In May 2009, I sat in in my empty 14th floor glass-windowed office in London for the last time. As I watched a  cold grey drizzle fall over Canary Wharf, I daydreamed of my new adventure about to start. I was moving back to Malaysia to join my father in building and opening a paradise island resort. I imagined warm, tropical days of swanning around barefoot in a sarong under the shade of coconut trees, just like one would find in images in Condé Nast Traveller. 

Fast forward to February 2022 as we hurtle towards Batu Batu's 10th birthday, I can safely say that the reality could not have been more different. The journey has been far more textured, far more challenging but also far more rewarding than I could ever have imagined.

When we opened to friends on 1st April 2012 , we had 30 staff members. At that time, we had no jetty so guests climbed out of the boat and into the water to wade to the beach (bags on heads). Some of our “guinea pig” guests came with their DIY kits in their bags to help us finish the resort. My husband’s MBA class filled all 22 villas for the first time. We sold the rooms with / without hot water, with / without curtains at prices graded by villa completion. We worked 7 days a week, on-call 24 hours a day for almost two years such that we never knew what day of the week it was.  We had arrived at opening with a toddler in tow and left with two (in the 2nd year of operations my daughter was born and I would feed her in meetings with the team). In March 2020 pre-COVID, we were 90 strong.  Looking back over our first decade, I think we can be proud of our progress.

Thankfully, life is calmer these days. Just about calm enough for me to sit and reflect on precious lessons learnt during those exciting times. Living with nature in the first two years, my husband Laurent and I saw early on that human impacts on the planet are very real. During our soft opening when a sewage pipe polluted one of our wells and our guests had toilet water coming out of their taps (we learnt a thing or two about service recovery then), we understood how our waste has a direct impact on quality of life and nature. We also saw coral reefs bleach overnight, black oil spills and dead adult turtles (IUCN classified as endangered) wash up on our beaches struck by boats or having ingested plastic. Our beach bar had to be urgently dismantled when the island's Long Beach eroded at 2 metres a day in 2019.  These personal experiences have run parallel to the global phenomena of floods, hurricanes and forest fires flashing increasingly frequently across the news headlines.

The realisation of the consequences of our actions on nature gave us the impetus to focus on lessening our impacts on Mother Earth. Our mantra to start with was to "tread lightly", something which is not at all easy to do and we continue to try hard to move in the right direction. As a tourism business, we started looking at goals that went beyond the traditional economic bottom line. Could we not only lessen our negative impacts but try to leave the place better off than when we started?

Beginning with our environment, we set up an internal conservation department shortly after opening which in 2019 became Tengah Island Conservation (TIC), an independent non-profit biodiversity management organisation registered in Malaysia. You can view TIC's latest newsletter here, and read about the wonderful projects the team implement. In 2019, TIC and  Batu Batu won the WTM World Responsible Tourism Silver Award for the category Best for Wildlife and Nature Conservation (of which we are immensely proud).

In moving towards actively supporting biodiversity and local communities, we made some wonderful new friends who have helped us along the journey. We now work hand-in-hand with local government agencies and other local stakeholders as a founding member of Sustainable Travel Mersing, a multi-stakeholder initiative to have the Mersing District certified as a sustainable tourism destination. We turned a piece of hard-soiled land at the back-of-house into a permaculture garden with the help of our friends from FOLO (Feed Our Loved Ones). We created KakakTua, our guesthouse and community space in Mersing and partnered with Think City Johor, Mersing District Council and University Malaysia Terengganu to map out Mersing Town Centre and understand the community's history and culture a little better. We continue to work with our friends at The Long Run - an incredibly impressive, supportive conglomerate of like-minded properties that truly and authentically think and act as industry to show we can make a positive difference. Most recently we connected with like-minded organisations within Malaysia to create a sustainable tourism network, brainstorming on how we can learn from each other and spread this brand of tourism for good. In this journey, support from friends old and new have been key and the UN SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals is undoubtedly one of my favourites (I believe one of the unsung heroes of the 17).

In a nutshell, the past decade has taught me that there is so much more to running a tourist business than making guests happy. Of course, this remains a top priority and as many of you know, we have an incredible and warm staff team who excel at just this. We hope to take this a step further in 2022. Besides emerging from two years of pandemic pain (all fingers and toes crossed) we want to increasingly involve our team in our journey of testing out, trying to creating and spreading regenerative tourism. We got started in January with a brainstorming session which you can read more about here.

Do keep following us to find out how we do as we embark on the year ahead. Hopefully you can get out to visit us on our island paradise and just one small request, as tourism re-opens and holidaying restarts en-masse, please do think about whether you leave the place you visit better or worse off than if you hadn't visited at all.

Stay well and wishing you all a wonderful year of the Tiger ahead.

Cher

Co-founder, Batu Batu Tengah Island & Tengah Island Conservation