I'm sorry I did't post yesterday -- it only means I'm having a great time!
I left off with my airline drama, which I haven't thought about until I had to pack up my stuff and check out of the Reef Shark room at Scuba Junkies Backpackers. I had the only single with a queen sized bed and in-room bathroom. My friends think I'm the high roller for spending 55RM (about $16) for a spacious room, instead of the dark, cramped, smells-like-boys'-socks dorm room. It's all relative, right!?
Wednesday night, I wound up eating alone in the Scuba Junkies bar -- Vegetables with Malay BBQ sauce. I am craving fresh veggies. I would love a big spinach salad with crumbled bleu cheese and bacon bits right now. Tired, I went to bed pretty early because we were to meet at the dive shop at 8am for 3 dives in Kapelai and Mabul!
I had breakfast with two Danish boys, Anders and Jacob. Very nice, very polite, kind of reserved. They are starting their Advanced Open Water course. Geez, it seems like such a long time ago that I visited Laura Fosco in Honduras to get my AOW.
I met up with Mel and Flo, a Canadian and Frechman who were to be our Dive Masters for the day. I got paired up with another Danish guy, Martin, who is traveling alone for several months. He had been diving here for a while, so he was a great buddy to have. Our entire group was fairly advanced, evidenced by the fact that we were all able to make it to the max dive time on every single dive. On our boat, we had a Thai girl and white guy couple who are DMs in Koh Tao (Thailand). They did their own thing on all the dives. There are alot of Germans here -- three snorkelers, and several divers who did not arrive together. You know I love the Germans! They are friendly, fun, well-traveled and speak English very well which makes it easier for me. Perhaps I will learn some German someday...
So the dives... Kapelai and Mabul have many artificial reefs. What the locals do is sink houses, boats and metal construction material in the water, and over time, the fish and other living organisms make it their home. Mabul and Kapelai are known for "muck diving" with alot of smaller "macro" organisms -- shrimps, nudie branches (ocean snails), sea horses. We also saw tons of typical reef fish (angel fish, box fish, etc.), a lion fish, crocodile fish, barracuda and a turtle. I got so excited when I took my first video of a turtle gliding by slowly... Well, the next day, I got to see tons more and wound up deleting the first one. Martin is so good at finding the little stuff. He keeps motioning to me, "come look" but he points and I have no idea where he is pointing to. It didn't help that I had a very foggy rental mask, because I couldn't find mine when I was frantically packing for the trip. No matter how many times I cleared my mask, I always had water in the nose area and it would fog up again a few minutes later.
The waters are very calm, not much waves to worry about on the surface (which makes some divers sick before they go down) nor strong currents below. After three dives in super warm water (30 degrees Celsius, whatever that is in Fahrenheit) at about 25-30 meters (about 90 feet, I think), I was exhausted and hungry.
When we got back to Semporna, our dive group got together to log our dive books at 6:15pm. We had so much wildlife to write about in our books, I ran out of space! Martin and I went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, during which we talked about anything and everything. Martin is a carpenter from Copenhagen, and he is traveling for about 3 months through Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. He started out volunteering at an Orang Utan sanctuary in Kalimantan (the Indonesian side of Borneo) and wound through the island to Semporna. He wasn't sure of his itinerary from Semporna but has some friends to meet up with in the Philippines to do some more volunteer work with orphans (many of them victims of violence and/or sexual abuse). He is such a good diver that Mel, our DM, asked him if he wants to stay and be a trainee. He's make a great DM with his great buoyancy control and interest in finding the little things for fun divers like me. He had already dived Sipadan, so I wasn't going to have him as my buddy the next day (booo), but that's just an opportunity for me to make another friend.
asami
