Bangkok to Tioman

So...we finally made it, back to the land of smiles. Back to the warmth; back to life with islands on the doorstep; back to cheap food, affordable taxis and days of shopping. It’s amazing what memories stay with you when you leave...and what memories get conveniently left behind. Back to the damp, sweaty, cloying heat and its induced exhaustion; back to the stinky overly ripe streets, drains and klongs; back to the stationary traffic and horrifically long journeys; back to that out of breath and close to dying feeling gained when climbing the steps to the sky-train in 36 degree heat; back to packed department stores full of shuffling people with no sense of direction and a strange desire to stop dead when disembarking from any and every escalator. Oh yes...it’s good to be here.

We arrived in Bangkok about a month ago, I was so excited to get back that it was bound to be something of an anticlimax. I had built it up for so long, telling Nick and just about everybody who would listen about how great life used to be. When I arrived I felt so nervous that it wouldn’t live up to everything I had made it out to be, that I found it all to be more than a little bit stressful. I found myself constantly apologising to Nick for everything...sorry for the traffic jam, sorry you’re sweating, sorry it’s raining etc etc etc. Anyway, after a few days of this we flew down to Singapore and I let myself relax back into beach mode.
We spent one night in Singapore (a slightly unnerving place, hardly a car on the roads and far too little rubbish to be in Asia) before heading up into Malaysia and catching a very seasick inducing ferry over to Tioman Island. Tioman was just how I remember it, quite a few bars and restaurants yet never quite managing to provide a decent night out. Every restaurant serves the same dishes badly and the bars aren’t really set up for a mad night out. While on land was lacking in that certain spark, the diving lived up to all my memories of it and we dived everyday and could have done more. It is nudibranch heaven, even I managed to find stuff and I seem to be going blind.

The pictures are the view from our balcony (what can I say, we splashed out, seem to struggle with the whole budget backpacker thing now), one of the cool nudis and a cuttle fish.