Malaysia Vacation

A rather complicated way of getting to Kuala Kumpur includes going to an obscure bus station in Singapore at midnight and getting onto a bus where they don't check your ticket. You drive 45 minutes and get off the bus to go through customs where you're not asked the nature of your visit or how long you'll be staying in Malaysia. You get back on a bus where after about 15 minutes the bus pulls over to the side of the highway to pick up two passengers. Oh, and a dutch guy (a different dutch guy) decides he's going to talk your ear off about his days as being a CEO of a diamond business in Antwerp (what he's doing taking an overnight bus in SE Asia, I don't know). Deciding that the best way to pass the time is to sleep, you do so, only to be woken up having arrived in Kuala Lumpur at 4:30 in the morning. Slightly flustered because you are in the middle of Little India although you had been told you would be arriving at the central bus station, you make your way through the 100 taxi drivers to try and figure our where the hell you need to go. Not able to find the Ringits hiding at the bottom of your purse, you barter with a taxi driver to take you to the bus station for three US $. You get there only to get on another bus to take you to another airport so you can catch your plan to Tawau.

Then it gets easy.

I think that it finally sunk in that I was am a minority and a bit of a novelty when I was boarding the plane and noticed that I was one of three caucasions on board. After three hours of screaming babies, us westerners got together and realized that we were all heading to Semporna to do some diving with Scuba Junkies.

Two hours later, we were there, settled in, and passing the day away. I made friends with Greg from Montana by way of Japan, and Zsophie from Hungary by way of Kuala Lumpur, and we got excited to dive. The next day, we headed out to Sipadan, and it knocked my socks off. Pulau Sipadan is regarded as one of the top sites in the world, and it has held its reputation. It's a small island surrounded by a coral reef, and then a 600 meter wall. It is incredible. The coral was so colorful, and there were turtles, turtles everywhere. Further down the wall were an abundance of grey sharks, white tipped sharks, sweetlips, schools of parrot fish, angel fish, puffer fish, moray eels, clownfish -- you name it, we saw it (did I mention the turtles?). Truly incredible, it made the Great Barrier Reef look like a big sand pile.

One exciting incident of note that I hope never to experience again in my lifetime happened on the final dive. We were at a site called Turtle Cave, and the dive was going splendidly. We had just exited the cave and were swimming along at about 25 meters when I head this blast come from behind me. At first I thought it was a boat, but it was too loud. Then I looked at my air gauge and saw it dropping at an alarming rate. I didn't know what the hell was going on, but it was bad, so I torpedoed to our guide and grabbed her octopus (buddy regulator). At this point I had no air, so we had to go to the surface (surrounded by turtles). As it turns out, one of my regulator hoses had cracked allowing all the air to exit my tank. Kind of scary when you're about 70 feet below the surface. But everything was fine, and we went down for another dive. I think the moral of the story is that I might want to think about lugging around a regulator next time I go for a dive trip.