17 Apr Scuba Diving Mabul 🌴
Aaron and I arrived at the small Tawau airport and stepped outside to a gang of taxi drivers asking where we needed to go. We said Semporna and a man gestured to his cab and said 25R each, you wait here. Well, we weren’t going to give in that easily, so we walked up to a security guard and asked about the public bus. He notified us that there was no longer a public bus from the airport to Semporna and that we would have to take a taxi to Tawau town for 20R and then get a bus ticket from there. We walked back over to the cab driver who gave us a knowing smile and we piled in with two other travelers.
From Semporna we checked in at the Scuba Junkie Hostel and walked across the street to their office to do any paperwork for our reservation. The girl at the counter talked us through the contract, which specifically states ‘no public nudity’, along with other more generic rules, so of course Aaron had to argue a bit about it, but eventually he signed and we paid the 11R jetty fee for getting to Mabul Island.
Exploring Semporna was an interesting experience. It is an extremely dirty town. There is trash everywhere, broken shells that can’t be sold, rotting fish and clams, and all of the runoff from that mixes with the mud in the streets during the daily afternoon downpours. It’s not all bad, though. There are good Indian and Chinese seafood restaurants, a great fruit smoothie cafe called Amazing Island (try the avocado smoothies), and a local market along the waterfront. Nevertheless, we were not sad to say goodbye when we hopped on our transfer boat in the morning.
Mabul
Bright and early we were hustled onto a small speedboat with some other Scuba Junkie patrons. We stopped at another jetty for them to ‘sign us in’ at the edge of the harbor, then had a beautiful one hour boat ride to Mabul. The sad part is, we had to stop multiple times because the motors got stuck on trash floating in the ocean. So it goes.
When we arrived we dropped our bags on the dock and were told to immediately grab our rental gear and hop back on the boat. First day of diving! I was nervous, because I haven’t actually done any fun dives since I got my Advance Open Water in Koh Tao, Thailand. It’s been a couple of months and I had very little experience in the first place, but Aaron has been doing this a while and he checked my gear and said he’d keep an eye on me. He didn’t need to, though. The moment I hit the water I felt fine – like I’d been doing this my whole life. This fish out of water finally got her element back!
Our guide the first and second day introduced himself as Nasi Goreng, or Nasi, for short. Aaron and I sniggered, because if you read my Malay food guide, you’ll see that nasi goreng is ‘fried rice’. The jokes commenced. He and the other dive masters were amazing, though, pointing out the different kinds of fish and invertebrates. We did three dives every day, aside from one rest day in which we decided to do an extra night dive, and four dives during our Sipidan day. We saw the most incredible things! I had nothing to compare it to, considering the visibility was terrible when I trained in Koh Tao and I hadn’t experienced anything else, but I could tell that this area was especially diverse. A few of the many amazing things we saw were a few kinds of lion fish, an enormous cuttlefish, a color and shape changing octopus, enormous groupers, green and hawksbill turtles, tons of angel and butterfly fish, a million different nudibranches (one of my favorites), a pygmy seahorse, crocodile fish, stone fish, tiny cuttlefish fighting over a female (coolest thing ever), shrimps, enormous moray eels…I could go on and on. We only rented a camera for one day, and in just one dive we took some incredible pictures.
With our reservation we got a one day pass to dive at Sipadan, which is a famous diving reef. It has both open water and coral beds on steep wall drop offs. They only give out so many passes to visitors per day, so you have to plan ahead and go with a resort. This is the place they take you to try and see the big stuff, like whale sharks or hammerheads. It was actually my least favorite day of diving. We got 4 dives in for the day, and while the coral looked beautiful, it was hard to tell because the current pushed us by so quickly. We spent little time looking at the macro life, and the guides were mostly focused on the deep blue to catch a glimpse of something big. We didn’t see anything, unfortunately, and maybe if we had I would feel differently, but I think I’m much more of a macro diver. I like the little things 🙂
One dive in Sipadan was pretty incredible and worth the trip, though. The guides were looking for a school of barracuda. I didn’t understand what the big deal was, as they aren’t the coolest looking fish, but whatever. When they found the school, though, they all freaked out and rushed us into the water. You could see the top fins, like tiny sharks circling atop the water. As soon as we went under I understood why they were so amped about the barracuda….Hundreds, thousands of them were passing so thickly they looked like a solid wall. Then they would start spinning around each other and there was suddenly a giant funnel of large, sharp-toothed fish above me, and I was looking up through the center like the eye of a storm that could tear me to pieces. It is a difficult experience to describe, but I will never forget it.
The resort itself was really nice. The buildings are surrounded by local plants and coconut trees, and the resort has beach and reef cleanups regularly for the trash that floats in. They also work with the locals to collect turtle eggs in order to monitor hatching and get them safely into the ocean. There is a common area with all day coffee and tea, a buffet style breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and they serve cake snacks twice a day in between dives. You can see all the way to the other side of the tiny island from the bar upstairs. It all seemed pretty lush to me. It was awesome having those things available, especially the tea and cake, but it was a weird environment. If you offered to help anybody with anything they absolutely would not allow it, because you’re a paying customer. That feels weird to me. If you’re struggling with a huge jug of water I’m not just going to sit and watch, I’d like to help! But overall it was a really cool experience. The resort thing is a bit pricey, but dives with rental are only $25 a piece, so a better budget option would be to find cheap lodging on the island and dive withScuba Junkie (I’ve heard that the budget joints don’t have the greatest dive masters). It may be difficult to get tickets to Sipidan this way, though.
I went to bed pretty early every night, because I’m super lame and was exhausted after so much diving, but on our times off we did explore the island a bit. There was a big soccer game one day where Scuba Junkie played another resort’s team. Many people from the local village came to watch. The parts of the island that aren’t owned by resorts are packed as full as possible with small driftwood and sheet metal houses on stilts. Most of them are connected to one another and trail out into the ocean with a rickety wooden dock as a walk way on the side. Some of these sketchy looking docks lead to restaurants that you wouldn’t have even known were there.
Some of the villagers live here year round, but others are a people called the Sea Gypsies, or the Bajau Laut. The few Bajau Laut that remain come to the islands seasonally when storms rage over the ocean. The rest of the year they live on small boats with their entire families, free diving and working with the spirits of the ocean to feed their families and sometimes to trade with other groups of people. You can see on the water that one larger boat has clothing and other miscellaneous things hanging from it, obviously a living space, while it trailed a line of much smaller and shallower boats for them to take out individually for fishing or trading.
One gypsy woman rowed her small canoe up to us as we sat on a dock, displaying her wares of cowries and conch. We couldn’t do anything with them so we waved her away, signaling no and smiling. She smiled back and pointed at the can of sweet condensed milk I had just bought, then pointed at herself. I shrugged and handed her the can. I could get another. She smiled broadly and rowed away to sell her wares somewhere else. Not much later she came back around and pointed at me and then herself again. I shook my head no and said I had nothing else to give her, so she smiled and tugged on her ears and pointed at me again. She wanted my gauges! I laughed and said no way! You’re ears aren’t even pierced, what would you do with these? And she just smiled, shrugged, and rowed away again, constantly bailing out her small boat with a cut bottom half of a water bottle. It seems a laborious, yet simple life.
We returned to Semporna after our exhausting and incredible week and stayed one final night there, had breakfast with our friend and dive master, Shantha, lunch with our new friend, Anna, then got a taxi back to the airport. We arrived super early so we could share a ride and save some cash, but after already spending several hours at this tiny and boring airport, it turns out our flight was delayed by several more hours. We spent the evening with another girl we met at Scuba Junkie laughing at odd ingredients in canned drinks and generally shooting the shit.
When we fiiiinally got back to Kuala Lumpur we stayed at the airport hotel, Tune, because it was so late and we were exhausted. Breakfast was not included, but we got lucky and the guy let us into the buffet anyways, so we had a huge morning meal (fo’ FREE!). We then headed back to the house I couchsurfed at to grab our big bags we had left behind and spend one last evening with Andrew, Stephen, and Shammah. We went to this amazing Chinese vegetarian restaurant that literally had ‘fried gluten’ on the menu. Also, fried gluten with gluten sauce, gluten on fried gluten with gluten sauce, gluten in garlic, gluten and tofu…
Or maybe….
Pick your poison. Honestly, it was incredible, and the tofu and ‘gluten’ dishes they served really did look and have the texture of fish or chicken or whatever was described in the menu. It was insane! How do you make tofu look and flake like fish?? Just don’t plan on opening a place like this in the States. The gluten freebies would have a heart attack.
After dinner I got utterly smashed and with only about two hours of sleep dragged Aaron out of bed in the morning to head to our next stop: The Cameron Highlands!
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