The oil-rig-turned-hotel. Photo via Seaventures Dive Resort.
This time, it's for real: The type of project proposed by Morris Architects for the (pre-BP spill) Gulf of Mexico has actually been carried out in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, where an old oil-drilling rig has been turned into a hotel catering to snorkelers and scuba divers.
The Seaventures Dive Resort, located in the Celebes Sea, surrounded by Borneo, Indonesia, and the Philippines, is hardly the swank scene envisioned in the architects' rendering, according to the Wall Street Journal's report on the hotel:
The 25 tiny guest rooms, although spotlessly clean, resemble those on a cruise ship that has seen better days. A visitor's room had a rusty metal locker without hangers to serve as a closet, and the reading lights and shower water heater didn't work. The air smelled from the oil powering the generators.
Diving off Sipadan Island. Photo via Seaventures Dive Resort.
But the hotel's guests aren't at Seaventures for pampering. The simple quarters are just a place to sleep in between dives, where the "crystal-clear water" offers "an amazing array of coral reefs swarming with hundreds of species of multicolored tropical fish, sea turtles, and other aquatic life." Nearby Sipadan Island, a national park visitable only by a permit, is a world-renown divers' paradise:
Coral reefs start at a couple of feet below the surface, just off the coast, and dramatically drop off in steep cliffs to around 180 feet. In a minute, a few oddly shaped and brightly colored individual fish give way to schools of hundreds or even thousands, seemingly unperturbed having a human in their midst. They range from thumbnail size to several feet long, from paper-thin to plump, from striped to polka-dotted or decked out in every hue.Despite the wealth of opportunities to get up close and personal with nature, and the apparently unprecedented reuse of the rig, the hotel isn't exactly eco-friendly. There's those smelly oil-powered generators, to start. Not to mention the trip to get there: "a flight to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia; another flight to Tawau, on the east coast of the Malaysian Borneo state of Sabah; an hour's drive and an overnight in the tiny port city of Semporna; then an hour's boat ride to the oil rig."
Still, it's always cool to see this kind of extreme recycling being carried out. And maybe the next oil-rig-turned-hotel could be decked out with some solar panels or wind turbines instead. Via: "An Oil Rig's Second, Scuba-Diving Life,"
