Greetings, EarthTrip hangers-on!

By now, I'm sure you are all on the edge of your seats, wondering how 
it will all end. Or maybe saying to yourselves, "When is this going 
to end? How do I get myself off this list?"

When you last heard from me, I was in Borneo, finishing off a couple 
weeks of traveling there with my friend Matt from Houston. We flew 
back to Kuala Lumpur, where we found our friends Jen, Rich, and Sid in 
a classy old hotel bar, the Colliseum. We spent the evening catching 
up with each other's lives, telling tall tales, some of them actually 
true. That evening and for the following week, our high-flying friends 
took excellent care of we low-flying backpackers, buying us beers,  
letting us crash on their hotel room floor, and helping defray our 
travel costs.

The day after our reunion, we hired a minivan and driver to take us to 
Mersing, a port town on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia. There, 
we boarded a catamaran ferry for a 1.5 hour bumpy ride out to Pulau 
Tioman (Pulau being Malay for Island). This is a good sized island and 
meets most of the stereotypes for a tropical island paradise. We 
stayed on the ferry to the last stop, Salang, a small village on the 
north end of the island, to where most of the backpacking crowd 
flocks. We rented out a large room at a modest but pleasant little 
resort and the five of us stayed there for the next five nights. 
Khalid's Resort is set back from the beach on a small creek, which is 
absolutely teaming with life. We enjoyed watching the 5-7 foot monitor 
lizards cavort there, amidst fiddler crabs and fishes swimming around 
in the murky water. The smell however, was something less than 
pleasant, especially when the tide was flowing in, reversing the flow 
of the stream and stirring up its olfactory delights. 

Altogether, it was a very relaxed time, in which we alternated between 
sleeping in most mornings, lounging around reading, scuba diving (Jen, 
Rich, and myself), snorkeling, hiking across the island (Jen & Rich) 
or over the hill to the secluded Monkey Bay (Matt, Sid, and myself), 
lying around on the beach, dining at the various restaurants, and 
astounding the locals with our beer consumption prowess (the bartender 
insisted that we must be English, despite our American accents). The 
snorkeling was some of the best any of us had ever done,  and we saw 
sea turtles, blue spotted stingrays, bizarre looking squid, 
irridescent cuttlefish, schools of barracuda, other large fish 
(tuna?), moray eel, entertaining clownfish guarding anemonies, and 
scores of other colorful tropical fishes, some literally swarming 
around us (we guessed others had been feeding them). The corals were 
somewhat less spectacular, particularly the more shallow ones which 
seemed to have suffered a bit of blight, perhaps due to El Nino 
effects.

We left the island on Sunday, parting ways with Matt (he's headed 
north to Thailand, sort of backtracking Chris' and my route across 
Asia), the rest of us taking a ferry on to Singapore, where Jen lives. 
Rich and Sid have returned to Houston and I'm relaxing here for a few 
days before my last overseas stop of the trip - Bali, Indonesia, where 
I will be spending a couple of weeks prior to my flight back to the US 
on July 26. It's been an amazing year for me and, while I hate for it 
to end, I am definitely looking forward to seeing family and friends 
again soon.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of Than's leg of the EarthTrip 
Travel Extravaganza!

Than Putzig