Rumor has it that I have an easy life on this trip. However, these friends and family members can’t be more wrong.

Long term travel involves endlessly packing your stuff, finding something new to do, finding a new place to sleep, loads of scary stuff and exhausting activities….

I had no idea what else I could do here except climb Mt Kinabalu. I met several people who spoke highly of the diving possibilities. Not deterred by any advance planning, I immediately took the first bus after climbing the highest mountain of South East Asia. Sitting on a cramped bus for 7 hours wasn’t a smart idea. Massive muscle ache was the result.

The first of my diving course on Mabul was actually a full day of studying inside a room at 30 degrees without aircon. My ‘hotel’ was a crappy house on the water. The next day, I remembered why I had never dived again after doing it once in Egypt. Claustrophobic feelings when I went under water hooked up to a machine that I didn’t understand, a leaking mask that I didn’t manage to clear. I wondered why I was paying for this stuff, wasn’t my trip supposed to be fun? My diving experience was of to a bad start.

Things changed quickly though. The locals are amazingly friendly, the fellow divers are fun and the diving is truly amazing. On my first two trips I was fortunate to see a turtle that would make a great soup for an entire medium-sized village, a 1.2 meter long fish and god knows how many other small and big water animals (I’ll never know their names). I also realized that it had been ‘ages’ since I had been at a beach (which is quite an achievement in south east Asia). So I confess: It takes 45 minutes to walk around ‘my’ island. The room including all meals cost 20 euro/night. I’ve got my PADI ‘open water diving’ certificate and have scheduled several ‘fun’ dives. Now life is easy!
🙂