We've said goodbye to Borneo and Malaysia after having spent a fantastic week or so exploring the East of Sabah. From Sepilok, we boarded the bus for a wiggly windy 5 hour journey south to Semporna on the coast of the Sulu Sea. The journey gave us a horrific indication of how much of the rainforest in Borneo is being destroyed to make way for huge palm oil plantations - at some points all the eye could see was rows and rows of palm trees and only the steepest slopes were left to forest. Craziness.
We arrived in Semporna and joined up with an Aussie/NZ couple from the bus who were staying in the same hotel as us and headed through town to the hotel. As usual, no thought has been put into any town planning whatsoever and the whole place is a mishmash of ugly concrete blocks and smells like dead fish and sewers. Nice. Why did we go here, I here you ask.... Well, off the coast of Semporna is the only oceanic island in Malaysia, Sipidan - it is not attached to the continental shelf but it a limestone column that sticks up from the sea bed. This makes for good coral reefs apparently and is one of the top dive spots in the world. Fortunately, there's no development on the island and only 120 divers/snorkellers can visit each day which is keeping the place nice and clean and tidy (unlike most of Malaysia...). As you can't stay there, we stayed on a nearby island, Mabul, which consists of stilt villages built all over the pristine white sandy beaches and most of their rubbish appears to go straight in the sea. You can imagine why I say it's fortunate that Sipidan is not developed. But it had some nice spots and we spent a day wandering around the island and lying on the beach shadebathing.
The following day we headed out on the dive boat to spend the morning snorkelling around Sipidan. And it was so so so worth the trip down there as it was by far and away the best snorkelling I've ever done ever. The water was unbelievably clear and there was so many different types of fish that it was just like swimming in an aquarium. It must have been the reef that the Finding Nemo people based their reef on :-) The first spot we snorkelled was a shallow reef and the fish were mainly small brightly coloured and there were all different colour corals and anenomes.
We thought that was great, but the second spot was even better - along the edge of the reef where there was a drop-off down to about 30m so there were a lot of larger fish including reef sharks and Giant Sea Turtles. It was amazing to swim alongside such graceful creatures in the deep blue of the sea. We saw at least 10 of them - some in the shallows of the reef and some out in the deeper water. Brilliant. I didn't want to get out of the water, but it was one of the best things we've done on the trip so far and I'm reluctant to snorkel anywhere else now as it will seem rubbish in comparison!
We took our sunburned bodies back to the mainland and headed back to Kota Kinabalu on the night bus. Argh I hate buses and we spent 10 hours on a crappy bus attempting to sleep in my broken non-reclining chair shrouded in my sleeping sheet as the air-con was set on 'arctic'. But we survived and luckily were able to check-in to the hostel in KK at 6am and get a couple of hours decent sleep before starting the day. We've just spent the last couple of days hanging out in KK and figuring out where to go next... We decided that after 4 months we're now done with Asia and ready for something different so we're spending a couple of days in Singapore and then heading to Australia to suss out maybe working there for a bit. So it's goodbye Asia for now and I'll miss:
- cheap good food
- cheap shopping
- friendly people
- amazing beaches
- amazing wildlife
- amazing cultural stuff
But I'm happy to be leaving:
- being stared at/hassled
- being ripped off by taxis
- the smell of open sewers
- the smell of dried fish
- cockerels with internal clock issues that crow at 2am
- crazy frog ladies
- being hot all the time or freezing cold anywhere with aircon
But we have had a fabulous time in Asia and will definitely come back to visit all the places we haven't been - and there's a lot I still want to see! But for now, I'm very excited about going to Oz and having some home comforts back again.
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