Overnight busses suck. (Jan.9/09 - Semporna, Borneo, Malaysia)

It didn't take long to realize that it was going to be a long and restless night. The road to Semporna crossed some pretty mountainous terrain, which made for a curvy roller coaster-like road that the bus driver bombed along in the dark. Sure, the seats were comfy and reclined enough, but the friggin' air conditioning was blasting so hard and so cold that we may as well have been riding in a deep freeze! Our packs were inaccessible, so we were left to shiver for the entire eight hour bus ride. I even resorted to wrapping myself up as best I could with the curtains hanging from the window! We did manage to fall asleep around midnight, and at 3:30am the bus came to a stop and the lights were flipped on. They told us it was a ten hour trip, so we expected to arrive in town at about 5:30am, when at least we could find a cafe to curl up in and daylight would be breaking soon. But no, it was the middle of the night and a random guy is offering to take us to town to get a room at the hostel above the dive shop we had picked from the guidebook. He knocked so hard on the door that the whole street probably woke up, but someone did come to the door and show us to a room. Phew. I thought we'd be curling up on the sidewalk with the stray dogs for a minute there! Daylight woke us up at 9am, and we set out to find some breakfast and then someone to take us diving.

Unlike everywhere else we've been in Borneo, where foreign travellers are few and far between, Semporna is crawling with them - and they're all divers! I guess when a place becomes known amongst the dive community as one of the world's best dive sites, it will always be busy. When we inquired about diving out at Sipadan tomorrow, the lady behind the Scuba Junkies desk pretty much laughed at us. She said there are eight divers on the waiting list, and the first available day is two weeks from now. So much for that! Luckily, there are tons of other islands surrounding Sipadan, so we will have to work with that. While sitting at breakfast in a little Chinese coffee shop, we saw a poster on the wall advertising a company called Singamata that has a lodge built on stilts over the water on a small reef a few miles offshoer, where you can stay and snorkel and dive for two days for the same price as one day of boat diving with someone else. We tracked down their office and discovered that a group of eight would be there tomorrow, and they had requested to dive Mabul Island (Sipadan's little sister, with essentially as fabulous a reputation) tomorrow instead of the default nearby islands. Score! So we signed up and even talked them into giving us gear rentals for free. So for two days and two nights, we'll call a 'floating' lodge home and dive so much that we'll be waterlogged on the bus ride back to KK on the 12th.

We wandered around town for the rest of the morning, checking out the fish and veggie markets spread out along the waterfront. We enjoyed some fresh grilled prawns for dinner and called it a night for our early boat pickup in the morning.