Underwater images from Layang Layang and Sipadan, Malaysia, Jun 2005


Living, Food and Diving:
Probably our best dive trip to date, except we did not see any schools of hammerhead sharks in Layang Layang - only saw a solitary one swimming deep in 50m on one dive. But almost everything else was there: schools of bumphead parrotfish, barracuda, jacks, grey-, white-tip and leopard sharks, turtles, giant puffers, loads of small critters, and mostly healthy reefs.

The trip itinerary was: HK- Kota Kinabalu (overnight) - Layang Layang Resort (5 days, 16 dives) - KK - Mabul SMART Mabul Water Bungalows (3 days, 10 dives) - KK - HK for a total of 11 days. In both places, room, food and diving is all at/with the resort. The rooms in LL are comfortable; British style 3-square-pins electrical outlets are handy for charging batteries; satellite TV has BBC so you can see what pain the rest of the world is suffering. The food is pretty good, considering everything is flown in from KK (LL is 1200m by 200m, one third is occupied by the air-strip, a third by the resort, and a third by the Malaysian navy). The twin-prop 20seater Skyvan from KK lands around 8:30am, and first dive is 11am. All dive sites are 10-15min by boat, so all surface intervals are at the resort -- in other words, five meals alternate four dives each day. We were approx 8-10 per boat with one DM; dive groups of 8-10, with 4-5 camera result in overcrowding whenever someone spots something interesting. Other than that, diving was fantastic; we did [Wreck point, The Point, House reef], [The Point, Crack reef, Shark's cave II], [The Point, Shark's cave, D-wall, House reef], [The Point, Mid reef, Runway, House reef], [The Valley, House reef]. Most dives are wall dives, with convenient large hard-coral reefs at 5-10m towards the end. We only saw one 3m hammerhead down at around 50m (we were at 38m). Our DM was Jasper, except one day when John and Eugene Fu (who runs the resort) subbed for him.

Over in Mabul, SMART Water Bungalows are fantastic -- great rooms, excellent service, fantastic food (and lots of it). Eating is buffet style, except they also cook up some special stuff individually at dinnertime (e.g. lobster, tiger-prawns etc). The routine is: wake up, breakfast, speedboat (20min) to Sipadan, two dives, back to Mabul for lunch, one or two dives in Mabul, big dinner. For a few dollars more, they'll speedboat you to Sipadan for two more dives there. We did this once. That morning we had probably the best dive of lives at Barracuda point (turtles, a 2m leopard shark, several white-tips and a grey reef shark, and a large school of barracuda doing circles). The same site, in the afternoon, was a pretty average dive. Overall, Sipadan probably had more sea-life than we've seen any other place, and more variety too; small stuff, big stuff, and way, way too many turtles. The DM for all dives was Lisa; we were 3-6 divers per DM. The dives were at [Mid reef, Coral garden, Lobster wall, Paradise II (night)], [Barracuda point, Hanging gardens, South Point, Barracuda Point], [SMART House reef, Paradise II]. The house reef dive at SMART was great, with a large school of Jacks, Frogfish, a gigantic Grouper, Stonefish, Nudibranches, school of yellow line Barracuda, Pipefish, juvenile Sweetlips...

The photos below were all taken by my Olympus C5050Z in an Olympus PT-015 housing, with a single Inon Z220s strobe. My photo-skills are deteriorating -- I'm considering fixing this by (a) more dive trips (more practice), and (b) switching to an SLR. The photos are processed mostly on Photoshop Elements.


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If you'd like to get the original of any of these, send me email. This thumbnail-page was created by IrfanView, followed by much editing.