Hi guys,

We've had a great last few days, spent on the island of Pulau Mabul in the Celebes Sea, just off the coast of Borneo. This area is renowned for its diving, particularly for one of the islands called Sipidan, near to where we are staying, which is one of the top ten sites in the world. The main purpose of our trip here was to do an open-water diving course, although a few days chilling out on the beach hasn't gone a miss!

We took a speedboat over here on Sunday morning from Semporna on the mainland, which took just under an hour and went past many other of the islands within the archipelago. Our first day was spent learning the dive theory, most of which was rather dull and over-informed but passed by pretty quick. Our hotel (can't really call this place a hostel) is fantastic and we have our own triple-bed hut with en-suite bathroom, where unlike the last 3 weeks, we haven't had to share shower space with the toilet! (a welcome change!) We are also right next to the beach so after our theory was finally over, we rented some snorkel gear from the dive shop and went for a trial run.

The great thing about Mabul is that the reef is literally just off the edge of the island so there was tons of marine life within about 50m of our room! The variety of marine life here and the coral is incredible, putting the barrier reef to shame a bit - they had some awesome fish including bright blue star fish, angelfish (dinner plate sized to thumb-nail sized) and tons of others I couldn't begin to name.

Since we get free dinner on the island, Martin and I chilled out in the hammock (yes Martin has his own hammock and is very happy about it!) for a couple of hours and had a couple of beers in the bar before eating. Despite our previous assumptions of staying in a hut in the middle of nowhere, we were amazed to find that the resort has a fully fledged bar, compete with live band, (shockingly slow) wifi and sky TV, meaning that to my dismay, Martin could stay up til 1am to watch the city game (yay!) The band in the evening were all Malaysian but they were really good and we chilled out with a few beers watching them (or all 3 Sunday football games in Martin's case). After bribing the barman with a drink to let us stay and watch the end of the city game, we were literally the last ones home (even the barman had gone to bed)!

The next day we dragged ourselves out of bed and down to the jetty for our second day of the dive course, the first practical session. Our instructor was really good and showed us how to use all of the equipment and put it together etc, although she did make us do a 200m swim at 9am to 'check our fitness' (after this we concluded that we are definitely not fit!) After a few exercises in the water of taking the breathing thingy in and out and the mask on and off we went for our first dive.

The dive site was called 'Awas', which means warning in Malay - good choice! Actually the reason it got its name was because of the amount of random bits of rope/wood/ship parts down there, which boats could potentially hit. We'd only been in the water about 5 minutes before Mel, our instructor was waving madly at a large rock - it turned out that the rock had eyes and what we were actually looking at was an enormous green turtle just chilling out on the bottom! After him we saw another 3 turtles, including one hawksbill turtle, with the biggest one being at least a metre from head to toe - they were amazing to see. We also ran into a couple of metre-plus long barracuda while on the dive, amongst many other smaller fish and a couple of little rays. Apparently giant barracuda only hunt in groups and the couple we saw were alone but the eyes and the teeth were enough to have me swimming in the opposite direction!

After lunch we went on our second dive over the reef that Martin and I had snorkelled the day before, although we were obviously able to see a lot more when we dived. We ran into a couple more turtles swimming along the reef, although these were smaller, perhaps 70cm long. Also clocked many more enormous angelfish, some lionfish, an octopus and a crocodile fish (so named because he looks exactly like a mini-crocodile…duh!) It was quite difficult diving over the reef, as opposed to the sand on our previous dive as you have to work really hard to control your height so that you don't touch the coral - I think we got the hang of it eventually!

I decided to give the third day of the course a miss as my ears have been playing up and hurt under the pressure of the water and I didn't want to risk any problems as we have to fly twice on Friday - hopefully I'll be able to get a scuba certification from the previous two dives, which is similar to the open water course, just means you can only dive to 12m, not 18. Martin battled on however, completing another two more dives and a few more of the same skills we had done the day before - I'll leave him to fill you in…

We started the third day by completing a few more skill tests both near the surface then down at 8 meters as well. Most of these were fine although one of the skills involved removing all of your scuba gear and then putting it back on again just in case you ever got caught on something and needed to remove it, this is quite worrying when you are 8 meters down and your air source is floating next to you! Luckily this was just and exercise and is very unlikely to ever happen in real life. We did two full open water dives both to 17m. The first was on a site called 'Artificial Reef' which contained lots of man-made objects that had been placed on the bottom to attract fish and other sea life as there is no coral around this part of the sea bed. As part of this dive, I had to use an underwater compass to navigate between 2 points, which I just about managed but it's so disorientating under the water I doubt I could find my way around for a whole dive. On this dive I saw a Giant Grouper; a Juvenile Midnight Snapper (I like this one); quite a few Black Spotted Puffer Fish and an Emperor Angel Fish to name just some. It was really good and I started to get the hang of staying neutrally buoyant (ie not floating up or down underwater). After this we broke for lunch before going out on the boat for the afternoon.

The afternoon dive was in between Mabul and Sipidan (the island famed for its massive fish/shark sightings), although we were closer to Mabul as diving at Sipidan is strictly controlled by a permit system. On Mabul's side the drop from the reef is much more gradual but it still descends from 7meters to nearly 600 meters deep in a stretch of water that is only about a ¼ mile wide. The Sipidan side is even more extreme with a drop of almost 900 meters (the reason for all the massive fish) but has really strong currents which I'm nowhere near ready for! The site was called 'Stingray City' although I saw no stingrays but did see another couple of turtles as well as a reef octopus; banded pipe fish; a giant moray eel (not a fan!); and batfish.

We spent most of the evening in the resort's bar chatting till closing time with the dive instructors and few others we've met while staying here. It has such a relaxed atmosphere which has been a welcome break from travelling and moving on every other day but we still are both knackered, diving is tiring!

On our final full day we had decided not to dive partly because we have to fly the following day and partly cos we can't afford it! This proved to be a great decision as we got a good lie-in, the first proper one since we left Hong Kong really. In the afternoon we decided we would hire one of the resort's underwater cameras and took it out snorkelling just off the resort jetty. The camera was a serious piece of kit and could go to 40 meters deep but I think it would have been too much to deal with at once, had I taken it diving. We managed to get a few good snaps and were delighted to see a huge turtle almost as soon as we got in the water.

Today we have to get the boat back to Semporna and leave out lovely little island. It's been really good fun, but without the diving there really isn't much else here to amuse us. Once we get back we are off to the local airport to fly to KL where we will be sleeping in the airport for a few hours while we wait for our flight to Medan in Indonesia.

Lots of love Martin and Katie