Island Environment

Home Sweet Mabul
Between visits to Sipadan, divers can enjoy boat dives on a series of mini walls that ring Mabul, topping out in just 15 to 25 feet of water. Visibility is typically in the 50- to 75-foot range, and there are fairly strong currents running along the walls, so we drifted along, checking out what was hiding in the nooks and crannies of the reef. We didn’t see many big critters--the largest for me was a 2-foot crocodile fish--but the little guys were great fun to stalk with my camera.

For photographers who prefer to shoot macro, most resorts also offer unlimited “muck diving” right off the beach. The “muck” is really pea-sized, white gravel interspersed with small branching corals, ideal habitat for finding colorful pygmy sea horses and those beautiful, but elusive, Mandarin fish.

Topside, Mabul isn’t much bigger than Sipadan. During our stay, I walked around the entire island in about an hour. In addition to five resorts, there is a small village including a school and regional police barracks. Throughout the five days that we stayed on Mabul, there were many opportunities to meet and interact with the villagers, who were extremely friendly and eager to share their island with guests. Since Malaysia was a British Colony until the mid-1960s, English is widely spoken. Wherever I went, my greeting of “Hello” was always met with a pleasant “Hello” in return and a welcoming smile.

Most of the island’s resorts were built new after the move from Sipadan, and some took the opportunity to proactively safeguard the island ecosystem. Borneo Divers, the resort where we stayed, even built a sanitary sewer system including a waste treatment plant that also serves the needs of the village.

Parting Shots
On our last morning of diving, we returned to Sipadan for some early morning dives. The boat left before sunrise so that we would be in the water just as the sun came up. As we got settled in on a site named Barracuda Point, out of the darkness came a parade of several hundred huge green bumphead parrotfish. These five-foot-long monsters sleep on the shallow water reef in a massive school. As the sun rises, the school moves in unison out toward the edge of the wall where the fish disperse and spend the day doing whatever it is that bumphead wrasse do.

The effect was startling. The bumpheads surged like a thundering herd of buffalo as they came toward us. I hunkered down behind a coral head and started shooting as they brushed past me, ignoring the flash of my strobe and hardly moving aside to keep from slamming into me. Like a waterfall of fish, they just kept coming and coming. As the school trailed off, I turned to watch the last of the bumpheads disappear over the edge of the wall and paused to admire the scene. What a remarkable end to a remarkable dive trip. This was my first trip to Sipadan, and thanks to proactive conservation efforts, it certainly won’t be my last.

Topside Malaysia
While diving Sipadan is the highlight of any Malaysia trip, you don’t want to travel halfway around the world and not see the topside attractions of a destination as exotic as Malaysia.

Our trip was arranged by dive wholesaler Scuba Travel Ventures, and included five days of topside tours, starting with terrestrial parks and wildlife sanctuaries on Borneo. After leaving Mabul, we took a bus across the island to reach the next portion of our trip: the Sepilok Nature Resort, an eco-lodge beside the Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary. We arrived late in the afternoon and that night we were treated to a trek through the rainforest, before spending the next morning at the Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.

Since orangutans are solitary creatures, and very difficult to find in the wild, the only reasonable place to see them up close and personal is at a rehabilitation center. They are brought in, usually as orphaned babies, and spend several years with other orangutans growing up and learning to survive. This particular center is at the edge of a large preserve and the older orangutans “graduate” into the preserve in a natural maturing process.

Our next stop was the Kinabatangan River, home to a population of proboscis monkeys. The monkeys get their name from their distinctive noses--the males have broad, cylindrical noses and the females have very pointed ones. They live along the river banks and are most easily seen from a boat. The journey also offers a glimpse at a vast array of rainforest birds including eagles, hornbills, egrets, herons and kingfishers.

Our last stop was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s bustling capital city. The city is modern and appealing. The downtown area is an exotic mix of English colonial architecture and modern high rise buildings, including some of the tallest buildings in the world. Dining was great, and a walk through the Chinese market is not to be missed.