A short boat ride from Kota Kinabalu transports you to another world, one of vibrant coral reefs and ancient rain forests teeming with wildlife. Welcome to Pulau Gaya, a small island in Malaysian Borneo that is sure to seduce anyone keen on creatures—and creature comforts.

Photographs by Martin Westlake

*Left to right:* Aboard the Lumba-Lumba, Gaya Island’s private yacht; on the terrace at Gaya Island Resort’s Spa Village.

A wild boar bit me in Borneo, but I only have myself to blame.

I was having a picnic lunch on a beach at Gaya Island Resort when a babi hutan, drawn by the whiff of a tasty morsel, sauntered across the sand. It sniffed my left foot—cute, I thought, it wants to play—then moved to do the same with my right foot, except it clamped onto the big toe and started yanking.

“Haaa!” I yelped, and it let go. Mercifully, my toe was intact, save for a flap of loose skin. I hobbled into the water to clean the wound, by which time my porcine assailant had slunk back into the forest.

In hindsight, I should have listened to Scott Mayback, the resort’s resident marine biologist. An hour earlier he had urged me to shoo the boar away should she get too close, explaining that the animal, habituated to snuffling around this beach, had grown “a little frisky” after giving birth to a litter of piglets. “Clap your hands together and shout ‘haaa’ loudly,” he advised. I guess there’s a reason that wildlife is so named.

Wildlife is abundant on jungly Pulau Gaya, a 15-square-kilometer island near Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, that’s home to just three hotels (including the two-year-old Gaya Island Resort) and a tight cluster of stilted villages. In addition to the wild boar, indigenes include giant red flying squirrels and quick-fingered macaques, lesser woolly horseshoe bats and olive-winged bulbuls, stout monitor lizards and violet carpenter bees armed with mandibles that can bore tunnels through wood. But where the local fauna is most spectacular, most colorful, is in the sea. Save for its easternmost peninsula (where the villages are located), Pulau Gaya sits in the protected waters of the 50-square-kilometer Tunku Abdul Rahman Park—TARP, for short— which was established in 1974 around Gaya and the neighboring islets of Mamutik, Manukan, Sapi, and Sulug.

Gaya Island Resort takes its presence in the park seriously, employing both the 36-year-old Mayback (who oversaw the opening of a marine center last year) and a full-time naturalist. From the water, it looks like a seaside hamlet trying to attract as little attention as possible, with villas perched inconspicuously on concrete piles between dipterocarp trees. Overlooking the jade expanse of Malohom Bay, Gaya Island isn’t big: the main public area—reception, pool, restaurant—has accommodations behind it in a loose loop that you could circumambulate, at a reasonable clip, in 10 minutes. But it has all the trappings of a luxe beach idyll: villas with king-size beds wrapped in silky sheets, deep bathtubs designed for serious soaking, and a deck with a large daybed; a spa complex by the mangroves where treatments utilize heady ingredients such as cinnamon, coconut, and ylang-ylang; a 40-meter waterfront lap pool; and a pair of accomplished restaurants that includes the formal, dinner-only seafood joint Fisherman’s Cove, set on a deck that’s perfect for stargazing when conversation flags. Many of the rooms come with the added attraction of a view of the sun rising over Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia’s tallest peak. When seen from offshore at night, the property appears especially dreamy, its lights shimmering like candles on the hillside.

*Left to right:* The resort’s longhouse-style lobby; a Sabah-style ceviche of cured snapper with lime juice, ginger, and chili at Fisherman’s Cove restaurant.

Justin Juhun, the resort’s naturalist, grew up on a timber plantation on the other side of Sabah. The 42-year-old has been around animals all his life and once kept crocodiles as pets. “At feeding time, they’d become playful and excited, just like dogs,” he told me early one morning as we trekked up into the island’s hilly interior, following one of the forested ridges that meet along the island’s spine. Before long, I was picturing Juhun in the robes of a Buddhist monk, not just because of his moon face and close-cropped hair, but because in the jungle—and when we kayaked in the still, thick air of the mangroves a couple of days later—he seemed completely at peace, even with mosquitoes circling his calves and ants scurrying across the back of his neck.

As we walked, I learned that Gaya and the other islands in the marine park were geologically part of Sabah’s Crocker mountain range, and that rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age had separated them from the mainland. “This is all primary coastal dipterocarp forest; there are only a handful of islands in the world like Gaya,” Juhun enthused. “Proboscis monkeys live here. So do 18 species of lizard, 21 different snake species, and 72 species of birds.” Farther on, he pointed out an endemic shorea tree (a teak-like hardwood) and then a nibong palm, whose soft heart could, in a pinch, serve as a meal. He picked up a pod from the forest floor; inside was a large seed sheathed within a blood-red film. “This is from the knema tree. Most people call it wild nutmeg. Hornbills eat the seed, as do green imperial pigeons.”

We walked past regiments of what looked like ants (“Those are termites,” he corrected me) and spotted a flying lizard asleep on a gnarled old liana vine. Higher up, when the forest’s din grew louder, Juhun said, “Cicada. Most people think that the sound comes from them rubbing their wings together, but it doesn’t. Cicadas eat tree sap—high in water, lower in nutrients. They secrete the water and retain the nutrients. When the water leaves their abdomen, which is a like an accordion of membranes, this sound happens.” Minutes later, I felt droplets on my head. “Cicada pee,” he grinned. Nice.

But as I said, the sea is where the local fauna is most spectacular, as I discovered while snorkeling a robust reef just a short boat ride from the resort. My guide was Mayback, a shy New Yorker who transforms in the water, moving with a fluidity befitting someone who makes his living from the sea. In addition to leading snorkeling tours, he runs Gaya Island Resort’s marine center at Tavajun Bay, not far from where I encountered the wild boar. There, he rehabilitates rescued sea turtles, grows coral, and teaches guests and local schoolchildren about conservation.

Shortly after we entered the water, Mayback dove down to the seabed and brought up a piece of broken coral. “Looks like this was done by an anchor,” he said. “Boats aren’t supposed to anchor in the park, but they do.” After slipping back down to reattach the coral, he pointed to other damaged patches, assigning blame variously to a diver’s fin or the coral-munching drupella snail. But generally the reef was vibrant, in hues of green and dun with pops of red, orange, pink, blue, and yellow. At one point a blacktip reef shark sped past us in a monochromatic blur, clearly rattled by our presence.

*Left to right:* Admiring the views from a villa balcony; resident naturalist Justin Juhun.

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.

Gaya Island’s private beach at Tavajun Bay, a five-minute boat ride from the resort jetty.

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.

*Left to right:* Suite bedrooms feature brass wall art and batik throws; a morning stroll along the resort’s boardwalk.

In April of last year, 134 scuba divers from all over the world staged a clean up of TARP, logging 168 consecutive hours of underwater housekeeping (and earning themselves a Guinness World Records entry in the process). Their haul: more than 3,000 kilograms of rubbish, including 1,560 kilos of plastic and 357 kilos of rubber and cloth. Afterward, the state minister for tourism, culture, and the environment, Masidi Manjun, remarked, “I am still sad to hear that our visitors too feel that we could have done more on our part to help keep our sea clean.”

According to British biologist Hazel Oakley of the Tropical Research and Conservation Centre, an organization that has implemented marine conservation projects in Malaysian Borneo since 1999, “TARP is a marine park because of its location, not because it’s an especially great marine environment. It’s right there in front of the city; you can get tourists out on the water without any effort. But there are flipsides to this. Having every tourist from Kota Kinabalu lie on the beaches there leads to sunscreen pollution and shorelines that get trashed.”

Oakley is frank about the challenges facing the park. “The islands act as a barrier for KK from bad weather, so there’s not a lot of water movement inside the bay,” she told me, explaining that runoff from the mainland is high in clay content, which clouds the water and reduces the ability of coral to photosynthesize. “But you don’t have to go far for visibility to improve. TARP’s almost like two parks: some parts exhibit great Malaysian marine diversity, but some parts—those closer to the city—are dead.”

I asked her about illegal fishing. “It happens. Policing is handled by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, but they have a big remit, everything from stopping smugglers to catching turtle hunters. So it’s left to Sabah Parks, but Sabah Parks doesn’t have the resources to really help. The good thing about resorts like Gaya Island and the local dive operators is that they put eyes on the water. Watching is a huge deterrent.”

She added, “That said, it’s difficult to tell someone he can’t bomb fish if that’s what he needs to do to feed his family. Arrest him, and his oldest son drops out of school to take his place. Economic alternatives are the only way forward, and the resorts on Pulau Gaya are part of that solution as well.”

On the way to breakfast on my last day at Gaya Island Resort, I spotted a bronzeback snake, thin as a pencil and as long as a strand of spaghetti, warming up in the morning sun. I thought about picking it up—I’ve always had a fascination with snakes, and I knew that this one wasn’t poisonous. Then I recalled the wild boar and also something Juhun had said over dinner the previous night: “It was lucky a monitor lizard didn’t bite your toe, or it would be gone.” I walked past the serpent, adjusting my attitude, learning my lesson. Nature should be respected, valued, and protected, but ultimately it should be left alone.

The jetty at Gaya Island Resort, with the Sabah mainland in the distance.

THE DETAILS

Home to Malaysia’s second-busiest airport, Kota Kinabalu is readily accessible from several major cities in the region, including Hong Kong via AirAsia, Singapore via Scoot, and Kuala Lumpur via Malaysia Airlines. Gaya Island Resort (65/6836-2455; doubles from US$400) provides guests with private transfers from the airport to Sutera Harbour Marina for the onward speedboat ride to Gaya Island.

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2014 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Naturally Gifted”).

The Wild Waters of Gaya Island

Stay inspired with our DestinAsian newsletters