Rawa, 2007

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We actually wrote a series of posts 11 years ago during our visit to Rawa Island in 2007, but all but two (here and here) of those posts were lost when I migrated host servers around 2009-ish.

Over the last ten years, we’ve been oscillating back and forth about checking out a Malaysian beach resort again after our Rawa Island 2007 trip. There are some really stunning beaches on the eastern coast of Malaysia. Not quite the Maldives of course, but for South-East Asian standards, they’re pretty good. Aside from the popular large-scale type ones like Redang Island, there are also somewhat less accessible ones like the Perhentian Islands. Rawa Island is actually fairly accessible: you catch a bus from Singapore to Mersing jetty, then hop onto the resort-arranged speed boat for the short 30 hop over.

Rawa is also a little different from the other stunning beach resorts: it’s very private – there are just two resorts on the island, and both share a stunning white sand stretch of beach. The island itself isn’t very big: you could easily walk from one end of the beach to the other in under ten minutes – and you pretty much have to make up your own activities on the island by either swimming, trekking, snorkeling, or water sports. There are also no restaurants on the island, apart from the one that’s in the resort – so you really don’t have options for dinning: you’ll have to pay the half or full-board rates charged. The island since 2007 also saw some pretty scary reports of violence, including an incident where foreigners and a royal entourage got into blows, and one where a northern European model’s body got washed up onto the beach.

Pictures and recollection comments of our 3 day visit in 4-6 Sep 2007:

The ferry comes by the island’s jetty every few hours. Everything on the island needs to be brought in and out as needed.
You get what you pay for – crystal clear waters, and shallow enough near the beach for kids too – still under adult supervision of course.
Not photoshopped. The fish life congregate around the jetty area, likely because they have been conditioned to expect food from guests around it.
The restaurant sits in the center of the beach, with tall palm trees providing welcome shade.
The island’s one and only restaurant. You’ll have to eat what they feed you, though unlike Telunas, you get more variety typical of buffet-styled spreads.
Fish-feeding is a favorite guest activity. The water is less than a foot deep near the jetty.
Hungry critters!
The wife snorkeling. As she remembers it though, most of the corals around the shore area were dead, but one can still get very pretty views of the life under the water surface.
We were pretty much nearly the only visitors to the island during our Sep 2007 stay. There were a couple of ang mo guests staying at Alang’s Rawa – the other resort on the island that offers more basic/rustic accommodation types – and that’s it.
The jetty provides a vantage point to view sunsets.
The Konica-Minolta 5D – my go-to DSLR during those couple of years.
Couple-only visit, before the kids came along haha.

This was Ling’s second trip to Rawa, and she’s been really wanting to go back for a third visit. There’s no denying that the beach is really clean – I reckon our kids will love it – and the water near the shoreline crystal clear. A check on the island’s accommodation rates reveal though that prices have gone up substantially since our visit, so much so that I don’t particularly find them competitive against say just paying that sum more and doing Maldives altogether.

The four posts in this series:

  1. Copenhagen, Dec 2004
  2. South Korea, Dec 2006
  3. Rawa Island, Sep 2007
  4. Medang Island, Jun 2007