Hello from Puerta Galera in the Philippines!!

After possibly the longest journey in history we have arrived. Before leaving Semporna I quickly ate a cheese toastie at the dive shop, only to find myself with food poisoning half way through our overnight bus to Kota Kinabalu.I spent the rest of the journey in the toilet……..not an experience I ever want to repeat.

It's bliss here, I love it and could so easily stay for months on end…. It's so amazingly quiet and chilled out and the diving is out of this world - we have seen things we haven't even seen in Borneo yet so it's very exciting.The dive shop is awesome too, very small but really efficiently run and the guy who owns it is really nice.

We have done a lot more diving than we planned as it is so good. I have seen pygmy seahorses, seahorses, frogfish, snake eels, 6 robust ghost pipefish and heaps of ornate ghost pipefish all at one dive site! We've got some amazing photos which I have now finally added to Facebook. The currents are quite strong here at the moment which does my head in a bit, I don't really enjoy diving with currents when you are looking for small things…too much like hard work.

I even tried a drift dive here - and when I say drift I really, really mean it, the current was absolutely ripping. Gene and I were actually both worried that we may not make it out of the water safely at one point. It started out fine and we had fun swimming upside down as the current carried you along the reef.Then all of a sudden our divemaster was waving frantically at us to grab a rock and hide in a little fish bowl area which protected you from the current and from where you could watch the fish swimming above you. This was all cool until the divemaster looked at Gene and mouths "what do we do, the current is too strong to get out?"

OK so at this point I started to get tears in my eyes and shut down so I didn't show how scared I was and start to panic.Gene grabbed my hand and pulled us out of the fishbowl and we kicked like crazy upwards only to find we had hit a down current, a very strong one which quickly pulled us down to 32m. Despite all the kicking in the world we couldn't get back up at all. We inflated our BCDS to help drag us up and eventually got to 26m, then 16m where we had to stop and do decompression safety stop as we had been pushed into deco by the down current. It was scary as hell. Because we had to stay put at 16m to do a deep safety stop the current continued to carry us out into the blue and there was no sign of the other 2 divers or the reef until we were a bit shallower. Scary…

Eventually we all got to the surface and onto the boat to find we had been carried a significant distance into the blue…many kilometers further than we had intended when planning the dive. It is safe to say it has put me off drift diving for the time being, I found the whole thing scary as hell and energy sapping.

The island itself is so lovely. I managed to get Gene to spend an afternoon on White Beach with me instead of diving and I really enjoyed it. There were stalls all along the beach so I managed to get some much needed clothes shopping in as well. Gene proved to be a hit with the gay Philipino men where we stopped for lunch, which is so often the case when we are in Asia!! Not to mention the young giggly girls in supermarkets etc ;-)

I have eaten so much yummy food since we got here…they sell pork which is a must when you have lived in a country where they don't serve pork anywhere. Borneo's residents are predominantly muslims so finding pork is impossible. We had loads of delicious steak and barbeques to make sure we stocked up. Oh and cheese!!! You can't get cheese or anything particularly healthy or delicious in Semporna either. It was like heaven to be away for a week!

I will be very sad to leave Little Sabang, it has been a really nice week away from reality. I will definitely be coming back to the Philippines to see what else the other islands have to offer. It's such a shame we don't have more time now as there are so many good places to go and see Thresher Sharks, Hammerheads and big rays. Next time though.

Hope all is good back in England, speak to you all again soon xxx