Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

When my brother and I were traveling in peninsular Malaysia three years ago, I got my Advanced Open Water PADI certification at Turtle Bay Divers, on Pulau Perhentian. My dive master there was a fantastic person and teacher named Mike. Born and bred in Kuala Lumpur, he oozed cool, so I tried to impress him as much as possible by maintaining excellent buoyancy and finding lots of nudibranches on our dives together. When I asked him about his #1 dream dive destination, he got a faraway look in his eyes and spoke of an island called Sipadan, just off the coast of Sabah. "You look up, and you see turtles swimming above you. You look down, you see sharks beneath you," he said with a sigh. Sold. I don't know if Mike's made it to Sipadan yet - I hope so - but what he said stuck in my mind. When M and I sat down in October and began planning our route for this adventure, Malaysian Borneo was at the top of my list. Furthermore, when we sent out our 'Hey world, here's where we're going, do you have any recommendations for us' email to everyone we knew, several people came back and said that the best diving they had ever done was at Sipadan. Double sold.

We signed up for a five day, four night package at an island resort with a dive operator called Scuba Junkies, with M earning his Open Water certification along the way. M and I mostly have been winging our travel, planning two or three days in advance, but to visit Sipadan, a protected marine park, one needs a permit. The government of Sabah only issue 120 permits per day for divers and snorkelers, with odd restrictions on things like gender balance, so we did our best to anticipate our movements and booked five weeks in advance. With the exception of M's first day on the island, when he had to spend around a hundred hours doing all the boring PADI classroom work while I was reading in the sun and snorkeling with turtles, this part of our trip was delightful and vacation-like. In fact, it was sort of like dive camp for adults.

Being the prime athlete that he is, M attended plenty of skill-based sports camps growing up (not to mention the one he founded), but with the exception of a week long swim camp the summer before ninth grade and a few weeks at a musical theater workshop thing the next summer, it's something I never really experienced. Enter life at Scuba Junkies: breakfast began at 7:30 AM in a big communal dining hall, where all meals were served, and we reported to the jetty at 9:00 AM for our first dive. Afterwards, we'd have 45 minutes for tea and coffee before reporting back around noon for our second dive, followed by lunch. After the third dive, tea and biscuits were served, and then we had the rest of the day to wander the island, watch the local kids play with marbles, find a soccer game to join, or try to piece together a decent run by doing the same loop over and over, with only a teeny bit of trespassing onto one of the larger resort's garden paths. Dinner was served just after seven, and we'd stuff ourselves to the gills before retiring to our room. One of the great ironies of diving is that in spite of barely moving at all when you're underwater - exertion is discouraged, since you suck more air - it leaves you both ravenous and spent. We could barely keep our eyes open at night, and would get in a few minutes at most of our team read, The Hobbit, before passing out. There were nights when M asked me what I last remembered from the story, and I'd name an event from the first minute and a half of his previous night's reading. Needless to say, we did not get very far in our Tolkien.

Four days passed blissfully in this manner, and on our fifth day, we went to Sipadan, which was everything we expected and more. Here are our thoughts halfway through the day:

The only downside to all of this is that M is possibly the world's most spoiled new diver. 

After a full day of swimming with the sharks and turtles Mike promised, we returned to Semporna, the not-terribly-attractive coastal town that serves as the portal to Mabul, Sipadan, and a handful of other islands. Our flight to Indonesia was the next afternoon, and we expected the evening to be completely uneventful. However, as we mentioned in a previous post, we sort of got caught in a shootout between supporters of a Filipino sultanate and the Malaysian army. M explains: 'We first got wind of it when the restaurant we were eating in started shutting down at 7:38 PM communicating that the police were coming and they would be fined if they were not closed. As you can imagine this was confusing to us, having eaten there before and much later in the night. In any event, we stepped outside to walk the short distance back to our hostel and noticed that everywhere was shut down, or in the process of doing so. And then we got different bits of info that there was a shootout, that it was just rumor etc. etc.  We heard the next day from fellow travelers that there was a shootout VERY near to our hostel. Really though, I'm not sure how close we were to the larger standoff, this shootout may have been the result of police tracking down a few stragglers. All in all there were nearly thirty killed on both sides and I don't think we were anywhere near that. The airport the next day did have real military presence including tanks. So easy to miss those things if you don't speak the language.'

Who knew that between Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Malaysia, the latter would be the closest we'd get to danger? Next stop: Bali, Isle of Wonder.

Love and Lollipops,

S&M

P.S. More news on the Sulu Sultanate/Malaysia clash.