We left the Borneo jungle to go scuba diving off some islands off the coast of Malaysia.
We decided to book a scuba tour to go to Sipadan island which is considered one of the top diving destinations in the world.
It was discovered by Jaques Cousteau and ever since people cross the globe to get a chance to see one of the most beautiful coral reefs in the world.
In order to go out there you need a special permit that only a few dive companies can get so we had to commit ourselves to a four day dive package with 13 dives.
We debated whether it was worth it and decided that we will only be here once and life is too short to miss out on an opportunity like this so we went for it.
It was definitely worth it. Every day we went out for at least three dives.
On our first day and dive we saw a gigantic six meter whale shark and many turtles and colorful soft corals.
On that same day we saw a gigantic two meter garoupa and some very rare creatures that our dive mastered was bragging about.
We also saw a sea horse, huge moray eel, and lots of really cool fish. The visibility is incredible.
We stayed at a dive resort on a island called Mabul.
The resort is nice but right next lives a small community of fisherman that are displaced "sea gypsies" who do not have an official nationality.
They most likely came from the Phillipines and settled on this island a long time ago.
They live in slum like conditions with houses built out of scaps of wood and anything they can find.
They fished and gathered food from the sea. They have no sanitation and they tossed most of their garbage in the sea where they gathered their food.
The children can not go to school because they are not registered citizens.
We would see them ever day catching fish or collecting sea urchants.
It is like night and day seeing the beautiful resort right next to this impoversed village.
Continue reading (Incl. Pics) at: Sipadan Island
..
