Preliminary 2008 Sabah visitor statistics are in. I've added them to my historical graph for ease of reference. Overall, numbers appear to be down around 7% on 2007. However the number of visitors from non-contiguous countries is barely down (less than 2%) and the number of non-Sabahan Malaysian visitors is up for the ninth year in a row: this time by over 7%. The apparent down-turn is actually caused by a big drop (60%) in the number of visitors from Indonesia (the drop in their actual numbers matches the total drop in all visitor numbers to within 1%) and I would be surprised if this represented a significant group of true tourists; given the global economic downturn I am quite surprised that non-Indonesian visitor numbers have not plummeted. Incidentally, the figures for the month of January 2009 appear to reflect this argument in comparison to the month of January 2008 as well (aside from a significant drop in South Korean visitors).I'm a huge fan of these large soft corals (photographed on 30th August 2008 off Gaya island). I didn't touch them though so I can't confirm if they were from the family CLAVULARIIDAE (if so they would withdraw into tubes) or XENIIDAE (nowhere to hide).
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