Turtley Awesome

Turtley Awesome
Pulau Pom Pom, Malaysia

Pulau Pom Pom, Malaysia

There are few places in the world that we have got on our list that we want to return to, although it is seems to grow every year as we fall more and more in love with places we visit and experiences we have. One of the places on that was on the list is somewhere that we visitied in our first year on the road – Pom Pom Island in Borneo.

Whilst our first experience on Pom Pom was definitely not an easy experience it is somewhere that we have just not been able to get out of our system, we very nearly returned in 2014 but with a massive increase in terrorism through the Abu Sayaf we decided against returning and subsequently the project had no choice but to change location.

Pom Pom the first time was something of an endurance, there were food shortages, there were major infections and there were some very wet nights in leaky tents, but the sheer joy of snorkelling with amazing huge green turtles and walking the beach with Team Turtle looking for turtle mamas, and learning so much from the pre and post graduate marine biologists was just so amazing it made up for all the short comings.

It was Tim’s idea to return to Pom Pom to volunteer as Turtle Interns to guide and help the other turtlers, I took a lot of convincing as I remembered nursing the weeping wounds on both of our feet for long after we left Pom Pom but eventually I conceded and we booked our flights to Malaysia.

It seemed like fate was telling us that we were doing the right thing when we suddenly won our holiday to Australia and it just worked perfectly to slip in before going to Pom Pom.

After our Australia holiday we had a day or two in Kuala Lumpur to relax a little in preparation and before we knew it we were off to Semporna, the gateway to some of the best snorkelling and diving in the world and also one of the most unpleasant little towns in Borneo. Sadly it had deteriorated even more since our last visit, the shore line was still awash with garbage and the local children were still following you everywhere begging, but sadly these same kids were now stumbling around grasping plastic bags full of glue, a sad sad sight.

That evening we headed to the only restaurant that we know in Semporna that does good western food. We were slightly devastated to see that Scuba Junkie Restaurant had vanished but we decided to commit and try its replacement and we could not have been happier when they presented us with the very same Scuba Junkie Menu that we had drooled over 3 years before.

Over dinner we received a group email from one of the TRACC coordinators to work out where everyone was going to meet the following day to be transferred over to the island. Most people on the list were A-level students returning on the night bus from their exam in Kota Kinabalu there was mention of one lone volunteer who was staying in Semporna. As we looked around the restaurant there was just one lone girl so we decided to try our luck and ask her if she was Jillian. Amazingly she was Jillian, albeit a very shocked one, given that two strange English people she had never seen before knew her name. We quickly explained that we had seen her name on the email and thought we would try our luck. After a quick chat we went our separate ways with a plan to meet for lunch the following day at the proposed meeting point.

I would like to say that we had a nice relaxed evening in Semporna, but we didn’t we listened to the worst Chinese karaoke we have heard for a very long time for most of the night.

The next day we packed up ready to head to Pom Pom, we went to Bismilah 2 restaurant ordered some brunch and not long after Jillian joined us and we set about waiting for all the other Pom Pom volunteers to arrive. After about 2 hours we were beginning to get a bit restless, especially as Bismilah 2 was being closing down around us and the fan that had been our only respite from the scorching heat was switched off to demonstrate that we were definitely not welcome anymore.

Just as we were losing all hope some westerners walked into the restaurant and we finally had some hope that we would be making it over to Pom Pom. These volunteers had actually come from Pom Pom and would be staying in Semporna to recover from the various, ear and skin infections and back problems that were troubling them. This was a slightly concerning sight as whilst Pom Pom infections had been rife previously we managed to avoid anyone having to leave the island. With reports of hospital trips and antibiotics, it was pretty clear some things about Pom Pom had not changed at all.

After a few phone calls we managed to get hold of Julie the Camp Manager of the island who was running late shopping and would be picking us up soon, we decamped to the nice air conditioned lobby of our hotel to wait for our lift.

Before we knew it we were bundled into the van and were on our way to the pier where hopefully one more volunteer who had just arrived from the airport would be waiting, and she was, the colourful little Aussie Kat was not the slightest bit phased that she had been dumped at a pier with no sign of life and was just taking it all in her stride.

I was a little surprised to see just how small the boat over to Pom Pom was, we were balanced on a plank of wood on Flying Fish a new addition to the TRACC boat family.

Our journey over to the island was pretty smooth, there were turtles popping their heads up the entire way and flying fish leaping from the water into the mouths of waiting birds.

Arriving on Pom Pom was a little surreal, everything seemed so much smaller, No 4 the dining/lounge area seemed half the size that I remembered and likewise so did the dive store and the kitchen. Everything was the same as before save for a rather nice upgrade to the jungle showers and toilet which were now sporting tarped walls and roofs and a concrete floor.

We were shown to our little tent with a pair of camp beds on either side, it was a vast improvement on the tiny tent and inflatable mattress we had had previously.

After settling in we made our way to No 4 to meet the rest of the island and it soon became clear that Pom Pom had changed quite a lot since our last trip where the majority of the volunteers were pre or post graduate marine biologists and the camp was a 50/50 mix of divers and snorkelers. Now there were no snorkelers and a lot of Dive Masters and Dive Master trainees.

We soon settled into island life and after our first few snorkels we were over the moon to see all our turtles out relaxing on the reef at low tide. Sadly with the sand levels vastly changed due to various piers being built around the island, the sea grass that the turtles used to be seen eating at high tide was pretty much all gone along with the high tide turtles.

We soon got into the rhythm of snorkeling in the day and getting as far as we could with the turtle surveys when the tide, weather, visibility and jelly fish would let us. I received an almighty zap from one jelly fish which actually made me leap out of the water it was such a shock and then spent the next 3 days nursing my itching legs.

We were being so careful not to get any cuts as we knew full well that whatever lurked in the sand, sea or water would leave us with the nightmare that is a Pom Pom infection, nothing but antibiotics can treat these nightmare wounds and we did not want them again. However no matter how careful we were it was inevitable that one of us would succumb and it was Tim. A simple mosquito bite was the culprit and as soon as Tim showed me the tell-tale yellow infected lump on the front of his leg I reached for the antibiotics, we know better than to wait and thankfully we didn’t as even with a high dose of amoxicillin as soon as we saw the infection Tim was wrecked. His foot swelled up, the skin around the wound turned red and to jelly that didn’t bounce back when you pressed it and he had serious pain in the glands in his groin showing that this had spread to his lymph nodes. This was looki
ng like a very nasty case of cellulitus and thankfully the antibiotics took hold and slowly but surely Tim improved.

Whilst he was recovering Tim was banned from the ocean so I set about being the lone turtler which is not a lot of fun when you have 2 kilometers to snorkel each day, thankfully Tim managed to walk the island at night with me as this was definitely not something that I was prepared to do on my own.

As I mentioned earlier, we cancelled our return to Pom Pom in 2014 due to an increase of kidnappings in the area following an actual kidnap and murder on the island, whilst there had not been any problems on the island since it still remains on the UK government advisory to not travel and therefore all of our travel insurance policies are void whilst we are on the island. As a precaution because there are two hotels on the island the Malaysian military has 35 police on the island to watch for any suspicious activity. The police have two camps from which they watch, one outside the resort next to our camp and one outside Big Pom Pom resort further down the beach. We had to check in with the police every time we walked around the island so that they knew we were out there, occasionally we were not allowed to walk due to intelligence they had received that it was unsafe. On the occasions we were allowed to walk I can’t say that I felt particularly safe given that the darkest and most exposed part of the island that we were covering was the only part of the island not being monitored by the police. We would occasionally hear boats passing by in the pitch black which was extremely disconcerting as all night boats have been banned in the area to try to prevent any further terrorist attacks.

Thankfully our night walks were not in vain and after just a week we found a beautiful green turtle getting ready to lay. Given that Pom Pom had changed we were initially told that we just had to wait for her to start laying and then call Big Pom Pom resort who would come and collect the eggs for their hatchery, this was a little sad as picking out those eggs as she lays is the most amazing experience in the world, but without any Marine Biology staff on the island we did as we were told. It was magnificent watching her lay, it was equally frustrating that Big Pom Pom staff couldn’t come for nearly an hour after we had called them by which time the turtle had laid her eggs, buried them and was sat over the nest enjoying a sand bath. We then had to sit and wait a further hour until she finished her sand bath to try and locate the eggs to dig up and move to the hatchery. Which we did. All in all she laid 95 eggs which were carefully recovered and moved to the safe hatchery at the resort to ensure that poachers don’t dig up the nest and transfer the eggs to the market to be sold for £1 a piece.

After this initial misinformation we established that we were allowed to recover the eggs if we found a turtle laying which makes much more sense but sadly every other turtle that we found on the beach had dragged herself up from the shore line to the tree line, no easy feat for a huge and egg filled mama, only to be faced with piles and piles of trash that she could not dig through and then had to turn around and head back to the ocean to perhaps try again tomorrow or if she can’t hold on anymore release them into the ocean.

It was heart-breaking to see the island so full of litter so we set about our turtler responsibilities of having a beach clean up. We cleared bags of litter from the reef at low tide, we tried to clear as much as we could from where our turtle had tried to lay.

We made the absolute best of our time on Pom Pom, we snorkelled as much as we could, we did as many night walks as we could, we went to every release of baby turtles as we could which was infuriating to see small out of control Chinese children stamping their feet in front of the babies and splashing water on them to stop them swimming and we watched the sunset from the pier nearly every night.

We were coping with Tim’s leg infection and trying to treat his ear which had been playing up for weeks when we had some bad news from home. My grandad had been taken ill and we decided that we needed to leave the island. We thought about it and talked about it and made the sad decision to cut short our stay and return to normality to be in contact with our family.

The turtles on Pom Pom where every bit as spectacular as we remembered and we were glad we returned to see them but this was just not the right place for us in the circumstances. There are still few places that we have been in the world where you can walk from the beach onto an amazing reef filled with stunning juvenile and adult fish and where not a single dip in the ocean goes by without at least one turtle passing by. It is a very special part of the world but for the time being we need to formulate a new plan.

Next stop,,,, who knows!!!