DEBRA Teng's love affair with life under the sea began more than 10 years ago.
The actress had signed up for a diving course when a man who was interested in her told her: "I was 60 feet underwater and all I could think of was you."
"I thought, 'Wow, I want to know what that feels like!'" she recalls, chuckling.
Some of her most memorable dives since then have been in Malaysian waters.
"Malaysian dive sites are great because they're quite accessible," she notes over tea at Han's café at Suntec City. "As far as diving is concerned, I love East Malaysia."
She waxes lyrical over Lankayang, an island in the Sulu Sea about an hour-and-a-half by boat from Sandakan in Sabah.
"It's really spectacular," she says. "A lot of photographers go there because the fish tend to stay still for you to photograph.
"You see jawfish and it's so cute in the way it sticks its head out of the ground, like a muppet.
"You see blennies and fire gobies, nudibranch and schools of barracudas, a wall of them."
She recounts a few memorable encounters with the sea creatures.
"There's this resident barracuda, about 2m long, which hangs under the jetty, almost without fail, around 5pm every day. They even have a name for him - George!
"The first time I encountered him, I panicked because when barracudas are on their own, they're hunting. I started backpedalling but when I realised he wasn't moving, I relaxed.
"The other thing that was special was this pair of clownfish that had just laid eggs, like in the cartoon movie, Finding Nemo.
Pulau Tioman
"Thousands of eggs and within each egg, a pair of eyes.
"Every evening, my diver friend and I would sit there for an hour, hoping to see them hatch. This went on for almost six evenings. But on the sixth evening, the babies had already hatched. We just missed them," says Teng.
The other great dive site in East Malaysia, she says, is Pulau Sipadan, about 30 minutes by boat from Semporna in Sabah.
It has been described by the late French oceanographer, Jacques Costeau, as "an untouched piece of art".
Teng's most recent diving trip was to Pulau Tioman in August last year.
She says: "In Tioman, the visibility can vary, from very good to 10m. You can see huge Napoleon rass, blacktip sharks, whitetip sharks, triggerfish and batfish, which will follow you like puppies because they're so curious.
"The most worrying thing is when divers who are not experienced go to Tioman. They can't control their buoyancy so they step on corals, leaving a trail of dead corals behind them."
She says dive trips in Malaysia need not be expensive, starting at $400 for a sojourn that takes off on a Friday evening and you're back in Singapore by Sunday evening.
Two companies which put together such trips are Simply Scuba (tel: 6732-5900) and Deep Blue Scuba (tel: 6557-2705).
"Diving has helped me as an actress," says Teng, "because when you're on stage, it's easy to get carried away, especially when you're not very well-rehearsed.
"But through diving, you learn to stay calm and go with the flow."
This article first appeared in The Straits Times special, "Travel Malaysia 2008", on Oct 17. It is published by the Special Projects Unit, Marketing Division, SPH.
