Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysian Borneo - April 20th

Kinabalu is pronounced like Hullabaloo. And to be honest, though I’ve read Louis L’Amour adventure stories about Borneo, I have not always wanted to come here. Still, “Off the Mangrove Coast” is about diving to recover $50,000 from the safe of a sunken freighter, so it was pretty cool to dive here. And the other divers didn’t even double-cross me and cut off my air supply.

Anyway, it was a perfect diving day in the Bandah State Underwater Park; we did a three tank dive so I had 2 1/2 hours of bottom time. It was fantastic, starting with two different giant sea turtles, the second of which was the largest I've ever seen, at least six feet long. I got videos of both swimming; they are a little cloudy as I was zooming in through about 20 feet of water:




Turtle1 and Turtle2 look better in the close-ups shot before they started swimming:



We saw a trumpet fish


We saw a little octopus hiding on the bottom (they are hard to see):



We saw a jellyfish floating around:


We saw a puffer fish hiding under a coral (also very hard to see in the shadows)


And we saw spectacularly colored fish swimming through spectacularly colored corals:








It was a Yurtle the Turtle, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue fish, Dr. Seuss kind of dive.

Joani again went with the party crowd, who opted for the beach, the pool, and pool drinks of the Shangri-La Hotel in Kota Kinabalu. She was swimming with a different kind of fish:



All in all a very good day. Tomorrow: the Sultanate of Brunei












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