It was a 4-hour drive from Borneo Rainforest Lodge to Semporna where we hopped aboard the afternoon boat to Mabul Island. We’ve booked a couple days with Scuba Junkie Sipidan to go scuba diving there. Our cruise today was aboard one of the Scuba Junkie dive boats, serving today as a ferry.

Here’s Mabul Island as we approached from the northwest:

Scuba Junkie’s lodging is called Mabul Beach Resort. It’s south of the beach at the foot of a long pier. At the end of the pier is the boat landing and dive center. You can see it on the map above and in the photo, below.

Below is a view of Mabul Beach Resort looking south toward the dining hall. Our room (a bit rustic compared to where we just stayed) is immediately on the right in this photo, at the north end with a view of the beach.

Below is the view from our patio. That red-roofed building is the dive center. Beyond it, that blue structure is an old oil drilling platform turned diving resort.

After getting settled into our room, we walked down the pier to get our diving schedule and scuba gear.

To our left were Scuba Junkie’s dive boats, back ashore after returning from the day’s diving.

Below is the view to the north of the pier. There were several hundred ramshackle stilt houses there with lots of little children swimming among the pilings.

Of course, poverty leads many of these people to live in houses like these, but as descendants of “Sea Gypsies,” they have cultural reasons for doing so as well. As you can see, these stilt houses are interconnected by boardwalks, fostering a tightly-nit community.

And this way, there is no worry about flooding during rainy times, extreme tides or storms, as there would be on land. Plus, being elevated above the water allows air to circulate below which cools the interior of the house.

But here on Mabul Island, one of the main motivators must also be the lack of land upon which to build, the bulk of it being taken up by the resorts.

Several families also live on small boats in the harbor, as you can see in the photo, below.

I lived aboard a 40-foot wooden boat for 3 years in my 20s. I was single then. Even living alone, it was a bit cramped. It’s hard to imagine an entire family living on a boat about 1/4 the size of mine. And don’t even think about where the sewage goes.

The photo below is of the dock at the end of Scuba Junkies’ pier. All the dives leave from here.

Scuba Junkies is affiliated with PADI. Dale and I are both PADI-certified Advance Open Water Divers, but not having used tanks in over a decade, we decided to take a refresher course.

Our instructor (and diving buddy), a Bruneian named Doris, took us straight off the deck for drills, an area they call “Awas,” a word I was already familiar with, having seen it all over Borneo. It means “be careful” in Malaysian.

We did a total of three dives in Mabul. On the first, we saw 4 large green turtles lounging on the sandy bottom, and another giant green turtle hanging out on a sunken wreck like the lord of the manor. Our second dive was a wall dive to 60-feet; lots of tropical fish, a moray and a big squid. Our last dive was a wreck dive, followed by hanging out in open water in the midst of a huge school of barracuda.

The day before our departure, we took a walk to see the island. It was a very short walk because it’s a very small island, and there’s not much to see, other than the water-supply system: a bunch of collection barrels (below, top left) and a plastic water-pipe distribution system, running on top of the ground (right). The bottom left photo is of the local grocery store.

We took the morning boat back to Semporna on Friday, October 17.

It was much cooler on the water than it was back on the beach at Mabul.

Here’s a typical fishing boat. I think it’s also a shrimper, given all the lights.

The entire waterfront around Semporna is lined with stilt houses.

We spent our final night in Southeast Asia at the Wing Tat Grand Hotel in Semporna, apparently a favorite among the Chinese tourists to Borneo.

Which reminds me, we saw almost no other Americans our entire time in Malaysia, other than our boat-mates in Sukau, 4 retired teachers from Chicago, friends that have been traveling together for over 30 years. Delightful ladies.

Here’s Semporna from the top of our hotel. You can see the stilt houses off in the distance.

Our final meal was at the Dojo Kopi house. No alcoholic toast tonight. The specialty at Dojo is their Nanyang Kopi, a delicious coffee drink, similar to what we enjoyed in Vietnam. The hotel’s convenience store had Sabah Bird’s Nest Gummis. Pass.

Our hour-long drive the next day to the airport in Tawau was mostly through oil palm plantations, although there were also a few coconut palm plantations, as well as bananas any time we passed a settlement.

From Tawau we fly to Kuala Lumpur on the Malay Peninsula, then to Taipei, Taiwan, and on to Seattle. Just a couple hours layover in Kuala Lumpur and in Taipei, and about 20 hours in the air, but we’ll be back in Washington State the same day we left, thanks to flying back in time across the International Dateline.

It’s been a great trip, but we’re ready to be back home in the U.S.A.