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Published: October 28th 2008
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The only reason we had ended up in Malaysian Borneo was that we were looking for a link between the Philippines and Indonesia, and the cheapest option was to fly through Kota Kinabalu. As we started to look into Sabah, the Eastern province, we found more and more to do there.
Aside from having some of the world's best primary rainforest, and one of the highest peaks in Asia, just off the East coast is an island called Sipadan. The island sits atop a rocky spike that rises 600 meters from the surrounding sea floor. The sheer wall between the deep blue and the pristine coral reef that surrounds the island attracts a host of marine life and makes for some of the best diving in the world. Both Scuba-nuts, we couldn't pass by without a few days in the water.
Following a pirate raid on the island and a mounting dispute with Indonesia over ownership of the island, the Malaysian government decided to kick all the resort off the islands, and station a hefty military presence there instead.
Now only 120 permits are issued daily for visits to Sipadan, so the dive companies juggle the continuous stream
of divers from around the world. We had booked our diving a month in advance with one of the cheaper options based on the nearby island of Mabul. Nevertheless, when we arrived, the owner could not tell us which days we would be diving, except that we would definately have 2 days at Sipadan during our 4-day stay.
It worked out great for us. The morning of the first day we caught the boat from the port at Semporna to Mabul Island. The Billabong divers accomodation was built, like much of the island's homes, out on stilts over the water. It was a really relaxing place to be, there was good food, good company, and boats coming and going with excited divers every day.
The fist day we caught a lift with a dive boat going out to a nearby sandbank called Kapalai with a fancy resort built on it. We dropped into the water to do some snorkelling while the divers were under the water. Just on that small area we saw big schools of sweetlips, flutemouths, and loads of smaller tropical fish.
The next day we had the chance to head out to Sipadan. The
boat left early so that we could get two dives in before lunch. As we hit the water for the first dive, we knew that this was going to be something different fro dives that we had done before. We looked down through an incredible 40m of visibility at a huge green sea turtle cruising slowly below us.
The mornings dives just continued to impress. Swimming along the steep wall, we continuously had white-tip reef-shark swimming below us, turtles sufacing above us, clouds of butterfly fish, jacks, wrasse and even big schools of barracuda all around us. We saw well over 50 huge turtles in the two morning dives, with several of them coming right up to us to take a closer look. There was just too much to see. It was like plant-spotting in the jungle! The whole way back we were both bubbling over with excitement at all the incredible things we'd seen.
During our stay we did four dives at Sipadan and 2 more around the island of Mabul. Mabul had some really interesting sea-life, including scorpionfish, frogfish, and the tiny but exquisite mandarinfish (we had to dive right as the sun was setting to
see them), but it was clear why people come all the way across the globe to dive at Sipadan. You would see as much in a single dive there as on 10 dives anywhere else we've been. And just to add to it, the conditions were perfect. With 40 metres of visibility, it feels like you're diving in a big swimming pool, and the water was so warm that we did all our dives without a wetsuit!
Our next five days was filled with diving, eating, snorkelling, eating, diving, chilling on the jetty in the evenings and a whole lot of non-stop ranting on about how fantastic the dives were and all the things we saw. Good times!
It's really hard to explain how good it was, so I'll leave that to the pictures...
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emily schuyler
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hey we dove here too!!!
Hey guys!! Your blog is looking pretty awesome, sounds like you're having a great time. We just got back from Borneo as well, and we totally dove off Mabul! That's crazy, small world eh? p.s. Kapuk is doing just great. They have both pretty much stopped eating in preparation for winter and just spend alot of time cozying up to each other on the rock. Its pretty adorable.