After some much needed R&R at the Mayfair Hotel in Sandakan, it was time to head off for our next adventure in Semporna. Semporna isn't much of a city, but what's special about it is that off it's shoreline, lies one of the most beautiful dive sites in the world called Sipadan. Sipadan is an island that is heavily protected and only 120 people are allowed to dive a day.
To warm up for our dive to Sipadan, we signed up for for diving on one of the other islands with a company called Scuba Junkie. Scuba Junkie was in our guidebooks and was one of the only dive shops that showed up on google for the area. They had reasonable prices and the dive site sounded pretty sweet too.
The next morning we woke up bright and early for our dive at Mataking Island which is about 1.5 hours away. Before we even got to dive we were having equipment difficulties. Joeys regulator (for those of you non divers: breathing apparatus) was not working very well because the air gauge needle kept on bobbing up and down everytime he took a breath, which means it's broken. Mine seemed fine on the boat but half way through our dive, mine started to do the exact same thing. Luckily it didn't cause any complications. A problem like this isn't necessarily catastrophic, but with diving it is always best to be on the side of caution.
Our first dive was pretty cool. More so of a drift dive. The cool thing about Mataking is that most of the things you are looking for are micro. So the entire time we looked for things like shrimp, frog fish, and nudi branches. Joey and I are all about finding big stuff. The little things could interest us less, but it was still diving and we had a great time. Our guide was very knowledgeable and passionate about the little things.
That night we rested up for our big day at Sipadan. We had to move hotels because Scuba Junkie had no more room. We moved to Borneo Global Backpackers, which was the company we were gonna be diving with for Sipadan. This whole trip Joey and I have been able to avoid dorms, unfortunately this time to save money (cuz Sipidan was prettttty expensive) we decided to stick it out in a dorm. LUCKILY there was only one other person in our 8 person dorm, it was a french girl who was very quiet! We were so happy.
The next morning we set out for Sipidan. We were sort of scared because the people diving with us looked like pros. It was a couple, and the guy actually turned out to be an instructor in Australia. Joey and I both had a sigh of relief when we found out his girlfriend only had a few more dives than us. We are still really bad on sucking up our air quickly, and there was no way that we wanted to ruin another person's Sipidan experience by having to come up early.
Our guide that morning said he had saw a group of hammerhead sharks about 100 metres away from the reef, so that is where we set off. In Sipidan the aim of the game is to look for more macro animals such as sharks, but the reef itself is amazing in itself. Unfortunately we did not run into any hammerheads, but we did see lots of white tip reef sharks. Whoop de doo... We've already seen lots of them. The cool thing about Sipidan was that they were EVERYWHERE. After our 3 dives, I bet we saw atleast 30 white tip reef sharks.
For our last dive we went to Turtle Tomb. The dive site is basically a huge reef drop off that goes down 600 metres. We only went to about 25 metres in total, but there was nothing beyond that anyways. The reef wall was absolutely beautiful covered in soft and hard corals of all different colours. There were all different types of tropical fish as well. One of the highlights of the dive was going into a cave they call Turtle Tomb. Sadly, turtles sometimes swim in there and can't find their way out and then they die :( I am glad we didn't see any turtle skeletons. It would have made me sad because I LOVE LOVE LOVE sea turtles.
The next day, Joey and I were exhausted after 2 full days of diving. There was a big festival going on in Semporna. It was a boat festival with lots of beautiful coloured boats in the harbour. We were both amazed at how many people were at the festival in the streets. You could barely get anywhere. What used to be a 2 minute walk turned into 20 minutes. What annoyed me most was the fact a lot of woman had umbrellas to cover themselves from the sun. Normally a woman walking down an uncrowded street with an umbrella is perfectly fine, but when the streets are packed with vendors and thousands of people, an umbrella is not a wise choice, especially when every woman does it. There were many times I feared for the safety of my eyes. There's this new invention called sunscreen, maybe you should try it sometime. Both Joey and I found the festival quite intense because of the sheer volume of people. Another thing we experienced in Borneo was that everyone just stares at you forever. Peninsular Malaysia was fine for this because I guess they are used to seeing white people, but in Borneo it edged on the side of ridiculousness.
Joey and I barricaded ourselves in the room for most of the days because it was too hot and crazy outside during the festival. We were glad to leave Semporna on a night bus. Malaysia is known for it's plush overnight buses. This bus was no exception except the windows were all smashed in and kept together with black saran wrap. Very safe... The driver blared Pitbull, Lady Gaga and Beyonce all night, until I got Joey to tell him to turn it down. When the driver did, the people around us didn't like this. They decided to torture us with their cellphones on speakerphone, and listening to their craptastic music full volume. Don't try to take music away from South East Asians, it won't end well.
Finally Joey and I got some shut eye... we were abruptly woken up by the guy behind Joey puking into a barf bag about half a foot away from Joey's face. I was glad to learn that we were very close to our destination of Kota Kinabalu.
When we arrived to KK, we headed to Borneo Global Backpackers to see if we could rent a room for 5 hours to get some much needed sleep. We were very thankful that they gave us a discounted rate so we could get some shut eye! Later that day we walked around KK, just waiting for our flight to Manila. On to our last country!
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