Week 41: Return to Sabah - monkeys and coral

 

Attaboys to the government of Malaysia - they're not afraid to schedule a few holidays. Eighteen, to be exact. Which means there's two three-day weekends each in May, June, and July. Magnificent. Tack on a vacation day and it's the perfect situation for a long weekend to go diving and explore.

Jo was anxious to get back in the water since it had been since February for her. And by anxious I mean in every sense of the word...excited. But also nervous. Throw in a head cold and the decision to dive or not was a gametime decision. Adding to the complication was my idea that we could just walk to the jetty to get to the boat...not that far, but far enough in high heat/humidity to suck some of the life out of poor Jo in her already sniffly state. No points awarded to Erik for sensitivity for that.

However, as you can tell from the picture, it all turned out ok. Water was clear and crazy warm at times (90 degrees at the surface!). Creatures were interesting and plentiful. This might be my favorite shot from the trip - there were feather stars on the reef, but this was the first time I'd seen one swimming

The variety and colors of the coral were really amazing - was glad to see them looking healthy

Handsome lionfish

The little purple guy is a nudibranch

So many fish

Beyond fantastic diving, he island of Borneo has a lot to offer. Including the rare and funny looking proboscis monkey. Apparently there's about 5000 of these left in the world, and they're found exclusively in riverside mangroves. We hopped in a van to go ~2hrs into the jungle to hop on a boat tour to see them. The good news is got to watch them jump from tree to tree and do fun monkey things. The other news is that we didn't really get a great picture of them close enough to be really worth posting here. But here's this anyway

If we had something better than an Iphone camera to zoom in, it would have looked more like this

Apparently the larger the nose the more desirable the male. Which I'll be reminding Joanna when I'm 75 and starting to resemble Dobby from harry potter fame. In the meantime here we are on the river 

Also observed but without photographic evidence was a crocodile on the river - too far under the mangrove to enable a convincing shot. As supporting argument I offer the our guide's narration to Joanna on the topic

There were some points along the trip where we half expected to hear a banjo in the distance. Or at least the Malaysian equivalent

Finally, we returned to the base camp area for dinner and then headed out on the boats again to see thousands of the tiniest fireflies ever all flashing in sequence in the mangrove trees. It was pretty special. Low light + slowly moving boat did not lend itself to a decent picture. Which seems to be the the theme of the river excursion. 

Last, but certainly not least, I wrapped up the Father's day weekend with Jo filled with appreciation for the chance to talk with both Z and A and my own dad, grateful for the relationships in my life that mean the most to me. Plus a righteous father's day brunch with this view. Life is good.