Author: Kristen

The process has begun for me to start transitioning back into society. After staying in an actual hotel last night and sitting in the Kuala Lumpur airport now, I realize there are a few things I need to start getting used to again.

-Being indoors: Last night I took my first hot shower in over eight weeks. I forgot it was even possible for warm or hot water to come out of a tap at this point, and it was amazing. Along with this came air conditioning. Last night was also the first time I’ve slept through the night since being here. I woke up at 6:30am in an all out panic thinking I had over slept, but really I had just skipped my mid-sleep wake up. You mean I don’t need to wake up dripping in sweat at 2:30am with sand in my bed and centipede PTSD anymore?

-Appearances: To be honest I’m looking straight up haggard in this airport bar right now. Being around people all day who are wearing minimal clothes, sitting in wet bathing suits, with no shoes on and hair that hasn’t been washed in a week really makes you forget how people present themselves in real life. I’m in an old T-shirt with frizzy hair and sandy sneakers while people next to me look like presentable humans. After a few days I think I’ll be back to my normal self but until then I’ve gotta work with what I’ve got.

-Choices in regards to food and drink: For the last two months I’ve been given no options when it comes to meals aside from the fact that I could choose to just refrain from eating something that was prepared. In regards to drinks, the choices were water, beer, whiskey, soda and instant coffee. Normally a day of flights is hell for people, but this feels like vacation to me. Having options as to what drinks to order and what restaurants to eat at is a nice luxury. I’m not knocking the food at Pom Pom at all because it was delicious, but for two months you were served what you were served regardless of what you felt like eating. The Burger King located 10 feet away from me is looking real good right now…

-Spending money: A great thing about TRACC and Pom Pom is that while there are no real bars, restaurants and shopping, this also means that there’s no where to spend money. You don’t need to worry about the usual habits of carrying around cash, credit cards, phones, and ID because there’s simply no where to go and nothing to buy. $100 could last me over a month on Pom Pom (depending on how hard I was crushing beers), but I’ll blow that in one day at the airport.

These are just some of the things I’ve noticed since stepping off of Pom Pom in the last 24 hours. I’m sure my mom will be much more critical of me and will probably lay a tarp down in her car when she picks me up at Newark and sand blast me/torch my suitcase on site, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. 😎

My last few days at TRACC have flown by as expected, and I’m happy to say my very last day on Pom Pom couldn’t have been more perfect. The day began with a 6am turtle release, where I saw about a dozen turtles hatch and make their way into the sea. At this point I’ve seen turtle releases at midnight and sunset, but I have to say the sunrise release was my favorite. Watching these baby turtles venture into the sea with the sun rising in front of them was a great start to the day.

The camp management decided to make a final joke of me when making the day’s schedule. As I mentioned before, I’ve pretty much become an underwater janitor at TRACC with being put exclusively on manual labor and reef scrub activities. My schedule for the day was listed with all kinds of scrubs: 9am step reef scrub, 11am ARC reef scrub, 1pm biscuit scrub, 3pm turtle scrub and 6pm night scrub. I had a good laugh at this and we all joked about how the reef cleanliness will inevitably suffer after my departure.

My actual schedule was to just join any fun dive that I wanted, which allowed me to dive at Lobster Wall, Eastern Plateau and North Tip. Each dive was unique and had me feeling nostalgic about my time here and how amazing it’s been. I couldn’t help but wonder when I’ll dive next after ascending from my last dive, and I know I’ll miss this every day.

At night we partied with some beers and whiskey, hanging out on the beach until after midnight. I couldn’t have asked for a better last day, filled with great dives, great people, and plenty of laughs.

I knew my time here would go quickly, but it still seems surreal that it’s over. These last two months have flown by and I feel like just yesterday I arrived on the island and was greeted by 30 tan, dirty strangers who would soon become great friends. I feel so fortunate to have had this experience and know I’ll look back on this time as being something special. At TRACC you live simply, learn constantly, grow personally, and party hard. The knowledge I’ve gained, experiences I’ve had, and people I’ve met will stay with me forever, and I’m so glad I allowed myself to take this risk and pursue something I had been thinking about for over a year.

In all honestly this blog will do no justice to my time diving at Sipadan. Sipadan is known as one of the best dive sites in the world, and coming from Pom Pom where most of the coral is destroyed, Sipadan was the polar opposite. We were lead by a local dive crew and did three dives around the island on Sunday, each unique and amazing. But above all, the highlight of the day was… sharks!!

Going into the day, I had heard there was a high probability of seeing them but didn’t want to get too excited. I wasn’t sure how I’d react being in the water with them, but on our first dive we dropped down and were surrounded by them immediately. I wasn’t scared or nervous at all and realized pretty quickly that these gray and white tip sharks weren’t interested in us in the slightest, paying us no mind. Most were about 4-6 feet in length and the closest one probably got 5 feet away from us. It was a surreal site to see them swimming amongst turtles so close to us and the surface. This was truly a bucket list experience as we swam along the reefs and were surrounded by close to fifty sharks throughout the day.

Along with the sharks, we saw huge lobsters, cuttlefish, grouper, and bright healthy corals. I wish I had more pictures to capture these sights and hope I never forget them, but everything exceeded my expectations and more.

After diving we hit a local cafe where a Malaysian woman cooked us some amazing noodles, soup, and a stack of sweet pancakes filled with a hazelnut spread for dessert. Everything was delicious and cost less than $2 for everything. We then headed to a local bar at one of the resorts where we got a bottle of wine and some cocktails for the first time in two months.

This trip is definitely a highlight of my time in Malaysia and I feel so lucky to have experienced the amazing dive sites here. It’s odd that my diving resume consists of some of the worst reefs in the world and also some of the most highly regarded, but I’m happy to have experienced both.

We arrived on Friday in Mabul, where we are staying for the weekend at Billabong Scuba. We dove three dive sites here yesterday and are diving three sites at Sipadan today. It’s beautiful here and feels like a vacation from my vacation. Bianca, the South African girl I’m rooming with, and I were thrilled when we opened the door to our waterfront hut. The fact that I have a bed in an enclosed room with no bugs plus air conditioning makes me feel like I’m living the high life after camping outdoors these last two months. If you look below and think this room looks like a shitty motel in a rundown part of town in the states, I don’t care because to me this is luxury.

We spent the afternoon swimming and hanging out on the beach. We had our own little area until a bunch of the local kids started hanging around asking for money. They usually go away when you tell them no, but these kids were relentless. See below for a little girl maybe eight years old grabbing at Taylor’s cigarette, which happens all the time. It’s sad to see these kids under ten smoking and walking around with no clothes on and dirty all the time and I still haven’t gotten used to it.

At night we hit the Reggae Bar, which is a small bar on the water that sells beer and rum. It is apart of Scuba Jeff’s hostel (that is both his name and his business’s name). And let me tell you, Scuba Jeff is a character. He is a bald, heavy set Malaysian man in his forties who loves to drink, smoke and party. He had tons of stories for us, as he’s owned his business for over ten years after retiring from the police. Clearly the island life suits him better, and you can tell he loves hosting gusts from all over the world. He even cooked dinner for myself and Bianca and it was the best food I’ve had since being in Malaysia. Marinated chicken, fresh caught tuna, rice and creamy potatoes, it was amazing.

We dove three different sites on Mabul yesterday, each of which were beautiful. Compared to the damaged corals, sparse marine life and rubble we are used to seeing on Pom Pom, we saw beautifully colored corals, giant groupers, huge schools of fish, flatworms and plenty more. It was a nice change in scenery and makes you wonder if our efforts at TRACC will ever help to return the area to even a fraction of what Mabul is.

I’m currently in a beautiful KFC at 10:30am eating a chicken sandwich and fries. This is the closest I’ve gotten to “food from home” in almost two months and I’m enjoying it more than I’ve ever enjoyed fast food in my life.

I arrived yesterday by boat to Semporna on the mainland with five other people from TRACC. We’re headed to Sipidan this weekend for a dive trip, which is supposed to be one of the best dive sites in the world. Our boat doesn’t leave until lunch time today so we had all of yesterday to kill in Semporna. I’ve written about Semporna before, as it is the dirty, poor town closest to us on mainland where the weekly shopping is done.

With nothing to do yesterday we spent almost the whole day “bar hopping”, which pretty much consisted of finding small shacks that sold booze and sitting at tables by the water. We grabbed some roti for lunch and found a place for dinner with a pretty American menu. I had chicken for the first time in weeks and we ordered about four plates of varying cheese- cheese fries, cheesy garlic bread, pizza, and cheesy spring rolls.

We later found a rooftop bar that was actually pretty nice if you could ignore the smell of garbage while enjoying the skyline view. They sold mixed drinks here which was a plus because every where else we found only sold beer. We spent a few hours here and were going to go home around eleven but heard about a club down the street. We have nothing to do today besides get on a boat so we decided to see what this club was about.

We walked into a dark, basement bar area to find two tables of old Malaysian men singing karaoke. Not what we were expecting, but hey we could get down with it. The bar only sold liquor by the bottle or beers by the bucket, so we got three buckets of beer and requested some Bon Jovi on karaoke, which surprisingly got the place going. I’m not kidding when I say that within an hour this place transformed into a full on night club. Bartenders pouring lines of shots, people dancing on stage and all over the dance floor, club music blasting. It ended up being a ton of fun and I think the Malaysians enjoyed watching some white people attempt to dance to their music.

Now it’s off to Sipidan today, should be a nice weekend to close out the trip! But first let me finish this tray of KFC alone.

I’ve officially passed my Rescue Course! This course may have been my favorite because it involved mostly scenarios that allowed you to play around with other divers, taking turns pretending to be a panicked, tired or unconscious diver. I also feel like I learned a ton of valuable skills that I’ll hopefully never have to use but are good to have on hand.

My course consisted of some basic CPR training along with rescue skills that can be used in the water and at the surface. These included rescuing a tired or panicked diver, different tow methods, how to use oxygen and flotation devices, how to transport an unconscious diver to surface, shore and boat, and how to remain calm when difficult situations occur.

The end of my course consisted of a “hell dive”. I went on a dive with another rescue trainee and three dive masters in which anything and everything you could imagine went wrong simultaneously. The best way I can describe this dive is babysitting toddlers under water who were extremely capable scuba divers. I had my mask ripped off, my gear ripped off, other people’s gear taken off, divers floating to the surface, divers swimming away, divers picking up coral, divers tangling themselves in rope or each other, divers disappearing, divers using their own gear as a flotation device, and divers riding me or each other. To say it was busy is an understatement and I have never exerted myself more underwater. While most of these things will most likely never happen on a dive, it was good to have training in managing stressful situations underwater, and also pretty funny to have our dive masters acting like 4 year olds who have never dove before.

It’s crazy to see how far I’ve come as a diver since I’ve been here. To go from not being able to set up my own gear or get myself to achieve neutral buoyancy underwater to being able to function with my fins being ripped off while grabbing another diver’s gear and strapping it back on them, I’ve come a long way. 2-3 dives a day will do that, but I’m lucky to have that luxury being here. Safe to say that diving really is an addiction and I know I’ll miss doing it every day when it comes to an end in a few weeks.

Meet Nicole! She’s an A-Level here from the UK. I met Nicole within a half hour of being here when I crammed into a tent with her and five other girls to introduce myself because I thought that was normal. She’s an expert in coral and can tell you about 50 different kinds, which came in handy when I went on a coral identification dive and failed to name just one.

Name: Nix

Home Country: England

Favorite 3 Places in the World: Japan, Los Angeles, Brighton

Best Know at TRACC For: My pink mermaid sandals and rocking a top knot

Journey to TRACC: I worked for a while and saved all of my money to come here. I did marine conservation last year in the Seychelles and wanted to go more into it. I found TRACC on the Girls that Scuba blog and wanted to come here because TRACC does so many different projects that allow you to get exposed to a lot. I saw the A-Level course and wanted to get some more qualifications on my resume.

Worst Job You’ve Done to Afford Travel: I was a cleaner in a care home for a while which wasn’t great.

What’s Next? More traveling for sure, I’m going to dive at Sipidan after the A-Level course is finished and then I’m going to road trip around Borneo for a bit. I also got my working visa for Australia so I’ll head there afterwards.

Just as in life, there are many different projects here at Pom Pom that people excel at and are not so good at. I would categorize projects here into two categories: Physical and intellectual.

Physical: ARC reef building and installment, anemone cage cleaning, COTS collection, biscuit scrubbing

Intellectual: Fish, coral, and invertebrate identification, surveying

It is to no surprise of my own that I have gravitated towards the physical tasks. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only am I not an asset to the intellectual projects, but I’m actually a hindrance. After failing the invertebrate test once by getting a whopping 30/71 correct and failing it a second time, along with going on multiple identification dives and failing to identify more than half of the fish and coral correctly, I got the point. At TRACC, they don’t want to give up on you and want everyone to exceed at each project. After a few weeks of ducking out of tests and surveys, I had to keep it real. My strengths lie in the manual labor of hammering artificial reef blocks into the ground, churning cement and shoveling sand, and cleaning cages under 5 feet of water.

I discussed this with a dive master recently after he asked why for weeks I haven’t shown up to retake the invertebrate test. I had to level with him- dude, I’m not gonna pass it and if I do, do you really want me to be responsible for counting invertebrate on a survey line for data purposes? He agreed, saying he appreciated the honestly and also agreed with my severe inability to identify anything underwater, confirming me as the liability I knew I was.

As a result, I’m eternally assigned to make cinderblocks, scrub cages, collect hazardous sea stars and scrub coral. Can’t complain, gotta get a work out somehow. Also ya girl can’t pass a test here to save her life, but at least I’m honest?

The Irish Goodbye has always been one of my favorites moves, encouraged by the Cooney family since childhood. For those who don’t know, the Irish Goodbye is the act of leaving without saying goodbye to friends or family, usually used at bars or big family gatherings when you’re intoxicated and don’t want to deal with saying goodbye to a bunch of people.

The Irish Goodbye has been the only way I leave any social situation here, and considering that I’m living at a camp with 50 other people, I Irish Goodbye all day long. A lot of people feel the need to announce to the common area when they are going to sleep or leaving, wishing everyone a “goodnight!” to signify their departure. Not me, not ever. No one realizes I’m gone until I’ve already been asleep for an hour. I Irish Goodbye drinking nights, meals, chores, lectures, all of it. There are simply too many people that I would have to say bye to. And with this many people, a departure pretty much goes unnoticed until someone comes up to me the following day saying “hey I got up to get a beer last night and I came back and you were gone”. That’s the business of Irish Goodbyes baby.

Dear body,

I’m sorry that this island life is not allowing you to live your best life. I recognize that you’re taking a hit with each day that passes here, and I only hope that I can get you back to health in a few weeks. Just hang in there, it’s almost over. I need to apologize for a few things-

To my feet: I’m sorry that you look like wet bars of soap that have been dropped on the ground multiple times on a dirty shower floor. Between being barefoot and damp all the time and walking on dirt and sand, you’re really a lost cause at this point. I’m also sorry if that description is graphic but I keep it real.

To my stomach: I’m sorry that I’ve fed you 13 times the amount of carbs that you’re used to and have eaten a days worth of protein in the time that I’ve been here. I promise to never have white rice again after this.

To my hair: I’m sorry that I’ve ripped out 3/4 of you in an effort to comb out sun, sand and sea water and that I will have to cut off the last 1/4 of you when I get home because of how dead you are. Also sorry that you look like you belong on a dirty hippie.

To my mind: I’m sorry that I’ve only allowed you to turn off for four hours at night and that you live in constant paranoia of bugs and creatures crawling on you. I’m also sorry that I’ve forced you to do Fahrenheit to Celsius, ringgit to dollars, and meters to feet conversions constantly each day, putting you into overdrive.

To my liver: I’m sorry that I’ve filled you with cheap Malaysian beer and whiskey as opposed to the classy Bud Light and Smirnoff that you’re used to. You’ll be back to the boujee life soon.

To my skin: You don’t get an apology you lookin bronzed as hell.

We’re in this together!!

Xoxo Kristen