Below Borneo: Diving in Kota Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu is most famous for nearby Mt Kinabalu, which towers 4,095m over Borneo. Having already done an expensive trek in Mulu, we decided to skip the pricey summit trek. So instead of exploring what lies above Kota Kinabalu, we spent three days exploring below it, learning to scuba dive in a PADI Open Water Diver course.

Our first day was in the classroom, learning the theory behind safe diving, followed by two practical days. First we had to practice a bunch of drills in shallow water, like flooding our masks and clearing them underwater, removing and retrieving our regulators and using each other’s backup regulator in a simulated out-of-air emergency. The scariest drill was having to take off our masks while deep underwater and swim around blind for a while.

After the shallow water drills, we swam out deeper for our first open water dive. It’s fun and challenging learning how to control your buoyancy underwater – by adjusting the amount of air in your lungs you can either float, hover weightless or sink to the bottom. As we became more confident underwater, we tried experimenting with weightlessness. Hovering vertical, head-down, with blackness above you and the light at your feet is a surreal, disorienting experience!  It also feels unnatural breathing underwater and seeing the surface so far above.

We got to see some cool things, including heaps of Nemos (Clownfish) in anemonies, a school of barracuda, some deadly poisonous stonefish, the aggressive-looking lionfish and a stingray. We even stopped in at a “cleaning station” and had a manicure from a team of mantis shrimps.

Although we got the hang of diving fairly well, we both had a few mishaps at times. At the end of each dive you perform a precautionary “safety stop”, waiting at 5m depth for 3 minutes to help avoid decompression sickness. After a minute of hovering at safety stop, Sally suddenly became buoyant and started floating rapidly to the surface. Whoops!

Our instructor Ryan was a nice, relaxed guy from Australia. One lunchtime he took us skin diving and lent us his dive computer so we could test how deep we could go. Craig got down to 6.6m on one dive – it’s a lot scarier than scuba, being that deep with empty lungs!

You might think that diving would be the most dangerous activity we did while in KK, but actually it was a day at the beach. We bought a return ferry ticket out to a nearby island to enjoy the sun for a day. The boat company turned out to be a bunch of incompetent cowboys. On the way out, the driver whacked the speedboat across the choppy ocean, slamming us against the hard seats every few seconds and refusing to slow down. Arriving to the beach with a big headache wasn’t the best start to the day!

But we’d have asked for that driver again if we’d known what would happen on the return trip. This time, the driver went zooming into the jetty at speed and, with the bow raised, was unable to see an oncoming boat. He pulled off the throttle at the last second, but it was too late – we hit the side of other boat with a loud bang. Luckily no-one was hurt and the boat hull was damaged but intact.

There’s an active Ultimate Frisbee club in Kota Kinabalu, so we joined them for an evening game on the beach. Running on the beach in the hot, humid weather was a hard workout, but it was cool playing Ultimate again. One of the players kindly showed us around the city the next day. We saw the city mosque, some landmark buildings, a public park with dancing fountains, a seafood market and the state university.

Best food spot of the week? An Indian restaurant serving thali on banana leaves. Yum! You can get roti with a side curry for 1.6 ringgit (NZ$0.60) here, which makes for an irresistible breakfast (or lunch… or dinner…)

Alcohol, however, is subject to high sin taxes and is really expensive. Solution: at 1% alcohol, pre-packaged shandy avoids the tax. Mmm, Jolly Shandy.

Cheers from KK! What once seemed like forever away has arrived - we are off to our final destination: Singapore.

Written by Craig Drayton and Sally Robertson