Situated in South China sea “Tioman archipelago” is known for it’s live corals and marine nature reserve. Tioman has given me some fairy tale stories to tell and some to forget.

Tioman has more than 7 inhabited islands and patches of tropical rain forest. During my first visit i stayed at Salang. It’s more a chilled out island with clear water beaches, lot of coral reefs and some hilly terrain for hiking. We did a short hike for an hour to reach a white sandy beach and whole of the evening i spent snorkeling and exploring the coral reef just off the beach as every first timer says “It looked a different world underwater, I could see lot of colorful fishes, corals, best time of my life”. Yes in fact it’s all true  🙂 🙂 I also did my first DSD – discover scuba dive. What more one can expect on an island during your first visit. It was definitely enjoyable.

Again came back to Tioman after a year as a little matured traveler.  I’m a certified open water diver now. I stayed in the backpacker island of ABC(Air batang). It’s quite and laid back island.  A bungalow on the rocks with see view would cost you about RM50(approx 15 USD).  I signed up for my dives and my first dive was a shallow dive with some amazing corals along with sightings of turtle, reef sharks, puffer fish, purcupine fish, titan trigger, etc. Evening when back from dives had a very quiet and relaxing time next to the beach watching the sunset and chatting with some fellow divers.

Next day we started early about 7am and went for our dives. After the dive we had breakfast in middle of the ocean and water was so clam that we decided to swim for a bit. The coral reefs were just amazing and one cannot explain these experiences in words. Similarly during the subsequent visits we did 6-7 dives and all of them where entirely different. By now i am also an Advanced open water diver. We did few amazing drift dives, with no effort the current just drifted us and at one point a titan trigger and I were moving at the same speed 🙂

In Tioman we did about 3-4 wreck dives, you always find variety of marine life next to the wrecks. I and a dive master Cedric paired up for the dives. We ended up clocking 60+ mins underwater in few of our dives.

I had one bad experience that actually made me stop diving for a while. One weekend I reached Tioman late and  didn’t want to miss my dive so asked the dive master to get my gears ready and I went directly to the boat. I know it was my mistake to ask help from someone to check the equipment. The moment I got into the water and started descending down my primary air source stopped working and chest started aching. Immediately used the octopus and continued with my dive by the time I completed my dive and went up to the surface my BCD didn’t work as well, the sea was rough and boat wasn’t there. I kept swimming and also held on to co-divers until the boat came. But it took me more than couple of month to recover from all sort of pains and this kept me away from diving for a very long time.