A snorkelling day on Sepanggar Island
SabahTake a boat from Kota Kinabalu for a focused island outing with snorkelling, beach time and a view back towards the city.

Choose a concrete experience, or use a guide to compare different places. Transfers, guides and availability belong to each individual trip.
20 discoveries
Take a boat from Kota Kinabalu for a focused island outing with snorkelling, beach time and a view back towards the city.

Combine a guided island climb with reef stops in Tun Sakaran Marine Park, using Semporna as the mainland base.
Explore a shallow reef setting off Brunei with an operator-led boat outing, keeping sea conditions and swimming ability central to the plan.
Join a boat-diving day from the Serasa area, with sites chosen for your qualifications and conditions. Brunei offers reef and wreck options, but a named wreck is not a guaranteed stop.

Maratua offers reef diving with a much wider range of conditions than an island photograph suggests. Walls, shallower reefs and current-exposed sites require different choices. Staying on the island lets a dive team match each outing to qualifications, recent experience and the conditions, rather than treating every famous site as compulsory.
Use Miri as a city base for boat dives on the reefs offshore. Choose a single dive day or a longer stay with several outings, with sites selected for conditions and your diving experience.

Paddle from Poni’s Serasa Beach watersports base in a session of about an hour. Single and double kayaks offer a straightforward way to add time on the water to a Brunei-Muara stay.

Spend an evening aboard North Borneo Cruises, combining coastal views, a buffet and live music.

Sipadan is a marine diving destination where reef structure and deeper water meet close to an oceanic island. For trained divers, the attraction is time underwater along reef edges and walls, watching how fish and larger marine animals use a changing three-dimensional environment. A visit is normally organised through an authorised dive operator, with accommodation elsewhere in the Semporna island area or on the mainland. That makes the permit allocation and dive arrangements the starting point of planning, rather than simply travelling to the island and expecting to buy a dive. This activity suits divers who want a focused marine day within a longer Sabah itinerary and who are prepared to match their experience to the operator's assessment of the sites and current conditions.

Arrange a boat journey to Pulau Tiga for an island nature visit centred on its forest and unusual mud-volcano landscape.

Around Derawan, a reef visit begins where the island's shoreline gives way to shallow marine habitat. With a suitable local boat and guide, snorkelling offers a way to look closely at reef fish, coral formations and the changing colour of the water without undertaking a scuba-diving programme. Staying on or near the island lets you choose outings around local sea conditions instead of making the water visit the hurried end of a long transfer. This activity is best understood as a guided reef experience within the Derawan island setting, not a promise to visit every named island in the archipelago in one day. It suits confident swimmers interested in marine life and travellers who want a few focused hours in the water between slower periods ashore.

Explore reef stops around Mabul and Kapalai on a snorkelling-focused boat day, with clear arrangements for equipment, guidance and return travel.

Explore Mabul’s smaller marine life with an appropriate dive operator, keeping this experience separate from Sipadan’s offshore wall diving.

Explore Mantanani’s reefs on a planned day trip, allowing for the road journey from Kota Kinabalu and the weather-dependent sea crossing.

Travel beyond the Santubong estuary to Satang for island time, possible snorkelling and an introduction to turtle conservation.

Travel from Sandakan for an overnight visit to Selingan, where park rangers manage access to a protected turtle nesting programme.

Take an instructor-led first diving experience near Kota Kinabalu, beginning with a briefing and shallow-water practice.

Plan a reef-and-island day from Kota Kinabalu, choosing the islands, departure marina and level of guidance that suit your visit.
Join Sarang Tiung’s fishing community for a locally arranged sea outing to a bagang, a fishing platform off Pulau Laut. The experience centres on meeting the fishers and understanding their work, with the boat journey, net activity and return agreed around conditions at sea.

Follow the coastal viewpoint visit at Tanjung Simpang Mengayau, beyond Kudat on Sabah’s northern peninsula.