Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

I just have so many neat or beautiful subjects that I want to share with you. Hopefully you won’t be too bored…

I’ll open with a video (my usual instruction - to be able to watch it, be sure and open this post in your browser or click the link at the bottom of the page). We’ve seen many large and colorful scallops during dives, but never an Electric Scallop!

The next one isn’t the greatest picture, but this Banded Sea Snake is a very unusual sighting for us -

A fairly common activity for us to watch on sandy seafloors is the interaction between the Spotted Shrimpgoby and the shrimp that shares its burrow -

We saw tons of eels on this trip, many species for the first time, such as this Snowflake Eel -

Moving from big critters back to the pretty nudibranchs…

… Pikachu may be only an inch long, but he sure gave me big smiles.

We were amazed at how many different nudis were laying eggs…

… and we also got to see a Saddleback Anemonefish tending to its eggs -

Here’s a still where you can see the growing babies attached to the rock -

Oops! I got carried away with eggs, and forgot I was talking about nudis. This beauty made me think of my granddaughters and their love of sparkly things -

And yet another sparkler…

… followed by a massive specimen. This one was as big as my palm!

Most nudis were in the 1-2 inch range (although our guides delighted in pointing out ones as small as 1/4 inch, and I could only see them when I put my photos on my computer and blew them up). I enjoyed getting down on the nudi’s level to take their picture -

I definitely had to lay on the sand to get this Thorny Seahorse -

I’m sorry for the green cast on the next video. I was having issues with my camera that day. I loved watching him trying to land safely -

This was a very unusual nudi, with all sharp corners and straight lines…

… and this Soft Coral Crab playing tough guy made me giggle, because he’s only about an inch wide -

Here’s another tiny beauty - a Spotted Crab on the outside of a barrel sponge:

Alright… enough for today… bye!

We hadn’t yet visited this country, and we were “needing” a dive trip. Nonstop flights from San Francisco made it so much easier to get there, rather than our favorite place to dive (Indonesia). Upon landing in Manila, we were driven about 2 hours south of the capital to an area in the highlands, which was cooler and less congested. Along the way, we kept seeing shiny elongated trucks acting as local buses:

They were quite fancy up front, and had a row of benches facing each other in the back -

Motorcycles often had sidecars that were shiny metal, but I couldn’t ever get a good shot of one of them. Here’s a motorcycle with a sidecar hidden from view, but you can easily see all the passengers -

We were on the island of Luzon, which is the largest and most populous. Our stay was near Tagaytay City, in the municipality of Alfonso, which billed itself as the wedding capital of the Philippines. We certainly could understand the draw of the cooler and drier weather as a getaway from sweltering Manila. A lush, garden filled B&B offered the perfect place to relax for a few days…

… and smell the roses sunflowers -

Our next stop was on the southern tip of Luzon, for our first diving adventure. The area near Anilao is known for weird…

… wonderful…

… and tiny -

look closely in the center to find the Anemone Shrimp

That Hairy Frogfish gave us quite the performance with his lure (video alert: be sure to have this post opened in your browser to see the video, or tap the link at the bottom of the email) -

I did an absolute happy dance underwater when we found the Ornate Ghost Pipefish pair (pictured above)! I never thought I’d see one, and then I (my little old self) found another pair (by accident) as I was filming a Crinoid waving its arms -

Did you see the small male at the top of the picture?

This is what the first pair looked like on video -

Nudibranchs are often referred to a “sea slugs”, but they are some of the most beautiful and varied slugs on earth (or I guess I should say underwater). The name means “naked gills”, and you’ll commonly see their breathing gills fluttering on their backs -