Sipadan

Most lists seem to put Pulau Sipadan in the top five dive sites in the world. I haven’t dived anywhere near enough to know if that’s right, but I can tell you that this place is basically one giant exotic aquarium. I’ll skip the superlatives and just tell you about the place.

Access is from the nearby mainland town of Sempurna. This is a rather ordinary seaside town, nothing really worth writing about - except the lizard in the sewer. Most places here have an open sewer system: a concrete ditch along one or both sides of the road, covered by flat concrete blocks (an alarming fraction of these are broken and caved in, so I avoid walking on them when possible), welded metal grates, or often nothing at all. Inside the ditch resides all manner of garbage, sewage, animals, or other disgusting material. In Sempurna I saw a very angry five-foot long monitor lizard in the ditch wading through sewage up to his neck, luckily under a metal grate that prevented him from giving me a fatally-septic lash with his tail. Couldn’t get the camera out before he dashed under the safety of the concrete sidewalk, though.

Approaching the guesthouse where I stayed, built out over the water

Meredith captioned this “I see your two fish and raise you three”

There used to be guesthouses on Sipadan. Bear in mind that there is nothing else in this region of Sabah that can compare to the economic draw of one of the world’s top five dive sites. Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have fought a protracted legal battle over control of the island, including terrorist kidnappings of tourists and tons of illegal development deals.  All the guesthouses were evicted from the island, nominally to protect the reef from dumping of sewage and garbage, and a permit system was put in place.  The guesthouses are now occupied by a substantial Malay military garrison, and the government collects the permit fees where previously they got only tax revenue.  The permits are theoretically limited to 120 per day (400 per day was common before the permits), but the dive guides report that corruption and bribes are rampant.  So draw your own conclusions.  At any rate, the reef seems to be well protected and certainly teems with life.  At times it’s an underwater coral fantasy straight from a Jacques Cousteau film.

The guesthouses all moved to the nearby island of Mabul.  The existing inhabitants were already occupying most of the very limited real estate there, so all the new development went onto makeshift pilings out into the ocean.  There are two vast five-star resort complexes here built far out over the water, one complete with a helipad ($300+ per night). 

I stayed instead in a flimsy backpackers longhouse ($15 per night), where the occasional nighttime storm blew straight through the ill-fitting windows and left me sleeping in wet bedclothes.  Five days of diving, three dives a day (around $100 US per day) left me a little exhausted, but the tranquility of the island and its inhabitants was a welcome relief.

Lots of people here spend their time building and repairing ships, in a uniquely gaudy style

The finished product

The barbed wire seperating the village from the resort is an excellent place to hang your laundry

But enough about the village, here are some critters I met underwater:

Nudibranch (a psychedelic, Dr. Seuss sort of sea slug)

Cuttlefish, a sort of big hyperintelligent cthulhu-like squid. They communicate with each other via rapid flashing, fluttering color changes all over their body. When you approach, they start a kaleidescopic display of whirling colors as if to ask “you speak flashing cuttlefish language?” Upon receiving no reply, they fade back into camoflage with the background and go back to sleep.

Speaking of camoflage… (crocodilefish)

Here’s a funny story. A resort developer wanted to buy some unused land on Mabul that was controlled by the neighboring resort, which of course refused. So the developer goes to the neighboring petrosultanate of Brunei, buys a surplus shallow-water drilling rig, tows it to Mabul, and plunks it down right in front of the landowning resort, ruining the view of the sunset. He then develops it as a dive resort, converting the helipad into a sundeck, building luxury bunks in shipping containers, and painting it the gaudiest colors imaginable. Revenge is sweet…

Poisonous lionfishes

Frogfish, possibly the ugliest thing in the sea

When you’re looking at the clouds from 20m deep, you know the visibility is excellent…

All green sea turtles, abundant here.

Scorpionfish (poisonous), garden eel, and eyeball of unidentified creature

Fantastical coral gardens

The tornado of a school of barracuda, one of the most famous sights here.

Colossal bumphead parrotfish, each 3-4 feet long

angry moray eel

Shark, turtle, fish…

Nemo! These guys are endlessly fascinating. They hide in the tentacles of the anenome, then seem overcome by anxiety and swim around frantically. Wiggle your fingers and curiousity takes over for a moment, and they’ll emerge to look at the weird fingerfish before dashing back into safety.

Plenty more photos to see in the smugmug folder if you haven’t had enough. I’m back in Bali now. One thing I’ll say for Borneo, it may be overpriced, overhyped, and trampled, but no one hassles you on the street for t-shirts and motorbike rides.

Primates

The name “Borneo” has always conjured up images of wild apes and monkeys for me. Maybe from reading National Geographic, maybe from the animal flash-card game we had when we were kids, maybe from obsessively memorizing animal facts during various pre-adolescent zoology phases. But here I find myself in the northeastern corner of Borneo, absolutely swimming in primates.

And palm oil. I’ve been trying to write something capturing the magnitude of the environmental devastation here, under a blanketing monoculture of palm oil plantations. Imagine the corn fields of Nebraska, except infinite rows of palm trees covering what only a few decades ago was one of the world’s oldest and most diverse rainforest ecosystems. I don’t really have the photos to tell that story, so I’ll save the polemics, but there’s plenty of context on wikipedia and the like. What wildlife is left here, much of it endangered, is cornered into tiny and beleaguered sanctuaries of mostly secondary forest. In recent days I’ve been to a proboscis monkey sanctuary, an orangutan sanctuary, and a protected forest park along the Kinabatangan River. Excellent wildlife spotting, and there’s an overwhelming calm beauty to the jungle landscape. However it’s hard for it to match the unrelenting hype from the package-tour industry, and prices for some attractions here have gone well beyond western standards. It’s easily the most expensive place I’ve been to in southeast Asia, with every half-day excursion forcing you into an overnight stay with full board via a single concessionary, everything at obscene markups. And there’s simply no way to conceal the plantations or hide the fact that you’re visiting the very, very last examples of these critically endangered and disappearing animals. So the wonder of it is obviously a litle bittersweet.

So enough depressing rants, let’s look at some animals.

Black macaque

Proboscis monkeys

Hmm, bananas… don’t mind if I do

I am officially calling for a caption contest for this photo

Baby monkeys: officially cute

Those are all semi-wild animals, living near the feeding stations in the sanctuaries. The following are all wild, around the Kinabatangan River.

Yellow-eyed rumpled eagle

Silver mud crocodile

Rainbow-freckled kingfisher

Two-headed macaque

Three-beaked hornbills

Yellow-spotted nozzlenose bug

Broom-nosed leaf bug

Clear-tipped reef dragonfly

Leopard-spotted zebra moth, emerging from the chrysalis (in case you haven’t guessed yet, I’m making up all these names, I really don’t seem to be very keen at remembering species names)

My new arch-enemy and denizen of my nightmares: the brain-sucking zombie leech. Words cannot describe the horror of these wriggling little annelids, moving at improbable speeds by doing slimy little end-over-end cartwheels. Turn over a leaf, and there can be half a dozen of them, excitedly smelling brains nearby, reaching out and flapping about, anxious to crawl in your ear or under your skin and work their way into your brain and bring about the zombie leech apocalypse. One found his way up my shirt, through my buttons, and into my armpit. Another crawled up my leg, wriggled through the tiny gap in the zipper of my zip-off pant leg, and inserted himself into my thigh. One got on the inside top of my backpack when I set it down for a second, eager to drill directly into my spinal cord. One got on the bottom of my camera and flapped against my lips when I brought it up for a picture, perhaps seeking the direct route, or maybe looking for an eye. Don’t believe anyone who denies the undead zombifying nature of these demonic creatures; they’re already under the control of the zombie leech overlords.

This 5000-volt electric fence surrounded our jungle bungalows, in response to one of their buildings being trampled by a herd of pygmy forest elephants last year. No bullshit. Didn’t see any elephants (or the pygmy forest rhino, one of the rarest species on earth) but did see some elephant tracks, and apparently visitors do see them from time to time.

More proboscis monkeys, wild ones, and critically endangered - though you’d never know it from how common they are along this river.

Big male proboscis monkey lets it all hang out. These guys keep harems of up to a dozen females, enforced by violence and lots of hooting and frequent sex.

The fig tree - essential staple of many of the primate species here.

Plenty more photos visible here - these are just a quick selection.

Currently I’m in Sempurna, Sabah - jumping of point for Sipidan Island and many other renowned dive sites. This, according to many extremely experienced divers I’ve met, is meant to be one of the best dives sites in the world. I’ll let you know in a week or so.

more from Bali and Borneo

A little more of daily liife in Bali in this post, not just the beach…

OK, the tourist zone near Kuta Beach can be a little crass.

For a place that sustained several terrorist bombings and hundreds of deaths (backpackers like me, and locals) only a couple of years ago… this is the only reference to that that I’ve found yet. The young men running the surf shops and bars here grew up on Australian surf culture alongside their parent’s Hinduism - the fanatical Javanese Islam of the bombings is as foreign to them as it is to us.

OK, more beach shots.

I think this gives some sense of the chaos of cars, motorbikes, smoke, surfers, brightly lit shops, hawkers etc in Kuta.

Then I ran into Thomas, the Swedish fire-spinner I met in Kuala Lumpur. He has a place in Ubud, a well-established craft center inland and put me up for a few days. Urban southeast Asia everywhere else I’ve been is all cold, hard, dusty, artificial surfaces - bare concrete, tile, steel shutters, dirt lots, open sewers clogged with trash. Ubud is drastically different. Everything is an explosion of green, dripping with art, everything built and placed just so with deliberate craft. Everything built with with a local volcanic stone that famously weathers just so and looks positively ancient after only a few years in the sun and rain. Everything growing a patina of moss, enveloped by creeping ivy, blooming with tiny flowers between each crack.

This place is so fantastically alive - something is growing or buzzing around everywhere you go.

Green envelops everything

And everything is scaled just so, just a bit smaller than human size, inviting close looks and isolating details. It’s a fascinating place to photograph and can be difficult to make much progress down the street. Angie H., your brain would simply explode here.

Then there’s one of the reasons I went to Ubud with Thomas - I was fascinated to try to photograph his fire-spinning. Some results:

Then it was on to Malaysian Borneo to flee Indonesia before my stingy 30-day visa expired. Arrived in Kota Kinabalu (capitol of the East Malaysian state of Sabah):

Not too many photos of KK yet, as I’ll be back there in a bit for the annual Sabah Fest, which will add lots of color and variety to the town. Next stop was a quick peak-bagging dash up Mt. Kinabalu (4095m, 13,500ft), claimed to be the tallest in Southeast Asia (there’s a taller one in New Guinea, whose geographical provenance is somewhat contested). Anyway, it’s a beautiful massif of dozens of twisted and dramatic peaks on a stark granite pluton, not unlike the Sierra Nevada, utterly unlike the ugly piles of volcanic cinders making up Indonesia:

Dawn, on the way back down. Check out the shadow of the massif against the alpenglow, on the left, and the Pacific Ocean visible in the distance.

Next: orangutans, proboscis monkeys, and a river trek into the rainforest.

Maluku: Banda Islands

Last post in this series, after which we will be up to date.

A flight from Ambon to Kei was not too hard to work out. Kei has a decent sized airstrip, big enough for medium size, reliable twin-prop airplanes that come five times a week. Getting there was no problem. Getting to Banda was harder - there’s only one flight a week from Ambon to Banda and back (all flights in the region go via Ambon) on a tiny, lightweight cargo plane. Turns out the biggest flat spot on Banda Neira (the biggest of the small group of islands) is too small by half, so the runway consists half of landfill into the bay, has a pretty steep gradient to boot, and the plane has to make a sharp dive on takeoff or landing to avoid a volcano. Banda has no instrumented beacons, so all landings are on visual approach only. If the pilot can’t see the strip, he can’t land (four crashes in ten years), and since there’s no fuel depot, he must return immediately to Ambon rather than circle and wait for the low morning clouds to rise. Anyway, the one flight a week wasn’t nearly on the right day for me.

So I took a boat directly to Banda, on the state ferry line Pelni. “Ferry” doesn’t really do it justice - think cruise liner size with half of the boat consisting of steerage-class sleeping benches, covered with cigarette burns, cockroaches, and mysterious drip stains on the walls. The other half is perfectly serviceable, clean first- and second-class cabins. The boats cruise continuous circuits between Sumatra and West Papua, many stretches taking 3-5 days (luckily the bits between the islands I visited are only half a day). There are a couple of karaoke bars, video games, a room showing movies, sometimes live bands. Also a permanent traveling merchant class seems to live aboard, selling everything you can imagine. At each stop, an army of small boys rushes aboard and runs around the halls selling bottled water and cigarettes, screaming “air…rokok” at the top of their lungs, rushing out again before the boat sails. Middle aged ladies trundle around with big baskets of whole fish, rice, oily boxed meals, hard boiled eggs. Men wander around selling stuffed animals, huge varieties of clothing, perfume, fake gold watches, jewelry, shoes, luggage. The noise and fuss settles down a while after setting sail, and at night every available horizontal surface in the Ekonomi class has someone sleeping on a mat, surrounded by a fortress of boxes and luggage. Uniformed officers keep these locals out of the upper class cabin areas when possible, or simply lock the gates when not. It’s always worth a good exploratory wander first off, inspecting which routes towards the lifeboats are actually unlocked.

So I arrive at Banda stupid early, around 3:30 a.m. Another trepidacious walk around town, looking for an open guesthouse. Luckily this time the first one, recommended by fellow travelers in Kei, had space and the Ibu woke up when I came in. Ten minutes later I was asleep. Sleep is difficult in Ekonomi class, from the noise and movement and eternal light, and the abundant stories of organized gangs of robbers working the boats in teams. Many other travelers expressed surprise that I would even go down on the ekonomi decks, much less book a ticket there. As always so far though, I saw nothing worrisome and felt no threat. It may have something to do with me being a foot taller and 50 pounds heavier than almost anyone I see around me…

The Banda Islands were once the world’s only source of nutmeg. This is an apricot-sized tree fruit, containing a hard dry flesh (can be dried and candied into something resembling a bland, cloying candied ginger), a hard seed (to be dried in the sun and ground), and a red, rubbery skin over the seed (this is mace, to be dried in the sun and powdered). The island’s whole economy is still dominated by nutmeg, and it takes two hours to load the bags of nutmeg for export onto the Pelni boats on their bimonthly visits. Nutmeg groves abound in all the villages I visited, and nutmeg is laying around everywhere drying in the sun. Also peppercorns, eggplants, cassava (a staple starch in the small villages, wealthier communities having long ago switched to imported rice), cloves, chili, corn, greens, green beans, cabbage, papayas, jackfruit, breadfruit, guavas, bananas. Hard to find mangos and pineapples though.

Enough words, here are the pictures:

Drying fish in the sun. The woman uses a whisk to shoo away the flies, entirely too infrequently for comfort

Thin, curled strips of cork bark - used to waterproof the seams of home-built wooden boats. All the small boats here are simple dugout canoes from a single tree (have been searching everywhere to get a shot of the carving in action, but apparently it’s a rainy-season activity). Larger ones are built from planks and always have some water sloshing in the bilge…

Bamboo nutmeg pickers

Locally grown chilies

Nice t-shirt. One of the guidebooks notes how common this kind of thing is, and asked people who he was. Many didn’t know, and some said “I think he’s a nice old man who gives money to children.” This guy was a relative of the guesthouse owner, fishing with a net right off the waterfront guesthouse.

There are a dozen or so islands in the Banda group. Most day trips involve looking at the couple guesthouses in town for other tourists, and chartering a boat together. My first day trip out was through the owner of one of those guesthouses, who keeps track of the quality of the five or size boats available. His preferred guy was making repairs, so we used a new guy with a supposedly brand-new boat. You can see the result. The single-cylinder diesel engine failed in the open ocean and the boatman spent hours trying to fix it, with tools like a single rusty spanner and a fishhook. Turns out the fuel gasket had failed before and been replaced with some wraps of a black plastic bag. Guess what, that disintegrated under high-pressure diesel fuel immersion, and sprayed all the fuel into the engine compartment rather than the engine. After several fruitless hours, he pulled up a plank from the deck and started paddling. The three of us bules (Indonesian for whites) paddled too with steadily increasing panic levels as darkness approached. I fashioned a distress flag from a sarong and the long bamboo pole used for maneuvering in shallow water - it was ignored by several nearby ships until around 4:30, when the fishing boats head for home. Then we got a tow back to town with only severe sunburns to show for the day. This is the closest I’ve come to disaster on any of my trips abroad.

The open water is like glass here, in the calm season. No strong currents, no winds, no swells - eerie.

Nutmeg fruit on the tree

Nutmeg seeds and mace, drying on someone’s lawn.

Our boatmen - these ones trusted and reliable. Perfectly clear water, healthy corals, lots of fish. I snorkeled a lot (diving hasn’t really caught on here yet) but often you don’t even need a mask to see the fish, the water is so flat and clear.

Perfectly clear night skies too (alternating with torrential downpours)

This kid was sitting on the jetty at one of the tiny outlying islands, fishing with homemade goggles and a homemade speargun. The goggles are bamboo, carved perfectly to fit, inlaid with a bit of glass epoxied in place. The speargun is a bit of scrap wood, powered by a strip of inner tube, firing a straight bit of steel rod, triggered by a bent piece of wire.

Last day in Banda, on the way back to home base.

The plan was to leave Banda via the cargo plane (along with the other five tourists on the islands… one week is about the right amount of time to stay, so every week’s crop funnels together to the airplane). The pilot didn’t bother to phone the Banda airport for conditions before departing Ambon, and arrived to heavy, low cloud cover. So they sounded the klaxon to clear the dogs and motorbikes from the airstrip, he circled around a few times invisible in the clouds overhead, then turned back to Ambon. The crowd of locals (including a nine-months-pregnant woman with urinary complications) launched into a real shouting match with the airport agents. The local feeling is (I later learned) that (mostly Protestant) Banda is suffering from a deliberate campaign by the Muslim government in Jakarta to marginalize and cripple their economy, the lack of coordination with the plane being just one of many symptoms.

An hour later, clear blue skies. No rescheduled flight, there’s only one plane and it visits other islands on the other days. Got a refund from the ticket agent (tickets are purchased at his house, where he sits you in his living room with the kids watching TV and makes you tea. You don’t get a ticket or a receipt, just your name in a little notebook and an assurance that he’ll be at the airstrip and know you by sight!). Got on the next Pelni ferry to Ambon, luckily only a day later.

Ambonese kid, selling cigarettes on the street.

Next day, flew on to Bali. What a shock! Kuta Beach (epicenter of Bali tourism) might as well be Key West. Heavily developed, all concrete, packed with cars, motorbikes, plus-size package tourists (there are actually Americans here), “backpacker” food everywhere (horrifying mealy pizzas, watery pastas, steaks made of leather, and always European soccer matches on the TV) and endless touts and sidewalk sales pitches. Still it’s nice to have water pressure, a wide variety of food, abundant services, internet, pharmacies, etc etc. And there’s still a bit of magic left here behind the westernized verneer, when the devoutly-Hindu locals leave daily offerings to the gods on ever street corner and storefront, and in the light on Kuta Beach itself. Never seen anything like it - a mile wide, perfectly flat, clean, fine sand, endless sets of perfect surf tubes curling all day long just off the beach.

I’m only sharing one day’s worth of photos from Bali so far, more variety to come.

The area around Kuta is swarming with motorbikes, many of them piloted inexpertly by western tourists with no experience and maybe a couple of cocktails. Moving around here is a lot more dangerous than other dense parts of Indonesia, where every kid was practically born on a motorbike. Fuel for these diminutive two-stroke engines is different than car fuel from official gas stations, containing two-stroke oil. It’s usually sold from old cooking oil containers on the side of the road. This one was a little different.

Magic light.

That’s all for now. Next stop is Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo. My one-month visa is expiring, so I’m engaging in the familiar maneuver of longtime Southeast Asian backpackers - the visa run. Leave the country for as little as a day, get stamped back in with a fresh visa. This one will be almost three weeks though, climbing mountains, diving in Sipadan, and catching the famous Sabah Festival of culture, food, dancing, and music in Kota Kinabalu. Then back to Bali, visiting Komodo for diving and dragons, and eventually on to Java for the Waisak Fest - a celebration of Buddha’s birthday at the world’s biggest Buddhist temple complex at Borobudur. Looking forward to your comments and emails…

Andy