Melaka, Kuala Lumpur and Scuba Diving

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After spending a few days in Singapore we crossed the border into Malaysia. The first stop was Melaka which is an old historical town in the south of the country. We only spent two nights there as a stop over on the way to Kuala Lumpur but it was fun to spend a day walking around the town. We found a really good guesthouse to stay in which was extremely basic (outside shower & toilet, simple dorm room) but it was in a cool old building and had a great atmosphere to it (plus it only cost 2 pounds a night). The only problem with it was the fact that every morning the guy from the mosque opposite did the call to prayer really loud at 5.30am and woke everyone up - but it added to the experience and it was actually strangely relaxing.

From Melaka we travelled by bus to Kuala Lumpur - the capital city. The main attraction in the city is the iconic Petronas Towers which were at one point the tallest buildings in the world. If you arrive early in the morning then its possible to get free tickets to go up to the skybridge between the two towers and get good view over the whole city. We managed to grab a pair of tickets and went up to the viewing platform on one of the days that we were there, but, compared to some of the other cities I've visited so far, I didn't think the skyline was that spectacular - was still worth seeing though. However, the average-looking skyline was made up for by the fact that whilst we were on the viewing platform there was an impressive thunderstorm taking place over the city and I saw some huge bolts of fork lightning which seemed to change in colour from white to purple and lingered in the air for ages. One afternoon whilst in KL, we visited the nearby Batu caves which are just outside the city. The caves are situated at the top of a pretty big flight of steps which you have to climb and there's also a massive golden statue about 50m high at the bottom. The funniest bit was that all the way up the steps were these crazy monkeys which kept trying to grab everyone's stuff. They grabbed some girl's plastic bag and she ran off screaming - much to everyone elses amusement. Luckily I managed to take some decent photos of some of the monkeys without them swiping my camera.

After KL, the next destination was Tioman Island which is situated 51km off the eastern coast of Malaysia. The main reason for going there was because we decided we wanted to scuba dive and we'd heard that this place was a really good place to do it - and they weren't wrong! The water around the island was incredibly calm with hardly any waves and it was so clear and blue that you could see about 15m down from the surface. Since neither of us had dived before, we had to do the PADI open water course which, once completed, gives you a diving license to say you're a qualified diver. The course lasted 4 days in total and on the last day of the course we were able to do two proper 1 hour dives from a boat which took us a few kms off the coast of the island to a really impressive dive site where we saw some cool fish and coral. Annoyingly though, a group of other divers from the same dive company went to the exact same dive site the day before and saw a huuuuge whale shark which are apparently very rare to see there. I think Tioman Island might be one of my favourite places which I've visited so far because not only was the diving good there but the actual island was amazing too. There's a lot of very good beaches and the water temperature is about 30C. The island is 95% jungle which means you see some impressive wildlife roaming around, for example, I saw a lot of 5/6 foot long monitor lizards walking along the path which lead to the dive centre - when I saw one for the first time out of the corner of my eye I thought it was a crocodile which gave me a bit of a shock!

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Comments

[Rich Rich Cook]

Diving in KL
Ran across your blog while Googling scuba diving in KL. I'll be ther in mid-April and since I'm PADI open water certified, I want to dive while I'm there. Your report on Tioman Island sounds interesting. Any recommendations on dive operators to go with? How far is Tioman Ialsnd from KL?

[Dave S]

diving on Tioman
Hi. I used a dive operator called Fisherman Divers when I was on Tioman Island, they were pretty good. It's about 5 or 6 hours to the coast from KL I think and then it's about another 25mins on a boat to get to Tioman.