Previously on “Two Up and Overloaded” -
Marisa: I hope you can see in this video, but the water is so turquoise.
We are in one of the most beautiful parts of the world: the islands off of Semporna, East Malaysia on Borneo. People flock here from all across the globe just to see the incredible colors of this pristine, untouched hidden gem.
Oh my goodness! Look at this!
But after seeing the views from Bohey Dulang Island, we get back on the boat and prepare ourselves to see other sites where we are reminded that this place is gorgeous, but that beauty comes at a risk. This is, by some accounts, the most dangerous area of Malaysia to visit due to pirate raids and kidnappings of tourists. Even the UK and Canada have warnings advising against all non-essential travel here. Yet, at the same time, thousands of tourists descend upon Semporna every year because of its spectacular ocean scenery.
So we wanted to uncover the truth behind these stories and to see if it really is all that dangerous to come here despite what you may have heard. And in this video, we'll tell you everything you need to know and show you what it's really like out here.
Intro: Hey everyone! Nice to have you here. We are Tim, and Marisa Notier. I ride in the front. And I’m in the rear. We travel the world and we pack too much gear. Oh, all the places we’ll go! Through rain and through sleet and through mud and through snow. Oh, all the things we’ll see! We’ve been to a country or two. Or three! Oh, all the fun we’ve had! To have you along, would make us real glad. So give us a like, and hit subscribe to join us along our epic ride.
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Tim: So after our amazing little hike up and down the mountain, we got back on the boat where there was going to be lunch.
Marisa: Yes, lunchtime.
All right, we're back on the boat. We're going to have some lunch, which is provided as part of
the tour. I have no idea what it's going to be. And then I think we're going to go someplace to go snorkeling. Yay!
Tim: We got a little pre-packaged little plastic Tupperware. Yeah. It had I think chicken and rice, and an egg. A half an egg not a whole egg.
Marisa: Oh yes.
Tim: It was all right. It was much better than I expected and nothing that I would ever buy.
Marisa: It's a lot more substantial than I thought. I literally thought it was going to be two pieces of white bread with some maybe peanut butter or mung bean paste in between. This was a Chinese-focused tour. And so this was a very Asian meal.
Tim: We ate and then we immediately broke the rule that everybody's mother used to tell them: no swimming after you just eat. We did not wait 30 minutes. We went like 5 minutes. 5 minutes away, not even. And they were like, "All right, we are going to snorkel now.” Bam, yes we are.
Marisa: All right, we're pulling out now and heading to a snorkeling location.
Tim: And the majority of everybody, well, everybody put on their life vest, and then jumped into the water. And I was like…
Marisa: "Life vests?”
Tim: Like, how do you swim in a life vest? I want to go down underwater, you can't do that in a life jacket.
Marisa: To each their own.
Tim: To each their own, but I asked them if I could jump in without the life jacket, and he's like, "Can you swim?" And I was like, "Well... Yes I can." And so I jumped in to the shock and amazement of everybody else on the boat. They're like, "Oh no! He went without his life jacket."
This was just on a whole different level.
Marisa: Wow!
[Music]
The name of the islands of this region is the Semporna Island Park, and “Semporna” translates to "perfect" in Malay. And it is absolutely amazing, being situated beside an archipelago with some of the best diving and snorkeling spots on the planet. The Celebes Sea is world-renowned for hosting an incredibly wide variety of fish and aquatic creatures.
Out of the world's 793 species of corals, 580 of them can be found here in the Celebes Sea. It also lies within what is known as the Coral Triangle, and it has unusually warm waters due to some very unique characteristics such as active volcanic islands, deep-sea trenches, and a rim that prevents deep, cold ocean currents from circulating. This has created the perfect environment for life to thrive in its warm, clear waters.
Tim: The light coming through and reflecting off the coral and the waves, just... Just floating around, just absolutely, absolutely incredibly beautiful.
Marisa: All the different colors of the different corals, and there's pink ones and purple ones and blue starfish, and then of course all the fish are so colorful too. And then you have the light playing off of the water. The sun was coming out in full force now and it was making all those little diamond shapes that were rippling over everything. It was gorgeous.
And then we found Badrin, who was one of the tour guides, and he clearly was one with the ocean.
Tim: Yeah, he was Aquaman, for sure.
Marisa: Yes! He had on the big flippers. He could just dive, and he would take our GoPro down and then blow these bubble rings up at us. It was amazing!
Tim: And then he thought I could swim, right? And I told everybody I can swim, and I can swim. But then he was like, "Oh, so you can like... You can do everything?" So he's blowing these bubbles, and he's like, “I'm going to go down, and then I'm going to blow a bubble, I'm going to blow a bubble, and then you swim in between the bubble.” It'd be, like… In theory, it sounds awesome. Except for I'm just, we've discussed… And disgust is a good word.
Marisa: No.
Tim: We’ve discussed in other episodes, I got…
Marisa: It's hard to swim down.
Tim: Because I'm buoyant. Because of things.
So yeah, he'd blow all these bubbles, and I'd get like 5 feet under water and be like, “Emergency reserve oxygen!” My brain's like, “Get back up! Submerge, submerge, submerge!”
Marisa: No, not submerge.
Tim: Merge? That's... Merge?
Reemerge! Reemerge... What do they call it in submarines? There's dive…
Marisa: I don't know.
Tim: Un-dive, un-dive, un-dive, un-dive!
But yeah, we could see that he was very happy, and he was a very exciting little Nemo swimming creature, but he was so disappointed in us. We could see it in his eyes. He's like, "No. Swim through the bubbles," I'm like, "I know! But the bubbles are like 10 feet down (3 meters)!" I got like 3 feet (1 meter) maximum. He must have done it 20 times, and every time he was like, "So close. But through the bubbles…" I'm like, "Stop telling me to go through the bubbles, I know what the point is."
Marisa: Me too though. I couldn't do it either. I mean, I just can't hold my breath, I can't get down deep. We didn't have flippers on either, so...
Tim: Yeah, I'm going to blame it on the flippers.
Marisa: Yeah.
Tim: But he would dive down 10 to 15 seconds before we even submerged.
Marisa: He was amazing. I think he had gills because he never needed to take a breath. It was amazing.
Tim: But we were having a really, really good time. We were having a playful time with our new friend. We had a billion other new friends swimming alongside us too. Uh, the fish.
It was turning out to be a really good day.
Marisa: That was the best snorkeling of my life. That was so amazing.
Tim: That was really cool.
Marisa: Then we got on the boat and we headed off to another island that's
part of this marine park called Sibuan.
We're racing! And we're winning!
[Sibuan - Malaysia]
Look at this water, oh my gosh!
Once we got to Sibuan Island, they were like, "All right, go explore and meet back here at a certain time." And we were like, "Yes, let's go!"
Oh my gosh, the color. It's so amazing! The sand feels so soft. Oh...
And this island was gorgeous! The sand, it was like that perfect sand of your dreams. And then of course the water, being crystal, crystal clear.
[Music]
Tim: And we were swimming, but just to the left, there's this abyss of a drop-off from it's sandy, sandy, sandy to nothing.
Marisa: Yes, it just went straight down. There wasn't any coral or anything, just the sand went into the ocean. And it was amazing because you'd think there'd be nothing out there. But there was this school of huge fish.
[Music]
And I have to say, for me personally, this was one of the most magical wildlife encounters I've ever had. They were just going through the water in this graceful formation. And you could see hundreds of them in that blue, blue water. And it was like it was just me and the
fish. Well, us and the fish.
Tim: Well, no, I was off doing my own thing, and she would come up in her mask like, “Tim! Tim! Fish!”
Marisa: Tim!
Tim: Yeah, so I would swim by her and go under, and I saw these massive fish too. I mean, they were about 2 feet across (60 centimeters).
Marisa: Yeah! Huge!
Tim: And there were as many of them as I could not count, that's how many.
Marisa: There was one fish in particular that had kind of broken away from the school, and he was right up on shore where we were. And he was really curious about us, just as we were curious about him. You can see that one eye on one side of his head just looking at us. He was swimming by, and we're just swimming, looking at him. And he stayed there for a long time before he regrouped with his friends.
Tim: Classmates.
Marisa: His classmates, yes.
Tim: Because they're in a school.
Marisa: Woo!
As we walked around the island of Sibuan, we noticed something peculiar. We were not allowed to film it, but this island has a small military base on it, like all the islands around here. That's because of pirates. Yes, pirates. And this has been an area of pirate activity since its founding. Even in the 1800s, Sir James Brooke, the British Raj of Sarawak, and other colonial powers such as the Dutch and Spanish were combating pirates here. And unfortunately, the pirate activity in this area has also led to a history of kidnappings, especially by a southern Philippines militant group called Abu Sayyaf.
One of the worst incidents was in 2000 when 21 international tourists and resort workers were kidnapped for ransom on the nearby island of Sipadan. Since then, there have been other kidnappings by the group. And although almost every hostage has been released, this has left Semporna and Eastern Sabah with a reputation for being dangerous. That is why the Malaysian government has created military outposts on the islands such as Sibuan to protect the tourists that visit. Also, all boat traffic is required to stop after sundown here.
Tim: So as we were walking around, there wasn't just a bunch of guys with AK-47s walking around, but there was a big watchtower. If you can imagine the one from MASH or... like a lifeguard's tower from Baywatch. But the difference from Baywatch and this guy is they had a huge gun. It wasn't an uncomfortable overwhelming feeling.
Marisa: No.
Tim: But it was… if something were to go down, at least there's some guys that might know what to do to thwart off people with wooden legs and parrots.
So we were walking to the sand bar, and it was absolutely stunning. We found a little coconut.
Marisa: Yeah.
Tim: With a little coconut tree growing out of it.
Marisa: It was about to grow into a big tree.
Tim: Yeah. It looked like a tiny little planet with one little tree on it.
Marisa: This is nature at its finest.
Tim: We will live another day. Look at that. Bam!
The coral was right there, and there's little fish that had the suburbs I would say. They were like in the suburb communities of the coral, not in the downtown area, which is the ocean. And they were all just hanging out there. And you didn't have to dive deep and hold your breath, you just had to put your head underwater like 6 inches and you're in this little aquarium.
Marisa: It was like a foot of water and you can just walk out there and sit down, put your goggles on, you don't even need the snorkel part because you're just looking at... Well, I guess you do need the snorkel part.
Tim: You need the snorkel part, it's very important.
Marisa: Well, you sit down and then you lean over and you just put your head into the water and there is the whole aquarium. I mean, you are in the aquarium. It's amazing. And the fish don't seem to care, they're just hanging out, dipping in and out of the coral. The coral is beautiful.
Tim: So many fish that I had no idea that there are so many species of fish. Yes! So many different colors. I don't know how they find their own mates to make more of their same kind.
Marisa: So it was time to get back on the boat and guess what? We had one more snorkel place to go to that day.
Tim: We get on the boat, I think we're done, and they go to one more place. And they're like, "Okay, jump in again, fools." And we're like, "Whoa!" Like, "Yes, of course!" And each one was so different in its own way.
Marisa: This was beautiful. The water, I feel like it was even clearer than in all the other places. It was like a looking glass. It was just that blue of the ocean, and there were schools of fish everywhere. And the corals would grow into these giant mounds where fish were just darting in and out. Stunning!
[Music]
So there is some excellent news about the safety concerns of this region. Both the Malaysian and Philippine governments have stepped up security in the area. And regional intelligence sources say the Abu Sayyaf group is just a pale shadow of what it used to be. Most group members are now in jail, and there have not been any kidnappings since 2020. Still, travel advisories for tourists persist.
So the short answer is there is always a danger no matter where you travel to, and Semporna is no different. And everyone has a different level of risk that they are willing to take. But for us, that risk felt low enough that Semporna was definitely worth traveling to because of all the incredible things it had to offer.
Tim: I mean, look at this magic, magic.
Marisa: Magic, magic, magic, magic!
So even though Semporna may not be completely perfect, it's pretty darn close.
Next time, we get back on the motorcycle.
[Tim makes revving sounds]
Marisa: And we make one more incredible stop on the Celebes Sea before we say goodbye to it entirely. And then we start heading inland for the jungle where we hope to see elephants. But that will all be in the next episode.
So I hope you liked this video. If you did, please give us a big thumbs up and hit the subscribe button below, and we'll be seeing you next time.
Tim: Stay safe, everybody.
Marisa: And if you're enjoying our videos and you want to help support us, you can go to our Patreon link in the description below, and for as little as a dollar a month, you can get early access to our videos ad-free. Plus, you can get a postcard sent to you from wherever we are in the world. So check that out in the link in the description below, and we'll be seeing you next time.
Tim: Stay safe, everybody.
Marisa: Bye!
Tim: Peace.
Marisa: And then we found Badrin, who was the...
Tim: Flipper man.
Marisa: Yeah!
I'm going to say that again.
Tim: Oh, but I was doing such a good…
Marisa: I'm sorry, I know you were.
