Sangalaki Island
Sangalaki Island Resort is a PADI Dive resort located on Sangalaki Island.
Note: Scuba diving at Derawan can be combined with Sipadan island (Tawau airport, Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia).
More about Sangalaki Island
Sangalaki is the manta island of the Derawan archipelago, off East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo — a small, forested dot ringed by reef whose plankton-rich channels concentrate manta rays the way few places on earth do. Feeding trains of them cruise the shallows here; on the good days divers stop counting. The island is also one of Indonesia's most important green turtle nesting sites, so the sand you walk on in the evening may be dug up by morning.
Diving is organised through the PADI dive resort on the island, and the supporting cast around the mantas holds its own: coral gardens thick with turtles, and the neighbouring islands within day-trip range — Kakaban with its famous lake of stingless jellyfish, and the walls of Maratua. For underwater photographers, Sangalaki is the wide-angle counterweight to the macro life at Derawan.
The honest logistics: this is Indonesia, a separate leg from our Malaysian islands, reached via Berau in East Kalimantan. It is not a day trip from Semporna — but it combines into one Borneo journey remarkably well, and pairing Sipadan's walls with Sangalaki's mantas gives you the two great spectacles of the Celebes Sea in a single trip. We arrange the connections through Tawau regularly.