Up early again to get to the dive shop for the Sipadan trip. I thought I’d be diving with John and Mel, but it turned out they were doing Sipadan the next day and were off to Mantabuan instead. Sipidan is strictly regulated when it comes to diver numbers – no more than 120 per [...]

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This was the final day of my EFR and Rescue Diver course, and the second involving hands-on training and exercises. My instructor today was Ice, a local guy who speaks English, Malay and Cantonese. Along with us was Elsa, a girl from Hong Kong who was to play my victim/patient for all the hard work. [...]

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More water today than yesterday. Courtesy of my earplugs, my phone had been beeping for ten minutes before I happened to look at it and realised it was 07:10. Whoops. Well, nobody threw anything at me to wake me up.
I dressed quickly and walked to the Chinese place I’d had lunch the day before. Chicken [...]

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Yesterday, as I said, I sorted out moving town – finally. I packed up and shifted just after 18:00 with Vincent kindly giving me a lift the short distance to the City Bus stop – the one that takes you to the long-distance terminal outside of town. Good job, as the City Bus left 6 [...]

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This time tomorrow I’ll be in Semporna and on an EFR (Emergency First Response) course. I finally caught Vincent early enough in the day to get it all booked up. I just need to ensure I have a seat on the overnight bus and somewhere to stagger into at 4:30am when I arrive.
Not a lot [...]

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After spending a day doing pretty much naff all yesterday, I decided to do a little walking. My targets were the Sabah Museum and the nearby mosque. They’re near enough each other, but a bit of a hike from the hostel. On the way I passed the clock tower, which also used to act as [...]

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A lovely young couple here woke up this morning to find that someone had rifled their bag and taken a mobile phone… and approximately 500 Euro in mixed currency. The bag had been left in a communal area at the hostel here by accident. A small mercy is that flight tickets and passports weren’t stolen.
However… [...]

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Small post and a few photos and videos, so they’re all at the bottom. I didn’t get to dive with the girls this morning as their dive boat was full. I took a walk across the road and found most of the other dive shops shut. One, Sabah Divers, had an open door but [...]

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After staying up till 5am chatting to some guilty parties online, I crashed out and got up around one in the afternoon. As I surfaced, the girl on reception handed me a note – it was from Nydia and Christine, the German girls I’d met in Kuching. They were in town and would meet me [...]

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I stopped out to watch us batter Manchester United and really scupper the start of their season. And then updated the Ubuntu installation on my laptop. And talked to one of the café staff for half an hour. As a result, I got to bed around 2:30am with a 6:00 rise. Whoops.
As ever, though, I [...]

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