Civilization

Back in Bali …. Ahhhh …. Good coffee, whole wheat bread, broadband internet, flushing toilets and soft pillows. After returning from the wilds of Flores, we headed back to Ubud, the artsy tourists’ Mecca of Bali. For about a day and a half we ate well, relaxed and shopped for traditional wood carved masks and shadow puppets.

Having dove to our hearts content, we decided to head to Kuta (the commercial tourist Mecca of Bali) to try our hands at surfing. I can safely say that I will never try surfing again (sorry, Kathleen). Edan started our lesson with an unfair advantage having tried surfing a couple of times on the shores of northern California. I, on the other hand, was a complete disaster.

The truth is, it’s not that hard to stand up on the board and to “ride the wave” for all of three glorious seconds. The real problem is that getting out far enough and positioning oneself properly to “catch the wave” is a real bitch. I wasn’t even so bothered by the paddling, which is what most beginners complain about. I just didn’t enjoy getting pounded down and bounced around by the waves like a small fishing boat in a massive rainstorm. After two hours, our eyes stung our nasal passages had been corroded from several flushings of salt water and the sun had burnt us to a crisp despite that we were wearing t-shirts commonly known to surfers as “rash guards”. Today, my abdominal and arm muscles are killing me and Edan’s forehead is so red that I’ve started calling him Lobster Head. Well, it was an experience, I can say I’ve tried it and Edan might even be crazy enough to do it again.

One of the greatest things about spending our last two days in Kuta is that our friend Marie, one of our fellow divers in Flores, returned to Bali at the same time. We decided to meet up at Bali’s trendiest restaurant, KuDeTa. This was the polar opposite of Labuanbajo. The restaurant is set on a private beach with huge lounge chairs facing the water. Inside, the restaurant and bar had the same trendy minimalist design of many places we’ve frequented in New York.

Upon arrival we passed several security checkpoints, no doubt an effort to assuage tourists’ fears of terrorism. We were ushered to our table, already reserved by Marie – the first reservation we’ve made for the whole trip! Before ordering we were served bread and olives …. REAL olives, not the canned ones that have made appearances in other Southeast Asian restaurants that try to be trendy and western. The food only went uphill from there. After dinner, we adjourned to the beachside lounge chairs for desert where we watched the surf pound the beach under spotlights.

Today we will nurse our aching bodies and watch movies (our hotel rents dvd players for $2.25 at day). Tomorrow, we’re off to Kuala Lumpur ….

Flores, Komodo Rinca – No Lakes, No Hominids, Plenty of Fish

Flores didn’t work out entirely as we had expected, largely because of our poor planning. We went with three goals: visiting the three volcanic lakes of Mount Kalimutu ; seeing the archeological sites where scientists are still uncovering evidence of the life and times of Homo Floresiensis: and doing some high quality diving. We went one for three, but can’t complain. And I still haven’t quite found a sense of balance in Asia . When I lived in Egypt I learned that the rules of traveling there were quite simple – bargain for everything; never plan anything in advance because “full” or “too busy” doesn’t exist; and whatever you do, don’t ever pay for anything in advance.

Jenna and I haven’t really worked out the Southeast Asian rules yet. Most transport has to be booked in advance, and much of it must be paid for in advance too. Some visas need to be procured in advance too. But on the other hand, this doesn’t mean that the people you pay for their services in advance can be trusted.

Our flights from Bali to and from Flores , for example, were a mess. We booked on one airline, and arrived early at the airport to discover that they routinely cancelled most of their flights (as they had ours, despite having confirmed it the night before), and through sheer luck got on another flight with another airline on the outbound leg of our trip. We went through some shenanigans on the return leg too. Hence – don’t book in advance, don’t pay for transport until you are sitting on the vehicle. On the other hand, we didn’t plan adequately for Flores – it is a large island with terrible infrastructure, and we couldn’t get around it with any kind of speed or comfort. It takes advance planning and patience to get around – you need to rent a car, or find a reliable airline and clearly plan your travel around their most reliable flying dates. And the one place we did book ahead – our dive company – was fantastic. If we had booked farther ahead they might have found us a room in a very nice hotel (which was full!), but as it was they found us a tolerable space in the least offensive hotel in the fishing village turned port city of Labuanbajo . So, we’re still working out the right balance of planning vs. not planning. Is it a necessary exercise, or a painful bother that just unrealistically raises your expectations? Haven’t worked it out, and with only a short two weeks left in the region, we don’t expect to.

We landed in Labuanbajo on Dec. 2^nd. Our first impression was of fierce heat and dust. We later amended it to include bad food and noise. The city really has very little to recommend itself, but it is an interesting study in development policy. Labuanbajo was a backwater fishing village with nothing more interesting than a squid-fishing fleet just a few years ago. Although it was situated on the doorstep of Komodo National Park , the place had absolutely nothing going. It still has nothing very good going, but it’s quite a busy place. A few years ago the Japanese development agency paid to build a proper set of piers and a harbormaster building in Labuanbajo. It’s safe to say that it’s revolutionized the place. The bay itself is something of a miracle – it’s still covered in soft corals, starfish, juvenile reeffish, and sea urchins. But the daily pounding from the greatly increased number and size of boats and their concomitant dragged anchors, dumped motor oil, and the general Indonesian disrespect for the natural world (God’s great rubbish bin) is doing an efficient job of rendering the harbor into yet another murky and detritus choked bight, as seen all around Southeast Asia . The locals figure it will take another two years, tops. Still, can’t be too hard on the Indonesians, I could have substituted the name of any other group of people there. To add to its dirty “charm”, the city is going through a noisy and explosive building spurt. Although I can’t be sure, I’m sure it is a direct result of the pier – suddenly people are coming to Labuanbajo, trade has certainly increased, and the net result is development.

The growth is good for most of the people of Labuanbajo, even better for the expats and Javanese who run the big businesses, but unnecessarily destructive. I cannot tell you how many times one can look around the city and see something that could be done better and with less harm to people and nature but isn’t – roads in steep hills that the government starts but doesn’t finish, virtually assuring increased erosion and damage to the shacks of the poorest residents who live by the water, inadequate electricity that causes people to run generators in their homes and breathe in diesel exhaust. And of course, like all intelligent Indonesians, the good citizens of Labuanbajo have the normal degree of fear and distrust for the police – those officers of the peace who buy their office and then have to earn the investment back through extortion, bribe taking, and the invention of minor rule violations which they then so kindly agree not to report. At least no one fulfilled my nightmare of offering to sell us fossils (see our Bali blog updates).

So, Labuanbajo was unattractive from the start, and failed to grow on us. And we discovered that Mount Kalimutu was on the far end of the island, some 500km (and at least 15 hours travel overland) away. To get to it, climb it, and come back would take at least 3 days and a considerable additional investment of money. Similarly, the archeological sites were in a difficult to reach locale with the added obstacle that no one in Labuanbajo knew anything about them apart from the fact that they existed. Confronted with these problems, and the fact that there was fantastic diving in Komodo National Park , we took the path of least resistance.

We spent six days diving the park with a great outfit called Reefseekers. We made friends with other divers, had a lovely time with one of the owners, a passionate diver and conservationist named Kath, and generally enjoyed our time away from Labuanbajo. In addition to the diving we also managed to hike around Rinca island (one over from Komodo) and see Komodo dragons, chase illegal fishing boats out of the national park with Kath, and generally enjoy the deserted beauty of the islands off of Flores ’ west coast. The scenery is arid, sunbaked, equatorial scrub. Islands of rock and red earth that look so much like mountain peaks you can never forget that’s what they are. They’re covered in dry brush and leafless trees during the dry season (which should have ended by now, but there’s been no rain in 11 months), their shores fringed in the always bright green of mangrove swamps.

Flores, Komodo and Rinca separate the Indian Ocean from the warmer tropical seas that end in the Gulf of Thailand , and the islands themselves are separated by fairly narrow straits. The result is many currents and thermoclines, fast water and tricky navigation for small boats, and massive tides – up to 3m difference between high and low. It’s not a world record by any means, but it’s a significant thing when you wake up in the morning and find half the boats in the harbor are beached because the tide has pulled the water out some 100 metres.

Two oceans, small straits, lots of islands, strong currents, hot and cold waters, and strong tropical sunlight as your energy input – you get lots of plankton, lots of other marine life, a huge diversity of habitats, and fantastic diving. We’ll try to post pictures, but I’m not sure we’ll manage it. We now have hundreds. We’ll winnow them down and post the very best when we get home. We’ll also try to put a few more videos on YouTube.

For those of you who dive:

Flores is worth it. The currents can make it tricky, but Reefseekers makes it safe. We were jumping into cold water with all kinds of crazy currents – upwellings, downpulls, laundry machines, and strong currents that can move you at 3 knots in one direction, stop, reverse direction at a speed of 2 knots, then pick up again. But sometimes you would hit a site and there’d be nothing at all – you could hover until your air was done and you’d still be where you started. Regardless, a quality dive shop makes all the difference. They read the water, knew what we should expect, and planned the dive accordingly. We never lost a diver, never got separated, and never really got scared.

And the diving is fantastic and cheap. It’s not as cheap as Egypt or Honduras , but compared to most places in the world, US $65-90 (depending on the distance to the site, some are three hours by boat) for two dives is not bad. There was more coral than we had seen anywhere else, including in Bali . On one dive we hit a patch where I think I saw every species of clownfish (anemone fish, “Nemo”) in the books in less than 10 minutes. We saw healthy reefs, and as a result we saw with little difficulty animals that don’t live or are difficult to see elsewhere: fish of unusual size, hawksbill turtles, gorgeous nudibranchs, a giant trevally over 1 metre in length, and countless sharks, bumphead parrotfish, napoleon wrasses (one close to 2 metres), and of course the ubiquitous damselfishes, anthias, gobies, etc…

There are also some very unique spots – we did a wall dive with zero current at a site called Batu Bolong that blew both of us away. We had dived Batu Bolong three days earlier with a fierce and crazy current – one of the divers had been spun in a laundry machine on his way to the surface. With a strong current it is a beautiful but, by Komod standards, ordinary site. But when we came back the island waters were still.

The wall starts at around 7 metres and bottoms out somewhere outside of vis, maybe at 40 or 50 metres. Without a current we didn’t need to hug the reef or hide on one side of the island – we started at 26 metres on the southeast side and came up to around 7 on the north side, then went over top of the wall and nearly died – the view was phenomenal, like floating over creation. There were snappers and groupers and wrasses and sharks until your head exploded, the corals were healthy and widespread, and the clouds of smaller fish were so thick I almost felt that it was harder to swim through them. Jenna couldn’t stop talking about it when we hit the surface – it looked like she was going to cry.

We did a very different but beautiful dive in a haunting channel at the south end of Rinca island. There is a horseshoe shaped strait that separates a small island, Nusa Kode, from the larger Rinca. The channel is fairly cold – 24 degrees, and full of plankton. It means that the visibility is terrible, so things kind of pop out at you from the gloom. The small life down there was incredible. There are nudibranchs that have not been found anywhere else and are scientifically undescribed. There are sea apples – anemone-like animals (probably in the anemone family, certainly in their order) with a bulbous base and tree-like limbs that come in every combination of blue, green, red, purple, and yellow that you can think of. The limbs of the sea apple grasp plankton and are individually drawn into the mouth. It’s like a tree with a hollow at the top of the trunk that individually draws down and sucks in the branches to strip them of food, then pops them back up. Each branch is drawn down in turn, then released to find more food. It goes on, but you get the idea.

We cannot recommend it strongly enough to anyone who reads this and dives: Dive Komodo and Rinca – you won’t regret it. Just be sure to use a very professional shop – currents are tricky and that can mean that a great dive site yesterday will be crap today. You are often several hours from land, the radio doesn’t work everywhere, the nearest recompression chamber is in Bali, and that means that if all goes perfectly you are at least seven hours from serious help in the event of a major decompression event. So don’t have them. And you need to have oxygen onboard (Reefseekers did, a few of the other diveshops apparently don’t). We recommend Reefseekers – they are extremely safety conscious, ardent conservationists, thoroughly professional divers, and are building a resort on their private island which should be open next year, thereby considerably enhancing the Flores experience by limiting your exposure to Labuanbajo. We dove with a Finn who has been throughout Europe and the Red Sea, a Frenchman who has dived Australia , Tahiti, and much of the southern Pacific, and dive instructors who have dived Thailand , the Carribean, Egypt , and other parts of Indonesia . All agreed that Flores, Komodo, and Rinca contain many of the greatest sites they have ever seen.

How Hot is It? Eight degrees.

Eight degrees from the equator. That's damn hot. It's taken a while to get used to it, but Bali is an easy place to get used to.


We left Jogja over two weeks ago and landed in Bali. We immediately went north to spend a week in a time share resort in Candidasa, a small fishing village on Bali’s east coast. The week was a gift from Linda, Jenna’s mom, and we milked it to the fullest. This was by far the nicest hotel we’ve stayed in on the trip. We had our own bungalow with a pool outside our door. The ocean was 20 steps from the bed, as was the restaurant, and they even offered room service in case you couldn’t be bothered with the walk. Most importantly, it was our good fortune that the resort was on the same harbor as Gili Mimpang, Gili Tepekong, and Gili Biaha – some of the best dive sites in Bali. We used the resort’s dive company, and it was a 3-6 minute boat ride
(depending on the site) from our resort’s pier to the mooring lines for the nearest dive sites.

The diving was wonderful, although the currents were fierce at times. On one dive at Tepekong we ran into currents of about 5 knots at a depth of 10 metres as soon as we descended. There was no mooring line to hold and nothing to do – we kicked as hard as we could and were still moving backwards until we just held onto the reef to stay in place. There was no waiting it out, and after 12 minutes of furious work we had exhausted over half our air. We aborted the dive, and promised to try it again another day. Sure enough, two days later we headed back and were rewarded with calm (although very cold!) waters and a gorgeous reef.

Before we go any further, here’s the part you have to take on credit, because it is more than a fisherman’s tale: we saw both an oceanic sunfish (mola-mola) and a whale shark, and have no photos to prove it. The whale shark was a fast visit during a wall dive at Tulamben (a few seconds, nothing more), and we found the mola-mola on a camera test-dive at Gili Mimpang (I had just re-lubricated the o-ring on the camera case and wanted to take it down sealed and packed with tissue paper to ensure there were no leaks).

The mola-mola was really incredible. We were down at around 20 metres in a mild current with a visibility range of about 10 meters at Gili Mimpang, and the sun was in front of us, so that objects we approached were silhouetted. Our guide motioned up and to the left, and looking there I noticed that we were very slowly approaching a large and somewhat triangular black shape, almost like a rock overhang or pinnacle that I had somehow failed to spot earlier. Then I realized that although the pinnacle was getting bigger, I wasn’t moving. I was in the middle of one of those Obi-wan Kenobi “that’s no moon” moments, and before I could communicate with Ms. Skywalker at my side we were face to face with a mola-mola. It was huge – at least two meters tall, and a meter and a half long. There were full grown butterfly fish and moorish idols picking at the scales around its back, and they looked like pimples compared to the big fish. We spent a good 15 minutes hunkered down on a few pieces of coral watching the mola-mola do her thing. Mostly her “thing” consisted of hovering in place and letting the smaller fish scrape off whatever was growing on her. Occasionally she eye-balled us to be sure we were keeping a fair distance – I think that her eye was big and yellow – kind of like a shark eye.

In short, life in Candidasa was splendid. We were having one of those terrific Bali experiences that you here people talk about at dinner parties – the weather was stunning, the diving was terrific, we were in a quiet little backwater and being pampered every which way. There was even a massage table by the ocean where you could get a traditional Balinese massage ($7/hour) while listening to the waves break on the concrete pier below. We also rented a motorbike and took a spin up to the north coast to the village of Amed – another Balinese diving mecca. We checked out Eco-Dive, a great dive shop that we ended up diving with for a few days, and on our way home Jenna took the wheel as we took the long way home. The long way was a winding coastal rode that stretched out for nearly 50km up and down the hills of northeast valley. It was the Balinese equivalent of driving in the Gaspe peninsula. But instead of small Quebecois fishing villages around every beautiful bend of a well paved road, we had a narrow and bumpy road, often with no guard rail, small and quite poor Balinese fishing villages, and a surplus of mango trees laden down with ripe fruit. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to hop off the back of the bike and sneak into some farmer’s orchard to snag a ripe fruit. And to top it off, we had stunning views – of the ocean, of Mount Agung (Bali’s highest peak), of narrow valleys, terraced hillsides, and children bathing in the waterways by the roadside (apparently most of the villagers in Northeast Bali do not have running water in their homes).

After we left Candidasa the diving stayed as good, and perhaps even improved. We spent a few days in Amed and used them to dive in Amed, Tulamben, Gili Selang, and another small bay near Amed called Bunutan. Tulamben is famous as the site of the wreck of the Liberty, an American naval vessel that was torpedoed by the Japanese in WWII, beached, and then sank when it was pushed out to sea by a volcanic eruption in 1963. Today it is an amazing dive site – a wonderful artificial reef where I saw the biggest groupers and sweetlips I’ve ever seen – each was well over a metre long, and we have a picture of the sweetlips to prove it. But the sites up north are also great for finding the small and hard to find creatures that are the real divers treat – we saw ghost pipe fish that looked so much like coral you almost needed to poke them to see them. We found a crab so well camouflaged that I couldn’t find it whenever I looked away for even a split second – it was brown, slightly hairy, and looked so much like a hard coral that it took me 30 seconds to find the head even after the dive guide had pointed me right at it. We’ll try to post up a few pictures, but as always, connection speeds are quite slow.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Flores. We’ll use it as a home base to dive the islands of Komodo and Rinca. Hopefully our next update will have photos of Komodo dragons, and of hiking on Flores. With any luck we’ll hit two important sites. The first is a series of volcanic lakes in the mountains of western Flores that allegedly change color throughout the day as the chemicals in them react with sunlight. The second is the archeological site where Homo Floresiensis (“Flores Man”) was recently discovered. Apparently, a different hominid group was alive and doing quite well as recently as 13,000 years ago, until Homo Sapiens showed up on Flores. There’s a good article on them that we found in the Scientific American special issue on evolution that came out in August/September. If you have time and a curious mind, it’s a neat issue to get your hands on.

The gist of the Homo Floresiensis story is that they migrated to/were trapped on Flores long ago and evolved separately from other hominid groups. Like many animals above a certain size, they “dwarfed” when trapped on an island as a reaction to the ecological conditions of island life (I don’t know what these are exactly or why they tend to lead to dwarfish, but this is something I picked up from the Sci-Am special issue. It seems that animals below a certain size (roughly that of a rabbit) have the opposite reaction and grow to “giant” sizes for their genus. Thus the Flores man was full grown at 3.5 to 4 feet, and hunted pygmy elephants. If we can learn more on Flores then we’ll share. Unfortunately, I’m afraid we may get the chance to learn too much, and too close. In theory the archeological sites and their artifacts should be closed to all but official tours (if there even are any), but Indonesia is flagrantly corrupt, even to our naïve tourist eyes, and some specimens from the Flores digs have already disappeared. I hope to find a local museum, or archeology buff, or an official tour schedule, but am scared we will be offered fossils that we have no business laying our hands on.

We’ll report back in a while. We probably won't have decent internet access again until we reach Kuala Lumpur. After Flores we fly to Kuala Lumpur for a few days to renew our Indonesian visas, then we will spend a week in Jakarta with Sidney, Wayne, and Sam again. After that we'll head off to Hong Kong for a few days, then we're done, back in New York. Thanks for reading, we'll be in touch again in around two weeks.

Jakarta to Bali

We arrived in Jakarta on November 15th and were met in style by Wayne and Sidney, close relatives of Jenna. They were both working and babysitting their son Sam and his friend Jacob when we arrived, so they sent someone else to meet us at the airport. We had a blast at their house, even if it was only for a quick 15 hours or so. We even had bagels, which we’ve seen only through closed eyes since September.

We didn’t really have much of a chance to see Jakarta, since as mentioned above, we left no more than 15 hours after landing. First impressions: traffic, plenty of the combination shopping mall and condominium complexes that I’m beginning to think of as the standard ex-patriate pod - hermetically sealed against the developing world. You can live for days without leaving the mall/condo. The city is also poorer than Bangkok, or less committed to beautification. In Bangkok the slums are hidden, while in Jakarta they are clearly visible from elevated highways.

Very quickly we all hopped a plane to Jogjakarta, the second city of Java, once an important capital city and major trading centre. Today it is a busy city of several million people, but seems a little light on tourist attractions. It is, however, cheap and possessed of a number of good value restaurants. We were a little touristed-out anyway after Bangkok, and having two six year olds in tow takes a slightly dull sight and makes it unbearable. So we paid lip service to the idea of seeing important sites and made a fleeting visit to an old palace in the middle of the city. But we really spent most of our time splashing around in the water. Jenna and I checked into a modest and quite lovely hotel with a quaint little swimming pool, then immediately took a cab to go meet Sidney, Wayne, Sam and Jacob, along with Jacob’s dad, at the Hyatt Grand. The pool at the Hyatt made our hotel’s pool look like a puddle. The Hyatt pool had water slides, linked sub-pools, and enough space for a water-football game. We all had a great time.

The main attraction of our hotel was the owner’s collection of birds. We first noticed them at dawn. I was awakened by songbirds, close to the room. I went outside and discovered that there were nearly 100 different birds across the courtyard (and that the owner had considerately caged a small but quite loud bird in the starfruit tree in front of our room). Most of the birdcages were arranged in a penned and roofed area on the other side of the swimming pool. The owner looked to be a retired man with time on his hands, and I noticed that it took him nearly two hours just to feed his birds - every morning. In addition to parrots and talking birds, he had dozens of smaller songbirds that I couldn’t begin to describe. Each bird or pair had its own cage, most of them the old fashioned cylindrical kind that tapers to a ring at the top, suspended from the roof or supported from below. The birds must have made the man particularly happy, because two hours of pouring water and cutting papaya before you get to really start sweeping up the bird crap is not my idea of a good time. I feel that if you’re going to put that much energy into an animal, you should at least get a meal out of it in the end.

Which brings us to Bali. I’m currently writing from Ubud, a hill city in the middle of Bali. We are renting the upper floor of a villa here, and from our window this morning I had a lovely view of a flock of ducks waddling around and eating in our neighbour’s rice paddy. I am pleased to watch them waddle around and be cute, and content in knowing that they will soon be “bebek tutu” (smoked duck), a classic Balinese dish. Feeding ducks that will one day feed you: that I understand.

Thailand Wrap-up

We've had a few emails from people wondering why there haven't been any updates lately. The truth is we've been extremely lazy and consequently haven't had much to report. However, we've just arrived in Indonesia opening a new chapter in our adventures.

From Phuket we went to Koh Lanta a quiet island off the west coast of southern Thailand. We chose Lanta because of its proximity to the second best dive sites in Thailand. People told us it would be much more relaxed and less built up than the famous Koh Phi Phi where "The Beach" with Leonardo DiCaprio was filmed. The diving was definitely fantastic but after two days of that we decided to save our diving money for Bali and other parts of Indonesia. I lobbied for an extra day in Koh Lanta because the bed in our beachside bungalow was the most comfortable we had encountered in Southeast Asia. The Thais seem to have a special talent for finding the most uncomfortable matresses in the world.

From Koh Lanta we passed through Khao Sok National Park which lies between the east and west coasts of southern Thailand. Khao Sok is famous for guest houses comprised of treehouse bungalows and jungle treks. Unfortunately, we ended up staying in a bungalow that was firmly on the ground. Our big activities in Kao Sok were cruising down the river on inner tubes and following the jungle path from waterfall to waterfall. Mostly, we took it easy.

After 2 days in Khao Sok we headed to Koh Samui, an island off the east coast. In Samui we stayed in a bamboo hut that was less than 20 feet from where the waves lapped up onto the beach. This setting inspired true laziness. We spent about three days sitting on the beach reading and relaxing. We had a couple of nasty rain storms and we were surprised and happy to see how well our bamboo walls and thatched roof held up. That said, on our last night we opened the bathroom door to discover a cockroach taking an evening stroll across Edan's toothbrush.
We took in some serious entertainment in Samui. One night we attended a Thai boxing match which was actually comprised of 7 separate matches between opponents ranging in age from 5 to 25. Thai boxing is reputedly one of the most vicious forms of boxing in the world so it was pretty bizarre to see the little kids going at it. Definitely not something you'd see at home. On our last night we saw a fantastic Philipino cover band who played everything from U2 to Alanis Moriset and Metallica. They put on an incredible show including a number that involved balancing large bottles of liquor on their heads while performing various stunts with their instruments and random parts of their bodies set to the music of Pink Floyd's The Wall. Very entertaining.

From Samui we headed to Bangkok where our main objective was to get fitted for our custom-made suits. We took in a couple of movies - Thai movie theatres are really plush, like sitting in your living room with a massive screen. In an attempt to be good tourists we went to the famous Jim Thompson House and yet another temple but couldn't be bothered to stick around for very long.

We landed in Jakarta on the 15th and fell happily into the embrace of family hospitality. More later on our adventures in Yogjakarta with Sydney, Wayne and Sam (my cousins) .....

Warning: Explicit Content - Phuket Vegetarian Festival

We had the good luck to be in Phuket during the annual vegetarian festival. The event is a nine day festival running for the first nine days of the ninth month of the Chinese calendar, and honours nine emperor gods. The festival consists, in most of Thailand, of the public preparation and consumption of vegetarian foods. In Phuket and a few other cities it becomes far more complex, a ritual celebration involving acts of self mutilation and street processions. The local myth is that the festival rose to prominence some 200 years ago, when a wandering Chinese circus troop took ill in Phuket. Thinking that they had offended the nine emperor gods, they engaged in various painful rites of flesh-mortification to appease the heavenly ennead .

According to our guide book, a more likely explanation is that the ascetic traditions of neighbouring Indian communities migrated to Phuket. Regardless, it's a bloody and good show.

Our boat from the Similan Islands docked on Oct. 28th, and the festival ended Oct. 30th. The night of the 29th involved fire walking, but owing to a misprint in the english version of the info pamphlet, and given the paucity of directions, by the time we found the shrine they were raking up the coals. So we set out early the next morning to visit a different local shrine that was to be the starting point for one of the final street processions. We arrived a little early, just in time to see people lining up their cars and setting off fireworks as a prelude to the grand parade. Jenna was soon bored, and asked whether this mulling around was all we had come to see. As if on cue....

Similan Pictures

Here are a few pictures we took while on the liveaboard. The first is a shot I took of Jenna with a leopard shark. The shark is lying on the sea floor at 32 metres, and is about 2 metres long. The next shot is Sail Rock, a formation on one of the Similan Islands that has become rather famous around here. The third picture is a pretty high res shot of a sea feather, and the fourth is a macro shot of a staghorn coral at dusk, when the coral polyps come out to feed. The final picture is of the Octopus in Question, he that I communed with for so long on one of our dives.

Cuttlefish Mating

Here's a link to a video that Jenna shot on one of our last dives. It's quite choppy, but it's a rarely seen sight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4idVVJBOKY

Similan Islands

We left Koh Tao on what should have been a short trip to the Andaman coast island of Phuket. Instead it took 20 hours. We bought a “joint ticket” from a travel agency and got on an overnight boat that took us from the island of Koh Tao to the mainland town of Suratthani, where, in theory, the other part of our ticket should have kicked in and we should have been taken by minivan across peninsular Thailand to the bridge-connected island of Phuket.
But since we seemed to be the only travellers headed to Phuket, the minivan driver decided to save himself the trouble of taking us where we were going and just drive us to a different city (Krabi) with everyone else from the boat. It took another 8 hours to correct his “oversight”, but eventually we arrived in Phuket.

We found the diveshop we had contacted earlier – Calypso Divers – without any trouble. The next day we went out on their boat to the islands of Ratya Noi and Ratya Yai for a total of four dives. The diving was terrific – mild currents, good visibility, and we took some pretty good pictures.

While the diving is great, Phuket itself leaves much to be desired. The pizza is the best in Thailand, but that's pretty much the only thing it has going for it. It has Southern Thailand island pricing (take the Bangkok price and double it, at least) without island charm. It's loud, garish, and touristy. It's too pricey and commercial for backpackers, and too plebeian for the jet-set. It's the geographic equivalent of a fat, middle aged drunken white guy in a hawaiian shirt with his belly button showing.

Still, the diving makes up for it. We just spent 6 days on board a liveaboard dive boat – the Jonathan Cruiser. Owned by a Swede named Tomas and run by a Swedish instructor named Mattias and a Thai dive-master named Yay, the boat was a terrific time. We met four lovely English kids, a terrific Frenchman who is a phenomenally experienced diver and an old Bali hand (gave us two pages of tips and maps), and a very nice Finnish woman.

Dive boats are simple: sleep, eat, dive. When you're diving you burn a lot of energy keeping warm. Water is a very efficient conductor of heat when compared to air, so keeping your body at 37 degrees even when the water around you is a balmy 30 degrees still takes quite a great deal of energy. The consequence is that you can eat big meals often, pretty much after each dive. We had pounds of eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, buckets of thai food and western dishes for lunch and dinner, and even a snack in between.

For the divers out there, this is what diving is meant to be. Great vis, great currents, phenomenal macro life, and even a few pelagics. It's one of those situations where you don't know where to look, you keep spinning in ecstatic circles, taking it all in at the same time. The best stuff is all between 10 and 30 metres, so no technical diving skills are needed to access the best sites. The deepest we hit was 32.5 metres, and that was just to check out a shark. We did four dives at Richelieu Rock (use google earth), and I think it's the best site I've ever dived. Despite seeing no whale sharks, no rays, and only one leopard shark (and it was resting at bottom) the diving was still phenomenal. On our only wreck dive of the trip I spent a good 15 minutes bonding with an octopus at 20 metres. I looked at him, he looked at me, and there we were. For quite a while. We also managed to arrive in the middle of cuttlefish mating season, we've seen a few of them and Jenna took a great video of what appears to be a male humping a female while two more females hover and watch. And we've been told that there is only better to come – Bali, Flores, Komodo, and Rinca are apparently good enough to make you cry.

For those of you who don't dive, I can't even begin to describe how great it is. The pictures won't do it justice, it's one of those things you just have to do to understand. As noted above, we did take some half decent pictures. Unfortunately, posting them is proving difficult. We'll try to post a few more small ones, but the big stuff will probably have to wait until we get home and have oodles of time. We'll try to post a few small pictures now, and perhaps get the cuttlefish video onto Youtube. I'll update again with links as soon as this is all done.

Diving in Koh Tao

After a brief interlude in Bangkok - during which we scoured the city for a good tailor and ordered several custom-made suits – and a rather unpleasant overnight bus, a three hour wait and then a four-hour boat ride, we arrived on the island of Koh Tao to begin our scuba adventure. Koh Tao is located off the eastern shore of southern Thailand in the Gulf of Siam. It is a beautiful little island catering entirely to tourists and almost exclusively to scuba divers. Scuba shops are as ubiquitous as restaurants here and conversations are filled with stories of shark, turtle and barracuda sightings.

Our plan for Koh Tao was to brush up our scuba skills, get comfortable with our new equipment and relax. All accomplished.

The beaches are pure white and the water is clear turquoise. We settled into a comfortable bungalow on the beach and signed up for some classes with a very reputable dive shop. We’ve been diving here for 4 days. In that time, I’ve received my advanced diving certification (bringing my level up to Edan’s) and Edan has been certified with a deep-diving specialty (he’s now certified to go down 40m while I’m only certified as deep as 30m), and he took an underwater photography class using the special case that accompanies our camera. Some of his first good shots are posted here. No joke, he actually took that shark picture – we saw lots of sharks and they were quite friendly. I highly recommend that you download the photos to your own computer so that you can open them in a lager screen. They look much cooler that way.

The visibility has been fantastic so we’ve seen some incredible stuff down there, including the sharks, blue-spotted sting rays and moray eels! We even did a night dive (this was a required element of my course) and got to see all the nocturnal fish and feeding coral that you don’t see during the day. All in all, a magical experience.

Now we’re off to the western coast where we’ve arranged a live-aboard dive cruise beginning on Oct. 23 (ending the 29th). We’ll be sailing around the Similan Islands and enjoying some of the best diving in the world.

Hope everyone is doing well! Love from both of us.

The Genocide

We’ve arrived in Phnom Penh , and the city is one of those strange and contradictory places. Not if you walk in and know nothing – then it’s just a typical Southeast Asian city – great food, loud, lively, dirty, and often garish. But the life, the neon, the noise, and the bustle are all juxtaposed against what we come to see as tourists.

Tuol Sleng, a torture center for the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979 is perfectly unobtrusive except for the barb wire perimeter. It’s an old high school converted to a prison camp, and so it is smack in the middle of an old residential neighbourhood. Which makes it so much more jarring to go from the hordes of touts, beggars, and cabbies all clamoring for your money and walk into a pit of horrors.

Jenna and I were both shaken. This is a “fresh” genocide – the cab drivers and waiters and shop owners are either old enough to have lived through it, or to be the equivalent of our parents generation – born right after the Holocaust. And the questions I want to ask of strangers but don’t dare are almost overwhelming. They are the same questions that I have pondered since I was young and first learned what the Holocaust was. But here there are different questions too – there is no consistent Other in the Cambodian genocide, which complicates the normal dichotomies.

I don’t want to write too much about Tuol Sleng, or about the killing fields at Chouen-Ek. We’ve seen the mass graves, the piles of skulls. We walked on paths with scraps of clothing and white bone erupting through the dirt at our feet. It took a very long time to get through Tuol Sleng because we stopped and looked at every picture. I couldn’t do otherwise, it was the least we owed these people. There were thousands of pictures.

Angkor

There are really no words to describe the wonder of Angkor. We spent three days exploring the ruins of the Khmer Empire, built between the 9th and 13th centuries, the most famous of which is Angkor Wat. When the Khmer Empire collapsed its cities were abandoned. Some of its temples remained in use until 100-200 years ago, but many of the sites were neglected completely. European archeologists began restoration of the sites in the 19th century. Although many of the structures are in ruins, some of the carvings are in incredibly good condition.

Out of the 15 odd temples we visited over the three days, I think we spent the most time studying the bas-reliefs on the inner galleries of Angkor Wat and exploring the temple of Ta Phrom. Ta Phrom has been completely taken over by the jungle. Immense trees grow right out of the stone walls while their muscular roots twist through every crack and crevice. The jungle is simultaneously destroying and supporting the ruins. We found it impossible to comprehend how such marvels could be neglected and forgotten for so many centuries. Their beauty is striking as is the thought of how many human and material resources went into to building them.

Although it rained for the entire first day and part of the second, we managed to catch one magnificent sunrise over Angkor Wat. The rain was a bit of a downer but it also meant that we were battling fewer tourists along the way.

Cambodia is a country of marked contradictions. Siem Reap, the city closest to Angkor and used as a base by tourists who come to visit the ruins is jarring against the backdrop of this ancient marvel. Every hotel and restaurant has appropriated the names of Angkor and other major temples and sites. Their signs are garish and overwhelming, lit up in neon with their staff bombarding you for your business at every turn. It felt almost filthy. But, then, who am I to judge a people whose country has been broken so many times and who have no choice but to focus on surviving from day to day. They do what they need to do and the signs of (slow) development are everywhere. Construction is rampant and the people are incredibly enterprising.

Signs for the People’s Party of Cambodia lining the streets are ubiquitous. Once in a while we saw the sign of one of the opposition parties but these were few and far between. Our guide explained that most people do not support the People’s Party and do not give permission for the party’s signs to be mounted in front of their houses and businesses. Nevertheless, it keeps winning elections as a result of its support from the Vietnamese.

Our bus ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was actually hilarious. They played what we determined were sing-a-long TV shows, karaoke style. There was also some bizarre Cambodian sketch comedy which the lady behind us seemed to be enjoying immensely. The driver honked the horn for the entire five hour journey – we’re not sure what at. That’s what we get for taking the $6 bus rather than the $9 one. It’s a good thing we didn’t go for the $3.50 option.

(Apologies, internet connections are slow here so no pictures for now)