Mar 12th, 2008
Sipidan
Borneo activity number 2; scuba diving one of the Top 10 destinations in the world. Bring it on! The amazing thing about traveling around this part of the world is that you can get any flight you want, at bargain basement prices. Our one-hour flight to Semporna (Tawau) was delayed by 6 hours so rather than hang around waiting for it, we switched airlines and bought ourselves a last-minute ticket for 30 quid each. A breath of fresh air.
The only highlight of diving Sipidan Island off the east coast of Borneo is the diving itself. Stay underwater for as long as possible as any time spent on land will be quite underwhelming.
Semporna is a main coastal town where you arrive – stay – and get out as soon as possible. It’s grid street layout is full of men and teenagers who, on the slightly menacing side of being friendly, all shout ‘Hello’ at you. If you say Hello back they laugh, if you don’t you feel as if they might pick a fight. How pleasant. We chose to stay on an island towards Sipidan (these days it’s forbidden to stay on Sipidan itself), but it was a disappointment for other reasons. Whilst, here people do genuinely mean Hello, which was a relief, their attitudes to rubbish were frightening. I didn’t see one bin, or even a pile of rubbish. It just accumulates wherever the culprit (young or old) discards it. As you can imagine, it ends up lapping the sea edge. It’s a simple case of education and leading by example by the larger companies and resorts. Sadly these resorts are all owned and managed by Malaysian businessmen on the mainland peninsular who couldn’t give a damn about the long term survival of the island and their business. The local, Western run dive schools don’t appear to care either with no effort being made to help teach the local people about keeping the islands clean.
So all in all, we had big smiles on our faces the day we dived Sipidan. The water was crystal blue, the diving was awesome and the sun was finally out! Heaven. We came face to face with a few sharks, saw loads of turtles (Sipidan is a breeding ground for the little shelled cuties) and all our favorites like batfish, angel fish, boxfish and pufferfish.
Upon returning to scummy Semporna we crammed in a night dive before bed. I still have nightmares about the amount of rubbish we swam past; a bra, a trainer, a nappy. This is one place where you want to keep your mouth firmly shut. Our German Dive Master turned out to be the owner of the dive centre and he also turned out to be a right idiot; he kept us waiting for an hour in the dive centre and then just before we got in the water said ‘Ah I am the only one who is allowed to take pictures’. Later, he abandoned us underwater, went back to the boat, got his camera and we had to twiddle our thumbs while he took his precious pictures. But these things aside, we did see some pretty freaky, weird and wonderful nocturnal creatures including some green things that looked like leaves, a cuttlefish that was soooo small we used a magnifying glass to see it and a cool 4cm yellow frogfish who was hiding in a crack in the rock (this was the critter that instigated the photography shoot). Thankfully, the other Dive Masters from this place, Scuba Junkie, were the saving grace and made the rest of the trip fun. Their rooms and service on the other hand could do with a good scrubbing, let alone the thieving monkey who stole Guy’s flip flops.