don't care how much fun you think you're having, but you aren't seeing anything when you're snorkeling. The feeling of being in the middle of a school of fish (or under them) is beautiful. At one point there were thousands of little fish around us, not particularly scared of us, but the whole school would react and twist in one direction whenever we made a sudden movement.

Tioman has some great reefs, teeming with fish, we spent quite a bit of time after each dive trying to identify the things we saw (Kaj did most of the identifying, we weren't as good at remembering what the fish looked like...) We also saw a pair of cuttlefish (which I love) mating and laying eggs in coral (the female plants each egg right into the coral). We swum round a shipwreck, which was damn cool. Saw a big school of barracuda with a huge (90cm) pufferfish in the middle. We found and followed a hawksbill turtle for a while. I want to go back again and again!!!