Pulau Dayang (2008)

This weekend Matt and I took our second trip to Pulau Dayang, off the coast of South East Malaysian peninsula. We hopped on a van on Friday after work (and after the best chicken rice I have ever had), and took it all the way across the boarder to Mersing. We got off there, waited for a few hours (until 2am), then we got on a dive boat - I was selfish and went in near-first, and grabbed a bed for us - and we slept on the rocky four and a half hour boat ride to Pulau Dayang. We arrived and slept in beds for a few more hours.

Basically for the whole weekend we dove and ate and then dove and then ate. Literally this was our Saturday and Sunday:
Breakfast
Dive
Lunch
Dive
Snack
Dive
Dive (night dive)
Dinner
Sleep
Dive
Breakfast
Dive
Lunch
Boat ride back to Mersing and bus ride back to Singapore.

Luckily the food was good - and the diving was excellent. This was our first time using our new underwater camera and case, and we loved it. Now I don't have to link to wikipedia to show you what we saw!

Matt did his underwater photography specialty, so we had an instructor just for the two of us, and we loved her. We had met her last year when we went to Pulau Dayang. I had my longest dive (69 minutes), and I don't think we went deeper than 16 meters the whole time. It was super relaxed, great diving.

We were with a fun group of people as well.

A few thoughts about diving and Melanie - diving pushes me. I am not comfortable on boats. I take dramamine, and I listen to NPR on my ipod. Somehow that makes it okay. I am totally scared of the dark, but I pushed myself to go on a night dive. Somehow after a minute or two, I felt pretty comfortable under water, and I didn't think that the coral boogie monster was going to come after me. Sometimes we are getting pushed by currents, and it scares me that I am not strong enough to swim into them, but I always am, and it's always okay. I think I have learned a lot just by pushing myself to do this.

The pictures that are on the blog are (in this order):
The "resort"
us
giant puffer fish
blue spotted ray
turtle
sea worm (it was HUGE!)
starfish
bumphead parrotfish (these are the ones we swam with in Perhentian - not a great photo, but they're huge and so cool!)
clownfish (Nemos!)

Click here to see more pictures.