Saturday 16 June 2012

Sukau & Sandakan, Bye bye Borneo












We went for a boat cruise on Kinabatangan river to see some jungle and wildlife.


We saw Proboscis monkeys again!







It was really hot haha good that the boat provided some umbrellas!

We saw Borneo pygmy elephants! They are really rare so we were very lucky. There is only about 1000 of them. http://www.worldwildlife.org/species/finder/asianelephants/borneoelephant.html


We saw four elephants so thats 0.4% of the entire population. They are so cute! The bigger ones were smaller than 2m and the baby one was almost half that.




hornbill



enjoying the ride









our guest house in Sukau

On Friday morning we took a minibus to Sandakan.

market



Sandakan is a nice town by the ocean. The harbourside had lots of restaurants and in the evening we caught the end of the Ireland-Spain football game in one of them.


On Saturday morning we headed to the airport to fly back to KL.

The airport looked almost like a cathedral
We took our last flight with Air Asia for a while. We have flown them eight times this spring and the flights have been always on time. Pretty good!



Back at KL LCCT airport we headed to the kiosk that sells Finnish Fazer chocolates! Yummy!


Then it was time to say goodbye to Air Asia and LCCT airport since we are flying to Korea from the KLIA airport, or the "real" airport. So many good memories from this airport and we don't know when we will be back. But we will be back for sure!



Sipadan, Mabul, diving and Semporna


Hotel kitty

Jason was in Semporna over three years ago and now the town was much cleaner and nicer than before.


They build a lot of houses on the water.




Sleeping giant man haha

Tourists only come to Semporna to go diving, there is not much else to do there. We booked two days of diving through Big John Scuba. The first day we went diving around Mabul island and stayed there for one night. On the second day we went diving in Sipadan (a really cool tick on the diving list haha).

cuuuute and fluffy puppy at the dive shop


Semporna town

Mabul is about 45 minutes boat ride from Semporna.

Mabul island




We checked in to our hotel Arung Hayat and went diving!


me and Denise from Singapore getting ready for diving
The water temperature was only 29°C but it felt really cold when I got out of the water all wet and it was windy as well. Not like Andamans and the Philippines with 30+ degrees under water!

In Mabul we saw loads of macro stuff and different kinds of nudie branches. All of these underwater pictures were taken by a Dutch girl Miriam who shared her pics with us.

nudie branch

We didn't see the nudie branch and the frogfish in these pictures but we saw other ones. Would be so awesome to have our own underwater camera.


Frog fish
Diving in Mabul was really good and I'm glad we did that too and not only Sipadan. There was so many little tropical fishes who just didn't seem to  mind at all when I swam amongst them! Cool! We also saw moray and ribbon eels and all sorts of stuff.

Our guest house on Mabul island. They had really good food!





Relaxing in between dives











On the morning of June 12th we got ourselves ready to go diving in Sipadan! Wohoo! It is one of the best dive sites in the world. You are guaranteed to see turtles there and we saw two even before going under the water.

Getting ready to go to Sipadan



Sipadan beach






my mask was on a bit tight



beach lizard









Once again these underwater photos are taken by Miriam.

Barracudas
On our last dive in Sipadan we saw like about two meters long barracudas, way bigger than the ones in this picture. They were really close to us and eyeing Jason very angrily, pretty intimidating. He was scared...


Reef sharks
We saw loads of sharks on every dive. I tried to count but very quickly lost track because there were so many! Some of them were small but we also saw a couple bigger ones like close to two meters long. 








I think a very pinchable pylly -Jason wrote this


Beautiful Sipadan



turtle








Back in Semporna it was nice to fill in our dive logs because we had seen so much! Can't wait to go diving again but I have no idea when that will be. Jason really got me a great bday present, the Open Water course :) Thanks!