Pulau Tioman is an tropical island about 50km of the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia, famous for it’s great diving sites, beaches and rugged jungle and on top of that it provides a few duty free shops in an otherwise super expensive country for alcohol a real heaven.
I have visited Tioman in 2007 before and since we knew that it’s monsoon season what means it is not going to be very busy we decided to go here to take some time adapting to our new environment.
As expected the weather wasn’t so perfect with lots and lots of rain and the sea rough and turbulent with almost zero visibility.
Things one could usually do on an tropical island like lying on the beach, sun bathing until the last brain cells are fried or diving through divine coral reefs weren’t really possible but we found other things to do.
Instead we explored the island a little bit, went hiking, looked out for interesting plants and animals, especially for plants that might be edible.
We didn’t have a busy schedule so everything we did we did in a very slow pace…
We made our first fire in Asia ever!
Beforehand we collected some wild edibles like fresh water cone shells, bamboo, coconut, Morinda leafs, bananas and banana flower.
Because of the monsoon, lighting a fire wasn’t very easy.
There were strong winds and because of the constant strong tropical down pours everything was soaking wet. I have never made a fire before in Asia so we had to find out how to make it and what we could use for tinder.
It took us some time, since I didn’t really expect that there could be any difficulty on lighting a fire in the tropics. I decided to build a Dakota fire pit to protect the fire from the wind. By building a small pyramid and adding dry bamboo shavings and dry palm tree bark as tinder we succeeded.
My first attempted on friction fire lighting with a bamboo saw failed and also the flint wasn’t successful primarily because of sluggishness though…
That was dinner. Well not really. I liked but Kathie wasn’t to pleased.
Served in a coconut shell: Cone shell in fresh made coconut milk with bamboo and Morinda leafs.
Toe incident
That happened on one of our very few hikes on the island.
Hiking through the jungle we wanted to take a little short cut through the water. We needed to climb along a rock were the water seemed to deep to walk through. As many of these rocks there are covered with super sharp shellfish like oysters and barnacles…
We both slipped of the rock after trying to hang on to it unfortunately did Kathie lose her shoe while slipping so here feet and toe went through the shells….
It’s all good again! Its nearly two weeks again. Just wanted to shock a little bit. When it happened Kathie was crying bitterly as she fall into the salt water after she slipped! Madonna, incredible pain°
Since she is such a brave women she fast calmed down again and despite blood sweat and tears she made it all the way back through the jungle which from the place it happened was still more then an hour along a thin jungle track away from home…
Wild Life
We found this huge dead snake hanging attach to a rope from a bridge across a small river in Juava (east side of Pulau Tioman ). We were shocked that the queen of the jungle was likely killed by the locals. The snake was between 3 to 4 meters big. wow°
Red Headed Krait
While walking across the island which is an about 3 hours jungle hike from the west to the east coast I almost stepped on this snake
We didn’t take a photo we were a little frightened. (Internet download)
As we now know it was a quite poisonous snake. Lucky!
End. … .. but to be continued.
P.S: this first real blog post was a mountain of work!
It took me days to figure out how things work…
I hope I’ll learn fast so I don’t lose the fun doing this.
K
Life With Nature 