Batu Batu

Pulau Tengah is the only inhabited island in Malaysia's Sultan Iskandar Marine Park, reached by a 20-minute speedboat from Mersing. Twenty-two stilted villas, built from local timber by Malay craftsmen, run along the shoreline and into the rainforest behind. Each has a four-poster bed, rainfall shower and freestanding bathtub on a private deck. Before the resort opened in 2012, the island was a UNHCR transit camp: around 120,000 Vietnamese boat people sheltered here in the late 1970s and 1980s, and some now return as guests.

The resort founded Tengah Island Conservation in 2015, now an independent NGO that has released over 32,000 turtle hatchlings and surveys nearly 30 square kilometres of reef. The resort's own waters are a no-take zone, and turtles have returned to nest on the beach. Guests can tour the hatchery, help carry hatchlings to the waterline, or dive 15 reef sites with the on-site PADI centre among reef sharks, moray eels and the occasional dugong. The restaurant sits between two granite boulders, batu in Malay, the origin of the resort's name, with a daily changing menu from the island's kitchen garden.