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.