Sheep placenta

Day 2 of diving was equally amazing….we started at a beautiful reef and had luckily managed to lose our diving companion from Day 1. He was a beginner, like us, and managed to constantly cause havoc throughout the dive, kicking us in the head and managing the rip the regulator (breathing piece) out of my mouth with his wild flailing at one point. It is nice to feel superior to someone though…

Our second dive was underneath an old oil rig that is now a resort – they’ve dumped all sorts of interesting stuff there…. ships, a playground (complete with rope bridge) and an old toilet. It was dark and creepy and we loved it – there was so much unique sea life hanging around under there.

I’d had a problem with my mask fogging up on the previous dives and had swapped to a different one….the new one looked a bit too small, so Josh told me to hook my old one in my BCD just in case. I did comment to him, “as if I’m really going to swap them over under water”…..yes, I had to swap them over under water. My new miniature mask filled completely with water, so I had to execute the diving equivalent of reversing around a corner in your driving test (that is, you have to do it to get your licence but you know you’ll never have to actually use it in real life). Anyway, I survived the trauma without having a meltdown or snorting (too much) water up my nose.

For our final dive, I’d jokingly requested that we see more turtles in one dive than our previous record of six…we managed to clock up eight before we had to come up.

(Hey it’s Josh here… I just wanted to point out the last dive was at a place called Lobster Wall which was basically a coral reef that dropped straight down into darkness… it was 70m deep but we only went to about 20m… when we first started to descend I had this surreal feeling watching Penny below me… it felt like we were sky diving in slow motion… truly amazing. I’m sorry we don’t have photos, but at least I was able to convince Penny on this trip that I’m not too spazzy to get an underwater case for the camera, and she’s going to let me buy one when we get back… <insert whip cracking noise here>).

Okay, enough bragging about our brilliant holiday…no one really wants to read about that. I’ll get to the peeing in a bucket stuff soon enough.

Once we were back in Semporna that night, we attempted to negotiate the bus station (with the usual “which is a tout and which is the real ticket seller?” issues) to buy our tickets to Sandakan for the next day.

Unfortunately, I have no outrageous tales of sharing seats with chickens etc….the bus was quite modern and air-conditioned. The only hilarious part was the English translations on the kung fu movie that was playing…

Our taxi driver had some issues with finding our hostel and we ended up just getting out of the taxi to fend for ourselves…. I left Josh and the bags near some fans and went in search of the hostel. Another hostel owner led us in the right direction eventually….unfortunately, Hostelworld.com didn’t mention the massive construction project that is currently going on right next door. Luckily our earplugs cut through some of the grinding and banging during the night (they don’t really do 8am to 5pm construction work here). But the family who owned it were lovely, and made us some delicious spicy pancakes for breakfast.

(Josh again… I just wanted to mention that the other day when I wrote the blog, I was sitting in the hostel foyer going insane from the construction noise, when it started raining and the construction stopped… the lady who ran the hostel told me that rain was good because they would stop working for the day and it would be quiet. They did, and it was, for about 5 seconds until her kids started playing the drums and tambourine immediately behind me…. ahhh the ambiance).

Not much else to say about Sandakan….hot, lots of greenery, smells like sewerage…. we walked around the rest of the day and took in the “heritage trail” and stumbled upon some awesome food markets. The markets just deepened the mystery I’ve discovered here….why can you get Milo absolutely everywhere? In every restaurant, in a can, in giant tubs at markets….

As for my blog title – I discovered that you can buy 30,000mg of sheep placenta in pharmacies here. And not in a dodgy hand-written bottle either….it was advertised in a Loreal type fashion on a big billboard…. apparently it’s good for your skin.