Our Big Scuba Weekend in Borneo

After getting signed off as Open Water Divers by Planet Scuba last weekend, we decided to do a real dive trip. Some friends of ours were planning a dive trip to Borneo. We made arrangements to join them, but they had a family emergency and had to cancel and fly back to the States.

We had already booked our flights so we decided to go ahead with the trip anyway.

They had booked accommodations on Mabul Island through Borneo Divers Mabul Resort. Our friend, Sporty Sharon, recommend Sipadan Kapalai Dive Resort. I sent emails to both resorts and the Sipadan Kapalai Dive Resort wrote back first, so I booked with them.

I screwed up our flight to Borneo and ended up wasting a day traveling. First we drove from Singapore to the Johor Bahru airport in Malaysia. From there we flew to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysian Borneo. Then another flight to Tawau where we spent the night. The next morning we drove overland through palm plantations to the boat jetty where we finally caught a speedboat to the resort.

The resort was fantastic. It made the long trip well worthwhile. Last week we were complaining about the spartan accommodations in Mersing and Palau Aur. You'll hear no complaints this week. In fact the resort was so nice we nearly forgot last week's shortcomings.

We stayed in one of the chalets on stilts over the water. We had perfect views of the morning sunrise over the open ocean.

The resort provided 3 boat dives every day, with unlimited dives from their jetty. They also took care of all the heavy lifting and setting up and breaking down the equipment for each dive.

We ended up diving at three sites, Mandarin Valley, which is the site just off the resort's jetty, and Barracuda Point and South Point which are both off Sipadan Island.

The dives at Mandarin Valley were OK, but the dives off Sipadan were incredible. The sea life was unreal. For our first real dive, it couldn’t get any better. We saw turtles, sharks, barracuda, clownfish, so many things I can barely begin to describe. But you can see for yourself, we have two videos from our dive posted below.

The resort sent an underwater videographer to record our dives. Of course we bought the video--it was our first dive. But we hope to avoid the geeky side of diving, which apparently involves coercing all your buddies to watch your dive videos, in particular the video of the dive that they all just did. Our friend Sporty Sharon wonders, "Why would I want to see a video of the dive I just did?" Yea thats a fish, I just saw it in real life.

We have lots of pictures and videos from the trip. More than half the pictures are mine. But since my camera is only waterproof to 3 meters, most of the underwater pictures are from our videographer.

There are two videos. The first video is from our South Point dive. The second video is from our Barracuda Point dive. As you watch the videos you'll find its hard to recognize faces under water. The best way to find me in the water is from my red swim fins and that damn bald patch on the top of my head. That, and I'm frequently waiving at the camera. Deanna is wearing orange fins and a black swimcap on her head.

Location: Palau Sipadan
Dive Site: South Point
Max Depth: 25.6 meters
Bottom Time: 42 minutes


Location: Palau Sipadan
Dive Site: Barracuda Point
Max Depth: 24.1 meters
Bottom Time: 45 minutes


We can't wait to go diving again.

I Always Wanted To Go Scuba Diving

Ever since I was a kid, watching Jacques Cousteau on PBS channel 9, I wanted to go scuba diving. Last week, I finally gave it a try.

Some friends in Singapore said they were going scuba diving in Borneo; they showed us pictures of their last trip and invited us to join them. It was all very last-minute, but we called Planet Scuba who helped set up their trip and asked how quickly we could get certified.

We hired a scuba instructor for one-on-one training and started the pool training the next day. That was Wednesday, and on the following Friday, we took off to the island of Pulau Aur on the coast of Malaysia for our four open-water certification dives.

The pool training was deceptively easy. I had little fear of going under water and playing around with the scuba gear, knowing that if I got in trouble, I could just stand up in the pool and breathe normal air.

It was troubling, however, to be unanticipatedly blind in my dive mask without my glasses. You can’t talk or hear underwater, and I could barely see the instructor’s hand signals only a few feet from my face. So Friday before we left for Palau Aur, I bought us both custom dive masks with prescription lenses. (For those of you that care, that was -4.50 in both eyes for me, and -1.50 for Deanna). At this point, we’re committed.

Our bus picked us up later that same Friday at 7:00pm from Singapore. The bus was purported to take 3 hours to get to Mersing on the mainland of Malaysia, where we would spend the night before catching a speedboat to the island in the morning. But the border crossing from Singapore to Malaysia is quite congested now days, because Singapore accidentally let their number-one most-wanted terrorist escape through an open window after he asked to go to the toilet. (Yea, really.) So the bus trip took an extra two or so hours.

The hotel in Mersing was nothing to talk about, but at least it wasn’t as bad as when we stayed at the Cheapest Hotel In Manhattan. (“I found it on the internet, honey.”)

In the morning we missed the tide getting out of Mersing. The instructor said he’s never missed the tide before, but our boat couldn’t get out the river mouth. We had to turn back and wait for the tide to come in.

Planet Scuba helped out by buying us breakfast in Mersing and negotiating with the hotel to allow us to check back in for a few more hours of sleep whie we waited for the moon to line up properly to lift the ocean back into the river mouth.

Of course the tide did come back, and we made it to Pulau Aur in time for two dives that Saturday.

I didn’t want to bring my camera on the dive boat. The camera is water proof, but its only water proof down to 3 meters (about 10 feet for friends back home). We planned to go much deeper. So unfortunately I only have pictures from the beach where we stayed. Maybe next time we’ll get a real underwater camera.

The actual scuba diving was fantastic and frightening. There were 3 other beginner divers doing their certification dives with us. And there was a literal boatload of experienced divers clamoring around doing their own things. In the chaos of all this, our instructor, Stella, and her assistant, Eric, did a great job of keeping us alive.

Yet, I still managed to screw things up. I dropped my prescription dive mask overboard after our second dive. Fortunately experienced divers find it a fun challenge locating things on the bottom of the ocean. Fifteen minutes later I was seeing again.

We stayed at the Atlantis Bay Resort, which was more Spartan than would normally justify the label “resort.”

We had a single cabin with a steel framed bed. Most of the other rooms were more like dorms with four people sharing two bunk-beds. The dive shop owner said the accommodations were “simple but clean,” -- mostly true. The room included group meals at the small canteen. Beers were 8 Malaysia Ringgits a can (about US$2.50). The food was no worse than the canteen at my office.

Two more dives on Sunday and we were signed off as open water divers. We’re already planning our next dive trip to Borneo.

And maybe next time I’ll get some underwater pictures to share.


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Penang, Malaysia

We went to Penang, Malaysia for the weekend. One of the reasons for moving to Singapore was the opportunity for travel around South East Asia. Singapore is a great jumping off location for these sorts of things. With only three-hour flight time, you can get to Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia; all of which can be a quick weekend getaway. We took an after-work flight on Friday and were home in time to do our laundry on Sunday evening.

Penang is a state in Malaysia, consisting of an island and a short strip of the mainland facing the island. Self-described as the “Pearl of the Orient.” Penang is a bit like Singapore, as it was also under the British rule as part of the Straits Settlements. Also like Singapore, the largest ethic population in Penang is Chinese. I think I read somewhere that Penang is the only state in Malaysia that is not majority ethnic Malay.

Since we only had one weekend, we acted like good tourists and tried to cram as much as possible the short trip. We hired a driver to take us around both days. A couple of highlights were:

The Snake Temple - I wanted to go here first, but it turned out to be much less exiting that it sounded. I think we spent about the same amount of time at the souvenir shops than in the temple. There is a large garden outside behind the temple where allegedly there are poisonous snakes living freely. We didn’t see any. We did see a couple snakes in aquariums. Deanna posed for a picture with two of them. But mostly it was just a small Buddhist temple.

The Penang Bridge - The Penang Bridge connects the island it to the mainland. It is 8.4 miles-long, which our driver told us makes it one of the longest bridges in the world. It is certainly the longest bridge in Malaysia.

The Penang Bird Park - A park with birds. It is a 5-acre park on the mainland portion of Penang. They claim to have a collection 300+ species of birds from around the world. We saw dozens. Maybe hundreds. I got bit by one. They had more than birds. They also have turtles, fish, and monitor-lizards.

The Penang Ferry - Since we already drove across the Penang bridge to get to the mainland, we took the ferry back to the island. The Penang Ferry arrives at Weld Quay in the city of George Town in Penang. Around Weld Quay there are all these old colonial-era jetties going out into the harbor. Each one is named after one of the old Chinese families that originally settled there and constructed the own jetty. Today some of been sold on to other families, but many are still owned by the descendants of the original families. Much of George Town is still made up of colonial-era shophouses, which are protected from development by heritage laws.

Kek Lok Si Buddhist Temple - On our second day we went to the Kek Lok Si Temple. There were no gimmicky snakes here, just the largest Buddhist temple complex in South East Asia. Its main building is a seven-storey pagoda containing over 10,000 Buddha statues. And its not just one big temple, but a series of halls and temples within temples. And its still growing. They accept donations to have your name glazed onto ceramic tiles and bricks that will make up their next expansion, which is apparently is 16 carved dragon pillars.

The Penang Hill - After the Kek Lok Si Temple, we had out driver take us to the Penang Hill. There are only two ways up the hill. You can take the “funicular” railway tram to the top, or you can hike it. The tram takes about 1/2 hour. The hike (I read) takes 4-5 hours. There is also a one-lane 4-wheel-drive trail that they use to take stranded tourists off the hill one-jeep-load at a time when the tram breaks down. Unfortunately, we didn’t leave ourselves sufficient time to explore much of the top of the hill before we had to head back down to get to the airport.

Abandoned in Malaysia

Last weekend we went to Malaysia to look at properties at this resort that is still under development. It was just over the border from the west coast of Singapore. The resort was beautiful and the prices sounded great; but that was only compared to your typical US and Singapore prices. In Malaysia it was ridiculously overpriced.

We didn't buy anything, but we thought about it. We did suffer a little adventure getting to Malaysia, which is best summed up from the notes in Deanna's travel journal for that day:

"15-July-2007: Up at 7:00am for a trip to Malaysia. The route from the hotel to Jorong East was uneventful. Apparently not many people are keen to leave Singapore for Malaysia. The bus from Jorong East is only $3.50 [Singapore Dollars] per person. They don't wait for you to clear customs in Malaysia, though."

We weren't the only ones who learned this little lesson last week. There was also a young couple with a baby. They were behind us in the line for customs and immigration. We were both taking a long time because the bus driver didn't give us immigration entry cards like they do on airlines. In fact, the bus company didn't even warn us we might need one. I'm not sure if it would have made a difference, though, because the friendly Malaysian customs officials don't have them on hand anyway. I'm still not sure where we were supposed to get them.

The delay was because the customs folks had to go looking around to find some entry cards for us. Everyone else from our bus must have brought their own, because they cleared out quickly. Soon, Deanna and I and the other couple were the only ones left at the immigration counter. I assumed the bus wouldn't leave behind the family with a baby, so I felt pretty confident being just ahead of them.

Of course, I was wrong.

Eventually, our friendly customs agents found a small stash of immigration cards--enough for everyone. But by the time we filled out the cards properly and cleared through immigration and customs and rushed out to where we were supposed to meet the bus, it was gone. Everyone was gone. We all looked around. And looked back at each other disbelieving. There was nothing. Just an empty parking lot and the road leading up to the freeway.

Not sure what to do, we walked out a bit into the parking lot looking around, thinking maybe we'd see the bus, maybe around some corner, or behind a pole or something.

But no, they were gone.

We were all stuck. Our bus had completely abandoned four adults and one child just inside the Malaysian border. And to make matters worse, as Deanna succinctly described in her journal, "the problem is, it's hot as f*ck."

So we just sat down for a while, avoiding the direct sun, but not able to avoid the humidity. There was a single vending machine, but there wasn't anywhere to exchange my Singapore dollars for Malaysia Ringgits. I handn't thought to change any money before we left.

So we waited. I knew the Causeway Link had at least one more scheduled trip across the border. So we waited. We hunkered down out of the sun and waited for the next bus to show up. While we waited we saw several other tour buses come through. None of them left without their passengers.


The impatient Causeway Link bus. Route CW3.

Another Causeway Link bus did eventually come through. And after a short explanation, the driver allowed us to join his group, no doubt displacing some other unlucky passengers standing around stupidly on the other side of the border without immigration cards and wondering how long their bus would wait.