Out of the blue

I finally made it! One year after getting my PADI, I enjoyed diving in Malaysia world class diving spot, namely Sipadan! Sipadan is an Island off Sabah state in Borneo Island, in the Celebes sea. It's unique in the sense that it is a huge limestone cliff standing in the middle of the ocean. From far, it just looks like any other paradise tropical Island.

But when you get closer, you notice something weird: just 5 meters off the beach, the color of the water suddenly swaps from light blue (indicating shallow water) to dark blue (deep water): there is a huge 600 meters vertical drop just few meters off the beach!!! Quite dizzy when you swim above it...

This creates a perfect environment for underwater species and the wildlife is incredibly abundant! It's really an eye orgy! It's actually hard not to see any amazing colorful uncommon species. In few dives, I saw more that in the rest of my (rather short) diver's life: sharks, turtles, barracudas, nudibranchs, lion fish, tuna, you name it! (check Marie's blog for some underwater pix). Visibility is of course exceptional since there is not muddy ground spreading particles.

One of the most famous spots in Sipadan is Turtle's cave: as per the name, it's an underwater cave were turtles can get in but not out, like a prawn's trap. This was my first "indoor" underwater experience, and it was pretty perturbing. Marie was afraid and disoriented in the dark, so she grabbed my hand... but I've got to confess I was happy she did cause I really started to lose it a bit as well. Then as our eyes got used to the darkness and our brain managed to recover the sense of balance, we tried to swim upside down: the air breezed out was accumulating on holes on the roof of the cave, and due to reflection it really looked like puddles of water on the ground. Try to imagine yourself swimming upside down, weighting nothing, and slowly approaching those air puddles on the ceiling, dipping your fingers in it and figuring out that it feels dry in this puddle.... Really really disorienting!!! When we left the cave, a gigantic school of jack fish was swimming like a vortex, as to greet us with a welcome back to the bright world! As I said, it's eyes orgy.

The last day we tried a totally different approach: we went for a muck dive on nearby Mabul Island. It's shallower and the ground is made of sand. Visibility is of course not as good, and we have to actually look for wildlife. But it's rewarding since we got to see really strange underwater things like scorpion fish (really ugly and also dangerous), crocodile fish (still very ugly, but not dangerous), frog fish and moray eels.

Since Sipadan is a really fragile environment, it is protected and it's not possible to spend the night on it, so we found accommodation in a longhouse on Mabul Island. Mabul is a very international Island: it used to belong to Indonesia territory a few decades ago, but it's now part of Malaysia and inhabited mostly by illegal Philippinos fishermen... Some may argue that the contrast between tourists spending in a few dive several month worth of earnings from fishing is disturbing. I can't deny. But I can witness that the kids hanging out at the pontoon, shouting and jumping in the water to splash everyone looked everything but sad!!! (thanks Marie for the kiddies pix).













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