Underwater Paradise

We arrived in Malaysian Borneo via boat from the Indonesian island of Tarakan. We headed immediately for the small seaside town of Semporna. Ironically enough, Semporna is Bahasa Melayu for "perfect". This explains the ocean surrounding the town, but it is the antithesis of the town itself. Luckily, we weren't in Semporna for it's seashore. We had come to feast our eyes on its underwater treasures. The islands off Semporna's shores are reputed to hold some of the best diving spots in the world and the island of Sipadan tops the list. We were heading to this island to try to see the hammerhead sharks, dozens of turtles, large schools of barracuda and other large pelagics which are rumored to ply these waters. Other nearby islands are said to be teeming with strange bottom dwelling creatures of the types we found in Lembeh Strait. We were going to search for these creatures with the help of Scuba Junkies Dive Shop, which came recommended as cheap and good.

Our first day of diving was at the famed island of Sipadan. Sipadan stands out from the rest of the islands much like Sangglaki did in Kalimantan - Sipadan rises from the depths like a grand pillar and the currents whip about it from all directions. Because it is surrounded by an underwater wall and because of the swift currents, many large animals congregate near. Due to this phenomenon, MANY people visit Sipadan year round. Also because of it's spectacular underwater life the Malaysian government has made the waters around the island a reserve and restricts access to 120 people per day and believe me, it does fill up. The government also kicked the resorts off the island in the name of conservation/preservation - or so we thought until we saw the troops of military men housed in the old resorts while keeping an eye out for pirates, terrorists and others who might illegally enter Malaysian waters.

KC finally buckled in to paying for his scuba advanced course long after fulfilling all the requirements but without paying the ridiculous fee for the plastic card. Up until this point, I never realized just how utterly worthless the advanced certification is. I could be a NAUI snob and attribute this observation to the lack of proper instruction PADI offers. After all, I was certified with NAUI and as far as I remember the advanced course was more technical and helped give a better understanding of how to navigate underwater. But the course KC did was a joke! He needed to complete 5 different dives for the certification and so on our first dive in Sipadan, we suited up with four other divers and 1 instructor for the deep dive. The first doubt about our chosen dive outfit came when I jumped in to find that my buoyancy regulator wouldn't stay inflated. No biggie though, just hop out of the sea, change gear and off we go!

Dive 1: Hanging Gardens
We descended down to 32 meters. On the way down we passed all the colorful coral and fish so at depth we were faced with the brown wall on one side and very murky water on the other. Basically, the only thing down here are sharks, including the hammerheads IF you're lucky enough to see them. We weren't. The viz was so awful and it wasn't even the right season to go hammerhead sharking. So instead we watched a lot of nothing for about 15 minutes. At the end of our dive we did see some sharks as we found ourselves floating over a group of about 10 juvenile grey reef sharks. There were also a few turtles, but none in the numbers everyone assured us we would see. Turtles were so common in Derawan and around Sanngalaki that they were no longer as thrilling and not even worth mentioning on subsequent dives. Just assume we saw at least 5 turtles on each dive and leave it at that. (In all seriousness, I don't think I'd ever get tired of turtles, but when searching for other amazing creatures it's a bit tiresome when the guide keeps pointing out the obvious and ubiquitous reptiles).

Dive 2: Turtle Cave to Barracuda Point
The second inkling of doubt about Scuba Junkies came when before descent it was discovered that my emergency regulator (aka octopus) wasn't functioning properly. 2 for 2 on bad gear. During this dive we visited Turtle Cave, which is part of a large cave system under the island. It is so named because the carcasses of turtles who couldn't find there way out before their breathe ran out can be found deep inside. For the super adventurous (and idiotic?) it is said you can tour these caves if you carry along a few extra tanks and are willing to remove your equipment from time to time to squeeze through the small tunnels. We barely scratched the surface of the cave and only went as far as the light.

After leaving the cave we were kicking around with not much to see. Lora The Always Searching decided to turn 180 degrees to see if anything had started swimming behind the group. Sure enough, off in the distance was an enormous swirling school of barracuda. Since we were the last divers of the bunch and the others were speedily sailing through the water in the other direction, they missed the amazing barracuda mass. Ecstatic at the sight, we frantically tried to make noise underwater so the rest of the group could partake in the silvery fish, but it was to no avail. Soon the fish were barely visible in the distance in one direction and our group in the other so we were forced to abandon our efforts of fish gawking to join our blind guide once again. Later on the surface we told the others what they'd miss. Our guide's explanation for his lack of observation was because the great toothy beasts were usually found during a later section of the dive. Goes to show you that by becoming to familiar with a site one can become blind to the unexpected and thus miss out on some great sightings.

Sadly, we trudged on, but it didn't take long before we came across another large school of albeit, less intimidating fish: the trevallies. The flat shimmering fish were wonderful to watch as they circled around each other in almost complete unison. Among the mass was one or two giant trevally which were about 4 feet long and darker in color. We could have stayed among the fish but again, our swift mates had already grown tired of the school and had jetted off in search of other creatures instead of appreciating the ones they'd already found.

Dive 3: MidReef
This dive wasnt' anything to write home about except for the spotted eagle ray. We ended in the shallows over beautiful coral where some yellow finned jacks and some tuna were playing but our guide had had enough and called us to the surface before we could explore further.

Dive 4: Night Dive at Tong's Marker
Great night dive! Except for the claustrophobic feeling one gets when 6 people with flashlights are trying to squeeze around a creature the size of a baby's toenail, it was fabulous! Our dive guide was one of the owners of the dive shop and is an exceptional guide who has logged thousands of dives and has a knack for finding the smallest and most amazing underwater creatures. His eyes are phenomenal and he is the reason that this shop was recommended to us. We had hoped to get him as a guide for more dives but unfortunately this was the only one and the other dive masters that we dove with did not have the anywhere close to as good an eye as he had. We had came to Semporna not only wanting to see the big creatures of Sipidan but also the many small strange ones on other nearby islands and to get your money's worth for macro diving you often need an experienced guide with a great eye who has logged many dives in the area. Scuba Junkies has a program where many new dive masters are trained, which is all fine and good unless you are the unlucky one who gets one of these fresh dive masters in training who has only logged 3 dives in the site and knows it hardly any better than you do. But enough of the complaining and back to the great night dive with the great guide.

As soon as we jumped in we found a small bamboo cat shark which was an interesting looking fellow. We slowly descended a bit deeper along the slope and our guide began pointing out this and that for all of us to see. There were decorator crabs and spider crabs and tons of nudibranchs. We even saw a nudibranch that our guide had never seen before and one which he thought was a species that had not been described ever before. He said that he had already found a number of new species in the area and it certainly seemed like he knew his stuff. When he saw the new interesting creature he took tons of pictures and did a happy dance underwater. After an hour underwater and having seen many new animals we surfaced and headed back into town to warm up and rest our sleepy heads.

Dive 5: Black Coral Garden
We came to the dive shop in the morning and we were informed that we were no longer going to the island where they had told us the night before. We were not entirely happy about this since we had been briefed on this island and had decided that it would suit our interests for macro diving. But we could not do too much about their last minute change and decided to suit up and go dive anyways. We also got one of the dive master trainees as a guide and he was very thorough and good about explaining the dive beforehand (something you do not always get in SE Asia diving) but his knack in finding small things was not so great. We dropped down to about 25 meters and we saw a garden of black coral which actually is not black except for the trunk of it and it actually looks like a large white bush. After this we swam around and saw a number of nudibranchs, a crocodile fish and a few other things. The visibility was really poor here (only about 10 feet or so) and there was not anything else really notable about the dive other than the black coral.


Dive 6: Sibuan Island - Froggies Highway
Once we got up from the black coral dive, we were informed that we had to switch islands because the current was too strong here for the open water diver class that was on the same boat. So we decided to go to the same island that we were originally planning on heading to. Our next dive was supposed to be a place to possibly see some frogfish and luckily we did see a nice big green one that Lora found. We also saw a huge crocodile fish and got some great pics. This dive was better than the last and probably better than our next one but nothing spectacular.

Dive 7: Sibuan Island - Mandarin Point
Our last diver of the day and the last dive for this area we decided to look for some resident mandarin fish. We were told that we would see them in the beginning but when we did not see them in the first twenty minutes I thought that we were not going to get to see them at all. Mandarin fish are really shy and small but extremely colorful (almost like a flouresent blue green pattern on an orange background). Casey had seen one before but Lora had not so we were hoping to have an encounter and we were told that this place was pretty much a certainty. We were getting a bit anzy when we had not seen it, nor anything else interesting in this shallow dive through some fields of broken coral. Luckily at the end of the dive we finally did find quite a few in a patch of sea urchins. They certainly are gorgeous little fish but unfortunately there was nothing else worth taking note of on this dive.

Overall this second day was not so great and our expectation for great macro diving was certainly not met. We found later that the islands that we had visited are not the best places to see the creatures we wanted to see. We decided that our choice of dive company did not really suit us. I guess we are a bit snobby about our diving but we did shell out quite a bit of money and we had hoped for better quality of dive guides. We had not come at the best time of year since the visibility was pretty piss poor and some of the bigger pelagics were not around. Sipidan had been really nice but our expectations had been a bit too big. But we would both like to try it again sometime when we have a bit larger budget to spend more time and do it with a different company.

Mantas, Turtles and Sharks, Oh My!

After being out of the tropical waters and in the forest for a month or so we were ready to dive back in. And what better place than a group of small islands where we heard that people often encounter dozens and even hundreds of manta rays, there is a saltwater lake filled with stingless jellyfish and beaches where turtles lay their eggs nightly. This group of islands is off the coast of Berau in East Kalimantan: Derawan, Sanggalaki and Kakaban, and while we had not heard as much about it as other famous dive spots in the area, we were still very excited about the prospects.

The main attraction for us was, of course the manta rays, which neither of us had seen yet. Mantas are big, harmless stingrays which filter feed on plankton. There are similar ones off the coast of Florida where they are the namesake for the baseball team The Devil Rays. The ones here do not get quite as large as those, but they still reach wingspans of more than 10 feet.

We approached Derawan Island by speedboat and quickly noticed that the island, like so many in the Philippines, was heavily populated. Many houses were situated over the water on stilts, including our accomodation, which made for a very eye-pleasing view out over the ocean. Once we got settled, we decided to survey the small island as well as look for a boat for a snorkeling trip to Sanggalaki Island the next day. On our brief walk we saw a large turtle swimming near shore as well as a fenced off area which served as a sanctuary where turtle eggs were protected until they hatched. We would end up seeing tons more turtles in the water over the next few days, but unfortunately none laying or hatching on the beach (though we searched the beaches at night). Over dinner we talked with a nice Canadian who had been diving in the area the past week. He was one of those divers that has been many places and since he was highly impressed by the underwater world in the area, we felt confident that this would be a great place. He informed us that when he visited Sanggalaki, the famed manta island, he had seen dozens from the boat even before jumping into the water and tons more underneath. We could hardly sleep with anticipation of our trip the next day.

We woke up early, jumped in the boat and prepared oursleves for the 1.5 hour ride to Pulau Sanggalaki. We passed through a rain storm but when we arrived the sun was shining on the white sandy beach. We got off the boat and were able to see turtle tracks and nests in the sand. It is pretty much a deserted island other than one small resort and it was thick with forest. This lack of people on an island was rare to us after living in the Philippines where it sees that every semi-inhabitatble island is jam packed. The lack of people also meant a lack of fishing pressure and therefore, as we were about to see, there remained a wealth of big fish underwater.

Our boatman took us to the other side of the island where the mantas hang out and we were worried that something would be wrong and they would not be here today. We thought our fears were turning into reality since we did not see any as we approached their hangout. Still nervous we jumped in and were immediately whisked away by a rapid current. At first there was not much coral nor many fish and no mantas (our worst nightmares come true!). But this did not last for long. After a few minutes of drifting we were surrounded by schools of large fish. And then our first manta came into view. It was huge and appeared out of the murky water to glide gracefully past. It was a surreal experience.


The current was strong all day and it was fairly bad visibility for tropical waters at about 20 feet. This often doesn't make for ideal leisurely snorkeling conditions, but it did make for a great opportunity to see tons of big fish, mantas and other marine life since many of these creatures prefer the strong currents and the food that is brought in on them. Often times the large mantas would appear out of nowhere from the murky depths and provoke a scream from Lora which would then in turn scare KC. It was all good fun and the mantas provided quite a show for us especially in the PM during low tide when the current got even stronger and even more of them congregated in the feeding area. We had the boat drop us and then we would be whisked by the current past dozens of these gentle giants filter feeding in the shallows.

Each time we were dropped off by our boat, it proved to be a new experience. On one pass we would see tons of mantas, on the next loads of turtles and one the next it was 5 sharks and hige school of sweetlips. By the end of the day we were both pooped but felt that it had been our best day underwater ever. We not only saw dozens of mantas but also more turtles than either one of us had ever seen in all of our diving and snorkeling (more than fifty for the day). We saw about 10 reef sharks and 3 leopard sharks (also a great sighting which neither of us had seen before). To say that big fish were plentiful would be an understatement as schools of huge snappers, sweetlips and jacks were commonplace. For two biologists who love the water it was really nothing short of spectacular and also an uplifting experience after seeing so many fish-depleted waters in the Philippines. By 4 PM our boatman wanted to head home and so we reluctantly hung our snorkels and fins up for the day.

The next day, we planned to visit the island of Kankaban which has a saltwater lake that has four species of stingless jellyfish which inhabit it. The lake has long been cut off from the ocean for so long that the jellyfish trapped inside, in the presence of no predators, have proliferated and evolved to become stingless. I had once seen a program on a similar lake in Palau (small island in Micronesia) and it has always stuck in my memory. I was longing to see this weird phenomenon and once I heard about this place I was certainly excited since it was the next best thing and a whole lot cheaper to visit.

Unfortunately our boatman from the previous day (who had been great) was busy so we had to look for another one. This proved to be more difficult than the first day but we thought that we had one lined up the night before. In the morning they did not show up and we decided to wait for a while since time in Indonesia moves like time in the Philippines (which is not American time). After an hour or so though we were getting worried since it was eating up our snorkeling time and the island was a 2 1/2 hour trip away. We went to look for the boat and found that they had just returned from fishing and did not really seem too ready to take us out. After awhile and agreeing to pay a bit more money than we had agreed upon the night before we eventually headed off. On top of that, this boat was slower than the one the day before and every time you moved on the boat, it felt like it was going to roll over. After such a great and easy experience the day before we were a bit discouraged (Oh well... that's life) but hoped that it would still be a good day.

After finally arriving at Kakaban, we jumped in the lake and found that it was even murkier than the surrounding sea with visibility of only about 10 feet. The jellyfish were certainly there but not exactly in the proportions that I had imagined. I had dreamed of floating through throngs of the pulsing little jellies and having to fight my way through (much like I saw in that program on Palau). It was not exactly like that but it was still pretty neat to be in the presence of so many beautiful but usually irritating little creatures without feeling the bad effects.

What actually turned out to be the best part of the lake was the mangrove fringed shore. Along the shallow edge, the bottom and the mangrove roots in the water had been colonized by a community of strange and very colorful organisms. There were sponges and tunicates of many bright shades of red and orange. There were morays, flatworms, sea cucumbers and fish which were specialized for this very unique environment. It was like nothing we had ever seen before and it made the visit to the lake really worth it even with the problems with our boat (it also broke down on our way home: it was getting dark and we almost thought that we were going to be stuck out at sea all night or worse).

But we got back safe and even decided to try another trip. We decided to go back to Sanggalaki since we loved it so much. Our boat the next day was a different one and much better and our snorkelling while not quite as good as the first day, was still peppered with mantas, turtles and big fish. These islands were probably the most impressive that we have seen for cool marine life so far and we would both head back in a minute and maybe next time we will strap a few tanks on our backs.

You Want Me to Dive Where?!?

Lembeh Strait diving could be considered the antithesis of Bunaken coral reef diving. One does not got to Lembeh to view hordes of brightly colored tropical fish or large sea reptiles. Instead, at Lembeh, one searches the black sandy sea bottom for small but unusual critters, many no larger than your thumb. This is called "muck diving" because of the muck that is kicked up as one swims over the soft substrate. Muck diving in this area is a relatively new phenomenon (its not even in the Lonely Planet yet...but probably in the next edition). The resort we dove with is brand spanking new and it is one of the 5 resorts that have opened in the past year....many of them branches of the ones found in Bunaken. Searching the sandy ocean floor may not sound like fun, but it's actually a lot of fun playing investigator...and you never know what you may find!

To start off, we made our way from Tangkoko to Bitung. We had an interesting time trying to find accommodation in Bitung and ended up "chartering" a public mini-van. By charter we mean asking him for information on where to stay and then him proceeding to drop his other passengers off and chaffuer us around without our permission and then charging us half of what we spent on the room. My biggest beef so far with this country is that everyone seems to think its ok to charge the foreigner double, quadruple, octuple the local price for transportation. We're beginning to realize that if you ask "how much?" it really means "I have no idea what I'm suppose to pay so please feel free to take advantage of my innocence and empty my pocketbook." We've just started shoving how much we think the price should be in the driver's face then running away before he could charge us more.

Anyway...

We'd heard rumors that prices on Pulau Lembeh were a bit steeper than prices on Pulau Bunaken and since we're trying not to splurge all of our money before we reach the end of our trip we decided to head to the city of Bitung (pronounced Bit-oong) on mainland Sulawesi and see what information we could dig up about the island and diving. We hadn't anticipated that diving the area is so new that none of the locals are familiar with it! We came to the city with no information about how to get to Pulau Lembeh or contact information of any resorts. So bright and early we made our way to the wharf and began asking around. Thankfully we were able to fumble around enough Bahasa Indonesia to get our point across and actually ran into a dive guide who was on his way to work. We stopped got off at the dive shop he worked at and immediately set to work getting ready for two dives since our plan was to dive and then head back to Bitung for the night.

Muck diving is difficult to explain...its not what you'd call exhilarating and there aren't schools of fish to ogle over...but it definitely has its moments. Muck diving is more akin to playing detective and your reward is to witness the most unusual animals of the shallow seas. We saw (among other things) ribbon eels with firey nostrils, frogfish the size of a plate and pygmy seashorses no more than 1/2 an inch long. Overall, we'd both rate diving in Lembeh better over diving in Bunaken and we're hoping that we'll get to return to Lembeh Straight before it turns into a major Indonesian port.

Diving across new borders

Saying Goodbye to the 'PinesWell after another failed attempt to climb a mountain we decided we have had enough of the Philippines. We are outta here. Actually our visas were up and Mt. Apo was our last plan for the country that we have called home for the past two and a half years. For me it did not really sink in until the last night that we would be leaving this wonderful country that has provided us with so many memories. In many ways both of us wanted to stay longer to visit more places and meet more people in a place where we felt familiar with the culture, language and surroundings. But another part of us was itching to move onward to new destinations on a trip that we had been planning for the past year or more.

So the day after we got back from Apo we headed to the airport with our Indonesian visas in hand. Luckily our taxi driver was one of the nicest that I have had and it made me remember what I will miss most about the Philippines: the people. Sure I have had to leap over cultural barriers and sometimes living in this country has not been the easiest but the people here have made it so worthwhile and have given me life long memories.

Back to the airport. We were headed to Manado in northern Sulawesi (a huge and weirdly shaped island in eastern Indonesia). This area is known for its unparalleled marine biodiversity and amazing diving and this was one of the main reasons that we were headed here. After our hour long flight we were already in a new country excited about the potential that it held. We were also both a bit anxious about a new place where they did not speak the language that we had grown so accustomed to speaking and knew that it would be harder to get around and have deep connections with people that we had in the Philippines. But we were ready and got through customs with no problem. Then we haggled a bit for a taxi that brought us to our first hotel in Indonesia. We tried to communicate with the folks at the reception with our few Indonesian words that we had been studying and our message was successfully conveyed with accompanying hand signals. So we navigated our way through our first hurdle without too much trouble and we were feeling confident. It would certainly be more difficult to get around here but hey that is part of traveling.

Hello Indonesia
We went out on the town of Manado for a bite to eat and the streets were filled with food stalls (these are somewhat lacking in the Philippines) serving delicious looking food. We sat down for an absolutely delicious and spicy meal of gado gado and a coconut curry. It was sublime (absolutely delicious food for less than a dollar). I was certainly going to enjoy this part of Indonesia.

The next morning we headed to the port to try to find out about the boat to Pulau Bunaken (Pulau is Bahasa Indonesia for island) off the northern shores of Manado. This part of the world considered the "coral triangle" and is the center of underwater biodiversity. The Philippines is also part of the triangle, but its waters are largely overfished and only 5% of its corals are still in pristine condition. The corals of Sulawesi, however, are rumored to be spectacular. According to the Lonely Planet, Pulau Bunaken is where divers go when they die. And so we came to the island to see for ourselves. There isn't a huge selection of accommodation on the island. It's a fairly small island with a small community with basic living conditions. Most of the accommodations are owned and run by foreigners (surprise, surprise!). We decided which accommodation based on the overwhelming response from the locals as to where was the cheapest place on the island. It was also a good choice since it it's also the only locally owned resort on Bunaken. The first day on the water we went out with other guests on a snorkeling extravaganza. It was brilliant! The colors were spectacular and the fish were plentiful. I hadn't seen such a wide variety of fish since the Great Barrier Reef. It was overwhelming. So many species and many we had never seen before. We visited three spots and were in the water most of the day coming away tired a little sunburned but fulfilled.

The second day we dove. The first dive was also incredible. We saw 3 of the largest green and hawksbill turtles that either of us have ever seen (probably over 4 feet in length). One was even sleeping in a crevice on the wall of the reef and we were able to get a really close look. There was a huge Napolean wrasse that was almost if not bigger than we were (also something we never saw in the Philippines even though it should have been). The second dive turned out to be not as good but still a fair amount of fish including about 6 large large Napolean wrasse at the end of the dive and a whitetip reef shark. The area where some other sharks was devoid of them on this dive. Oh well. The next day we went for our final dive and we saw some other colorful corals and some more fish but again it was not as good as our first.

The afternoon we went for our last snorkel on the other side of the island in search of some rumored dugongs. We were not lucky enough too find them but the snorkeling was again superb with absolutely gorgeous coral with almost 100 percent cover in many areas (something we did not see too much in the Philippines or anywhere else for that matter). We also went for a snorkel in the mangroves which was a bit eerie but interesting with roots and branches surrounding us in the murky water.


Overall the island had offered some great snorkeling with amazing fish and coral diversity. There were sheer walls surrounding the island which provided some pretty good diving but not quite as amazing as we had anticipated. Perhaps we have been a bit spoiled by our diving experiences in the past and we are expecting too much. It certainly was not too much of a let down though. We had a few days in the water to be awed a bit by its natural wonders. Our first stop in Indonesia gets a check in our book (maybe not a check plus though).

We also had an opportunity to meet some other interesting folks who also made Bunaken their home for a short time. There were even two other Americans: one who was teaching English with the Fulbright program in Java and another anthropology student who was trying to find out a bit about the ocean and the people in the area. There were also the German and Swiss students who had been assigned to work on the island with an environmental education program for three months which feel apart shortly after they arrived. They gave an interesting insight on the island and development work in the area. It was weird to be in the company of other Westerners. It had been awhile again and it seemed like the island was crawling with them. It was nice for a bit of conversation but certainly does not help our Indonesian language skills. It is a bit weird to be on the tourist trail since it seems that almost all of the Philippines is off it. It has its good points and bad but we will try to jump off it soon at least for a bit.