Malaysia - Tioman & Mabul

Hello gang!

We are relaxing at the "Rooms" hotel in Tawau after a nice hike in the nearby Nature Park where I totally botched my phone at a slippery stone near a waterfall. So I'm typing this on Silkes phone. I'm actually glad, the phone was between my hip and the stone, see the carvings...

Tomorrow we'll cross via ferry into Indonesia and meet our friend Thomas. Together we continue on our last month before we return to 🇨🇭

Ok, so let's review our Malaysia trip!

Tioman Island

We landed in Kuala Lumpur (lovingly called KL by the locals). After visiting Petronas towers and the musical water spring animations, we took the overnight bus to Mersing. It's not recommended unless you hate sleep and love ice cold AC air! From Mersing, a ferry brought us to Tioman where we checked into B&J Divers and stayed there.... for 1 hour.

Why? We found out that this was the "wrong" side of the island. No macro here, only big stuff. That's not for us. Additionally most guests come and do Open Water or Advanced courses, so it's full of rookies focussed on education, buoyancy, etc.

So we did what every insane person would do. We found and whatsapped a dive center on the east side (Kenji from Amigo divers) and arranged a transfer, diving and accomodation there on the same day!

The B&J guys were not amused and kept our 200$ deposit. But that's fine. The next five days were full of amazing ultra macro diving. Local guide Anne (insta: ankezoidd - she's how we found the dive center) is a crazy good spotter. They have a special type of Costasiella here, not living on leafs but in the sand.

Here are some impressions. Most nudis were less than 1mm in length:

But we didn't only find nudis. Here are a few other guys we met. But the theme was consistent: ultra micro small:

One funny story was on a night dive. Besides Anne, Silke and me, another female diver was with us on the sand. She used to whirl up the sand with her fins a lot, like many beginners do. This makes photographing a nightmare.

So as a good samaritan, I distracted her by showing her mediocre things like decorator crabs or mantis shrimps to keep her at distance from Silke.

We found another term for this kind of diving here: Sushi belt macro. Because the guides would bring little stones like presentation plates with the nudis on them to the divers for photographing. I fell in love with Silke all over again when she signalled to the guides - by forming a roof above her head with her hands - to put those nudis back to where they are home.

After all this excitement, it was time to say goodbye to our seafront hut and our Amigos and drive/ferry/bus/grab back to Kuala Lumpur where we stayed in the fancy Mövenpick hotel (because it had a warm fresh water shower!) before flying to Tawau the next morning.

Mabul Island, Kapalai & Sipadan

From Tawau airport via Semporna and to Mabul island, Scuba Junkie arranged everything.

Attention. Scuba Junkie Mabul is not a normal dive center. They have 34 huts and 4 dorms. I have never seen such a big dive center. Every day, 8 boats with 6-8 guests each went out. The scale is massive but it's very well organized. I heard, they have a monthly turnover of 300k USD which does not surprise me.

The clientel is mostly young (18-35) and on OW & AOWD (80%) level, looking for some days diving on the famous Sipadan island, mostly interested in big fish.

As you know by now, this is not our cup of tea but still, we gave it a shot. We spent 3 days à 3 dives on Sipadan (it's a Marine Reserve, a small island 40min away from Mabul) and 3 days with 3 + 1 night dive in Mabul and Kapalai.

Sipadan

Sipadan had schools of Barracudas, Bumphead Parrotfish, Jacks and a few solitary sharks (white/black/grey reef) and many many turtles. But even Silkes and my eagle eyes found almost zero macro there, which was assumed but still surprising. The cutest macro we found on Sipadan was this:

Anyway most divers are willing to pay the hefty fees for Sipadan to see Hammerhead sharks.

It is what Scuba Junkie advertises most, and what attracts most divers but ironically, nobody gets to see.

Even though the guides take the group away from the wall into the blue for 15min each dive and try to attract the HH's by rustling their metal pointers on their tanks or pet bottles... It's supposed to sound like crushing bones under teeth, thus attracting the predators. However, this never worked when we were there.

Silke and I still had loads of fun. By pantoming slowly swiping away money bills (since every Sipadan dive costs over 100$). Or by me letting Silke ride on my tank on a long passage.

One time, I signalled to Silke that I saw a Stone fish. But it turned out to be just a stone formation that looks very much like one. My embarassment was huge. So what does silke do in the next dive? She brings me a stone, points to it and grins. With this woman on my side, I lose most of my air by laughing. Great times!

Mabul

We were super happy with Mabul, itself! The dive center has a wonderful house reef with lots of macro, see here:

Kapalai

A neighboring island to Mabul. We only had two dives there, but it was the first time, a Day Octopus touched both our fingers and playfully tried pulling us in. An absolutely unforgettable experience.

The crazy thing about Kapalai is that they built an artificial reef underwater which was more like a village. Huge structures like houses in a underwater village.

And there we found the Lembeh Seadrogon. Guides tell us, they haven't seen any in 3 months, so we got lucky 😉

Okies, that's it for now!

Have a wonderful time until next time!