New Photo Albums & Video!

Click here to view our Philippines Photo Album

Click here to view our Malaysia Photo Album

Click here to view our Sipadan/Mabul Video

Psychedelic Cephalopods

As a pit stop before hitting Japan, we decided to visit the Philippines for about a week. Wanting a little more bottom time we left Manila asap and headed for Puerta Galera on Mindoro.

The diving was way better than we had expected and full of macro life just waiting to be spotted. Adding to our creature list we found some new and bizarre things like the Mimic Octopus who has the incredible ability to imitate several other animals from flounder, to sea snakes, and even Lionfish. Another funky fish is the Robust Pipefish. These guys blend in so well with the sea grass that we would have swam right over them. We also found some underwater Japanamation, featuring Pokemon’s Pikachu, the cute and cuddly nudibranch. No lightning bolts though.

Finally feeling a bit water logged we decided to retire to our sand castle, the sand was actually all over the bed though. The Tropicana Castle, while true to the real thing in cleanliness, was an interesting alternative to our previous accommodations.

Sipadan & Mabul

Two weeks after our live aboard in Thailand we’re back in the water at Sipadan & Mabul. Sipadan attracts divers from around the world with its large schools of barracuda and turtles to the rare chance to see a whale shark. While we didn’t see any whale sharks, we did get to swim with thousands of barracudas as they circled into a tornado above us. We had seen large schools of fish before, but none as massive as the ones in Sipadan.

Sipadan is a turtle breeding sanctuary so naturally there were turtles galore. The most we saw on a single dive was perhaps 10 whereas other divers had seen 40 to 50. Additionally there were numerous white tip reef sharks lounging in the sand waiting for their pictures to be taken.

We only spent one day in Sipadan searching for large pelagic animals and the other days scouring the reefs for little odd creatures. We found numerous nudibranchs, leaf scorpionfish, ornate ghost pipe fish, and many frog fish (the orange fish below). We saw 7 different frog fish on a single dive.

Although we saw several cool creatures, none top the pygmy seahorse. It’s like a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle underwater as we searched a massive sea fan for a creature smaller than our finger nail. It’s amazing how well they have adapted their camouflage to match the fan.

Mandarin fish were one of those creatures we’ve seen in fish stores, but hadn’t found in the ocean until this trip and we didn’t just find one but 8 in a single fan. There are amazing to watch as they swim into and out of the corals not really minding our presence.

It will be hard to top this part of Malaysia, but our next stop in the Philippines should offer just as unique creatures as we found here in Mabul.

Manta Madness!

Dive! Dive! Dive! We boarded the Dolphin Queen out of Khao Lak for our 5day/4night liveaboard to the Similan and Surin National Parks off the west coast of Thailand. Our routine for the next 4 days was dive, eat, sleep, and repeat as we made 14 dives in total. We started off diving the Similan Islands which were filled with schools of marine life and plentiful soft corals. Our first dive to the last was amazing, despite some current. We found everything from ghost pipe fish to funky crustaceans.

After a few dives we were in the routine and headed north to the outer islands of the Similan, Koh Bon and Koh Tachai. Koh Bon was our first encounter with a Manta Ray and one that we are not likely to forget. It’s majestic watching such a beautiful creature with a 5m wing span cruise effortlessly past us. We saw them on all three day dives in Koh Bon and on our last dive they came within several feet. Our trip was extremely lucky as previous trips dove the site 4 times without any sightings.

The furthest north was to the current mixing pinnacle of Richelieu Rock in the Surin National Park. The nutrient rich site was covered in purple soft corals and lavender sea anemones leading Jacques Cousteau to name the site after Pope Richelieu who wore the purple robe. There was a pair of Harlequin Shrimp, a yellow seahorse, several mantis shrimp, large schools of yellow-tail, and many more. A resident barracuda about the length of Jenny was hanging around a cleaning station watching as divers swam past. We named him Cudda-saurus.

As our trip came to a close we were sad to leave our friends. We enjoyed spending our surface intervals playing cards and telling stories and hope to see our fellow divers on a future trip, but until then, we’re off to Ko Phi Phi to do nothing but lying on the beach.

Nha Trang

As we leave the rain behind we board our 12 hour “sleeping bus” to the seaside resort town of Nha Trang. And by “sleeping bus” we mean Vietnamese sized sleeping bus as we cram ourselves into our sleeping pods for the night. It was actually quite cozy having three rows of beds stacked two tall with extra drivers/riders sleeping in the aisles to maximize capacity.

After a few hours of sleep we reached our new home for the next four nights. Surprisingly as it sounds this was the first time in our 6 months on the road that we spent an entire day doing nothing but lounge on the beach. Although the beach wasn’t suited for swimming it was pleasant to relax listening to the waves crash.

We teetered back and forth on whether we should dive Nha Trang as it’s supposedly the best diving in Vietnam; however, it was the off-season with low visibility and cold water. So we compromised and did a snorkeling/sighting seeing cruise around the nearby islands. We chanced upon several large Blue Starfish, a cleaning station, and a pair of Octopi (that weren’t too happy to see us).


We sailed past a fishing village where locals were paddling their thuyen thung (basket boats) to their favorite fishing spots. It was quite interesting to learn that these boats were invented under French rule when a new tax was levied on all boats. Leave it to the clever Vietnamese to turn a basket into a pseudo boat to evade foreign taxes.


We made several friends during our cruise; some were traveling around the world similar to us, others just a few weeks here. We met up at the Louisiana Brewhouse (don’t quite know why Louisiana) for some homemade brews before parting ways for the time being. We had to eat dinner at the “Good Morning Vietnam” restaurant simply for the name. Although one would think they would serve American food, they severed some of the best Italian we’ve had on the trip. Its sad to say, but our pizza here was better than Italy!

Poor Knights Island

Being avid divers we couldn’t pass up a chance to dive one of Jacque Cousteau’s top 10 dive sites; whether it be one of his top 10 overall or top 10 sub-tropical we don’t know. At 60F we donned almost 14mm of wetsuits to keep us warm for our underwater exploration. Not knowing what to expect for sub-tropical diving we were pleasantly surprised as we entered the water.

We were greeted by hundreds of Trevally Jacks schooling up tiny shrimp for dinner. Once we settled down with our 25 lbs of weight, we explored the encrusted wall and to our delight we were saw numerous nudibranchs (aka sea slugs). Being enthralled by a single nudibranch on a dive we couldn’t believe it when we saw families of them, some as small as a finger nail to almost 4 inches in length. We encountered five different species on our two dives!


During our lunch interval our skipper guided our boat into the largest sea cave in the world. Rikoriko cave received its name from Maori word for dancing light because the reflected light seems to dance across the ceiling of the cave.


The skipper shared a few stories about how the islands became to known as the Poor Knights. One story involved the similarities of the islands to a dessert sailors used to eat while they were at sea with the different colors on the shore line resembling the poor knights desert. The other story comes from the view of the horizon looking like a knight buried above the ground with the head at one end and the feet and shield at the other. Back in those days rich knights were buried underground, while poor ones above. Since, Cook didn’t have any notes on his charts about his reason for naming these islands, nobody knows the real reason behind the name of the Poor Knights Islands.

Hurghada, Egypt

Our first stop in Egypt took us to Hurghada on the Red Sea, which is home to some of the best diving in the world, though we like to call it “Here I rob ya.” Our adventure started at 11pm when we boarded our flight to Cairo. We arrived at 1 am and were “greeted” by a swarm of taxi drivers waiting for their next “agnobi” prey. Just so you know, you are not their friend AND they do have a “special price for you”, and it is usually 2-3 times more than you should pay! After many “La Shokrans” (No, thank you in Arabic) we found the domestic departures terminal for our flight to Hurghada, which left at 6 am.

We arrived at Waves Hotel around 8am, which we had booked and paid for 5 nights. It seemed as though we were a burden to the hotel staff and short of giving a tip just to get some information about our room we wouldn’t have known what to do. Long story short they didn’t have our reservation, then they did, then they “lost” it and needed us to pay again because they never received payment. We were not informed of this last part until 1pm (check in time). We managed to get a refund from the online site and found another hotel, which ripped us off too, but after 30+ hours of sleep deprivation we didn’t care. Even the guy at Burger King, BURGER KING, tried to charge us almost twice the price, and things are labeled! We were just about to buy a flight out of Egypt but the next couple days were significantly better. We stayed at the Golden Rose Hotel, which had an extremely helpful and friendly staff who taught us some Arabic.

We’re glad we stuck around because some of the nicest people we have met thus far have been in Egypt. It is a bizarre spectrum the Egyptian people make up from the most hospitable person who would walk you to the ends of the Earth to help you find what you need to the money sucking, rip you off street vendor who could care less. Unfortunately as a foreigner, you seem to encounter the latter more often; however, the others you met defiantly make up for it. We meet a couple other Americans on the boat. One was studying Arabic in Hurghada for a couple of months and helped us around the city, helped us with Arabic, and invited us over to his house for a home cooked meal. We are so thankful we met him, because he gave us a completely different perspective on Egypt.

So about the diving, Deep-Divers.com is a great dive shop. We only did 8 dives in four days because our dive times were 60+ minutes each, with our longest dive being 74minutes. We saw a little bit of everything underwater from nudibranchs to Clown Fish to even a Crocodile Fish. The vast number of marine life kind of makes the Caribbean look like the Wal-mart fish section. Everything was so vibrant and healthy with schools everywhere. We didn’t get to see any dolphins or rays underwater; however, dolphins would periodically swim near the boat. Jenny’s favorite part was the cleaning stations, those fish had their work cut out for them! The dive days were long with the boat departing around 9am and returning to port at 5pm, but we already miss the water and will come back to the Red Sea one day. Now we’re off to explore the Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Karnack in Luxor!