UPDATE (05/19/05) - Seriously. If you came to my site looking for porn, you've come to the wrong place. There is nothing even remotely arousing on this site, unless you have a coconut crab fetish. This is nothing more than my little blog where I ramble on about whatever is on my mind.
(06/05/04)
The hotel view where I stayed my first week was awesome. We literally got the nicest suite in the 5 star hotel, and we had this massive balcony overlooking the swimming pool, beach, harbor, and a little bit of golf course. The room was actually really nice too. Oh, and the currency exchange worked out so that the room cost US$35 a night.
Scuba lessons were fairly easy. We did our confined water and open water dives at Sapi Island, which is the small island on the right of the picture above. There were many fish from Finding Nemo among the corals, plus a few schools of small barracuda.
And the instructor was very patient with our very short attention spans.
After 4 days of classroom+diving, we went to Sipadan Island. Fairly commercialized now, but we still saw sharks, stingrays, moray eels, way more Nemo fish, hundreds of adult sea turtles, and we got to watch sea turtle hatchlings run out to see. I have video of the baby turtles, but I haven't had a chance to upload it. Also, I'm gonna have to scan the underwater pictures taken with conventional film. Some of these pictures are computer desktop-worthy, especially the hi-res versions.
And the coconut crabs native to the island climb up coconut trees and cut coconuts to the ground, then attack the coconuts with their massive claws. This one was about 30" wide from toe to toe. The claws are strong enough to get into coconut shells, so we didn't get too close. The numbers are dwindling because the damn Taiwanese tourists are catching them and eating them at night between dives. I can't make this stuff up.
We then went to Mt. Kinabalu and checked out the stuff in the area, including a pretty nice golf course. I played 18 holes for the first time in my life, and I'm estimating that I went around in about 150. Yup. I suck. Oh, and I got violent diarrhea and vomiting from inadvertently consuming unfiltered tap water. Delicious. Guess which picture is shortly after one of my bathroom trips.
And we found out that the civet of SARS fame (google search if you must) resides on Mt. Kinabalu. Who the hell would want to eat this disgusting looking animal? Dirty Cantonese Mainlanders, that's who.
What Asia trip description is complete without some fob ridicule? I submit an innovative method for avoiding sun, and the ridiculous Asian fears of the numbers 4, 13, and 14.
Once I get settled down here and find a job for the summer, I'll probably be updating on the weekends and what not. email me please, because I feel out of touch with the Austin/Houston people.
