Maybe it’s true, that I can’t live without you… Yes, it’s true. SMUX Divers can’t live without the world underwater.
This time round, SMUX Diving Team has travelled to Malapascua and Moalboal in Philippines for our year-end holiday trip. It isn’t just one diving location, but TWO. Of course, two is better than one!
The journey there wasn’t very tiring as the flight’s short. Look at the enthusiastic faces below when we arrived at the airport!
We were hungry and went to eat Jolibee, a KFC a-like fast food restaurant. Their chicken is awesome! After 5 hour bumpy rides in the van and a boat transfer, we’ve reached Malapascua and checked into Slams Garden. The place’s quite decent, except that the cocks continuously give morning call at anytime of the day.
We had to wake up early in the morning at around 5 am everyday to catch the thresher sharks. They are so cute! They swim slowly in around monad shoals as it’s a cleaning station, where the cleaning fishes eat the dead skin and bacteria on their body. We have also seen the mandarin fishes mating before sunset. Research has found out that mandarin fishes starts courtship 20mins before sunset and mates daily!
After our endeavour in Malapscua, we took a 4 hour van ride to Moalboal to look for sardines. Jolibee’s so nice that we went to eat it again. Bob and Remus shared a meal that consist of 8 piece chicken and 4 plates of sphagetti. YUM YUM!
SARDINES HERE WE COME! Look at them below! It’s like an army of ants but its millions of sardines! They can block of the bright sun into the water.
FANTASTIC! It’s the first time all of us seen so many fishes at one time. When we dive towards it, the school of sardines will make a ‘hole’ for us to dive through. How cool is that! We managed to see a school of jackfish preying on sardines. The jack fishes will swim slowly towards the sardines and ‘chiong’ towards the sardines. Poor sardines, being one of the bottoms of the food chain, get prey on by almost any other fishes and sharks. We went on to another other dive sites to look for a plane wreck and a sunken island. The wreck we’ve seen is a copton plane and some of us have taken the pilot seat and trying to start the plane. If only it could work….
On the last two days of Moalboal, we went to look around Moalboal for nice places. We went to see a waterfall nearby our town. The water is great and refreshing! It’s even better than swimming pool! The next day, we went to see cock fight but we were 20 mins late. So sad! Fortunately, we managed to eat some appetising chicken at the roadside stall and it is really cheap and good!
The trip was tiring but a fruitful and meaningful one. We took back not only images and memories of the trip, but also the message on the memorial that is deep in the sea that we saw.
It is not the years in a life that counts, it is the life in the years..
