Diving Paradise!!!

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We arrived into Semporna at 4am and, unwilling to pay for a nights accomodation for just a few hours sleep, we ended up spending our first night in town on a pier! Thankfully at 7am we were able to check into our hotel of choice and settled down for a few more hours sleep in the 'Floating Inn'. It was a really lovely hotel and so called because it is built out on stilts over the water- you can see the waves rippling beneath you through the wooden floor boards in the dorm room!

Semporna turned out to be a horrible little town and we were surprised at how dismal it was, considering the large numbers of tourists that visit there. It had a small selection of mediocre restaurants, a huge market, one very good pub, a plethora of dive shops and more rats than people once the sun set. It also had the obligatory open sewers, road side litter and stench of durians in the air!...

We organised our dives- three the following morning out at Mabul Island and three the next day at Sipidan Island- before celebrating over a pint and a pizza with a guy we had met on the night bus and would be diving with. He had a camera with an underwater case so we were all excited about the next day's dives and the photos to follow...

Mabul Island provides some of the world's greatest muck diving and Scuba Junkies took us out there early the next morning for our first couple of world class dives. It was amazing and the wealth of marine life was incredible. Very quickly we realised that the area's excellent reputation is very well deserved and worth the trip down! The following day we headed out to Sipidan with Sipidan Divers, to what is considered one of the world's greatest wall dive locations and, again, we were not disappointed.

In the six dives that we took off the shores of Semporna, we saw at least 40 black tip reef sharks, dozens of sea turtles, an octopus, lots of nudibranches, lots of scorpion fish, crocodile fish, morays, big banded sea snakes, lion fish, barracuda, napoleon wrasse, parrot fish and, that's just to name a few of the bigger and more exotic species!!!

Sipidan Island was absolutely beautiful and we got the opportunity to have a picnic lunch there for an hour or so. It is truly paradise and ranks highly in my list of most gorgeous beach side destinations. Mabul Island was a little less easy on the eye, due in part to the stilted village wrapped around the island and the lack of trees on the island itself. It was a different experience to visit and it was worthwhile just to see the lifestyle enjoyed by the local people in such a remote and idyllic location and the hardships they face being so cut off from mainland civilisation (all of their drinking/cooking water is collected rain water).

On our way home from our last dive our boat passed a trawler that was in the process of reeling in a big haul of tuna and our boat stopped to buy a couple for their BBQ later that evening. The BBQ was a definite highlight of the trip and as it takes place every night we enjoyed it more than once. The tuna was fantastic- as were the prawns, squid, ahi tuna and marlin that gets piled high on your plate for E3!!!

Donna and Aisling joined us and we organised our next bus journey east and, six dives after arriving, we headed onwards.

Next Stop: Sandakan...

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