Total Miles Traveled: 32,091
Tioman Island is a large picturesque, mountainous island off of the southeastern coast of peninsular Malaysia. It’s known for its diving and super laid back lifestyle. There’s only a 2 mile road, and most of the kampungs (villages) are only accessible via boat. To reach Tioman, we took a 5 hour bus from Melaka to the port village of Mersing and then took a 2 hour ferry to our “resort”.
Tioman Island is also where my cousin Javi owns a dive shop. Bali Hai divers is attached to a small “resort” called Panuba Inn. Panuba is for divers and is very – shall we say – basic. The chalets are ‘clean enough’ and different types of critters have made themselves at home in the chalets. That said, you cannot beat the view!
Also, since Panuba is a bay – the waves don’t crash like they do on the beaches – instead there is a contant whooshing of small waves that is really intoxicating. I haven’t sleep so well in a long, long time! Listen in the video below.
When I mentioned to my cousin that I wanted to get my advanced certification he said not to worry – he’d hook me up. And boy did he! I was able to complete my advanced certification and Tony and I got certified on enriched air (or Nitrox)!!
Here I am doing my course on navigation with a compass underwater:
Tony and I got to know the dive masters well in the short time that we were there. Maybe that’s because we made a beer run with them – AFTER our diving of course 😉 – and treated them to a case.
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And sharing some beers with my instructor Barry.
Diving Tioman
We did 8 dives over the course of 4 days. Our favorite dive was a cavernous coral area that offered lots of pass throughs and small caves. Unfortunately visibility was low overall, but we saw some amazing coral and got to swim around 3 different wrecks.
Some of the coral at Tulai – the best coral garden we saw in Tioman:
Giant Clam:
Turtle (my favorite):
A Thai fishing boat wreck, 90 feet below the water’s surface:
There were tons of reef fish (sergeant majors) hanging out around the jetty, so we happened to find some bread and cause a feeding frenzy:
Unfortunately, Tioman and many other dive destinations are suffering from warm water (29C+ or ~85F+) which causes coral to bleach. Bleaching happens when coral expels the algae living inside of it and it becomes white. This is presumably due to global warming, but the jury is still out on whether it’s that, or simply cyclical temperature changes in the environment.
Check out more photos from our dives on the Flickr slideshow:
[flickrslideshow acct_name=”tony-chen” id=”72157624726037218″]