Borneo 2015 – day 18

Thursday 16th July

Today is my paternal grandmother’s 91st birthday, so I gave her a call to wish her a happy birthday and apologise for the fact that I have not, in two and a half weeks of searching, been able to find her a birthday card.
I reminded her that we are currently in Borneo (she has the beginning stages of dementia), and she was happy enough that I had bothered to call her from here and not to worry about a card. This would be the first year since I was about 7 that I have not sent her a card. Perhaps I’ll send her one when I get home just to keep the record in tact, even though it will be late.
I rang her from Jesselton Point Jetty, which was where we were assembling for our day’s activities. We have booked a day with Diverse-Borneo, a watersport company who specialise in dive tours, snorkelling and the like. We are doing some snorkelling, and an island-to-island zipline. Apparently, this zipline at 250 metres (which runs between Pulau Gaya and Pulau Sapi, just a 15 min boat ride from the jetty in Kinabalu) used to be the longest island-to-island zipline in the world. Recently though, a new one has been constructed in the Philippines which is apparently longer.
Our boat ride included the 3 of us, a young Japanese couple who I don’t think had ever seen water before (later, they were snorkelling with lifejackets on!), and a handful of scuba divers who were on their last day of their Open Water Certificate training…
Our first snorkelling spot was about 50 metres off Pulau Sapi, the smaller of the two islands. The reef here was lovely, with a great diversity of coral, and more fish species than we had seen even on our boat trip from Kudat (totally not what we were expecting). Here, we saw plenty of clown fish (Nemo) which it turns out, are quite territorial. When you swim toward their anemone, the larger of them will come out and get right in your facemask with quite an aggressive demeanour. Which is quite humorous, because I could wrap even the biggest of them in the palm of my hand!
As a former scuba diver, I am quite used to duck-diving when snorkelling rather than just paddling around on the surface. However, my cold, even though it is now in its dying stages, was still giving me some grief with equalizing my ear pressure beyond about 8 feet below. I managed though. Although, I did find my time limit underwater severely curtailed, again probably due to the cold. I still managed to get down to about 20-25 feet though.
After half an hour of snorkelling, we climbed back in the boat and headed over to the jetty at Pulau Gaya, a mere 60 seconds away. Onshore, we were directed to the ziplining staff who fitted us with our harnesses. We were then sent up a staircase into the jungle and told to follow it until we reached the top. We felt like Frodo and Sam ascending the Cirith Ungol stairs.
At the top, we came upon the steel platform which is the launchpad for your ziplining adventure across the channel.
I was unable to take my still camera on this expedition, but the video camera was acceptable (and to be honest, the better choice anyway). Even though there are two parallel lines, I elected to cross first (solo), which would allow me to video my run, and then be in position to film Cath and Max coming across after me.
Of course, we’re now on the smaller island, and all of our belongings are still on Pulau Gaya. All of this has been well planned. Our tour guide for the day, Jason, waits with our gear, while we are led down to the Pulau Sapi jetty to catch another boat back across the channel.
Once back on Gaya, it was time for lunch.
After lunch, we had our second bout of snorkelling for the day, just off the beach. With these islands are mere 250 metres apart, you would expect the coral reefs to be pretty much identical. Maybe it’s the prevailing currents that run through the channel, I don’t know, but the reef here IS different to what we swam on this morning.
Half an hour of this, and it was time to hop back in the boat and cruise around to the south side of Pulau Sapi for our third and final snorkelling location for the day. This provided some more reef diversity, including a dropoff which exceeded my lung capacity. Still, it was great fun.
During our first snorkelling trip off the beach of Sapi, Jason snapped some shots of us with his little underwater Olympus camera. I’m (at the time of writing) trying to get hold of him via Facebook to see if we can get copies of those images. If he comes through, I’ll include some of those images with this post.
We got back to the jetty in Kinabalu around 17:00 and caught a cab back to our resort.
We again visited the club lounge for canapes and drinks, and photographed what had to be the standout sunset of our time in Kinabalu.
Cath then retired to our room, while Max and I headed over to the adjoining Country Club for a couple of games of ten pin bowling. It’s quite a modern bowling alley, and we had the entire complex to ourselves. In fact, I think the staff were quite stunned when we walked in. I don’t think they ever get very busy, somehow. We played 2 games, and a group of 4 Asian gentlemen walked in when we were on our last frame. Busy night, apparently!
Well, this really does feel like the end of our holiday now.
Tomorrow is Friday, and we fly out at 18:55. Sad faces all around. The last 3 weeks have flown by way too fast.