Back from Tioman Island (aka Paradise)

Wow!! I begged for feedback and got all kinds of it!! Mostly everyone said to lay off the grapes. Thanks guys. No grapes today, just weird shaped fishy tasting chewy things that once roamed the seas and now are roaming angrily in my stomache. It's weird eating fish and filshlike substances again...the karma is kind of heavy for me but damn it tastes really good!

"What took you so long to get here"? the groom said, smiling, as if I were one of the groomsman and had been holding up the wedding. We were shaking hands warmly as I congratulated him while he pointed out his new wife. It was the first time we had met. November is the end of tourist season here on Tioman Island and as everything shuts down for the monsoons, the tourist crowd was thinning rapidly. There was an excited buzz today that a wedding was happening and we were all invited. We, meaning anyone who happened to still be on the island. People I had never seen before would come up to me on the path (there are no streets in Salang, just paths that skirt the beach and hillside) and ask "Are you going to the wedding tonight"? Everyone who is anyone (actually everyone) was going and I wasn't going to miss the local style party.
It was 9:00pm and we followed the music and fireworks (yes more fireworks, Malaysians love them. Eating breakfast earlier that day a massive explosion went off 20 feet from my table...a group of old women wrapped in chadors surrounded by the sulpherous smoke sitting motionlessly as if nothing happened and me with a cup of tea in my lap). Anyway, along the muddy hillside was a group of huts slapped together for a large gathering, lights strung up festively and a palm grass stage where a local group was singing Malaysian pop tunes. Smoke hung in the humid night and about a hundred people were sitting around kind of dazed listening to the over-amped music. I walked over to the punch, looked around then asked someone where the cups were. The guy looked at me pitifully, like I had some learning disability and grabbed a half-full glass on the table, dumped it out and handed it to me. Trying to casually wipe the rim in the darkness I filled up the glass with a kool-aid red liquid. "Color right, flavor wrong", as some sweet but odd taste introduced itself to my tongue. I left the glass half full for the next guy. I had walked up the path with some friends I'd met earlier. Germans, Swedish, Swiss, and me the American, our group of 10 or so stuck out a bit as we hovered on the perimeter regressing to Jr. High status once again. I noticed one older man sitting next to the drummer waving for us to get up and dance. At the moment there was no one on flattened muddy "dance floor". So with some anxiety, and feeling that freedom you get when far from home, Heinrich my dive partner from earlier in the day, and I grabbed as many people as would dance. It was awkward at first. I was thinking that here was this Malaysian band, surrounded by Malaysians old and young and the only ones dancing were these crazy white tourists. But then I looked at their faces and apparently our spasmotic thrashing was big entertainment because they were laughing and taking videos. The old guy got off the stage and joined us and eventually the the place was jumping with dancers. Our work here was done. Dripping with sweat and smiling from ear to sunburned ear I went back down to chat with the groom. He was 33 and concerned about getting such a late start. But he also seemed ready and we joked about life as he knows it being all over. He and his family was sad for me not having a wife and kids, but at that moment I felt so right in the world...standing in a hot jungle, getting bit by mosquitoes, surrounded by people who were loving life and looking at a crescent moon through the fronds of a palm tree.
Tioman Island is one of those places that tourist brocures can't over inflate. The people, the water, the beaches and the jungle make it magic. Mokeys in the trees and 6 foot monitor lizards in the open sewer called a river remind me that I'm far from home. The fruit bats with their 3-4 foot wing spans, screeching up in the mango trees as the sun sets give it a mysterious and adventurous flare. I hated to leave it, but for some strange reason felt the pull of my bicycle. I guess the blisters on my ass had fully healed.