Lankayan

For two kids from the Midwest, Lankayan is quite a place. Just a little blip of an island (it takes about 10 minutes to walk around it) in the middle of the ocean, about 90 minutes from the nearest land. If you can put all of that out of your mind though, it's about as close to paradise as you can find.

The view from our room

Lankayan is known as one of the up and coming dive sites in this part of Malaysia and it is essentially a dive resort.

Final Check

Descent

You don't need to put on all of that fancy equipment to see some cool sea life though. There were lots of black tip reef sharks swimming in the shallow water around the island.

This hornbill turtle had recently died of old age and washed right up to the shore in front of our room. Lankayan has a successful turtle hatchery program. Each night biologists patrol the beach looking for turtles laying their eggs. The eggs are collected and protected to ensure that the maximum number of eggs hatch. We were lucky enough to see a hatching of of about 80 tiny little turtles. The turtles were released on the beach and scrambled into the sea. Turtles always return to the same location to lay their eggs so hopefully those turtles will return in a few years to lay some eggs of their own.

And lots of great sunsets...