prefectlife » malaysia

The rest of Malaysian Borneo

mary — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:34:00 +0000

After our time at Sipadan, the rest of Malaysia didn’t really stand a chance. But we tried our best. You just can’t go to Borneo and not see Orangutans, so we hit the Sepilock reserve to do our part. None of us were terribly impressed with the zoo-like setting. I mean, really, you come all the way to Borneo and it feels like you’re at the San Francisco zoo. The better part of it was staying in jungle bungalows near the reserve. We even manged to brave the heat and do a little trek into the forest where we saw fat squirrels and giant killer ants. We said our goodbyes to Peter and John a few days later and headed to see the largest cave system in the world at Mulu.

The Mulu caves, in total, is something like a couple hundred kilometers in length making it the most extensive cave system in the world. Sarawak chamber, the largest cavern in the world is large enough to house 20 Boeing 747s. It’s big, it’s dark and littered with ugly little critters, but it makes for good adventure caving.

So we did. We grabbed shoes with toes for the first time in a quite a while, our headlamps, hardhats(!) and followed our guide into the rainforest. She veered off the trail and started to climb straight up a forest covered limestone cliff up to Stone Horse cave. This is a real cave with no colorfully lit stalactites, no other tourists and actually no lighting at all. It does come with a few guide ropes to cross chasms that disappear into the darkness, plenty of beautiful unlit stalactite formations, a bunch of gross spiders, hairy centipedes, a 6ft racer snake, and lots of squeaky bats. We spent a few hours in the darkness, climbing, hiking, crossing ridges and abysses.

A couple million bats live in Deer Cave and they head out most evenings in search of insects for dinner which thankfully leads to the almost complete absence of mosquitoes in the area. The bats exit the cave in streams that resemble rotating corkscrews. They are so predictable and so many that the local airport schedules flights around their exodus.

The caves are surrounded by mountains and rainforest. There’s a great trail that carries you up 90′ into the forest canopy for a look around.

Wrong place, wrong time

mary — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:34:00 +0000

We happened to be in Kuala Lumpur during Malaysia’s 50th independence anniversary. Of course we did the obligatory Petronas Tower Bridge tour that took us up to the 41st floor of the former tallest buildings in the world. We went back out to watch the midnight fireworks at the towers, but found along with a few thousand other people that the fireworks were hidden from view behind nearby skyscrapers. We were woken up the next morning by F-16s booming through the city. We arrived at the parade grandstand just in time to see the aftermath being cleaned up.

Then there was the stabbing, which we wished we missed. We were ready to leave the city after a few nights.

Waterworld, the good version

mary — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:33:00 +0000

Since there are no longer resorts on Sipadan, we headed to the nearby water village resort of Kapalai.

This was the absolute show stealer for us here. The diving was good, but the resort was just fantastic. Kapalai is a set of bungalows hovering over the water swaying on wooden stilts over a submerged reef. There’s not a bit of land in sight until low tide exposes a small beach out back.

It’s just an amazing place. Our hut opened to the sea in every direction and had a private patio to sun and watch the schools of fish that congregate right under us.

We still had our South African floaties with us. After a morning of diving, Mary tied hers to the deck and floated out in the central area of the resort.

Kapalai -is- a dive resort, so we didn’t get get to relax in the sun too much. Every day we’d do two dives at Sipadan followed by a macro dive at nearby Mabul island. Most days finished by jumping right off our dock to hunt for the colorful dancing Mandarin fish at sundown.

With straining eyes, we even spotted a few pygmy seahorses. These little guys are like 1/4″-1/2″ tall and look just like the coral they live in. The first one was pointed out by a guide, but Mary amazingly found one later on when we were staying at Seaventure.

-Steve

Life on the Rig

mary — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:33:00 +0000

For better or worse, Kapalai didn’t have two rooms available when our friends Peter and John came to visit. Sad as it was to leave Kapalai, we were pretty excited to move over to the Seaventure Resort 15 minutes away at Mabul island.
Seaventure is an oceanic oil rig converted to a dive resort. It certainly isn’t the lap of luxury, but it sure is an oil rig! The story goes that it was brought to Brunei to be used as a casino. When that fell through, it was moved here. It still looks like an oil rig and there’s more rusted through metal than copious layers of paint can hide. It literally oozes character, but not so fun when it gets on your wetsuit and in your hair.

After the spartan and rusting rooms, the coolest part of the rig was the open-air elevator that goes between the water level and main deck of the rig. The best macro diving is directly under the rig amongst the massive support beams and to get there you just take the elevator down into water. Better yet, when you come up, the elevator is submerged so you can belly flop right onto the platform like a dolphin at SeaWorld!

Under the rig, we finally went too far with our frogfish fetish. Here we are taking one for a walk home. We followed (chased?) this poor guy for maybe 100 yards before he settled down and we realized we hadn’t been paying attention to which direction we’d been going!

After one dive on Mabul island, John asked “Yeah, so what was that two-tailed fish?”

It’s a cuttlefish having a seafood supper.

-Steve

Our vacation from diving is more diving

mary — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:29:00 +0000

After so much strenuous travel in Indonesia, we felt we deserved another small vacation when we crossed into Malaysian Borneo. Conveniently, Jacques Cousteau-approved Pulau Sipadan was waiting for us. Sipadan is a tiny island that is surrounded by sheer walls that drop to a 6000ft underwater trench. It’s famous for having loads of sharks and turtles cruising around its walls. Now it’s perhaps more famous for the number of divers that flock to it in search of the ultimate dive. So many divers were coming, in fact, that the government shut down the 5 resorts on the island in order to protect it. Now you have to stay at resorts on nearby islands and get one of the 140 daily permits to dive here.
Of course, the other version of the story is that the government realized how much money was flowing through here and kicked the other resorts off so they could build their own. That apparently hit a snag when they crashed a barge carrying building supplies into the island that they are trying so hard to protect … So for now it is just the divers and a Malaysian military base sharing a little piece of paradise. As for the diving: it is good. But we’re pretty spoiled after all the great Indonesian dives and can’t say our experience lived up to the hype. We did run across loads of whitetip sharks, a few fat grey and even a leopard shark. Lazy turtles were absolutely everywhere and unperturbed by divers. Actually one barreled right into Mary. We were even ‘lucky’ enough to witness a somewhat disturbing mating scene with the two half-shelled participants surrounded by a group of hecklers who swooped in every so often to bite the female.
There’s also an extensive cave system called the Turtle Tomb that we didn’t get to explore enough. It’s named for all the turtle skeletons found inside, although there’s been 4 or 5 divers left inside, too. Needless to say, the dive shops aren’t interested in taking people in anymore. Here’s Mary at one of the several “warning: you will die” signs just inside the cave: