Malaysia: Peninsula and Borneo - July 2006
Dear English-speaking readers, this page is an automatic translation made from a post originally written in French. My apologies for any strange sentences and funny mistakes that may have been generated during the process. If you are reading French, click on the French flag below to access the original and correct text:
Français The Tioman jungle, in the southeast of Peninsular Malaysia, is a protected natural park. Dense, almost impenetrable, it covers most of the island.
Let's hope that the airport opened by the hotel company Berjaya and the status of "duty free" zone recently granted to Tioman will not upset the situation too much... But I am not very optimistic about this.
This Friday, I decide to do as the Muslims do and to rest. After three days of non-stop diving, I want to dry off a bit!
So I rent a bike to go to the village of Tekek, where live most of the real islanders, the families of fishermen and small merchants in majority.
To leave "my" beach, we have to cross a mini hill via a small staircase. Carrying the bike over these few steps is not a big effort, but it is enough to make me swim. Malaysia, the country where you never get dry...
😂
Under the cover of the trees that shade the path at this place, marauding monkeys observe me approaching. Slowly I put down the bike to take out the camera.
But they are wary and return illico to hide in the branches.
The day of my arrival in Tioman, I was amazed by my encounter, on the way to the beach, with two huge monitor lizards. When I say huge, I am not exaggerating: those of Perhentian Kecil are small lizards of nothing at all, compared to these mastodons with the appearance of crocodiles which fled in front of me with a surprising agility for their clumsy gait of antediluvian batrachians.
I didn't have time to take pictures of them. But the monkeys, once perched on their branches, are less shy, and I managed to take some pictures.
