There is one Nemo and one Dory in my 45 cm cube tank.
I can lose track of time watching them swim around because they are so cute. I do not know about Dory, but Nemo is wild-caught.
Sometimes I wonder how Nemo lives out in the wild. Maybe he wants to go back to the sea, like in Finding Nemo. I have wondered about that too.
With that vague thought always somewhere in the back of my mind, my family ended up taking a trip to Kota Kinabalu over the Liberation Day holiday in August.
When I think of Kota Kinabalu, I remember it having been one of the honeymoon destinations we considered when we got married—a place for a beach holiday and sea-based activities. This felt like a good chance to see Nemo and Dory for myself.
It had been a really long time since our family had travelled abroad together. I came away with a lot on my mind, so I want to write separately about the trip itself.
For the snorkeling, we visited three spots around Gaya Island and Tunku Abdul Rahman Marine Park.
This tour on Klook had decent reviews and seemed reasonably priced, so we booked it and were happy with it. There is one thing you absolutely!!!! need to know about the meeting point, though, so it may be worth reading what happened below.
We were meant to leave DBKK Jetty at 9 in the morning.
It was about ten minutes from the Hilton by Grab, then another three-minute walk to the jetty.
Since you never know what might happen abroad, we got there about 30 minutes early, thinking the guide might already be there. He was not.
DBKK Jetty is the departure point for tours run by all kinds of companies, so it was pretty chaotic once we arrived—Western tourists, Chinese tourists, company guides, everyone.
I checked again 20 minutes before the tour, and he was still not there. I checked again ten minutes before, and still no guide.
I do not travel domestically or internationally all that often, but normally the guide is already there waiting. No one even ten minutes before the start…?
This was when I started getting a little nervous. It was not just my wife and me—we had my parents and my younger sibling with us too—so I was even more anxious.
No one answered the hotline number we had received by email and on the booking page, so my wife and I split up.
I stopped guides from other companies as I saw them and asked whether calling a local number might work. I even asked them to call the “Borneo Dream” team listed in the email, but no one picked up.
Every time I asked another guide, they told me this was a team that came here often, that I should wait, that I should trust them. But once it was past 9, all I could think was: we are screwed.
My wife said that, because she was panicking too, she had just tried saying everything she could think of. Same result. (Same “Trust Me!” here, too.)
Then, around 9:05, I spotted a guide I had not seen before and went straight over to him. Thankfully, he was our guide!!!
Looking back, I probably should have asked what had happened. At the time I was just so relieved that it did not even occur to me.
My guess is that there was a scuba-diving group already on the boat, and something may have delayed them while they picked that group up from another point.
After all that, we got on the boat, heard a quick explanation from the guide about how to use the life jackets and snorkeling masks, then headed to the first spot.
The guide we met at the jetty was assigned to our family, and he offered to take underwater photos with a DJI action camera for 150 ringgit (roughly 50,000 won). We said yes.
The first spot was at the location below.
Once we got off the boat and started snorkeling, we could see coral formations and schools of fish.
At home I mostly see frag corals in the tank, and even when I see well-kept corals at an aquarium I get completely absorbed. Seeing coral formations spread out on a scale so much bigger than that, as far as I could see, was really something.
The only disappointment was that the camera could not capture the colours the way they looked in real life.
Then the guide and my family started pointing at something. I thought, finally, Nemo? I could not see anything myself, but apparently a turtle had come by.
I saw a stingray, but there is no video of it, which is a shame.
A little later, I looked where the guide was pointing. For the first time I saw something swaying among the hard corals, and naturally it made me think of Nemo. Finally, Nemo?!
They were not like the Nemo I keep at home, but there were Nemos!
Two fairly big ones were swimming around the coral in the photos. Maybe because I like Nemo so much, they stood out to me in a way the other fish did not. Nemos are just too cute.
What was disappointing was that I could not get that close while snorkeling. To see them up close, I would have had to dive, and I do not know how to dive. That was a real shame.
After snorkeling at the first spot for about 30 to 40 minutes, we went back to the boat.
We had more than enough time in the water, and the guide worked so hard to take photos and videos that, before I knew it, the whole thing at the meeting point had completely slipped my mind. The first spot was a hit with the whole family!
