Much has already been written on Pulau Sipadan, even by the authors of this website, since - thanks to the famed French pioneer and diver, captain Jacques Yves-Cousteau - the Malaysian island revealed its unsurpassed natural wonders to the rest of the world in the mid-Eighties of the past century.

What else could we add, which has not been said yet? It's maybe best to repeat - once more - what we have said before: no other place on Earth can offer so much underwater biodiversity, so much large fish action, so many rare opportunities to watch feeding, courting and mating behavior of so many different species in the course of a single dive. Rising from a depth of more than 600 meters from the bottom of the Celebes Sea, just a few miles from the coast of Sabah (45 minutes by speedboat in calm seas), Pulau Sipadan is just a small island, the top of a long-lost lava chimney from a prehistoric volcano: its topside covered by a lush and thick tropical forest and ringed by a sandy beach, its shallow surrounding coral reefs suddenly giving way to precipitous vertical drop-offs, falling down to the abyss below.

Where else in the world can one get dizzy kneeling in the sand and looking straight down for 600 meters? Where else in the world can one see, in the course of the average dive, at least a dozen turtles of two different species, a twirling tornado of thousands of chevron barracudas, a glinting and shimmering rolling ball of hundreds of jacks, a herd of massive giant bumphead parrotfish grazing on the reef top, while all the time being buzzed by scores of whitetip reef sharks?

Then, of course, there's always the lucky day: when you might meet a pack of patrolling grey reef sharks down there at Barracuda Point, an immense whale shark gliding by in the current off South Point, or maybe bump into a couple of mantas playing in front of the Drop-Off, or even check a living wall of hundreds of hammerheads rising like ghosts from the deep, glowing in the open blue water at Hanging Gardens. If you're even luckier, as we were, you might swim with a tresher shark, see orcas, hear the underwater song of whales.

Without forgetting - like everybody seems to do - the unbelievable diversity offered by Sipadan' reef life, teeming with thousands of angelfish, butterfly fish, triggerfish, parrotfish, morays, groupers and even gobies: and if you look carefully you'll be rewarded with uncommon sightings like leaf fish of many colors, nocturnal scorpion fish and rare commensal shrimp.

This natural richness is not surprising: the island is ideally situated in the middle of very deep water, at the core of the area with the highest marine biodiversity of the whole world, right in the middle of the Indo-Pacific basin. Its paramount importance as a mating and nesting ground for green turtles cannot be overemphasized enough.

Of course the large number of visitors coming regularly to such a small place may place it in jeopardy, posing problems like overcrowding and reef damaging. Much has been done and much is yet to be done to solve these environmental hazards, and the Malaysian government has taken the first steps in the right direction by closing all resorts previously existing on the island. Sipadan can now be easily dived from the comfortable Kapalai Dive Resort, which lies a mere twenty minutes of speedboat away.