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!