In what's almost a new record for us, four buses, three flights, two taxis, two metro rides and two boat trips landed us on Malapascua Island, the tropical island of your 9-5 dreams.
What is Malapascua good for?
Magical sunsets.
Beer in 1 litre bottles.
Sunshine.
Friendly beach dogs.
And diving. HEAPS of diving. On a couple of dives I saw five white tip reef sharks sleeping in a cave, sea snakes, a pygmy seahorse, innumerable lionfish and scorpionfish, juvenile moray eels, gigantic starfish, a stonefish, clownfish protecting their miniscule young and heaps more that I didn't recognise.
Oh yeah, and on one dive I saw these guys.
Monad Shoal off Malapascua is a cleaning station that Thresher Sharks visit in the early hours of the morning looking for obliging smaller fish to clean them of bacteria. It's the only place in the world where you're pretty much guaranteed to see them and it's one hell of a surreal experience.
We sat on the bottom for a few minutes and were about to move to another spot before two cruised by and then the two in the video proudly swum past close enough that I wish I could've paused my life at that moment and admire them for a few seconds longer. I'll take what I can get though...
