Oh what bliss - no early start today. We slept in to a giddy 8.30 am and eased ourselves to an upright position. Somehow overnight I seemed to have lost the ability to bend my legs. Even touching the front of your legs elicited a wince! Shuffling to breakfast we surveyed the pleasant grounds and pretty beach in front of the hotel. Unfortunately thoughts of a snorkel in the sea were scuppered when Henry quietly counselled us not to - apparently 2 nearby villages release all their waste into the sea, so not as enticing as it looked. Instead we dawdled over breakfast and chit chatted with our friends in the group. We had all decided to go to the New Years Eve Beach Party that evening. Meandering back to our room we were pleased to see our laundry already back - we had 2 big bags full! This made packing preparations easier as we began to organise ourselves for the diving part of our trip. A scrummy lunch of steak and chips on the restaurant balcony, watching the hotel workers put all the open marquees up for the evenings celebrations, made for the perfect antidote to the frenetic pace we had maintained over the last 2 weeks. Heading back to the room, we spent the afternoon watching a DVD movie and I spent some time on well needed beauty treatments - hands, feet and hair were all back to a healthy state after developing ferrel tendencies over the last 2 weeks. Before we knew where the time had disappeared to, we were busy packing our bags and getting ready for the evening festivities. We were due to leave at 5.15am the next day, so literally needed to be ready to get up and go the next day. It was a great evening, we all looked very glam and quite different from how we looked during our trip. We partied till 2am (so in the end just 2 hours sleep) and bade farewell to our really nice group. These were (in no particular order) Jo and Andy, Danish Neils, the sisters travelling the world for a year - Amanda and Sandra, an interesting and incredibly well travelled American lady Sarah and Lucie from the UK who joined us at Mulu after 2 days delayed at Heathrow. Of course there was also the fantastic Henry who always managed a fantastic swan impression (everything organised and easy on the surface for us, but he was surely paddling away under the surface to make sure it always looked that way!) What a great 2 weeks we had with them all!!