We flew from KL straight to Tawau, a small town on the coast of Borneo in the region of Sabah. We had to re-clear customs here but it didn’t take very long because it was a small flight and a small airport. We had a driver waiting for us from our scuba dive company and he drove us to the small fishing town of Semporna, about an hour further down the coast. We checked into our hostel after an exhausting day of travel… tomorrow, it would finally be time to dive.
We hit the dive shop early and filled out all our paperwork then went down to the jetty for the boat ride to Mabul, our final destination for this, the first leg of the race… anyway the Semporna jetty was constructed by the locals and they somehow misjudged the tide levels, so when the tide is high in the morning half of the mooring points are underwater and you have to walk down through the water, wondering if the Jetty will drop out from under you at some point.
It didn’t, and we got on the boat to Mabul, which is a small island with some amazing dive sites, located about 40 minutes from Semporna.
The dive shop took all our bags up to the resort and we picked up our dive gear and headed out for our first dive at a site called Stingray city.
Penny is totally confident with her diving but people who know me fairly well sometimes ask how I, a guy who can barely swim and is deeply terrified of the ocean, can scuba dive… The answer is that I put my faith in the equipment and it does most of the work. Then it’s just a matter of staying calm and controlling your breathing. It still terrifies me every time I let the air out of my BCD and my head slips below the water, but once you’re under everything is different.
It really is like another planet… or like a part of our planet that we haven’t had a chance to ruin yet. Teeming with life and activity, colour and variety. At Stingray City on our first dive, we saw 6 turtles and I was sure I’d just had the highlight of the trip… but we still had 5 dives to go.
On our second dive we visited an artificial reef that was made up of a whole lot of old sunken crates and palettes. We saw a giant 1.5m long grouper lurking in the shadows along with a whole lot of smaller fish, but the highlight for me was a huge shoal of Trevally.. there were hundreds of them, all at least the size of my hand, swirling around us and above us as we swam through them… you see it on nature documentaries, where a shoal of fish seems to move like one single creature with direction and purpose, flowing around obstacles… it was something else to see it for real, only a few feet away from us, so close we could reach out and touch them.. looking into the eyes of each fish as they swirled past was the closest I’ve ever felt to nature… it was truly amazing.
The third dive of the day was at a place called something like black ribbon valley. It was another beAautiful site but the real highlight was the massive green turtle we saw… maybe 1.5m long. Huge and graceful and only a few meters away.
Then we went back to the resort to lounge in the hammock and enjoy the sunset…
Yayyyyyyy!! Great to have you guys back and blogging.
Yayyyyyyy!!
So glad the dives were amazing – makes it all worth while!