Ger’s Excellent Adventures

(pictures are from Sibuan Island, where I went diving yesterday)

I came to Semporna expecting to dive a few days at Sipadan then continue on to Indonesia or somewhere, but it has turned out to be a great place to work, so I worked most of the week and will spend the next 4 days diving at Sipadan and nearby.

I flew from Kuala Lumpur to Tawau, spent a night there because I arrived too late to catch the last minibus to Semporna, then caught a bus the next morning. Semporna is going to be my base for diving Sipadan, an island about 45 mins away.

The evening and morning I spent in Tawau I didn’t see a single other white person among the thousands of people I saw there, and I went to a night food market, a supermarket, and passed by tons of people on the way out of town. Woohoo, I finally escaped the tourists! (if only for a while)

There’s such a dearth of white skin in the area that the supermarket had a whole shelf of skin-whitening products, which I don’t think I have ever seen before: whitening foam, night whitening milk, facial foam, whitening scrub… what’s up with that?

I remember years ago when I was in the Netherlands I met a girl who said having a suntan there wasn’t about how you looked, it was more of a status symbol thing because having a tan implied that you spent a lot of time going to the beach and playing outside instead of working.

I heard the opposite is true in China, where dark skin is undesirable because it’s associated with being an outdoor laborer. I guess that’s the case here too? Silly white people lie in the sun, go to tanning salons and buy creams and oils to make themselves brown; it just makes sense that brown people would want to be white.

While I’m on this tangent, last winter in Whistler I noticed some of my snowboarder roommates would wear their goggles all the time — to and from the lifts, hanging out in the village, etc. I always tried to take mine off whenever I could to avoid getting an ugly goggle tan, and couldn’t figure out why others didn’t do the same. Eventually I came up with a theory that having a severe goggle tan there was a status symbol, because it implies you have been out on the mountain a lot. (even if you do look like a freak.) Not sure if that’s true though.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Malaysia. I checked in to the Dragon Inn, a floating hotel (actually not floating, but on stilts), got a $5 bed in the longhouse dorm room, stashed my stuff there and went walking around to get info on dive trips. After getting some info at Scuba Junkie I asked where I could get online, and they said their associated guesthouse has free wifi, just pop into the bar and help myself. I asked if it works in the rooms, and one guy said he thought it would in the rooms on the front of the hotel, which it did — and it’s fast, too.

I hadn’t expected to get much/any work done here this week, but armed with this new info about highspeed wifi in a cheap room just 45 mins away from one of the world’s best dive sites I decided to change my plans and work my usual work week (Sun-Wed) and dive the rest of the time. I could even dive from 8-4 every day and work from 5-11 each night! Excellent.

So in the time I have been here I managed to get in a full work week and do a couple day trips (3 dives per day): one with Uncle Chang to Mabul Island and one with Scuba Junkie to Sibuan Island. (pictured above)

I was really happy with the Mabul trip — it was just me and a divemaster who has been diving here for 10 years and knows the place inside out, and the diving was excellent.

The Scuba Junkie trip was just OK… Sibuan Island was amazing but I didn’t have a great day overall; maybe I was cranky from sleeping only two hours the night before (stupid 4am teleconferences!) The boat reeked of fuel for some reason, likely contributing to a headache I had for most of the day and the dives seemed mediocre compared to Mabul and Thailand. I think this site is mostly used to train beginners doing their first open water dives.

But the underwater visibility was fantastic, and it was a great day to be on Sibuan Island. I think the exceptionally good visibility was a partial contributor to the boring dives, because it meant there was no food for the fishies, so not many fish to be seen. And I did get a few decent underwater pictures, so maybe I was just in a bad mood.

There were some super cute kids running around naked on the island; I tried to work up the courage to go over and take pictures but chickened out :( I did some reading about Sibuan afterwards and apparently the kids are part of a group of sea gypsies who live on the island. My divemaster said there are some army guys stationed there as well (they arrived as we were leaving); I wonder how that works out. It’s not that big an island — you could walk around it in 20 minutes.

On the way back to Semporna I discovered there were two people in our small group who knew what W3C is! One of them (Ali) has been working and travelling for 5 years, mostly doing Web/IT stuff I think. Five years… hmmmm.

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I probably won’t get to visit even a quarter of the places I had hoped on this trip. I would be quite happy to stay right here for months, alternately working and diving.

Tomorrow I am heading to Uncle Chang’s guesthouse on Mabul to spend 4 days diving, mostly at Sipadan, which I have heard nothing but wonderful things about — hope my expectations aren’t too high. On the day trip to Mabul I did earlier in the week we spent the time between dives at Uncle Chang’s guesthouse, and it looked like a really nice place to spend a few days. While we were there a couple of the locals were playing guitar accompanied by a guy on a drum kit made out of empty pails, which was actually pretty impressive. I think they put on a little concert each night or something. The guesthouse only accommodates 14 people and from what I could see there’s absolutely nothing to do there except dive, read books, and play guitar. Nice.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 6:28 pm UTC and is filed under Asia '06-07, Malaysia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.