Sipadan-Kapalai Resort – Kapalai Island, Malaysia

Total Miles Traveled:  30,384

I (Lisa) have been waiting for this experience for 20 years (since I found out that such places existed)… where your bungalow is built on the ocean – with clear blue water for as far as the eye can see and where the fish swim under and around you.

Kapalai Resort is built on a sandbar off of Malaysian Borneo’s east coast in the middle of the Sulawesi Sea.  It is NOT easy to get here.  From the US, you would need to take a 15 hour plane ride to Kuala Lumpur (in peninsular Malaysia), followed by another 2.5 hour flight to Tawau, Malaysia (on Borneo).  Once in Tawau, you take a 90 minute bus ride, followed by a 45 minute boat ride to the resort.

Within in our first few minutes of arriving in our room and looking out on our private balcony (and from the bathtub), we saw barracuda, trumpet fish, sting rays and (my favorite) sea turtles.   But don’t let the beautiful view fool you.  This is no 5 star resort.  With no aircon and a very porous structure that lets in noises from both sea and human creatures, we felt like we were ‘glamping’.  But being woken up at 5am with the clanky clanks of the diving tanks didn’t bother us.  We were here to dive. And dive we did… 4 times a day for 3 days!

Check out our slideshow from the resort (below).  Coming up next – photos from our dives.

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