Soloing in ‘Bali Hai’

It was to be a journey back in time as the small plane lifted off from Singapore for the 50-minute flight to Tioman Island, a dot in the South China Sea off the east coast of Malaysia. The glittering crowns of Singapore’s ultramodern skyscrapers slipped away into a blurred mirage, and within minutes we were flying over the rubber plantations of the southern Malay peninsula. Just beyond the horizon was Tioman, reputedly so beautiful that it was the model for Bali Hai in “South Pacific.”

I was on a business trip to Singapore, and after a week of meeting-packed days in stuffy offices, I had managed to free three days for a badly needed time out. I chose Tioman based on its reputation as “still unspoiled,” even though my timing was risky: It was February, the end of the monsoon season, which starts in November.

In my state of eager expectation, I marveled at everything I could see from the plane, even the rubber plantations. From the ground, rubber trees in their ordered rows look spindly, sparse and unremarkable. From the air, the starburst clusters of their palm-like tops were as closely woven as an intricate carpet. In between, languorous rivers looking like loops of polished metal, their surfaces colored by sediments from the plantations, wound around shallow hills to gray sand beaches.

Ahead, lying on the curve of the Earth, a flotilla of islands, some no more than lumps of gray-green foliage, spread out toward the horizon. I had a sudden vision of some geologic pastry chef running mad, his pastry horn full of molten rock, squirting zigzags, squiggles and blobs of islands whose bizarre forms quickly hardened as they came into contact with the sea.

Forty minutes after takeoff, the shadowed shape of Tioman Island broke the horizon. Sharp peaks covered by dense jungle descended in serried layers to white coral beaches and turquoise waters. Beneath the undulating ocean swells, the outline of Tioman’s coral reef could just be seen. The island’s signature twin peaks beckoned to us, as they have to voyagers for centuries. In my head I could hear Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Bali Hai” and the lilting refrain: “Here am I, your special island, come to me, come to me.” By the time we banked for landing at the tiny airport, I thought I could see Bloody Mary bringing Lt. Cable ashore to meet her daughter and seal their destinies.

Pulau Tioman, as the island is known in Malay, is home to barely 200 people. In peak season they often are outnumbered by vacationers--Malaysians, Singaporeans and Australians.

As in many seaside destinations, pollution is a fact of life on Tioman and can be a problem. The coral in front of the hotel had seen far better days, and I wondered at times about the canal from the interior of the island that emptied onto the hotel’s beach. In places like Monkey Bay, which is more or less protected as a government-designated underwater preserve, the coral reef was still a living presence.

But all in all, Tioman lived up to my expectations. Even the monsoon pattern brought no more than an occasional shower.

*

I stayed at the Best Western Berjaya Tioman Beach Resort--the only real hotel on the island. It also has the only Western-style restaurant, though I preferred the Malay menu standby, satay (marinated grilled meat) with fruit and rice. Along with the restaurant, cafes and snack bars, the Berjaya has several bars serving alcohol. (Tioman is part of Malaysia, a Muslim country, and alcohol is supposed to be served only to non-Muslims.)

I could have availed myself of the resort’s tennis courts and 18-hole golf course, but chose to indulge in snorkeling and pool lounging. Scuba was available, and the hotel has a small sandy beach for ocean dipping; most of the beaches on this volcanic island are fairly rocky.

There is no town to speak of on Tioman; the largest village, at the little airport, has a bank, a post office and a couple of stores selling necessities such as flashlight batteries and aspirin.

Tioman is a sleepy place. Not much happens. The sea washes over the coral reef, and the palms and tamarisks stir gently in the breeze. Even the small water snake I noticed in a jungle stream not far from my hotel seemed to be taking a nap in the tropical afternoon heat.

Time has little value on Tioman Island. During monsoon season, when each day’s weather is a question mark, showers of rain, stray patches of sun and shifting patterns of cloud may be the only indications of the passage of the hours.

One afternoon I walked through a village so quiet that my attention was grabbed by two schoolgirls playing a board game in a shady corner. Water taxis sat motionless at anchor in the canal that functions as the island’s main anchorage. A sign on the local grammar school read, “My school is my castle,” and certainly Tioman is remote enough to be anyone’s idea of a South Seas castle, even one as enchanted as Bali Hai.

Beyond the village, which was decorated for the upcoming Chinese New Year with red and pink fans, crepe paper and firecrackers, the jungle spread toward the shore. Enormous black and yellow butterflies fed on the nectar of coral flowers. Green parakeets and myna birds with sleek black backs and yellow bills fluttered between the trees, while near the hotel compound exotic crop-tailed cats strutted like feline monarchs of the jungle, looking for a careless lizard. Huge jungle spiders spun webs as big as fishing nets between the trees, sunlight glinting off the strands like warning lights.

There is only one paved road on Tioman; it runs roughly two miles south from the airport down the western side of the island, ending just beyond the Berjaya resort. Cars are a rarity; motor scooters and bicycles are the rides of choice, and travel between settlements is mostly by boat.

My first morning I set out in a local boat with snorkeling gear and a small group of fellow underwater enthusiasts--mostly from California and New Zealand--to go diving at Monkey Bay. The sky was clear, with the baking blue warmth of summer. As I slipped over the side into the turquoise water of the reef, the sea came alive with fish. An aquatic welcoming committee swirled in the shifting currents around me. Electric-blue striped needle-nosed racers darted past parrotfish patterned in pink, green and turquoise. Black, silver and gold angelfish floated above a skittish school of smaller fish colored mustard, blue and green. On the reef, sea cucumbers hid among brain coral, and spiny black urchins with electric blue eyes and pursed coral mouths waved their deadly black needles in the slow surge of the sea.

It was like diving into liquid jade, the water spangled by flashing fins in confetti colors, clouds of pale silver fish floating motionless over even paler coral sand. Waving pink anemones moved with the ocean currents, and the tiny cobalt racer fish seemed to be surf-riding. It was as if the island jungle had slipped from the high peaks down to the ocean floor, a jungle of exotic, sinuous, brilliantly colored shapes moving in a forest of coral and seaweed.

On the boat ride back to the dock, small fishing villages slid by, stilted out over the water, and blue wooden fishing boats putt-putted off toward the horizon, leaving a faint wake of foam lace behind them.

One afternoon I was walking along the margin of low tide when I spotted a shard of blue-and-white porcelain among the white coral detritus and pieces of broken blue shells. Suddenly I was an archeologist, a scavenger, a picker-up of trifles tossed by that incessantly active junkman, the sea.

*

Two thousand years ago, Arab traders had used the island, rich in fresh water, as a stopping place. Two hundred years ago, British ships that traded with China plied the Malayan coasts, using cargo loads of precious blue-and-white Chinese porcelain as ballast for the voyage home. I had found shards as far as the beaches of Hawaii, and here on Tioman, pieces of the same vast marine jigsaw puzzle mingled with broken branches of coral, leaves washed down by jungle streams, warped bits of driftwood, mango-shaped seed pods, chunks of striated red-and-white sandstone, scallops and whorls and snail shells, mother-of-pearl, and seed pods like tiny pink and green brushes.

Among the flotsam, there was a pale turquoise handblown glass fishing weight with rounded ends covered with miniature limpets. Where had these things come from, and on how long and how distant a voyage? The pieces of smooth sandstone particularly fascinated me. Tioman is a volcanic island, so how had these pieces of ocean floor gotten here? I couldn’t read the shards of blue-and-white porcelain with Chinese--or were they Japanese?--characters written on them. What message might have been in those dashing black calligraphic lines of imperial dynasties long since vanished?

By Day 3, my life on Tioman Island had begun to take on the slow rhythms of the ocean and the timeless inevitability of waves curling up on coral sands. In the late afternoon, bouncing along on a rented bicycle through the villages of Tekek and Ayer Batang, I came upon men playing soccer in the middle of the only road. Bicyclers had to slow and move between them. In this “commuter jam,” I became aware of the smoke from cooking fires and hastened “home” myself under a swiftly darkening sky.

As I was staying on the western side of the island, sunrise was usually a hazy affair of gradually lightening sky just beyond a bank of lowering gray clouds. But there were sunsets of pearl. After my bike ride, back on the beach, the tide had withdrawn itself 50 yards or more from the high water mark, uncovering a wavy pattern drawn in silver water and silver sand. Mounds of jungle debris and clumps of coral littered the tidal margins, and visitors picked through the shallows in the silver twilight. In the tops of the coconut palms, birds screeched at each other as they secured their perches for the night. From the hotel restaurant, the smells of grilling satay and freshly cut papaya wafted out onto the breeze.

“Bali Hai may call you any night, any day. . . .” I was glad that I had answered.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Tioman Tidings

Getting there: Singapore Airlines’ direct flights from LAX to Singapore start at $1,550 round trip; United Airlines’ round-trip fare starts at $1,238. It’s another $133 round trip to Tioman Island on Singapore’s Silkair line.

Where to stay: The only Western-style hotel is the 376-room Best Western Berjaya Tioman Beach Resort; telephone 011-60-9-419-1000, fax 011-60-9-419-1718, reservations (800) 528-1234. Rooms with ocean view start at $113 per night; garden view, $90. The resort has four restaurants and bars, an 18-hole golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools, snorkeling and scuba rentals.

Other accommodations on Tioman tend toward the severely basic: cabins--called “chalets”--with few amenities.

For more information: Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board, 818 W. 7th St., Los Angeles, CA 90017-3432; tel. (800) 336-6842, fax (213) 689-1530, Internet https://www.tourismmalaysia.com.