When booking sipadan Kapalai Dive Resort, you have to decide whether to book a diving package or snorkeler package. Since we didn’t have a diving license yet, we chose the snorkeler package.
Table of contents
Kapalai and Sidapan’s diving experience
Facilities at Sipadan Kapalai Dive Resort include a PADI diving centre, which offers diving trips and courses, snorkelling equipment and kayak rental. The dive center offers three trips a day with speedboats to the best spots around Kapalai, Mabul & Sipadan. But beware: a dive in Sipadan cannot be guaranteed! The Malaysian government has limited the daily number of divers in Sipadan to 120 and introduced a conservation fee. Licences are shared between all resorts in the area and only 2 days in advance will the resorts know how many permits they will receive for their guests. All dives are accompanied by local guides, all of which have a very good knowledge of the dive sites. But also on the beautiful house reef you can dive wonderfully.
Diving in Borneo
Even if you saw a lot while snorkeling (turtles, firefish, colorful reef fish, etc.), it was a bit of a pity that we didn’t have a diving license yet, because Sipadan is considered one of the best diving areas in the world. The area was declared a nature reserve in 2004 and has been protected ever since. Since we also wanted to get a little “diving feeling”, we decided to take a taster diving course at the resort 🙂
After some explanations and exercises we went together with a diving instructor at a depth of 12 meters and saw two large turtles, moray eels and a big squid.
This fascinated us so much that we quickly decided to make a diving license on our next holiday 🙂
The video of our first Scuba Dive
Here is a short video of our very first dive:
Snorkeling at Kapalai Dive Resort
Of course, we are also shaded in the clear water every day. What you can always do here is swim with turtles. There are so many turtles around Kapalai that you can’t get out of the way of them 🙂