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Saz and Dave's travels
After a great night's sleep, we got up fairly early as we had decided to walk to monkey beach today, about 1.5 hrs walk away. Monkey beach is the next one along from Penuba bay (where we went yesterday) so we decided to grab breakfast at Penuba then carry on to monkey beach. The path after Penuba started out ok but then as it led us higher up and deeper into the jungle there were points where we really had to look for it and make sure we were going the right way. I had a bit of a nervous feeling that I couldn't quite put my finger on as we walked through the jungle, probably because it felt so remote and the fact we hadn't encountered anyone else on the way. This feeling was made worse when we passed some monkeys making some really odd noises. Not too sure whether monkeys are actually friendly towards people or not I decided to up the pace a bit and practically ran the rest of the way to the end of the path!
When the path finished we walked past a group of locals and then beheld the most fantastic view. Monkey beach is huge with red coloured sand and wonderfully clear water with no rocks. The sky was blue and the sun shining and what's more we had the beach practically to ourselves apart from one or two locals. When we got in the sea it was lovely and cool and clear. Perfect!
We spent the next few hours chilling here. However stupidly we had only brought one big bottle of water out today which we finished fairly quickly after the hot, sweaty walk here, leding us both to develop a bit of a headache. At about 4pm all the locals left on a small boat that did various trips and we hoped they might offer us a lift back but we had no such luck!
Feeling surprisingly tired we put on our shoes to set off on the trek back. After about 25 minutes of fairly fast paced walking and various wrong turns and loads of scratches we suddenley came face to face with a family of 3 monkeys. The female with baby on back had just crossed the path to the right and the larger male crossed in front of us. I was feeling pretty scared and asked Dave "What do we do?". Dave calmly said "just walk past, they will be more scared of you than you are of them!" Famous last words! Just after I had walked past, the monkeys got a bit agitated and the male made a wierd growling noise and started to run at Dave! I was terrified at this point and just ran hoping Dave and not the monkey were following. Luckily the monkey left us alone when it saw we weren't going to threaten its family but I still kept on running for the next 10 minutes!
We walked the rest of the way to Penuba pretty briskly just praying we wouldn't come across any more monkeys! Eventually we arrived safely back in Penuba bay looking incredibly sweaty! We walked the remaining 10 minutes back to Air Batong where we got a very welcome coke and a cold shower!
For our last night on Pulau Tioman we ate at our place again getting a wonderful piece of barbequed barracuda, chips, salad, rice and curry. After tea we went for tea and ice cream at another restaurant. Here we were disappointed as all the tables were full, however a very friendly couple from Singapore let us sit with them. This couple (late 40's) were a good laugh and we chatted with them for quite a while, gleaning tips for when we go tomorrow!
When we got back to the room we had to pack as our boat leaves at 7:30am tomorrow morning for Mersing where we will get a bus to Sinapore.
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