Snorkelling in Kota Kinabalu

I have other things to write about, but we went snorkelling today and that’s just more exciting then how Derek wouldn’t let me sleep in Kuching and I spent the entire day being mad at him.

We were planning to catch the ferry at around 8 or 9am, but we slept in (you only have to make that mistake once), so around noon we’re trying to figure out what to do and I finally snapped. We haven’t DONE anything. We went to the worst museum I have ever seen yesterday, and almost got heatstroke walking there. It was like someone found a boring coffee table book and a dead whale and turned it into a maze of blurry black and white photographs and a hanging skeleton that still smelled like fish. Okay the whale that stunk was kind of cool. The rest was so bad it was actually funny. Most of the English translations ended half sentence, I assume the curator doesn’t speak it and didn’t realize they missed a section.

Anyway, snorkelling. I figured we’d just go and check it out, the boat back was at 5 and we got there at 1, so we had four hours. The first thing we saw was this:


We then spent three hours swimming in that. It was all clouds of fish and dirty looking coral. It was awesome. The blue striped fish you can see there were super brave and would come right up to my face and stare at me. There were neon coloured parrot fish eating coral, you could hear them crunching it, we saw a ray of some kind, some brown puffers, white and yellow angel looking fish, and tons of sea cucumbers. I found a few patches of anemones full of clown fish, I dove down to get a closer look at one and a black clownfish swam right at me. I thought maybe it was a coincidence, so I stuck my foot at him and he attacked it. He was maybe two inches long. I saw a lot of tiny fish chasing off large two or so foot fish actually. Mini bullies of the sea.


I was following a group of 5 or 8 really big white fish with yellow fins, some reaching 2 feet in length, when suddenly I was following a group of black fish with yellow fins. They changed colour if they were over the darker coral or the white sand. It was amazing. I also saw a brown and white fish lean in sideways at the sand and fan it with his one fin blowing the sand off and checking for hidden clams. He found a little one and when he swam off I saw two broken bits of clam fall out of his mouth.

If I don’t find a waterproof case for my camera tomorrow I am throwing the biggest privileged white person tantrum this place has ever seen.