Hello again...well we have finally swapped deodorant for insect repellent and Emma is officially the 2007 International Bug Killing champion! We have a hectic couple of weeks. From Singapore we headed to Penisular Malaysia, spent 5 hours in the bus depot at Johor Bharu (lovely place!!!) and headed out to Tioman (Tioman is named after a bird, like the minor bird) Island on the East Coast. After a white knucle speed boat ride that took 1.5hrs we arrived at Salang on the north of the island. We then spent the next 5 days lying in the sun, snorkelling (amazing corals and fishes) and if we felt like we needed to move a bit, the odd bit of swimming. The island is pretty remote and quiet, we had some amazing weather including some fantastic thunder storms and some huge rain showers. Ramadam started when we were there and runs until the middle of October (14th or 12th I think) so locals could not eat after 7am (before sunrise) until 7.04pm. Instead they eat at 7.04 pm and then have 2 more meals throughout the night, last one is usually about 3-4am. The fasting is a demonstration of their commitment, respect and goodness and is really quite a personal thing. We spoke to a few people who were doing this and each had a different perspective. There were a couple of restaurants open but lying around all day you dont get too hungry! BIG NEWS we have given up drinking for a month!!! I think we may have been affected by all these time zone switches! We are now in our 17th day, feel no different (apart from no more all day hangovers!). It was really hard to start with, everywhere we went there was ice cold cans of Tiger beer...mmmm beer...Homer lurrrves the beer....Doh!...luckily as a majority of restaurants are Muslim they dont serve alcohol so instead of a bottle of red we've been having a bottol of the good ol' water!!! We decided to move around the island after 5 days and went to the really quite part of Air Butang (ABC). We had such a nice time, a beach hut about 5 meters from the sea, plenty of diving and great people. Whilst we were there we were involved in an international clean up day for Project Aware (check out those t-shirts!), we did 4 dives over 2 days and collected giant star fish called Crown of Thorns (cause thats what they look like!). These little critters eat the coral at such a rate and are responsible for killing huge amounts of coral in Australia and Asia. Over 2 days 3 boats collected over 1100 of them. To kill them you can either inject them with some icky poison (not in the budget) or bury then in a big sand hole (much better idea). The COT's have loads of spikes and you have to be really careful you dont get stung by them. We both did of course but have lived to tell the tale! Other than that we lounged around on our lazy arses for a few days and after a couple of weeks of sea and sand we headed to Kuala Lumpur...what a change take me bake to Tioman....