Picture above courtesy of Tony Li.
Arriving in Kuala Lumpur for our Transit
We were advised to go to the Transfer Desk to find out about our connections. But I had retrieved our booking online and knew that we were on the 0650 to Tawau (a day later than booked). The queue at the Transfer Desk was long and guessing that we had to transfer our bags to domestic ourselves today, we opted to head to immigration and baggage claim.
We ran into one of the cabin crew in the lift. He was on the way for a big debrief. Some of the crew are suffering from trauma and stress. I wasn’t feeling too bad but then I wasn’t seated overwing looking at the engine sparking.
At the check-in level, the counters should already have been open for the 0550 flight to Sibu (should open at 0250). But it wasn’t. Maybe the staff were airside helping at the International Transfer desk? That’s giving them the benefit of the doubt. They eventually opened up around 0340.
After what seemed like a lot of typing, we were issued boarding passes seated in the exit row. We had been given row 12 (non-recline) but were able to shift to row 14.
Airside, Uncle Lim’s cafe wasn’t open yet so we went for a long walk before returning to wait outside. We had a breakfast of kway teow soup, otak, karipap and tea. Time went quickly and it was soon time to board our flight to Tawau.
Finally in Tawau and Semporna
Once airborne we shifted to the other side of the aisle to enjoy three seats between us. Our meals came. While delicious, they weren’t well heated. As it was the first flight of the day I wasn’t too worried as it should have been safe. Then came the surprise … we had two more meals! It appeared the check-in agent had been busily typing meal codes into our booking, mistakenly taking the codes from our previous flight (BNE-KUL)!
At Tawau airport, the taxi to Semporna was MYR95, up from MYR90 four years ago. We managed to find a ride with a tour transport for MYR50 for both of us. The transport was probably dedicated to a group and the driver takes extra people as his pocket money. Win-win!
Our room at the Holiday Inn Dive Lodge was next to reception and windowless. We were a little disappointed but really, it made little difference considering it would only be today that we would be spending time in it.
We rested, went to fit our dive gear at the dive shop and then had dinner with an Aucklander by the name of Stephen who was quite a traveller. There’s now a stretch of waterfront Chinese-style restaurants specialising in live seafood. We picked one and ordered fresh fish and clams. I couldn’t work out what was going on but suspect they were trying to upsell us. They insisted Stephen had ordered the red fish when he had ordered the grey one. The clams turned out to be scallops. When the bill came, one item was left off and we didn’t bother to correct it.
Now, about the weather. The weather didn’t appear to be as oppressive as before. It was very un-Malaysian. It was warm but not too humid. There was a breeze at times. I was very surprised to find it pleasant!? Talk about global warming!
Impressions of Semporna third time around
It’s no longer the sleepy town that had the good concentration and diversity of food within a small area. It’s no longer the international diving mecca. Instead, there has been a proliferation of live seafood in the eating scene and the divers are nearly exclusively mainland Chinese.
We came here in May 2009 and Jan 2013 to use the town as a dive base; it had changed little in those four years. But from Jan 2013 to today, the change has been phenomenal. There are now multi-storey hotels (whereas it it was largely 2-storey converted shoplots). The town has tidied up a little but it is strangely less attractive to me.
But I’m sure there’s a cost to all this. Maybe the large number of divers will one day ruin the underwater environment, but fortunately the prize sites at Sipadan are limited by strict government quotas. Also, mainland Chinese love eating fresh seafood … all the good stuff like big prawns and lobsters. The international divers that used to be here would never buy sun-dried seahorses but now I see people selling them … and I’m sure the new visitors would be keen to buy them.
Judging from how some local businesses treat the new tourists, it appears they don’t necessarily like them. But their pockets love them. Mainland Chinese are bigger spenders than most Western backpackers (whom I hear have largely shifted to Mabul which is another bonus for locals who don’t like seeing excessive alcohol consumption).
Not only are the Chinese bigger spenders, they may also be a more steady income stream compared to Western backpackers who may heed warnings of piracy and kidnappings applicable to the region.
Diving
We had three days of diving based in Semporna, which you can read about here:
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- The river mouth now has a multi-storey hotel.
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- “Waterfront” live seafood restaurants.
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- Semporna “waterfront”
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- View of the “waterfront” from the water.
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- View of the “waterfront” from the water.
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- Our dive inn with its guard dogs.
