See the Monkey Swim...

I share a dream with Homer Simpson and that is to live below the sea. Failing that, I love to scuba dive and I've just dived in possibly the best site in the world, Sipadan island. Leaving Sam home alone on the island to get some sun and do some snorkeling I rode out on the dive boat to the first dive site, Barracuda Point. Everyone I'd met who'd been here had said how amazing the diving was and so I was very excited, but also not wanting to build it up too much in my own mind, just in case. Two minutes after leaving the beach we arrived at the site and looking out at the sea, I could already count several turtles at the surface and then saw some kind of massive fish splashing about, this was gonna be good. After back-rolling off the boat into the water, I quickly had a look at what awaited me below the waves and was instantly gob-smacked by the ridiculous amount of fish that were swimming about. I and the other divers were floating above the most beautiful coral reef I'd ever seen and just in front of me the reef suddenly plunged into the deep blue of the open water, down a wall that went down for possibly hundreds of meters. Never having done a 'wall' dive before I was a teeny bit nervous, I'd been told to keep a close eye on my depth gauge to make sure I didn't get too deep. As an 'Open Water Padi' license holder I'm only supposed to go to about 18-30 meters, with further training you can go to 30-40 meters, any deeper than that and you really need specialist kit. At 30 meters some people can get Nitrogen Narcosis which is basically like being drunk, not ideal under the sea. With all that in mind we started descending down the wall into the blue until we reached about 20 meters. There was a fair bit of current that day, so I didn't need to swim at all and was gently swept along with the wall on my right and the open ocean on the left. The visibility was incredible, 30 to 50 meters at least, I could see coral from the surface well down past where I was with fish of all sizes and colours swimming around, thousands of the blighters. I would keep half an eye out into the blue in case anything big swam past and it did! Every now and then you would hear a sharp metallic tapping which would be the Dive Master pointing out something interesting. Swimming past down below us was the biggest shark I'd seen, a Grey Reef shark, at least 3 meters long, it definitely made me a little nervous, but it just swam along minding its own business and was wicked to see! Not long after that and another sudden tapping sound, out in the blue was a Dog Tooth Tuna, which initially I thought was another giant shark, you couldn't believe the size of it, 2-2.5 meters long, mental! As I drifted along the wall, I would regularly see turtles, I lost count very quickly, I must have seen a hundred or more on the seven dives I did at Sipadan, so many that I would give most of them a cursory glance, before Sipadan to see one turtle would make my dive. Also I would see White Tip Reef sharks swimming along, beautiful, gentle sharks about 4-5 foot long. I would see several of these every dive and quite often you would come across them resting on the sand in amongst the coral on top of the wall. I was able to get to within a couple of meters of them when they were on the sand and lie down in front of them until they swam off. Its the stuff of dreams for me, lying about with sharks! Fantastic stuff!
Having floated along the wall for about 20-30 minutes, we swam up and over the wall onto what can only be described as an underwater valley of sand and coral. Floating down the valley with the current there was again a tapping sound and looking up from whatever had taken my interest was one of the most incredible sights these young eyes have ever seen. A giant school of Barracuda swimming over the top of the valley just in front of me, where they proceeded to stop and form themselves up into a huge tornado of fish! Hundreds, if not thousands of them were spinning round in a lazy circle, I grabbed hold of a rock to stop myself from floating past them with the current and just watched them. A completely awe inspiring moment! These silvery beauts were anywhere from 2-5 foot long, on a subsequent dive I managed to get myself right in the middle of them and floated watching them swim either side of me, again another dumbstruck moment.
Every dive I did at Sipadan was a fishy assault on the senses and the stuff of dreams. I managed to pack in 12 dives in 4 days :) not all at Sipadan itself, there were some other great sites, one in particular is the island of Mabul. Its famous for its 'muck' diving which apparently means looking for little creatures, like tiny sea slugs ( called Nudibranch's ), shrimps and that kind of thing. I spent a good couple of dives there peering into cracks in the coral and around rocks and finding loads of cool stuff. The best thing though was this Octopus that we came across. Not particularly small, but we spent a good 10 minutes watching it. A little fish was having a go at the Octopus, cause it was probably near its eggs or something and you could see the Octopus changing colours from almost complete white to a dark maroon colour. I managed to do a little film of it on the camera I was renting, if only I'd thought to do some films of the sharks and barracuda!
The icing on the already mighty cake of Sipadan for me though was seeing a school of Bumphead Parrot fish. On one of my final dives there we came again to the underwater valley and the barracuda, but this time along with the barracuda was a school of Bumpheads grazing on the coral. They are huge fish with big beaks that they use to crunch up the coral and there were at least 70 or more of them. I sat down on the sand about 15 meters down and watched them as they swam slowly around me, listening to their crunching sounds. Some of these fish are say 4-5 foot long by 4 foot high, giants. No pics I'm afraid, didn't have the camera with me that day, but have a look at the links, its hard to get any scale from the pics and mpegs on how big they are, but these fish are one of my favorites and being so close to so many of them was an over-whelming experience.

Sipadan slideshow

That was Sipadan and also that was the end of our adventures in Borneo. We had so many amazing experiences here in Borneo and we'll definitely be back here one day. Its well up there with Japan as a favorite place in terms of the amount of things to do and see. For anyone wanting to see wildlife its an incredible place to go, there can't be many better places on earth! I personally would put my Sipadan dives easily at the top of all my favorite things I've done since coming away, it was that good! Better than the Gibbon experience :)

Two blogs for the price of one? That's right, Return of the Monkey has a new update from the ever gorgeous Samantha! I've also added a Maps section which you'll find below the Links on the right hand side :)

Next up: Thailand ( part 2 )