In the afternoon we snorkeled the resort’s house reef. The nightclubby colors of painted wrasse and parrot fish appeared as if illuminated by ultraviolet. Gobies guarded holes dug by pistol shrimp, the latter regularly shuffling out of their homes to dump sand on the seabed before retreating. “They do that all day, every day,” Mayback smiled, shaking his head at the mindlessness of it all. Barrel sponges rose like mutant funnels; the branchiae of feather-duster worms disappeared whenever something brushed them. Blue-green chromises darted to and fro while pairs of clownfish flitted in and out of their host anemones. A honeycomb grouper did its best to hide under some table coral. Never before had I seen such proliferous and vivid sea life so close to a resort.
That evening I boarded the Lumba-Lumba (Malay for “dolphin”) for a sunset cruise. The 20-meter motor yacht, British-built and upholstered by Louis Vuitton, quietly slipped out from Gaya Island Resort’s jetty and navigated a semicircle around the island, skirting past Kota Kinabalu before pulling away. As we passengers paid tacit homage to the western sky, the crew served glasses of a fruity, crisp sauvignon blanc from New Zealand and an oaky Chilean cabernet sauvignon. With the islands of Gaya and Sapi to our right and Mamutik and Manukan to our left, a long-line fishing trawler puttering off toward the fading horizon and barely a ripple in the sea, the setting seemed idyllic.
Yet Pulau Gaya, designated a forest reserve since 1923, is not entirely Edenic, as any visitor to its one officially sanctioned village can attest. At Kampung Pulau Gaya, heaps of rubbish—plastic bags, soda cans, blown-out flip-flops, discarded food packets—blanket the shoreline. Since the village’s 500 or so households have no running water or sewage system, toilets are merely holes cut into the floorboards of homes. Garbage bins installed by the authorities have been pilfered by locals for their personal use. “It’s terrible,” one resident told me when I asked him about the mess. “But people don’t care.” I didn’t get to Kampung Lok Urai, the larger settlement around the corner that people had described to me, a tad sensationally, as a dangerous place filled with illegal immigrants—primarily Filipino squatters. But I didn’t need to. Passing by the dense tangle of stilt houses by boat, I couldn’t help but notice the flotsam of plastic bags and chunks of polystyrene that clogged its shallows.
Tunku Abdul Rahman Park’s broader environmental issues owe a lot to the proximity of Kota Kinabalu, just a few kilometers to the east. In KK, a city of more than 600,000 people and growing, the waterfront is lined with cranes putting up a new shopping center and condos, sending construction dust into the sea. The city’s drainage lines, including a particularly fetid one next to Centre Point mall, eject who-knows-what into the bay. To the north, in the settlements by Tuaran, rubbish ends up on the ground or in the mangroves, and while Tuaran’s river drains north of KK, currents shunt its output south toward TARP. There’s also a large port just outside town, and ports pollute.
