Mabul & Kapalai

A week here runs on two clocks. On permit days the boat leaves early for the crossing to Sipadan, dives its walls and is back by early afternoon; on the other days nothing is more than a few minutes from the resort jetties, so the boat drops a group and waits. Resorts were cleared off Sipadan itself in the mid-2000s, which is why the beds are over here instead, and most places let guests into the house reef between scheduled dives, so four or five dives a day takes no real effort.

The two islands are not the same dive. Mabul is real land with a village on it, and its fringing slope drops into darker, siltier sand where jetty pilings, artificial reef blocks and assorted dumped structures give small animals somewhere to hide. Kapalai has no island at all: the resort stands on stilts over a submerged sandbank, and the diving there is shallower and generally clearer, a patchwork of coral bommies, seagrass and open sand where a subject is easy to spot and easy to lose again.

Dives are slow by design. A guide works one stretch of slope at walking pace with a pointer, and the dive is judged on what a single pair of eyes turned up over an area the size of a tennis court. Visibility is the trade-off: 5 to 20 metres covers most days, and a clear morning on the sand can go milky by the afternoon once fins have worked over it. Divers used to covering ground find the pace strange for a day or two before it starts to make sense.

It suits photographers and anyone content to spend a week looking at things smaller than a hand. Little of it goes past about 20 metres and there is next to no current, so bottom times run long and buoyancy over silt matters more than the card in your wallet. Book early, though: Sabah Parks caps Sipadan permits per day and allocates them to licensed operators, so how many Sipadan days a stay includes is fixed by the resort when you book, not decided on arrival.