Sandakan - revisited

Hi

No update for a few days as I've had other distractions. Firstly turtles and now town. We sailed in light headwinds til early evening from Palau Tigabu, to an island in the Turtle Island group. Next morning it was nice to laze the morning away and then go across to Palau Silingaan. This island is the focus for tourists to visit, with nice accommodation, a lovely beach, OK snorkeling and of course, lots of turtles. Mainly Green Turtles and some smaller Hawksbill Turtles come to lay here for most of
the year.

Having been here with my sister Wendy only six weeks earlier, I knew the drill. We paid our park fee and wandered round to the beach for a swim (Anna) and book reading (the rest of us). While on the beach little hatch-lings would appear from the higher sand behind us tourists on the beach and scurry to the water. We all watched with delight as these tiny things, with flippers far too big for their little bodies, made their way to the relative safety of the water.

On the way back to the boat Anna found in the sand a 2gigabyte memory card. Back aboard we examined the photos on the card and recognised a lady and her daughter from the beach. When Anna returned the card to the lady she was quite overcome as the card had her photos from many weeks of travel in Europe, Japan and SE Asia. Anna ended up with a nice reward.

That night we assembled in the dining area and then followed the ranger to see a large green turtle laying her eggs with another a metre away still digging her nest. They take the eggs to a hatchery to protect them from predators and then release them from a basket at the waters edge. A very interventionist approach.

Next day a short sail brought us into Sandakan. We have had many reports of theft of outboard motors here, so we cleared our deck of valubles, and each night put the outboard inside the boat. That said, the yacht club is very welcoming and friendly. From my experience I have found people more open and friendly in Malaysian Borneo than on the more busy peninsula.

Liz and Courtney have gone to the Kinabatagan river for a night to see the myriad of wildlife that is compressed into one of the last vestiges of forest in this oil-palm dominated environment.

We hope to leave on Tuesday.. or Wednesday.

Colin

PS: There are photos available for this post. Also I have several pages/photos on Sandakan when I was here with Wendy. The link for these pages is on the right hand column of this page.