Sunday, October 18, 2009
Trip Report - Tioman Island 2009Finally back from our trip! OK, other than the diving and meeting up with friends, there honestly was nothing memorable about this trip .. which says a lot about our accommodation and food.
Day 1We set off in the wee hours, taking this dingy little van up North (4 hours including a rest stop), followed by a 1.5 hour ferry to Tioman. The main purpose of this Tioman trip was to complete our advanced water course, plus the enriched air nitrox course - in preparation for an upcoming (real) holiday somewhere early next year.
It turned out that the
resort chalet decent hut we were living in was situated right at the eastern end of the beach, while the dive company was at the western end. In any case, I was slightly disappointed as all the instructors were busy then, and we ended up with no dive at all on our first day - just 2 large books to read and study. The horrid place we stayed in was called Nazri's Place, which for some unfathomable reason was rated as "recommended" by a couple of diving discussion boards. Fascilities were spartan (to put it really nicely), water literally trickles out of the shower, the room smells, and worst of all perhaps, was the indescribably poor fare the restaurant offered - at a premium, no less. We paid RM7 for a plate of "fried rice" .. who would ever imagine that the ubiquitous fried rice could be end up being gross, right? Wrong. Dinner was settled elsewhere, as you might have guessed.
We went out snorkelling at the house reef, and it was dismal compared to Berjaya's (a 10-minute boat ride away, but alas, at 3-5x the price for accommodation). We did see a couple of eels though, plus a nice fat little blue-spotted stingray and some other critters.
Day 2Yay! Compressed air day!!
The usual pre-dive knowledge review, going through worksheets and theory, and then we were in! Our first dive was the Peak Performance Buoyancy lesson, which was taught by this remarkably cheery Australian chap called Michael. He was actually here on a dive holiday, and roped in to teach as well (and yes, he's more than qualified!). On hindsight, this was actually one of the most important lessons we went through, and I felt really good about it at the end of the dive. We got through all the exercises quite well, I'm glad to say - including weighting ourselves down correctly, hovering, breath buoyancy control, and at one point even a head-down position in which we were suspended for a while.
Second dive (Navigation) was taught by Grahame, this elderly Englishman who looks to be about 65 but has a fitness level to put the vast majority of us to shame (refer to our first Nitrox dive the next day). Yx was initially quite intimidated by him, as he was strict and spoke in a booming voice. But as with all things when it comes to learning, strict can be good. And anyway he turned out to be a most amicable chap with a Londoner's sense of humour. We did all the exercises in navigation, and right at the end of the dive, Grahame decided to test us on our buoyancy! He put a weight (about the size of a wallet) standing up on the seafloor, hovered right over it in a kneeling position, grabbed hold of it with his knees, floated around for a while, and replaced the weight - all without using any fins! Ha .. a master at work indeed.
Our last dive of the day was a night dive, one which I enjoyed very much indeed. I was initially a little apprehensive - going into the deep in pitch darkness isn't anywhere on my to-do list - but in the end we did it. The sea was totally calm, with no currents at all, and all the fish were sleeping. We almost trod on a blue-spotted stingray in the shallows though, and when we reached the sea floor at about 10 metres, we blocked off our dive lights and waved our hands in the water - whoa! Bioluminescence! It was really, really amazing. Yx didn't have such a great time though - she got stung by something (maybe an urchin?) and kept pointing at her calf. I got thoroughly excited, thinking she had a cramp in mid-water, and proceeded to do the usual thing for cramps. Anyway, we eventually surfaced after 35 minutes, and floating on my back paddling back to shore in the depths of darkness with hundreds of stars in the night sky was one of those magical moments I had.
Got back to the hut, and studied our nitrox tables and formulae well past midnight.
Day 3Still bleary-eyed, we got up super-early and headed off for our first dive at 9am, which is a deep dive at a small island called Cheveh. Got down to 31m, but neither of us felt any nitrogen narcosis symptoms. Oh well. There were loads of giant seafans around, and we were just a wee bit disappointed cos Grahame actually spotted a manta ray at Cheveh yesterday, but we just weren't lucky enough! Tonnes of great marine life here, with low to moderate current.
Our second dive was done with nitrox 32% at a shipwreck site, and this one was HORRID. I swear, I almost drowned on this dive - at the surface. The surf was horrid, and I ended up battling waves for 5-10 minutes (seemed like forever) to get the the marker buoy which marked the shipwreck spot. The waves kept crashing over my head and getting into my snorkel pipe, and it really seemed a futile exercise cos I'd fin hard to get ahead by 1m, and another wave crashes over and brings me 1m away again. So I really started panicking at one point in time, and by the time I reached the marker buoy, I was puffing away like I just ran a 400m sprint. Not a good start. =( On the other hand, Grahame was perfectly fine and looked as if the surf wasn't there at all! (When I bitched about the surf to him later on, he replied simply with "Those were great conditions! You should try diving the south coast of England ..") We eventually reached the first wreck at 28m, with Yx snapping away at photos. I ate through my air extremely quickly for this dive, partly due to the moderately-strong underwater current running against us, and partly cos of how I started this dive.
After a brief shore break, it was time for our second and final nitrox dive, once again done on EANx32. Thankfully it was a shore dive, and we went to this area called Ghost Town. It's an artificial reef, made up of maybe 10 pyramid-like structures. Very, very eerie. The bottom was super-silty, and we kept stirring it up no matter how we concentrated on buoyancy. In the end visibility dropped to 2-3 metres cos of all the sediment. On the plus side though, as we were heading back to shore past a staghorn reef, we saw a huge hawksbill turtle. His carapace must have measured more than a metre in length, and he was blissfully oblivious to our presence, munching on goodness-knows-what amongst the Acropora. Nice!
By some coincidence and a little planning, one of the airforce MOs was also on the island, and we took a water taxi to visit him at the Berjaya Resort in the evening. What we didn't count on though, was bumping into Freddy too! He's with the navy and they were also doing some exercise there, and it was his land break day. Nice to meet up with friends in the middle of desolation. Loads of drinks then, followed by a spectacular episode where Jeff tumbled right off his chair to land spread-eagle on the beach after a jug of Blue Lagoon. =)
Wenky
10:04 PM
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