We decided to get a boat out of Singapore to the island of Tioman because Kris and Anne had heard Tioman was great and because we wanted to avoid riding out of Singapore and through Johor Bahru. The ferry was a great way to skip the traffic nightmare.

Only about 10 or 15 other people rode the ferry with us. No large waves disturbed the South China Sea so the ride was smooth. We arrived in about 4.5 hours, then had to wait another 15 minutes while the crew found an immigration guy to stamp our passports and let us into Malaysia.

Tioman island has only two kilometers of roads. Tall, jagged, jungle-covered mountains make road building very difficult. And since everyone lives on the coast, most transportation is by boat.

We rode our bikes down the two kilometers of road, past the airport. Then the road turned into a 'sidewalk" (full of motorcycle traffic) which turned into a path/stairway. The path goes over a large promontory that connects Tioman's southwest bay with its northwest bay, Air Batang. Our boat had landed at the southern bay, but we wanted to stay in the northern bay, because that's where all the cheap places were.

So with a prodigious amount of effort, especially for a sunny mid-afternoon in the tropics, we lifted our bikes up the steep, uneven steps and through the jungle trail then down the other side. When we finally got down the other side, we vowed we would not repeat the procedure when we left.

Tioman, especially Air Batang Bay, fit into the category of tropical resort that we've noticed at Lake Toba (Sumatra), Good Karma (near Amed, Bali), Puerto Viejo de Talamanca (Costa Rica), the British Virgin Islands and Maui. It had pretty beaches, Bob Marley playing in all the restaurants, and lots of westerners reading books all day long.

In a lot of ways Tioman was better than any of the others. Tioman has cheap accommodation, crystal clear water, pristine and quiet beaches and good food.

We stayed at a place called ABC. Our little cabin was pretty small and slightly dingy but it had a fan and only cost about US$4 a night. The place grew on us after a day.

The restaurants at these resort places have learned what us westerners like. They serve banana pancakes and French toast, regular and iced coffee, sandwiches and burgers. The French Toast comes with honey not maple syrup and the hamburger comes from who knows where. On Tioman all the restaurants also have a fresh seafood barbecue every night. They're cheap and good, especially the garlic squid at Mawar's.

After our French Toast on Monday morning, we decided to hike the coastal trail north and see what we could see. The trail started with a scramble straight up some rocks but then turned into a pleasant leaf-covered path through the woods. Even though we were only a few hundred miles away as the crow flies from the hike we had done in Malaysian Borneo three weeks earlier, the Tioman hike seemed more like a trail in Pennsylvania.

We heard a lot of monkeys in the trees, occasionally getting a glimpse. They make lots of noise. The trails wind around and across boulders the size of houses and small office buildings. You could easily see why the island doesn't have many roads.

Unlike in Borneo, we had good footing. It did not rain the night before so we weren't constantly slipping on roots.

After about an hour we reached Monkey Bay. The bay's beach extends about 100 yards in a slight arc from one rocky promontory to another. The water was as calm as a small lake. And no one else was around. The whole paradise was ours.

We stayed about two hours during which time only two tourists passed by. Both continued on the trail north. We swam and hung out on the beach under a shady tree. Then we swam some more. We left only because we were getting hungry and had brought water but no food.

We've been to beaches just as pretty; we've been to beaches with good swimming; we've been to secluded beaches. But we've never been to one that was all of those. Monkey Bay was idyllic.

On the way back we stopped at Pemuda Beach Resort for lunch. The restaurant had the basic Malaysian Tourist menu--fried rice, fried noodles, hamburger with fries, and sandwiches. (Outside tourist areas you never see anything but noodles and rice dishes). The restaurants staff consisted of the standard Malay Muslim Scowlers. These are typically young women in Muslim head-dress (in Malaysia as in Indonesia, the head dress is worn as a scarf on top of the head, but doesn't cover the face) that take your order with no expression on their faces at all, except a scowl.

No matter what we do we can't get the Scowlers to smile. They barely speak, in any language, and we never know for sure if they got our order right. We're generally too afraid to even ask.

The Muslim Scowlers are never outwardly rude to us and they probably are just doing their jobs, which maybe they find terribly dull. But they always make me feel that I'm being rude to them.

The Pemuda restaurant was the only one we found on Tioman with Muslim Scowlers. We received unusually friendly treatment from most of the other restaurants.

We spent the evenings walking around the long beach at Air Batang Bay and watching the sunset.

A relatively large creek for such a small island enters the sea next to ABC. Ships have been watering here for hundreds of years and every morning we could see a few fishing boats anchored in the bay. A dinghy would shuttle 10 to 12 men ashore at a time and they all walked over to the creek for a bath.

The fishing boats were about 35 or 40 feet long and employed a surprisingly large crew of at least 12. One afternoon I saw 10 guys standing along the port side of a boat facing the stern. In perfect precision they all hauled in a very long rope. The whole group leaned over, pulled and stood up– over and over again. This must have been a common sight before electrical winches. I watched for several minutes but never did find out what they were pulling on. A fishing net I assume.

On our second full day we went diving. The Pemuda resort had excellent equipment and dive masters. They took us to a small island about 40 minutes away. The water was warm and clear and the fish and coral were beautiful. It was as nice a dive spot as I've ever seen.

Our Swiss dive master gave us a long scare talk abut trigger fish--what they look like, how to avoid them, what to do if we saw one. He seemed quite worried about them. Later we found out that he'd been bitten by one the day before.

The last morning we woke up early to catch the boat to Mersing on the mainland of the Malaysian Peninsula. We waited at the jetty and watched a huge school of fish hang out in the clear water below.

Next: Stranded in Mersing.

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