Pulau Sipidan–World’s Best Dive Site

It wasn’t really.  In fact, the diving in Indonesia at Komodo National Park was quite a bit better.  But before I get there.  From the jungles of Borneo, we headed to the coast town of Semporna, where we took photographs of shirts (see below).  In the morning, we were off to the island of Pulau Mabul where we would stay for a few days getting ready for our dive at Pulau Sipidan.  Due to its popularity as a dive site, the park gives out only so many permits per day and when we tried to get permits 3 months ago, they were already full.  We were put on the wait list and somehow worked our way up.
Anyway, we stayed on a little island called Pulau Mabul on the way to Pulau Sipidan at a place called Uncle Chang’s.  It was pretty cool.


Our cabin is the second to the last one on this row.  Interestingly, we stayed here for three nights and I never once stepped foot on the actual island.  all of the buildings on the island are on stilts over the water.  I have no idea why, but it is how a lot of the people build their houses here.  Maybe they don’t like to track in sand.
Anyway, we got a good day’s snorkeling in the first day, but then the weather turned on us and we got thwacked by a pretty serious tropical storm.  It turns out that the last place you want to be in a tropical storm is in a little cabin suspended over the water.

It cleared off well enough for our dive day to Sipidan so we were happy.  The deal with Sipidan is that it is separate from the continental shelf and is built on a limestone wall that descends into the abyss.  That isolation means that it attracts all sorts of fun critters like sharks, barracuda, and sea turtles.  There were so many sharks and turtles that I actually started to get disappointed when I saw “just another hawksbill turtle.”  Once time I could see 9 sharks (white-tip and grey reef sharks) at one time!

The visibility wasn’t great thanks to the lousy weather, but it was good enough!  Here is the happy couple after a hard day’s diving.

Unfortunately, the end of our Pulau Mabul story is not a happy one.  Here is the lesson: it doesn’t do any good if one makes the effort to UV treat all of one’s water if one is going to just use ice from the village.  Sally and I had a bit of gin that we had been traveling with and wanted a martini.  Well, we caught wind that there was a guy with an ice machine in the village and so sent along our $1 for a bucket full of ice.  The martinis were wonderful; the diarrhea was not.  (That was also the night a live mouse got stuck in our toilet.) We have decided that perhaps we will stick with taking our drinks neat until we are in more trustworthy climes.

Let’s Kill Mosquito Together

it appears that the fashion in this part of the world is simple.  On a T-shirt put some English words on it.  They don’t need to mean anything and the bigger they are the better.  In the town of Semporna, in the southern part of Sabah on the coast, Sally and I had a few beers and then hit the stores.  This is what we found.

From Semporna, we were off to Pulau Mabul to sleep and Pulau Sipidan to dive.  We kept reading that this is The (or at least among The) Best Dive Site in the World.  So we decided that it deserved a visit.  More on that next!

Orangutan on the Loose

I forgot one video of an orangutan at a rehab center (for orangutans, not people) that we went to after Kinabatagan.  This guy walked right at me and wasn’t going to deviate from his path.  I moved when he bared his teeth.

Borneo

Fine, we are not actually in Borneo; we are in Vietnam, but we have some serious catching up to do and it is raining, which makes for good blogging weather.  So, Borneo.  Pretty great.  Borneo is a really big island (I think something like the 3rd or 4th largest in the world) so we just stuck to one area called Sabah, which is an autonomous region of Malaysia.  First stop was a place called Sungai Kinabatagan, which is a major river in the area. 
We stayed at this pretty cool camp that was really rustic.  We stayed six abreast in these shelters that had a roof but no walls, the whole place suspended over a swamp.  It looked like this:

There wasn’t any running water and the best bathing option was the crocodile-infested river.  Good enough.  We weren’t there for the amenities.  The river is known as a hold out for wildlife since the rest of Borneo has been slashed to make way for palm plantations.  That makes Kinabatagan an island of wildlife like the orangutan, proboscis monkey, crocodile, and lots of birds.  We saw them all.  It was really great.

This is a kingfisher—one of my favorite bird families since they are always so brightly colored.




Here is the proboscis monkey, so named for his giant nose.  Proboscis monkeys also get absurdity points for their giant bellies.  They are found only in Borneo, so that is pretty cool.







Even Sally got into the act.  Note the official biologist gear including muddy rubber boots, brimmed hat and binoculars.  Looking good Sally.





The forest around the camp was beautiful—a tangle of lianas that would have made Tarzan proud.
Plus it had things like this:



It’s called a lantern bug and they are fairly famous.  I mean, look at it.  Of course it’s famous.


One evening, we had some crazy clouds which deserve posting.  Am I right?








At night, a lot of things are blind so you can get really close, like to this kingfisher…


…or to this super rare primate called a slow loris.  They are related to tarsiers, which are another cousin of ours.  He looked sad to be having so many people paying attention to him.


Here is another fun mammal—a civet cat that looks like a cross between a raccoon and a cat.  This is the Asian plam civet which are famous for eating coffee beans, then pooping them out, which are then harvested and fetch a really high price.  Evidently, the stomach enzymes make the coffee taste better.  I didn’t need another reason not to drink coffee, but I like the critter.

And of course then there was the orangutan.  They are basically the reason we came to Borneo (I, Brian, of course led the charge to Borneo, but I thin that Sally liked it too).  These guys are amazing.  They are a riot to watch, and even have a range of facial expressions.



And let’s have some video from the star of the show!

More Diving Photos

Now that I have had a chance to edit some photos, I thought it would be nice to get a few more up here.  So, here are some more from our dives off Komodo Island in Indonesia.  This was the best diving that I have ever seen.  Even my underwater housing flooding and ruining my camera didn’t ruin it.  Here are some photos before the camera died though. (I won’t mention all of the manta rays, turtles, rays, and sharks that we saw after the camera died.)

And since my internet is really fast here, let’s try some video!

Here’s a pretty cool hawksbill turtle just chillin’.

 

This is Sally swimming through a whole gang-load of little fish. I’ve never seen so many fish as in Komodo.

 

How about this green moray eel? They don’t see so well.

We are holed up relaxing a little bit in Hanoi so I will be posting a bunch of updates about our doings over the next few days.  Keep checking here!

Ramadan

It's Ramadan, August 1-31, and we're in the primarily Muslim region of Malaysia, Sabah on the island of Borneo. We spent our first few days here on the river Kinabatangan, on a jungle safari, cruising for orangutans, proboscis monkeys, birds, and other wildlife.

When we met the guides, young Malaysian men who were very knowledgeable about all things wildlife, they shook Brian’s hand, but apologized to me. The rules of Ramadan dictate that they cannot touch a woman for the 30 days. In addition, the men were not allowed to eat during the sunlight hours, relegating them to a schedule of waking at 3am to eat before sun-up and waiting until 6:30pm to break the fast. While we chowed down on delicious Malaysian food, they watched from the sidelines.

Five times a day, the staff disappeared into their staff room to pray. I asked where Mecca was, and the guide was confused. He said they just prayed to the sign. What sign? Later, when I started paying attention, I realized this sign was in every public space we entered, including our hotel room.

Meanwhile, we’re enjoying the food, the beer, and the hospitality. And we’re praying for good weather as we prepare to dive Sipidan.