DIVING ON SIPADAN - nothing short of awesome!!!
On the 1 July 2007 I flew from Ho Chi Minh (yes, I know, my Vietnam travel reports are still outstanding...) to Tawau in Malaysian Borneo, Sabah's main town of the Southeast, where I got picked up by Borneo Divers and dropped me off at the Marco Polo Hotel in the middle of the city. I only stayed there for the night.
The next day I got a transfer to Semporna, a small settlement where Bajau fishermen, Chinese traders, Suluk tribespeople and divers who could not find accommodation on Mabul or Kapalai mingle alike. It's about a 2 hours drive from Tawau and the gateway for world-famous Sipadan.
A 45 minute speed boat ride brought us from Semporna on the mainland to Mabul which is a low-lying island only a 30 mins boatride away from Sipadan.
After the Malaysian government closed all resorts on Sipadan in 2004 in an effort to avoid further environmental damage to Malaysia's only oceanic island, divers are now forced to either stay on Mabul or Kapalai, the latter being a single resort perched on stilts. Both places are famous for the superb muckdiving (muck refers to the muddy sediment that lies beneath each muck dive - it's the perfect habitat for unusual, exotic and juvinielle organisms that make their homes in the muddy sediment).
I had booked a room on twin-share basis at the Borneo Divers Resort on Mabul for 6 days / 7 nights, and I am happy to say that I was very impressed with it. The accommodation was clean and cosy, the buffet varied and delicious, staff extremely helpful and friendly, and the beer at the beach bar plenty and cold:-) The resort also has a pool with pool bar - what a treat:-)
I had booked a dive package through a dive tour operator based in Thailand. In hindsight I think it would have been smarter to book with the resort directly (i.e. cheaper). Whether you book with the resort or through an operator, the price usually includes your accommodation, all meals and 3 boat dives a day (2 of them on Sipadan, the other one off the reefs of Mabul or nearby Kapalai). National Park Fee / Permit (for Sipadan) and dive gear (if you don't bring your own) have to be paid extra.
Sipadan itself, for those of you who don't know, is a pinnacle of coral and limestone rising up 600m from the bottom of the Celebes Sea forming a 12 hectare island. It was formed by living corals growing on top of an extinct volcanic cone that took thousands of years to develop. The island lies in the center of one of the richest marine habitats in the world with more than 3,000 species of fish and hundreds of coral species that have been classified in this ecosystem.
With it's stunning visibility and the incredible range of marine life it greatly impressed the late marine ecologist and diver celebrity Jacques Cousteau. Ever since he raved about it, Sipadan is on the top of the wishlist of any diver with a serious interst of visiting the world's best dive sites.
Even though I personally can't compare the diving on Sipadan to more than the Barrier and Ningaloo Reefs in Australia, I am absolutely convinced, after my one week on Sipadan, that the island absolutely deserves its ranking amongst the top 5.
I did 24 dives spread over 7 days (3 - 4 dives a day, including night dives), and here's a list of only some of the amazing underwater creatures my eyes got to see (we actually weren't able to identify all every living thing we saw, not even with the help of marine/fish books...):
- Dozens of greenback and hawksbill turtles nesting, sleeping and mating
- big schools of barracuda and big-eye travelly (also called jacks) in tornado-like formations (swim in the middle of it and you forget there's another world around you...)
- blue spotted manta rays
- sharks (black & white tip, grey, hammerhead - no whalesharks unfortunately, wrong season...)
- heaps of differently coloured nudibranches
- ghost pipefish
- bennies
- garden & morray eels
- spanish dancer
- shrimps, gobies
- hermid crabs
- sea snakes
- cuttlefish
- lionfish
- pygmy seahorses
- juvenile sweetlips
- boxfish
- pufferfish
- frogfish
- leaffish
- crocodile fish
- flying gurnards
- etc. etc. etc. (the list goes on and on and on, I'd have to consult my dive log to give an exclusive list of what I've seen...).
A long story cut short: IT WAS JUST AMAZING!!!
Also, I was pretty lucky that I ended up spending the whole week with a group of very experienced divers. 7 of them were from a dive club in England. In addition to the 2 dive instructors from Borneo Divers we had 4 dive masters and 1 instructor amongst the guests, and everyone else head well over a few hunderd dives too (except me of course). No dive was taken without video camera equippment and digi cams:-)
It was an absolutely great bunch of people and we had a ball the entire 7 days! I actually extended my package by 1 day, I just did not want to leave!
Oh yes, and before I forget, those of you who have seen adds of Sipadan probably know that there is a mysterious turtle tomb which lies underneath the column of the island. It's an underwater limestone cave with a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers that contain many skeletal remains of turtles. The reason for that being that turtles who are thought of swimming into the cave to rest/sleep, get disoriented when they awake and don't find their ways out and consequently drown. Sad story ... if you think about it. Nevertheless, I found diving the cave ws really exciting! It was my first cave dive, and I guess I would have never made it in there if it hadn't been for my dear English friends...
Lucky me.
If you haven't figured it out already, I really think this was the HIGHLIGHT of my trip in SEA!
If you get a chance, go there! Stay there! As long as you can! There's not a single dive that is not interesting, and that includes those off Mabul and Kapalai.
Xxx.
Nadine
