2nd - 7th March 2012
With all the ferries leaving in the morning and we had a night to kill in Semporna before leaving for Mabul the following morning at 8am. We got a room in Dragon Inn, it looked the part, a big space, big comfortable bed, air-conditioning, small balcony etc. actually it was wonderful until I heard our neighbour singing through the thin bamboo walls, I knocked on the wall and the singing stopped but that didn't stop them him shouting on the phone at 3am or giggling with his girlfriend late at night. I hate noisy neighbours.
Djalma and I bumped into John, a young English guy we'd met on the live-aboard in the Similan Islands in Thailand, we said hello and moved on to get some dinner and book onward tickets. We ate on the street, some gorgeous chicken, a big plate of noodles and some gado-gado – probably our last for a long time. We found our way to the ticket office for a company running luxurious night buses to Kota Kinabalu. We booked our tickets for the night before our flight was due to leave and then headed back to the bar where John and his diving friends were drinking up a storm. Djalma got a couple of beers and after a short while I disappeared off to bed, not really feeling the atmosphere in the bar or the expensive cans of beer.
The next morning I got up at 5.30 to work out and tried to keep quiet for our neighbours although I really felt like stomping about as much as I possibly could just to return the favour. We had banana fritter sandwiches and coffee for breakfast before getting on the speedboat that took us out to Mabul where we would be staying for the next three nights.
The ride was choppy and the weather miserable, the hour trip seemed to take a lot longer and I was so grateful to get off the boat and get a cup of tea. Djalma and I decided not to dive that first day, we had booked our permits for Sipadan for the 4th and 5th and decided to snorkel and explore the island that morning instead. The boat was privately owned by the dive company, Uncle Chang, and his restaurant and rooms were spread out on wooden stilts over shallow water, it felt like we were stepping onto a different vision of Waterworld. We eventually found our way onto land, down a myriad of wonky wooden pathways and we liked what we saw.
We were expecting a completely dive oriented island and what we saw was people getting on with life, repairing boats, chatting to friends, women selling sugary snacks for children who queued up for sweet noodles and doughnuts in-between playing football or skipping or chasing tyres down the hard packed sand paths. Everything was swept clean and the wooden houses, sometimes shacks on stilts all looked orderly and well kept in their own way. We followed John's directions to a cheap home-stay further down the “beach” stopping frequently to make sure we were going the right way. We pulled up at Panglima and negotiated a room for 30 ringgit each per night, it wasn't luxurious but it was clean and dry and it smelt nice. We dumped our stuff down, locked our bags up and went out exploring.
We strolled round the island, passing over more of the wonky wooden pathways that connected houses, restaurants, jetties and home-stays with the island, the water underneath the houses wasn't exactly pristine. The water was clear and allowed perfect views of old trousers, metal cans and lots of other rubbish too heavy to be carried away with the tide. All the toilets and showers emptied directly into these shallow waters as well, always good to know beforehand I think. We saw a monitor lizard sitting on top of a wall and followed a rather more stable wooden path out to a more luxurious walk lined with hibiscus and bougainvillea.
After poking our noses around and admiring the clean water and the schools of small fish clearly visible beneath the surface. Walking further on back on the beach we stopped to watch a small group of boys watching the water intently, after a few minutes we still couldn't see what it was that they were watching so we said goodbye, to many giggles, and walked on this time following a fence. We thought at first that the fence was something to do with one of swanky resorts but it seems that it is there to separate the sea gypsies from the Malaysians, apartheid on an island this small (a population of 3000) seemed unthinkable, we only found this out on the morning we were leaving to go back to Semporna.
We stopped for a rather delicious coconut and snacked on the juicy flesh after drinking the water, the girl who took our money, Linda, had the biggest smile and was just charming, we walked along with our little pile of coconut and watched weekend life in the village. We stopped in the shade of a huge tree on a beach and while I sat on the sun lounger and took photos of boys fishing in small boat from afar, Djalma strapped on his fins, mask and snorkel and swam out to the oil rig 800 metres off shore. He was gone a fair while, of course from shore it looked a lot closer and after swimming for several minutes and not getting much closer it felt even further than it was. He made it though and climbed up for a look managing to get a ride back to shore. I wanted to get out of the sun so we headed back to our home-stay and had some noodle soup for lunch.
We got up early the next day, I worked out and then we headed over to Uncle Chang to get breakfast, scrambled eggs and baked beans (it did make me laugh) and get kit for our dives, none of it that great. The wetsuits were all some kind of micro fibre and retained smell (not great for sea weeing) the fins were the kind used when snorkelling (not with booties) and gave some people some horrendous blisters they were also rather too flexible to give you any kind of propulsion against currents. Not really minding that much, we were soon to be diving in Sipadan one of the worlds top dive sites! We got into the boat around 8.30 introduced ourselves to our fellow divers and in under half an hour we were pulling up at Sipadan.
We registered and got back on the boat, our guides finally introduced themselves and ran through the dive briefing with us. We'd heard some horror stories about Uncle Chang unsafe diving practices, I won't repeat them hear because I have no idea how true they are, suffice to say I was paying close attention and Djalma and I made sure to stay close together. The weather was cold, grey and miserable and the boat ride wasn't the smoothest, we got in the water at our first dive site and descended to 30m, as soon as we started moving I started to feel nauseous, properly vomalicious, one little burp almost came out with my scrambled eggs, coupled with some petrol scented air and I could take it. I'd heard that if you are sick under water you should just chunder into your regulator because the urge is to take in air immediately after throwing up, my regulator was making sounds and the thought of blocking my regulator with vomit 30 metres under the sea filled me with terror. We signalled to our guide and promptly made our way to the surface where I took in big gulps of fresh air and apologised profusely to my very understanding husband. Our first dive at Sipadan did not go how I expected. We sat, shivering on the boat waiting for the everyone else to come up. When everyone was out of the water we made our way back to Sipadan Island and had tea and snacks, well I had just tea not wishing to add much more to my groaning tummy.
Our second and third dives were great, the visibility wasn't amazing because the sky was so overcast but we saw so many reef sharks, we saw schools of barracuda and jack-fish and hovered above an amazing coral garden on one of our safety stops.
Back on Mabul we had dinner at the little restaurant near our home-stay and listened to a lady singing karaoke, she was surprisingly good and not too loud either, we were rather impressed.
The next day we had three more dives at Sipadan, I forget the dive sites (but all the photos are tagged) we were with a different group of people this time, James from the UK again, a young Danish couple, a French girl and a quiet Japanese guy, it was another great group of people and we had a wonderful time. I was careful not to over eat at breakfast and didn't suffer again, we saw so many things, more harks again and of course turtles, we got close to a large school of barracuda and a school of big bump head parrotfish, we saw a huge school of jack-fish and two giant trevally swimming with them. Towards the end of our second dive we passed through a patch with several big, aggressive triggerfish who chased a couple of people in our group, it's fair to say to was anxious to get out of the water at this point.
(Photo courtesy of Polish couple from previous day's diving)
We stopped in between dives for much needed cups of tea and food, the weather was crap, it was a little windy and it rained, only lightly, the whole day – not what you want when you want to get warm and dry after spending so much time in the water. We headed back rather elated at all the beautiful things we'd seen that day and shivering from the cold at the same time. James headed back to Semporna almost immediately but not before we all exchanged email addresses to swap photos. We made plans to meet for dinner after showers and naps, Djalma never made it out of bed, the poor darling was absolutely shattered so I went to say hello and then headed back to my big baby. We lay on the bed and gorged on Cadbury's chocolate, hot and spicy pringles and fizzy pop and watched a film, it was deliciously naughty.
We had a lie in the next day, until 7.30! We chilled out for most of the morning, I worked out and then worked on the photos, Djalma did our washing and went snorkelling. Just before 4pm we said goodbye to the cat and her six kittens and got the last boat back to Semporna were we killed some time in a restaurant before getting the night bus up to Kota Kinabalu.
The journey took a about 10 hours and we spent most of them cramped and freezing in under the arctic air-conditioning. We arrived around 5am and pre-apologised to each other for any nastiness or rudeness from a night without sleep, we found a café packed with local dudes and sat and had coffee and watched Tropic of Thunder. By the time the film finished at 7am we'd both laughed quite a lot and were feeling much better about the day ahead. We trudged out to a bus stop and got a bus into town, we nipped into the toilets of a swanky hotel and had quick washes, brushed our teeth and attended to nature. Baby powder fresh we had a look at the fish market before finding a place with wifi and cheapish food to spend the day before heading to the airport for our flight to Manila.
Our flight to Manila was at 6pm so we had all day to upload photos and relax, I got some postcards printed but was very upset when I noticed that bits had been chopped off all of them and then being told 'it's only a little bit' I could've screamed (it wasn't that bad but I was sleep deprived!) I took them back and got a refund. When 2pm rolled round we decided to head to the airport, a couple of buses later and we were there. We both had proper washes in the toilet cubicles – Djalma had the brilliant idea of taking in the magic towel, filling up one hand with soap and then stripping off in the cubicle and blasting himself with the bum gun, he looked so refreshed that I decided to try it for myself but it was much harder to negotiate big trousers and a bra with a full hand of soap on a wet floor.
Our flight was only two hours long and we didn't have long to wait, after sending up my usual prayers for a safe flight I snoozed most of the way. When we touched down in Manila it was dark and there weren't any buses, we flagged down a taxi and then had to direct him to our hotel in-between listening to our driver ask for more money the whole way. Not cool. When we arrived at our hotel we were greeted by a grumpy little midget who had given away the cheaper room we had booked and didn't apologise at all for it. She was not the nicest welcome to a new country and it took our combined will power to be nice and sort out a different room without jumping over the counter and giving her a good thump – she was so small I think I could have easily had her in a fight. We got our small room and a little fan, had showers and instantly felt much better about the day and then promptly went to sleep.
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