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)

An experiment

Many of you have asked to see pictures. Given the slow connection times in internet cafes over here, this has proved more difficult than we expected. So, here are three for your viewing pleasure. The first two were taken during our two-day drift down the Mekong and the third is a view of the Lahu village where we spent the night on the treacherous trek. We hope to upload more as soon as possible.

Everything moves slower in Luang Prabang

We've been enjoying Luang Prabang and the surrounding areas for a few days now. The city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, notable for its colonial French architecture and beautiful temples (wats). The downtown historic core of Luang Prabang is situated at the confluence of the Mekong and Khan rivers. So it's a rather thin and long city consisting primarily, from a tourist's point of view, of a riverside avenue, a main street, and a few lateral streets and alleys that branch off the two big streets in either direction. The town is quiet in comparison to Thailand, even the hawkers in the night market wait patiently until you approach them and show sustained interest.

And the food, as everywhere else we've been, is just terrific. Good baguettes with vegetables and cheese, tuna, pork, or egg are available for no more than $1. You can get a filling and vegetarian (but rather greasy and bland) meal in "food alley" for about 50 cents. If you're willing to pay $5-6 for a meal, you're eating very well indeed.

Besides "chilling out", the primary activities for a tourist in Luang Prabang include buying handmade cotton and silk textiles, elephant riding, visiting the local waterfalls (friends have told us that they are just stunning, and we've scheduled a visit for today, so hopefully they will feature in the next update), and of course, trekking.

Needing to rid ourselves of the memory of our last "trek", we signed up for one here, and spent the past two days in a rural district no more than two hours drive from the city. This trek was worlds apart from the Pai experience. Our guides, Sompon and Ni, were young, energetic, fun, and communicative. And the trek itself was slow-paced and lovely. The whole thing happened in a river valley, with stunning mountainscapes as the backdrop for everything and a slow moving river below.

Interlude - Apropos of Landscapes

When we find the time and a decent connection, I want to post an album of landscape shots - there is a fantastic landscape ecology story to be told about Laos. We have tons of pictures of natural resource use - logging, teak plantations, fishing, slaughtering animals by the riverbank, slash and burn agriculture on the hillsides, and other shots besides. One of the more interesting moments on the slow boat for me came when I sat next to someone who commented on how wild the mountains looked. I couldn't help think that they looked anything but - it was a completely human managed landscape. The ridges of the mountains look relatively untouched, complete with mixed hardwoods, but from the ridgelines to the river it's all human intervention. I grilled our guides on land use policy - the short version is that in river valleys with any villages, outside of conservation areas (and sometimes in them) the land is all in use for agriculture, hunting, and logging. Despite the communist past most land is owned privately, not by village councils (of course, this is not coming from authoritative sources) and farmers practice slash and burn on a three year cycle. In areas that have been fallow for two or more years bamboo takes over pretty quickly, and when you look at the mountains you notice definite habitat patches in very clearly human-made shapes. The bamboo, of course, is also used as a building material and food source. In and near the villages (on the rivers) farmers plant rice and small teak plantations. That seems to be the main purpose of the forestry and agronomy schools that we see everywhere.

Back to the Trek

The first day involved an afternoon bike ride (great, except for the last half hour when my seat broke and I did a very awkward last few k's). The roads were rutted and rocky, but the trekking company chose a good stretch of road with quite a few downhills and only a few bad uphills. They didn't provide helmets so we couldn't cut totally loose, but we still hit some pretty wild speeds. We stopped halfway through for a nice lunch in a local Khmu (pronounced Ka-moo) village. According to our guides there are three major ethnic groups in this part of Laos: the Lao, the Khmu, and the Hmong. We saw villages of all three types on our trek.

After our ride we arrived at a large Lao village that housed the local boarding school, which drew students from many surrounding villages, including Khmu and Hmong villages. The first thing we discovered, as we biked in over a bridge, is that the villagers had built small dams in the river to create run-of-river micro hydro installations. The next day I went down to inspect the small turbines and discovered that none of them were operational (which explained the diesel generator we had heard the night before). I was hoping for an explanation but never got it. I can't help but wonder if it's not just another failed development project, and why this one failed. Oh well, the grid is scheduled to get to the village next year.

And the villagers didn't seem to mind. When we arrived there was already a small drinking party underway. Some friends had dropped by from another village so a family whose house was located 10 metres from our "guest house" had us over to drink lao whisky and eat pork cracklings and grilled fish that they had just caught, seasoned with galangal and ginger. It was terrific! After some drinking we went to inspect the local school. 80:1 student/teacher ratio, no lighting in any classroom, and the kids couldn't care less - they were having a fantastic time and seemed to be learning either algebra or physics, hard to tell from a cursory look at the blackboard when it's written mostly in Lao. We then went back and had a great dinner, and slept soundly.

I woke up in the morning and swore I could hear a pig screaming. I went outside, and sure enough, a pig was being slaughtered just down the way from us.

STOP HERE IF YOU DON'T HANDLE GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS WELL.

The pig, a big 50 kilo sow, had its feet bound and was being held down flat by two men, one of whom was also pressing a large bamboo pole into its middle. By the time I got there another man had already slit its throat and was draining the blood into a blue bucket, which he swirled continually with his left hand while occasionally widening the throat incision with the knife in his right. When most of the blood had been collected they left the pig to go through its final spasms. A metre away they had a large pot of water and leaves boiling away over a cooking fire. When the pig was quite dead they took a few thin metal spoons, and ladling boiling water over its skin they began to scrape away all of its hair. This took about 15 minutes. After all the water had been used and the hair was nearly all gone, the pot was removed from the fire and the pig was thrown on top of the pot-stand, to singe away the remaining hairs (and presumably make the skin easier to work with. After a 15 minute singeing session the pig was trussed up on a sturdy bamboo pole and the three man slaughtering team moved down to the river. At the river we watched as they scraped down the carcass a final time before slitting it open from belly to ribs and extracting all the internal organs. The small intestine was cut off first, and its contents emptied into the river. After flushing the waste out of the intestine one man cut a thin bamboo rod which he ran through the entire length of the tube to ensure it was clean. Then this procedure was repeated with the large intestine. The whole spectacle attracted hundreds of fish, which nipped at the intestines, the spilled waste, and the small bits of flesh or whole glands that the butchers threw downstream. The rest of the internal organs were also cleaned and the head was severed. The remaining carcass was cut in two and then the meat was brought up to the women for cooking. Unfortunately, when cutting off the head one of the men had noticed small white ovals, looking very much like eggs, throughout the brain and in some parts of the pigs flesh. When the women saw the eggs they had a quick conference. Our guide explained that the pig was diseased, and that they would not eat it. All of the meat was thrown out, and then another pig was butchered, following the same method. This time we didn't stick around.

GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION IS OVER. COMMENCE READING.

After breakfast we headed out for a lovely and slow day of rafting. The river is quite low as the rainy season is just ended, so the most we could hope for were some class 2 rapids. Basically, Jenna and I got splashed a few times, but essentially we spent the day drifting, sleeping, and swimming our way down a gorgeous river. Time was moving as slow as it could, and it looked like little had changed around the river in a very long time. Old women were making bamboo fences to keep water buffaloes out of their vegetable gardens. Young boys were fishing with hand woven nets and trapping shrimp and crabs with traps made of woven bamboo. Even the boats we saw were being made largely by hand - the boards were cut with a two man saw. With the exception of some steel knives and one electric sander, the entire process was done as it had no doubt been done 200 years earlier. The whole thing was magic. We eventually pulled out of the river in the afternoon, and headed back to Luang Prabang. Fortunately, it's a city that works on slow time too, so it wasn't much of a disruption to head back in. Now we're here and luxuriating again - electricity, a great shower, and internet cafes. Hope you've enjoyed reading, expect another update here, or from Cambodia.

We've made arrangements to fly from here to Cambodia (via Bangkok) on Sunday. Our next stop will be in Siem Reap to allow us to visit Angkor wat, ancient and ruined home of the Khmer empire.

Next time check for a sink

For those of you who don't know, the best way to get from Northern Thailand into Laos is by crossing the Mekong and then taking a two day slow boat to a wonderful Laotian city called Luang Prabang. We had heard horror stories about the hard wooden slats used as seats on the slow boats. However, after reviewing our options in terms of time and money, the slow boat was the best way to go.

We crossed the Mekong border from Chiang Khong on the Thai side to Huay Xia on the Lao side at about 8am and found our boat shortly after that. All in all, it wasn't as bad as everyone said. There were some small cushions and there was enough space to move around comfortably. We figure this has to do with travelling in low season - we each got a bench to ourselves for the entire journey. The scenery along the Mekong is absolutely fantastic and it's quite a wonderful feeling to cruise along reading a book with the wind in your hair. The boat is covered from rain and sun but open on the sides.

Halfway through the journey the boat stops for the night in a town called Pak Beng. Since we were tired and hungry on arrival we chose the first guest house that seemed reasonable. Big Mistake. The room cost about $4, which turned out to be $4 too much.

After dropping our stuff and heading out for dinner (a lovely Indian meal, it turned out), we returned for a shower. I reached for my toothbrush and went to brush my teeth only to discover that our dank bathroom lacked a sink. I went to check the shared bathroom facilities (we has splurged on the extra 50 cents for a private bathroom). Low and behold, no sink. There was actually no sink in the entire place!

Ok, no problem, we thought, just brush your teeth in the shower. Unfortunately, the shower would be better described as a drip than a shower. After cleaning ourselves to the fullest extent possible under the circumstances, we surveyed the bed and the creepy crawlies that inhabited the room with us. It was at this point that we decided to brandish our handy mosquito tent, generously provided by a couple of our friends as a very practical wedding gift. This way, we figured we'd be protected from anything flying or crawling around the room as well as from anything living in the matress. This would be our flealess bag inside a true fleabag.

We awoke the next morning to the now familiar sound of roosters. We couldn't get out fast enough and were among the first people on the boat and ready to go.

The remainder of the journey was beautiful and peaceful. We arrived in the wonderful city of Luang Prabang and decided to splurge on an upscale guest house. For a mere $20 we got a room that even our parents would have enjoyed. We also had an outstanding Lao meal for $13. Ahhhhh, all is right with the world.

More on Luang Prabang as we explore it further.

Post Script to The Trek

In retrospect, it was an amazing experience. In particular, the trek gave us the opportunity to meet and get to know some fantastic people. Emily, Jarrad, Ullie and Evelyn were amazing and always kept a cool head. We were really lucky to spend so much time with Emily and Jarrad who lived up to reputation and, with a beer in hand, took everything in stride like true Aussies.