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Published: September 3rd 2011
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Up for banana and honey pancakes for breakfast on the beach with Katerine and Rasmus before heading to Temple of the Sea with Mee, our divemaster. The dive was very nice, full of bamboo sharks, hawksbill turtle and blue spotted stingrays. Apparently the diving at Temple had been out of this world for the previous 2 days so, inevitably, there were too many divers out there and, whilst it was obviously a good dive to do with plenty to see, it wasn't the extraordinary one that others had been lucky to have experienced in the days before.
Nevermind, you can't command nature to be there for you. So back ashore for and hour and a half, finding out that it was one of the divemasters 30th birthday that day and he was having a superhero party that night. We said we'd come along but had no clue about a costume. With our surface interval completed, I went diving out to Terumbu 3 whilst still not feeling particularly great I must admit, and "Eli" stayed behind with tea and her Kindle and her new nickname given to her by Mee.
This one was a damn good dive. Large rocks all
piled up and around one another with plenty of small tunnels to swim through. At the exit to one of these such tunnels was a rock that had a concave base so, as all us divers had been swimming under it for all these years, there was an air gap 15 metres below the surface that engulfed most of my hand before I touched the rock above. It may be a very weird thing to notice in the midst of all that tropical reef marine life but it's not every day you get a fairly substantial quantity of air 15 metres below the surface of the sea. Or maybe you do and I just haven't done enough diving yet?
During the dive, unicorn fish, yellow boxfish, star pufferfish, shedloads of normal tropical fish, another hawsbill turtle on the hunt for some food in the rocks and bumphead parrotfish were smashing their way through the coral. Plenty to see and do on that dive.
Still, boat back. Dive centre. Kit off. Re-setup kit on a new tank. Tea. Banana. 100+. Briefing and off diving again, this time to Shark Point.
And yes, we DID see sharks. Black tip
reef sharks, to be specific, circling around on the reef. It's always a great diving moment to see a shark silhouette gliding past before it emerges into the clearer, closer waters. A great way to end the diving for the holiday. That was Mabul, Sipadan and the Perhentian Islands. Malaysia has some damn fine diving spots. Better than my one Egypt experience thus far I have to admit.
So, diving done and back to the dive centre, de-briefings sorted and the staff were busying themselves with making their costumes. We paid for the dives and for the room all in one package and got free t-shirts out of it before heading back to the furnace.
We ate at the accommodation restaurant again and watched The Next Three Days on the screen as we did - terrible film. She had come up with a scuba themed superhero - "Super Buoyant!", as she has severe buoyancy problems concerning her chest. I decided to go as an Evil (Rocket) Scientist (easy to do really) and built myself a mini rocket out of a bottle, couple of bobbles, a hairclip and a sheet of paper: Neil Buchanan's got nothing on me!
We headed out to the bars on the beach and ran into Suzanne again so decided to join her at the bar she was at since the staff hadn't gotten to the out of their restaurant yet. We sat on the beach with drinks, watching the transvestite fire-poi dancers and being introduced to her new friends - a lawyer couple from New Zealand, Hamish and Julie - as Stephanie had left that morning.
The night was going well, drinking incredibly dodgy "Orang-Utan" liquor and having to endure a very sitcom stereotypical "Brit abroad" intermittently taking over the DJs microphone. So, before we knew it, 1am had been and gone and 2am was dangerously close to being the next hour that passed us by. The superhero party on the beach at the next door was in full swing but, since we were up at 6:30 am for the first boats back to the mainland, we decided we had to give it a miss in the end. Super-buoyant and the Evil Rocket Scientist would have to fight again another day.
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