A turtle eating coral. Egypt, October 2011.

Long nosed hawkfish hiding in coral. Egypt, October 2011.

Batfish. Egypt, October 2011.

Blue spotted stingray. Egypt, October 2011.

Nudibranch. Borneo, April 2011.

Lionfish. Mabul, April 2011.

White tip reef shark. Sipadan, April 2011.

Starfish. Egypt, January 2011.

Cuttlefish. Gran Canaria, March 2011

The photos from Egypt in October were taken with a Canon S95 in a FIX housing with a FIX UWL-04 Fisheye lens and a INON S2000 strobe. The rest were taken with a Panasonic Lumix TZ7 in a Panasonic housing with the same INON strobe.

• A year of diving
• What camera?
• Diving during the Malaysian monsoon

The turning point was joining two London based dive clubs, Big Squid and Clidive, both of which I have dived with numerous times since. Diving with both has meant a nice mixture of dive locations, types of diving and lots of dive buddies. With Big Squid the diving tends to be from hard boats whilst Clidive favour diving from the club rhibs. I’ve also been on quite a few independent trips to the coast.

Further afield, I’ve been diving in the Red Sea twice this year, the first was on Whirlwind in early January for a tour around the northern wrecks and reefs including the Thistlegorm and Shark and Yolanda reefs, and the second was at the end of October with Clidive on a very similar itinerary on a smaller boat called Juliet. I’ve also been diving from an oil rig in Malaysia where I dived at Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai, and I dived in Gran Canaria when I went out to visit my sister in March.

I have also been doing a fair bit of training this year. In January I completed the PADI deep speciality whilst on Whirlwind and in March I did the dry suit and nitrox PADI courses with Big Squid in the muddy puddle that is Wraysbury – that was my very first introduction to UK diving. Since then I have become a BSAC Sports Diver through training with Clidive and I am currently doing the Dive Leader course which I hope to complete early next year. In addition to that I’ve taken courses to drive the club rhibs, and to help out as an assistant instructor.

Next year is shaping up to be a great year of diving too. So far I have two trips to Egypt booked and will be booking a trip to North Sulawesi in Indonesia very soon. Thats on top of a whole season of UK diving with Clidive and Big Squid that I have to look forward to!

• Diving with seals in the UK
• Diving in Gran Canaria
• Diving Sipadan

When most people think about scuba diving they picture crystal clear water, hot sun, exotic locations and colourful fish. Until March that was what I thought of too, but then I decided that I would like to dive most weekends and unfortunately I don’t have the time or the money to fly off to some far flung place for a weekend, so I started looking towards diving closer to home. For the last year I’ve been living in London, so I thought I should investigate the cold, dark, murky world of UK diving.

So in mid March I found myself jumping in to a lake just outside of London. The water was a chilling 5 degrees celsius and there was at most, 1 metre of visibility. I was however doing a course to learn how to dive in a dry suit, so it was actually warmer in the water than it was out of it. That came as a big surprise to me. With a dry suit you have seals at the neck and wrists to keep the water out, so instead of a thin layer of water keeping you warm like in a wet suit, in a dry suit you have a layer of air that is kept inside. The air and a thick set of thermals kept me very warm indeed.

Discovering that UK diving wasn’t going to be as cold as I had anticipated was a real turning point for me. Although I didn’t see anything of note in the muddy puddle, I started to look forward to diving in the sea and seeing some of the many wrecks dotted around the coast. I ordered myself a dry suit and started planning weekends away.

Over the last few months I have dived at various sites along the South West coast including Plymouth and Falmouth, and last weekend I went on the best UK trip that I have been on to date to Lundy. Lundy was England’s first marine nature reserve and marine conservation zone and is the biggest island in the Bristol channel, lying around 12 miles off the north coast of Devon. The main draw of Lundy is the diversity of the marine life and the seal population.

Usually when I am told that we’re going to see something on a particular dive, I don’t get my hopes up, whether thats sharks, turtles, rays or whatever else, but on this occassion I should have believed the hype. We were surrounded by seals! The skipper told us to go down and just wait on the seals approaching us, so thats exactly what we did and within minutes we had seals all aound us. They chewed our fins, brushed against us, stared at us and mimicked our bubble blowing. At one point I felt a tug on both my fins and turned around to see a seal hugging one fin whilst another chewed the other. I wish I had taken my camera!

The other thing that made the Lundy trip so good was the visibility. On most of the dives it was around 10 metres. So not only was I nice and warm in my dry suit, but I was enjoying seeing lots of marine life in relatively clear water. I even got a little sun burnt! I’m going back to Lundy in a few weeks time and will definitely be taking my camera, so expect lots of seal photos after that trip.

The video was produced by Big Squid dive centre who are based in Clapham, London.

Photo credit: Andrew Bundy

• A year of diving
• Diving in Gran Canaria
• Diving the Great Barrier Reef

Sipadan is the only oceanic island in Malaysia. The remains of an old volcano, it rises 600m from the seabed, offering stunning wall dives all around. Located in the Celebes Sea off of Borneo, Sabah Parks issues just 120 permits every day to divers and snorkellers to enjoy one of the most marine diverse locations in the world.

Permits to dive at Sipadan are issued to dive centres located in Kapalai, Mabul and Semporna, with most receiving around 11 each day. Each dive centre needs to apply for permits on a daily basis with the identity of the divers, so it pays to book in advance, as most dive centres will guarantee a day at Sipadan for every 3 booked.

Sipidan is famous for its hawksbill and green turtle population. There is actually a turtle hatchery on the island where turtle eggs are recovered from the beach when they are layed and protected until the hatch, before being released back into the sea. This helps maintain the turtle population by protecting the eggs from predators. On one visit to Sipadan, we visited the turtle hatchery during a surface interval and saw turtles that had hatched that morning. They were tiny!

Before every dive at Sipadan, our dive guides would guarantee that we would see three things:

1. Your buddy
2. Bubbles
3. Turtles

In one dive at Sipadan I saw more turtles and more white tip reef sharks than I had seen in all of my previous dives combined.

Other common sightings at Sipadan included a herd of bumphead parrot fish that were searched for every morning. The bumpheads are pretty big and their denture like teeth make them look comical. They swim along in the shallows chomping on coral and shitting out sand. When you get close you can hear they coral being crunched. Schools of barracuda swirling above us, or balls of jacks, were spotted on most days too.

After a while I did get fed up writing sharks, turtles, barracuda in my logbook, so it was the unexpected things that kept it exciting. Devil rays, hammerhead sharks, eagle rays and octopus were spotted on a number of occasions. I will never forget when we spotted the hammerheads for the first time. Swimming along at a depth of 15 metres, the dive guide spotted them and started rattling her tank to get our attention and banging her hands at the side of her head to signal that she had spotted a hammerhead. Soon after, I had descended to 25 metres constantly checking my depth and trying to focus my camera all in the effort of getting just one photo. The hammerheads were still at least 10 metres below us and moved far too quickly for me to get close enough for a good photo.

Whilst Sipadan is famous for the big stuff, another world of diving is nearby. Mabul and Kapalai are renound for macro diving. Diving in only a few metres of visibility searching for small and unusual critters is a very different experience to the 20 metres of visibility, strong currents and huge wall dives of sipadan. Finding ornate ghost pipe fish hiding in the coral, brightly coloured frogfish sitting on rocks, and jawfish lying in the sand, it was a lot of fun seeking out the small things.

Mabul and Kapalai offer a number of upmarket resorts, in the form of floating villages, and Mabul also offers some budget accommodation. I opted to stay at the most unusual offering, a converted oil rig called seaventures. The seaventures rig has been converted into a hotel and positioned about 1km off of Mabul. I was told that the original owner had applied for permission to build a resort on Mabul but was refused, so instead dragged the oil rig in front of all the resorts to piss them off. The accommodation on seaventures is pretty basic, but when all you are doing is eating, sleeping and diving, you don’t need much more than a bed! The package they offer includes 3 boat dives a day to Mabul, Kapalai and Sipadan, plus unlimited diving on the house reef located below the rig.

The seaventures house reef is the best thing about staying on the rig. A lift takes you from the dive platform down into the water so that you can float off of it and start your descent. The seaventures reef was my favourite dive in the Mabul area. Its an artificial reef which is teeming with life. From electric blue ribbon eels to bright orange frogfish and a multitude of nudibranchs, there was always something interesting to take photos of. The only problem is that every evening the current really picks up, and since you need to get back to the lift to end your dive, it is very easy to get swept off it, as happenedto myself and two others during a night dive – fortunately I had a DSMB with me which attracted the attention of another company’s dive boat which took us back to the rig.

From chasing after hammerhead sharks and drifting along in the current at Sipadan to hovering in a couple of metres of water at Mabul trying to photograph sea horses, the diving off Borneo is incredibly diverse and offers something for everyone. I had a fantastic time diving with seaventures and would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone thinking about diving Sipadan, Mabul and Kapalai.

For more photos, please visit my Borneo gallery.

• A year of diving
• Favourite diving photos from 2011
• Diving during the Malaysian monsoon

The liveaboards in Thailand are no where near as luxurious as the liveaboards you will find anywhere else in the world where yachts and catamarans are used. The Thai liveaboards are more reminiscent of large fishing boats with very basic accommodation, simple but ample meals, and a very attentive crew.

The Similan Dive Safaris liveaboard is one of the more budget options for diving the Similans and therefore attracts a lot of backpackers. The group onboard were of mixed experience, some were doing their open water course, others advanced open water and the rest had a number of dives ranging from 10 to a few hundred. There was a dive guide for every 3-4 people, all of whom were very familiar with the dive sites and did a good job of pointing out various marine life.

The Similan and Surin islands are a lot more remote than other dive sites in Thailand such as those around Phuket and Koh Tao and as a result, there are far fewer divers. The only time I recall seeing many other boats and divers was on one dive in particular when a manta ray had been spotted. Although it was incredible to see my first manta, it was huge, the diver soup did taint the experience.

Over 4 days and 4 nights we did a total of 14 dives including 3 night dives. At the right time of year, a few of the dive sites in the Similans are famous for large numbers of manta rays, as we were there at the start of the season (October to May) we only spotted one, but the range of marine life more than made up for that.

• Learning to dive part 2
• Learning to dive
• Koh Lanta

A ten minute drive south of Las Palmas airport is Arinaga which is where Davy Jones Diving are based. The diving in El Cabron would be my first experience of shore diving, all my previous dives have been from boats, so I was excited about this new experience.

A short off road ride from the dive centre in Arinaga to the marine park found Uwe (my dive guide for the day) and I in a makeshift car park, which on a Saturday morning, was full of divers.

As the diving is shore based, the entry and exit points are mostly walk ins over rocks which need to be carefully timed with the breaking waves. Our first dive was a bit of a difficult entry as the waves were breaking on both sides of the V shaped channel, but soon we were in and the dive was under way.

The diving in El Cabron was pretty varied, from the hole in the wall which is a 2m wide hole going down about 6m to the exit, to arches and small caves, to wall dives and gentle drifts. On our final dive we went searching for Angel sharks at Lunar reef, we found a cuttlefish, but no sharks. On other dives we spotted several varieties of moray eel, shrimps, fireworms and stargazers.

A full 5mm wetsuit with hood and gloves is recommended for diving in Gran Canaria, but even though the temperature was 19 degrees, I still found myself getting cold as we were very unlucky with the weather and the sun was rarely out, there was actually snow on the hill tops.

Overall I enjoyed diving in Gran Canaria. The visibility was around 10-15m on each of the dives, it was different to what I’ve encountered before and the team at Davy Jones Diving were great.

• A year of diving
• Diving with seals in the UK
• Diving Sipadan

Since I returned to the UK 6 weeks ago updates have been few and far between and for that I apologise. A lot has happened over the last few weeks and my circumstances are now entirely different.

When my Dad met me at Glasgow airport I was in a wheelchair. For the next few weeks I barely left my parent’s house. I hobbled around on crutches but generally found it easier to just stay seated. Over time it did get easier. I started walking short distances with one crutch and then I tried not using that either. I could only make it a few metres though before it became a problem.

Initially I had no intention of looking for a new job until I was fully recovered, but after I updated my LinkedIn profile I was contacted by recruitment agents for a plethora of jobs. The following week I found myself on the train down to London for interviews. I successfully hobbled from interview to interview on my crutches, the result of which was offers from my first two choices before I had even finished all of the interviews that had been scheduled. I accepted one of them, cancelled the rest and headed back up to Scotland.

The following week I was once again on the train to London. This time the purpose was to find somewhere to live. I hate flat hunting with a passion so once I found somewhere that I could get the keys for almost straight away I jumped at it. I moved in two weeks ago.

Two days after moving I started my new job.

Best of all, the crutches and I have now parted ways. After leaving my crutches in coffee shops twice, it was obvious that I didn’t need them anymore. I am however still taking things easy, but I am very glad to be crutch free.

Although I am now working full time and living in London, I do still have a lot to write about. Over the next few months there will be more about my travels, lots of photos, and maybe a bit about my adventures in London.

• Leaving London
• Friday night on the Megabus to London
• Glasgow to London

Following my post about being screwed over by World Nomads due to their handling of my insurance claim following my hospitalisation in New Zealand, the General Manager of World Nomads, Chris Noble, posted a comment stating that he would investigate my claim for me.

Chris contacted the underwriters in the UK and came to the conclusion that they had, in his opinion, made the correct decision to not send me back to the UK based upon the wording of my insurance policy. In his correspondence with me however, it transpired that the insurers would actually have paid for me to stay in a hotel whilst recovering in New Zealand, but that fact was unfortunately never communicated to me prior to this.

After a bit of further investigating, the decision was made by World Nomads to reimburse me for the costs I incurred returning to the UK. I am currently awaiting payment for my taxi from Auckland Hospital to the airport and the costs of changing my flights.

This outcome is obviously better than nothing, but its not ideal. The only reason that I am being reimbursed is because of the miscommunication on underwriter’s part. I am still rather annoyed that the opinion of the medical team treating me in Auckland was ignored and over ruled by a doctor in the UK who had not seen me. The whole episode has left me wondering whether I will bother with travel insurance in the future.

Six weeks after being hospitalised, I am still hobbling about on crutches and still certain that I made the correct decision in returning to the UK. There is no way that I could have gone on to backpack in South America. Even with the public transport here in the UK its a real struggle to get around with crutches, never mind crutches and luggage.

One day I will make it to South America.

• How World Nomads screwed me over
• Game over

I have spent close to three weeks in Auckland City Hospital following an ankle injury the result of which is a recommendation from the doctors that I cannot continue my trip. In their infinite wisdom however, World Nomads’ underwriters, Millstream, have decided to ignore that recommendation and have rejected my claim for my trip to be curtailed.

The decision from the underwriters came after almost two weeks of communication between Specialty Assist (World Nomads’ medical assistance team) and my social worker who has been acting as a liaison between myself, the doctors and World Nomads because I have had no means of communicating with them myself whilst in hospital. Specialty Assist have dragged out the claim for much longer than necessary by repeatedly requesting the same information and telling my social worker that everything was progressing as expected. My social worker was actually told that all that needed to be done was to arrange the flights, but then when she called the following day she discovered that the underwriters hadn’t actually approved the claim yet. Specialty Assist dropped the ball big time. They have failed to pass on the correct information to the relevant parties and they misled my social worker and consequently myself for over a week. After being told that the claim had not yet been approved, my social worker had the case escalated and ended up speaking with the managing director of Specialty Assist. During this conversation it was confirmed to her that there was no problem with the validity of the claim, they had all of the information that they required and a promise was made to have a plan ready the following day. That plan was that the underwriters had decided to reject my claim.

Millstream decided that after six weeks of recovery in New Zealand I would be perfectly able to continue to South America. So they saw no reason for curtailment and therefore rejected my claim. Since my flight back to the UK (from Ecuador) was not until August, Millstream reckoned that I would have plenty of time to recover so there was no need for me to return to the UK aat that time, despite the medical team at Auckland City Hospital recommending it and disputing their claim that I will be fit to travel again in six weeks time entirely. Not only have Millstream ignored the recommendations of the medical team, they have also failed to take several other factors into consideration when making their decision. The majority of my time in South America was going to be spent trekking. I was going to go on several treks ranging from 4 to 10 days in Patagonia, Huaraz and the Inca trail, but there is no chance at all of doing anything so strenuous so soon after this injury. They have also failed to realise that I have not budgetted for an extended stay in New Zealand. If I was to stay in New Zealand for a further six weeks whilst I recovered, the majority of my budget for South America would be gone. And on top of all of that, I would be rather isolated staying in Auckland. Due to being on crutches and having limited mobility I would be pretty much confined to my accommodation for at least a few weeks until I could put weight through my ankle. All of this information was provided to Specialty Assist, but Millstream have chosen to ignore it. I have truly been left stranded by World Nomads.

Whilst in New Zealand I had no means of disputing Millstream’s decision. Specialty Assist are the only people contactable by phone and they relayed the standard “your claim has been rejected” line and all I have is a postal address for Millstream’s complaints department, so I was left with no choice but to fork out for a flight back to the UK myself despite it being World Nomads responsibility to pay for it. My flight back was not however what the doctors recommended. Their recommendation was for a reclinable seat with the ability to have my leg elevated during the flight, minimal flight changes and the shortest flight times. With the ticket I have it is not possible to do that. The only way I can have my leg elevated is if I buy an additional two seats or buy a new business class ticket, both of which are prohibitively expensive for me. I will be changing flights twice on my way to Glasgow, firstly in LA where I need to wait ten hours before my flight to London and then another change in London for the flight to Glasgow. This is because my ticket only allows for travel in one direction on my way around the world.

Once I return to the UK I will be disputing World Nomads decision through their complaints procedure and I will be contacting the Financial Ombudsman as World Nomads have failed to provide the service that I have paid for and have shown no duty of care. I am thoroughly disappointed by World Nomads. They left me stranded in New Zealand and were unwilling to reconsider their decision or help me in any way at all. For that reason I strongly advise everyone to look else where for travel insurance, World Nomads have taken my money and have done nothing but screw me over in return. Its unfortunate that you cannot tell how good an insurance company is until you try to make a claim, I’ve learnt the hard way.

Update: Chris Noble, General Manager of World Nomads, is now looking into my claim personally after reading about it on twitter.

• Settlement with World Nomads
• Goodbye UK, hello world!
• Travel Insurance

During the last eight months, the longest that I had spent in any one place was ten days on Koh Tao in Thailand when I was learning to dive, that was true until I arrived in Auckland. In total I have spent just under three weeks in Auckland and I haven’t actually seen any of the city. I arrived in the evening, checked into the hostel and then got on the bus to Auckland City Hospital where I have spent a total of 17 days.

It all started at Mount Cook four weeks ago. I was walking on the hooker valley track when I twisted my ankle. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I was still able to walk on it and made it back to the hostel in Mount Cook village. That evening it was slightly swollen and it did hurt a little when I put weight on it but I thought it would be fine after a few days. I started taking pain killers and anti-inflammatory pills in the hope that it would go away and spent the next couple of days resting it as much as possible.

On arrival in Taupo, four days later, after the ferry crossings between the islands, I discovered that I had a lump the size of a tennis ball growing out of my ankle. After a bit of prodding and poking, the doctor decided to stab it and try to drain some of the fluid out. That procedure was under local anaesthetic and once it wore off it hurt like a bitch! Time was a real problem at this stage as I was travelling to Auckland the next day and the day after I was flying to Santiago. I was therefore under strict instructions from the doctor to get it checked out at the hospital in Auckland as soon as I arrived to ensure that it was improving before heading to Chile.

When I arrived in Auckland I found that the tennis ball had burst and the wound it had left was oozing pus. At this point it was painful to walk on so the hospital was my only choice. Earlier in the day, before I discovered the oozing, I had considered skipping the hospital visit and flying to Chile. I thought it would clear up with the antibiotics the doctor in Taupo had given me, but fortunately a friend put things into perspective for me “would you rather get treated here where everyone speaks English, or in South America when you know no Spanish and the health system is no where near as good?”. So off to the hospital I went.

After waiting a couple of hours I was finally seen by a doctor who informed me that I had no chance of flying to Chile the following morning as his recommendation was for me to be admitted to the hospital and be put on IV antibiotics for at least a week. I called my travel agent back in the UK and postponed my flight by a week as I was still confident that I would make it. Later that night I was xrayed and examined by an orthopaedic doctor. The xray showed him that I still had a metal plate in my ankle from an accident I had a few years ago where I broke the same ankle by falling off a ramp at a skate park. His concern was that the infection could reach the plate and become chronic so the decision was made to operate on my ankle to remove the plate and clean out the wound in order to prevent further infection.

A week and two operations later I was still on IV antibiotics. My leg was in a cast and I hadn’t left my bed (apart from hobbling to the toilet). At Auckland hospital I had no easily accessible means of communicating with the outside world, no phone, no internet access and I couldn’t access the roof to send smoke signals, so I was fortunately allowed to make a couple of calls from the nurse’s phone to let my family know the score and to contact a few friends who managed to spread the word that I had been hospitalised. I ended up having visitors throughout my hospital stay; people that I had become friends with whilst in New Zealand, friends of friends from the UK and one friend that I first met in India who now lives in Auckland. The visits were very much appreciated and helped me through the long monotonous days.

In New Zealand there is a health care scheme called ACC which covers everyone, including visitors, for any medical care that is required following accidents that occur whilst in New Zealand. ACC was therefore picking up my hospital bill, a big relief after I was given an estimated bill four days in which already totaled $14,000! My doctors unfortunately advised me that I would not be able to continue my trip, it was their recommendation that I should return to the UK. After being discharged from hospital, I would be on crutches for six weeks and after that there was no way I would be able to do anything as strenuous as the trekking I had planned for South America.

Almost three weeks after first being admitted to hospital in Auckland, I am now sitting in LA airport waiting on my next flight which will take me back to the UK. My around the world adventure is over. It may have ended badly, but at least I had one hell of a time before this unfortunate episode.

One day I will make it to South America.

• Settlement with World Nomads
• How World Nomads screwed me over