Going diving to Sipidan I managed to get a direct flight into Tawau, where I stayed overnight in the small Chinese Soon Yee hotel that is friendly, cheap, and simple and came to my surprise with an ensuite bathroom. Yet, at first sight Tawau was disappointing, as there was a bit too much of unwanted attention in the forms of people laughing when they see you walking into a supermarket, or guys whistling and commenting when you walk down the street. Add to the list the amount of poverty that I have not seen in Malaysia before. There are many beggars and street kids, or children that look as if they were either orphans living in the street, or to a large part neglected children from super poor families. This is something you see in the many Filipino slums, but not normally in Malaysia. I was especially taken back when I watched three of such kids kicking and pushing a new hawker stall that was locked up for the night, and nobody made any effort to stop or reprimanded them. And what made it harder to get a good feeling about the place was the challenge to find a place that sells food that I can eat, aka meat free, in combination with beer. Normally all Chinese coffeeshops sell beer, so imagine my surprise when I walked past 5 Chinese coffeeshops and all of them had none! Finally I decided to sit down for dinner in the Kedai Kopi Ingot for a rather good claypot and and awesome avocado shake instead. On my return to Tawau after the diving trip I found a few more suitable food places for both breakfast and dinner, which made life in Tawau a lot more comfortable.

The next morning saw the minibus driver arriving punctually at 6:30 at my doorstep and off we went to Semporna, with only a 1.5h stop at the airport waiting for the three Japanese divers who were to share the Celebes Explorer liveaboard with me. Actually most of the day seemed to consist of waiting; first for the Japanese, then for the four Italians and three French who arrived only in the afternoon. Thus the four of us who had been on the boat since morning went for a late morning dive to the nearby Sibangkat Island, which was not exactly a fantastic dive, other than me finally seeing a crocodile fish, but in sad circumstances – we found it dying in a large piece of tangled finishing net that had been stuck on the corals and remained there. Our efforts to save the fish were futile, as it was much weakened and consequently died after its release. The afternoon saw us sailing to Mabul Island, where the boat stays at night. The dive there was most marked by strong current that send us drifting past the wall at rapid pace, too fast to see many small things, but I was lucky to spot two Banded Pipefish in a little cave.

Of all these events I have no images, and neither do I have any images of any of my dives, as I was recently told that against previous expectations there was never a housing built for my new digital camera, the Canon ixux 970, so I had to come to one of the best dive sites in the world without a camera. Yet, in a way, this seemed to be a blessing. I had the feeling that the fish know that I have no camera, because at numerous occasions individuals or even entire schools swam right into me, staying only a few centimetres away from me. In short I had some amazing wildlife encounters with all sizes of fish that are firmly set in my memory, which seems a lot more valuable than the pictures that I might have taken. Still there are many more pictures of the trip on my photoblog.

The second day on the Celebes brought us to Sipadan Island. One of the major advantages to dive from the Celebes is that it guarantees 4 Sipidan dives per week, and as I stay only for 4D4N I will get to dive in Sipidan two full days, which is brilliant. The first day of diving at Barracuda Point, White Tip Avenue, Hanging Garden, and the Drop Off was spectacular. The landscape is amazing, and the place is teeming with schools of Trevally, Round Batfish, and Humphead Parrotfish, as well as large fish such as tuna, Napoleon Wrasse, Yellow-eyed Snapper, and Whitetip Reefshark, not to forget the uncountable number of large Green Turtles, which I was fortunate enough to record mating from the upper deck of our boat. On the other end of the scale I was fascinated by the Purple Firegoby, who have to be one of my most favourite fish in the world.

When we dropped into the ocean Barracuda Point for our second day diving at Sipidan Island we virtually jumped into a arge school of thousands of Yellow Banded Barracuda. And as is this was not enough the sight was followed by a huge group of maybe 100 Humphead Parrotfish right after. The overall effect was quite astounding. The rest of the dive saw us counting about 15 Whitetip Reefsharks and numerous Green and Hawkbill Turtles. Three drives at Lobster Lair, Staghorn Crest, and West Ridge followed which was crowned by three sightings of Grey Reefsharks. The grand finale of the day was the dusk dive at Mabul Paradie 1, where we saw five Crocodile Flatheadfish, a free roaming Banded Murray, and the ever so elusive White Ribbon Moray. I also spend a lot of time watching Mandarin Fish as they are yet another of my top loved species. And this time I not only saw two adults mate, but also a 1cm long juvenile. And as if all these were not enough we spotted a tiny Papuan Cuttlefish and a Ornate Ghostpipefish just before surfacing at the onset of night.

The next day was to be my last day on the Celebes, and it saw us diving in Siamil Island. On arrival at the island the sea was teeming with tiny fishing boats from the fishing community on the neighbouring Danawan Island. Under the surface the reef had suffered equally from El Nino as from illegal dynamite fishing. Surprisingly enough there was still a lot to see. The sandy slope intercepted by some rocks, sponges and coral appears to be a fishy kindergarden; we saw juvenile Harekin and Spotted Sweetlips, Shaded Batfish, Flamboyant Moray, and Longhorn Cowfish. On the adult and non-fishy side of things there was no less than a few Orang-Utan Crabs, Peacock Mantis Shrimp, Giant Frogfish, Reef Octopus, Broadclub Cuttlefish, Leaf Scorpionfish, and – taking care of the next generation - a Jawfish with eggs in its mouth. All in all not bad for a badly damaged reef, that, if protected might slowly grow back to its original beauty. Returning for the night to Mabul we went for another dusk dive which brought us face to face with a gigantic and potentially deadly Esturine Stonefish as well as the tiniest baby Crocodile Flatheadfish, and a free swimming White-eyed Moray, and a large school of Yellow Tail Barracuda.

Thursday morning I had to pack and leave the Celebes Explorer. One of the smaller boats brought the two of us that were leaving to Semporna while the others went diving to Kapalai. I had about 3 hours to kill in Semporna before my trip back to Tawau and I found the small town rather friendly and pleasant to hang out in. As I could not fly after all the Wednesday dives I had booked my flight on to Kota Kinabalu on Friday. For some reason there were no direct flights back to Singapore available, so I had to fly first to KK and then on Sunday from there back to Singapore, and arrangement which allowed me to plan for some shopping and a good deal of avocado shakes :)

And KK was pleasant as usual; the town has not the charm of Kuching as it is lacking any form of old buildings, but it is great for just hanging out, sipping drinks in a coffeeshop, squeezing through the crafts market and the many night markets, or sitting at the food stalls at the harbour front watching the sun set behind the fisherman boats.I just had wished that Hakim could be here with me, because lounging around in coffeeshops and hawker stalls is just not quite the same alone. My guesthouse, the Borneo Adventure Centre, was the cheapest I could find with an ensuite bathroom. The room was great, but the place is a bit noisy with a main road behind the building and a mosque across the road. So after I had stocked up on all my essentials in Malaysia, it was time for me to return to good old Singapore.

Biking the Straights - well more like from the youngest of the Straights settlements aka Singapore, to the oldest one, also known as Malacca or Melaka - could be the name of my last trip to Malacca with Christiane. As Chinese New Year saw us both off work for 4 days we decided to grab the chance and execute our long talked about motorbike trip to Malacca.

Thus we booked ourselves into the Riverview Guesthouse right in the historic centre of town, packed our few things and went on the road. First landmark of the trip was the Tuas Checkpoint where I had to wait for Christiane, who was late, and as the friendly custom officer told me, waiting is not permitted, even though there was hardly anybody there on the first day of Chinese New Year at 8:30 in the morning. He was kind enough to let me wait behind the custom's clearing, and once Christiane arrived we headed across the bridge to the Malaysian side, where our next challenge was to pass the toll booth. It turned out that since I last sat in any vehicle in Malaysia they had "fully automated" the tollbooth, meaning that one cannot pay cash anymore, instead one has to buy a "touch-and-go" card. The confusing part is that each cubicle is still manned with a member of staff who can sell you the cards, which left us wondering why they cannot just take the money for the toll fare? Nevertheless a friendly Singaporean biker explained the details to us, where the Malaysian staff had failed and so we were on our way with our newly purchased card, which we did not need apart from this once, as we were leaving the motorway at exit 307 heading along the national road number 5 to Pontian Kechil and from there always along the coast and via Muar directly to Melacca.

The way lasted 500m and ended at the rest stop where we had a tea, and got ourselves mentally prepared for the road. Yet, against all my expectations the ride turned out to be rather civilised. The major problem seemed to be to find open coffeeshops on the first day of Chinese New Year. Despite the fact that the majority of Malaysians are non-Chinese, this rule seems not reflected in the demographic distribution of coffeeshops. Anyway, we finally managed to find a place that served us fried rice, which was good enough to strengthen us for the second leg of the journey.

The next major problem only hit us once we arrive at the outskirts of Malacca. For some odd reason the local Government does not seem to see the need for putting even one English sign, or even any indicator what so ever that directs the non-locals from the newly build route 5 to the historic town centre. Therefore we had to follow any sign that we thought would lead us to the right place, only to find out that Melaka Central as indicated on the directional sign was not only the name of the bus terminal which is right next to the historic town centre, but also the name of a new shopping mall in the outskirts, which is where we ended up at. The very helpful guy at the petrol station where we asked for directions then got the address wrong and even though he sent us generally in the right direction we ended up at the wrong side of the river and in the worst traffic jam known to mankind. It is amazing that nobody, especially the local administration has not thought about pedestrianising the core of the historic town centre, when it takes maximum 10min to walk from one end to the next. Despite the short distances from one end to the next people, that is to say tourists, end up DRIVING through the narrow one-way lanes to park right in front of a restaurant or shop. This is absolutely pathetic and spoils the atmosphere of the place completely. The traffic is so bad that the local Melakans never use their car unless the go out of town. Unfortunately we had to go through all of this in order to find our hostel, which we finally did after only about an hour of going stop and go through town!!!

Yet once we got there is was brilliant, the hostel is cosy, the beds huge, the owners super friendly and helpful, and we simply enjoyed our shower, north Indian meal and beer before falling super tired into bed. The next two days simply saw us walking through the old part of town, interlaced with some shopping at the nearby mall, and terminating with a late afternoon river cruise and a sunset view from St Paul's.

Our guesthouse was in Jalan Kampong Pentai, which is right at the river and runs parallel to the Tatong, Jonker and Heeren Street, which together with the Fort Famosa area on the other side of the river constitute the Malacca Unesco World Heritage site. Malacca and Penang got the World Heritage status together a couple of years ago, and even though the former has a lot more well preserved heritage buildings I personally prefer the more authentically Malaysian and less tourist overrun atmosphere of Penang (where Hakim and I travelled to again last December to meet Mario, Marie and Pascal).

The way back was even more easy, because most of the country still seemed to have been in holiday mood, thus there was neither weekend nor rush-hour traffic. Only the sky was threatening with rain so we kept on riding all the way to Pontian before we had the first drizzle. Just on time we found a great little coffeeshop that served vegetarian soup and wanton mee, over which we watched the downpour, before going on the last leg of the journey back to Tuas Checkpoint and good old Singapore, that seemed awfully busy in comparison with rural Malaysia. All in all it was a fun trip, which left me keen to go more often on longer trips, even when it means that at the end of the day your bum and your legs hurt a lot :P