SCUBA DIVER, BIRDER, OR BOTH?
Borneo’s Sabah is sure to please
Tropical birding and scuba diving both entail observation of colourful animals in the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems: the tropical rainforest on land, the coral reef in the sea. The means of observation, however, could not be more different.
The former requires hiking for hours in sauna-like heat for brief glimpses of rare species. The latter, on the other hand, stresses weightlessness — neutral buoyancy — in warm, comfortable water, with schools of fish swimming all around you. There are required breaks to avoid decompression sickness, and the less effort (and therefore oxygen) you use, the better recreational diver you’re said to be.
A few tropical hot spots in the world provide this kind of marine and terrestrial combination. Since my birder girlfriend Jessie and I live in Beijing, Southeast Asia was the obvious option. The Indonesian archipelago, in particular, is a paradise for such travel, and we eventually settled on Sabah, a province in the Malaysian part of Borneo known for its national parks both on land and in the water.
The Danum Valley, one of Borneo’s most famous lowland rainforests, lies just a five- to six-hour drive from Semporna, a fishing town and diving mecca in the Coral Triangle that features many coral reefs, most notably the one at Sipadan Island. On the west coast of Sabah lies another pair of marine and terrestrial animal havens: Kota Kinabalu and Kinabalu Park, home to one of Southeast Asia’s highest peaks and a wide variety of endemic animal species. The Kinabatangan River winds in between the two coasts, which planes can traverse in an hour. Given a few weeks, it’s possible to visit each site and obtain basic dive certification with some of the most affordable prices in the world. Travellers must decide only which world to visit first — the jungle or the ocean.
Jessie and I chose the ocean, enrolling in a standard three-day course with Scuba Junkie, one of the larger outfits in Borneo. Our instructor, Rachel, was patient and enthusiastic, and was unexpectedly joined by juvenile yellow trevally fish, each about the length of a lemon, on a few training dives.
The Coral Triangle, an area of tropical seas surrounding Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, is one of the most biodiverse marine areas on the planet. With more than 600 species of coral and 2,000 species of reef fish alone, diving felt like floating through a living jewelry shop.
The most taxing part of the experience came during coffee and tea breaks, when I struggled to identify all that we had seen.
Jessie took to the exercise quickly, transforming her birdwatcher’s eye to a diver’s one. In just two days of underwater training and two days of full diving, our list continued to grow, from sea turtles to frogfish and all sizes in between.
And that was without ever making it to the permit-limited Sipadan, a 610-metre coral tower in open sea where hammerhead sharks and barracudas school and where whale sharks are not an uncommon sight. At some point, I gave up trying to identify the fish and just floated with the current.
We returned to land by flying to Kota Kinabalu, gazing at the land below, overwhelmed by palm-oil plantations. Borneo is famous for its rainforests and coral reefs, but its national parks are more akin to islands floating in a sea of monoculture that dominates the landscape and much of the Malaysian economy: an image of the oil palm graces the Malaysian 50-ringgit bill.
Driving from Kota Kinabalu to Kinabalu Park took less than two hours, and we arrived in mist to the only cold weather we experienced in Borneo. The skies eventually cleared, revealing the highelevation rock faces of Mount Kinabalu, shooting up from the jungle. The next few days were spent catching glimpses of birds endemic to the mountains as well as a spectacular blood-red sunset. Of Borneo’s 52 endemic bird spe- cies, 37 are found only in the island’s mountain areas.
We returned to the lowlands after a few days, flying to Sandakan and then journeying on to the Kinabatangan River, home to monkeys, elephants and crocodiles. There had been reports of a herd of rare Bornean pygmy elephants, of which there are only about 200 left in the area. On our first day, we got lucky: a group of five emerged from the forest, bathing and roughhousing in the water. The next day, 27 elephants emerged, chomping down on elephant grass at the water’s edge. As we sped down the river, leaf monkeys, hornbills, serpent eagles and troops of proboscis monkeys lounged in trees by the river, their long noses visible from the boat.
On our way into Danum Valley, our final stop, we shared a van with Spaniards Carla and Alex. Like me, Carla was a fairweather birder accompanying an avian fanatic. When heat and humidity outweighed our dedication for spotting wildlife, Carla and I retreated to reading on the lodge deck.
Alex and Jessie spotted a wide range of birds; Carla and I tagged along intermittently. Dinner on the field-station patio was an exercise in comparing notes with guests.
Birdwatchers and animal seekers tend to have a few dream species; for Alex, it was orangutans and Borneo’s endemic pittas — small, colourful birds that scavenge for insects and leeches on the forest floor. Our persistence paid off. At the end of a long day, we glimpsed an orangutan clambering up a tree in the distance, scratching its belly. When it reached the top of the canopy, a loud cacophony of crashing limbs commenced as it constructed a nest for the night. Eventually, it lay down and scratched its arms. Alex danced a jig of happiness.