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Just got back from 3 days at sea and I do look a bit like a drunk trying to walk straight! Can’t seem to find my land legs and it’s making me laugh out loud which makes me look even more so drunk ! ???
I won’t bore you with a dive by dive account of the trip but suffice to say it was BRILLIANT ??. In a nutshell it was: Dive - Eat - Chill/Sleep/Sunbathe - Repeat! And this was 4 times per day so now I’m exhausted! (definitely going to write to my boss for an extension on the trip so I can relax a bit as well Lol)?
Straight off, about 10 mins into the boat trip I spotted a pod of dolphins ? (& the dive shop said it wasn’t possible to see them!! Ahahahahaha, just stick with me! ?).
The dives were really good, plenty of coral, some of it dead (global warming!) but some of it just like in the David Attenborough “blue planet” programmes - alive and colorful, wavering in the currents or crackling around the many fish that inhabit the corals. The fish were in their abundance: from small shoals of
electric blue and fluorescent yellow fish ? to huge Napoleon Wrasse, Batfish, Titan Trigerfish (they have a nasty bite of you get too close to their territory), huge Porcupine and Boxfish and then many other medium sized fish.
Of course I also saw reef sharks ? but these guys are so uninteresting after the Fiji shark dive I did at Christmas. These ones were only 2metres long- meh! Also on the trip and very nice to get close to and follow, were turtles ? (almost every dive!!!).
Drift diving got a bit hair raising at times as the currents really were strong. If anyone has watched the film “Finding Nemo”, I literally felt like the turtles in the film that catch that east Australian current and just cruise along it!
The crew on the boat were good fun - we joked a lot ? The other divers were all lone travelers like me so we made a good bunch.
The last day was definitely the highlight ... 45 minutes into the last dive, out of the blue, with beauty, grace and tranquility appeared a huge manta ray. Oh my god, at first I was in awe...if it wasn’t for the
regulator in my mouth, I would have had my mouth wide open! Mantas are just mesmerizing, how they glide so elegantly through the water, mouths open collecting plankton and filtering the water back out through their gills on the underside of their belly. Sorry waking if which, did you know that every Manta has a “fingerprint”, the spots on the underside of their belly and you can send photos to manta watch, the manta conservation, and if it’s one that’s not yet been identified, you get to name it! Yay, let’s hope the one I saw is a new one!
We watched the manta gliding around us for a good 15-20mins and a 2nd one even appeared!!! It really was magical. Whilst watching the Mantas, one of them decided to come over my way. I kid you not, he was centimeters if not millimeter above me, so much so, my dive master signals to me to get low. How much lower did he think I could get when I was already literally flat on the sea bed?! ???
Also one of the highlights of the trip, was the trek to find Komodo dragons! Komodo’s are the largest, heaviest lizard
in the world and one venomous bite can kill you! So naturally, I got up close and personal ?? yeah yeah, you only live once! Ahahahahaha ?
We trekked around the Komodo National Park, snapping photos of not only Komodo’s but also their food ... deers, wild pigs, Buffalo! ? We didn’t witness a killing but that would have been pretty cool...nature at its very best ? The closest we got to seeing them eat, was the piece of flesh still hanging out of its mouth (ahhhh sorry, not sorry if you’re squeamish ?).
After the trip, I had a bit of time to relax in Labuan Bajo, a dusty, Rastafarian-type, shack-filled, fishing town. It’s the type of place where your feet are never clean because there’s just so much dust on the roads. The Main Street is just full of dive shops and restaurants. Love it! ?
Ps. No diving pictures as I can’t seem to upload them from my GoPro camera to my iPhone! ???
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