Koh Tao

When I first visited Thailand in November I went to the islands of Samui, Pha Ngan and Tao. (Koh means island.) Like Little Red Riding Hood I found Samui to be horribly over-commercialized, Pha Ngan to be a grubby backpacker haven and Tao to be just right.

It's completely given over to tourism, but has a mellow, laidback feel. There's a small road, basically a glorified sidewalk, that runs between the main road and the beach. Most of the dive shops and guest houses can be found along the 'yellow brick road'.



Motorbikes and motorized carts use it, which is a nuisance, but otherwise it makes for a pleasant stroll when you're trying to choose a dive shop or looking for a place to eat.

Koh Tao is also one of the premier diving destinations in Southeast Asia. When I was here last year it was raining and the visibility was poor, but I was looking forward to diving so I went anyway. I aggravated my old back injuries and had to spend a week recuperating in Bangkok.

No such problems, this time around. The weather was hot and sunny. The diving was great. The beaches on all these islands are surprisingly narrow, though. This is the main beach, Hat Sairee, at low tide.



That hump in the distance is Koh Nang Yuan. It's the most gorgeous beach I've ever seen, so it deserves its own post.

Here is the "longtail" boat with our gear which ferried us to the dive boat, in the distance on the left. Even at high tide the water is so shallow you can walk nearly all the way to the boat.



The dive sites were great, but horribly overcrowded at times.



When I dove here last year I went with Ban's Diving Resort, which I didn't care for at all. This time I went with a smaller outfit called Scuba Junction, which I liked a lot. Our divemaster was a local girl named Kay. If you dive on Koh Tao I would recommend you dive with her.

I'm a bit biased because she saved my life. Well, maybe not my life, but she did save me from a berserk titan triggerfish. These fish are territorial, and mean. This one was close to three feet long and seriously pissed off.

What you need to know about triggerfish is how they feed. They bite off chunks of coral, sort out the chewy parts, and then spit out the rest. You do not want to get bitten by a fish that eats rock.

He came after Kay and I. As divemaster its her responsibility to make sure that I make it back to the surface with all of my flesh intact. He came at us several times. We fended him off with our fins. She gestured for me to get behind her. I set chivalry aside for a few moments and obeyed.

He went away. We swam off.

He came back. It took several minutes to finally get him to go away. Topside we talked about the encounter. She said she's been diving in those waters all her life and never seen a triggerfish that aggressive. Normally they just want to scare you off their territory.

On a less stressful note, as required by blogger bylaws, here is the obligatory sunset shot.

A rainy day in Thailand...

... is better than a sunny day at home, I suppose, but it's still a rainy day. After almost two months in Nepal I was looking forward to a few relaxing days in the sun on a beach in Thailand.

I'm still looking forward to it.

I planned my arrival in Thailand after the monsoon season. But the southeastern peninsula has its own, special, late season. It apparently begins the day I arrive.

There are three islands off the southeastern coast that I wanted to check out for different reasons. Ko Samui is the southernmost, the biggest and the most developed. I did get some decent weather there but the place is 'touristy' in the worst sense. For instance, it's possible walk the entire length of the town of Chaweng in a leisurely 30 minutes and yet there were dozens of idle taxi cabs lined up along the sidewalk.

On the good side, I was able to satisfy my Starbucks craving. They had their holiday promotions in gear and were featuring their seasonal drinks. Christmas carols were playing. On November 15. In a country that is 95 percent Buddhist.

But if the tourist nonsense gets to be too much you just escape to the beach, right? Not so fast. It's about as wide as dental floss. This is low tide:



You can see the businesses form a solid wall along the beach. In the foreground is a sign for one of the massage parlors on the beach. The ratio of massage parlors to grains on the sand on the beach is approximately 2:1. At high tide the beach disappears completely and the surf rolls over the steps of the resorts. All the chairs, umbrellas and sandwich boards are pulled off the beach so they don't float away.

I went to the other extreme, a beach called Hat Lamai where -- get this -- there are only three 7-11's, one McDonald's and not one Starbucks! How do people survive there? I only stayed there two nights. I was afraid that without a Frappucino I might resort to cannibalism or find "The Heart of Darkness".

The horror. The horror. Oh, and with an extra shot of espresso and a cranberry scone, please.

I stayed in a cute little bungalow right on the beach with what would have been a stellar view on a sunny day.



I then took the shuttle to Ko Pha Ngan, the island most famous for being the home of the legendary Full Moon Parties. Young folks come from all over the world to dance all night Hat Rin (Sunset Beach) fueled by their substances of choice, all officially illegal but readily available. I made a point to avoid the full moon. I did get the day after the Half Moon Party. You've got to give them credit for milking the moon for all it's worth.

This is the beach after a monster storm and a monster party.



Locals spent the entire day clearing the beach of storm debris and party trash. In the background are bungalows with boulder-front views. The beach was nice, but I had received dozens of recommendations to check the place out and it fell short of the island paradise it had been built up to be.

The weather was terrible but luckily the restaurants all have big screen TVs and show movies. So I watched a bunch of 'Family Guy' episodes and a bootleg of 'Tropic Thunder'.

(Memo to Hollywood:
On behalf of the human race and probably some extraterrestrial intelligences as well, I beg you: Please stop putting Jack Black in movies.
Thank you.
P.S. I am still awaiting responses to my previous correspondences regarding Colin Farrell and Nicolas Cage.)

If you're a 'Friends' fan, go to Ko Pha Ngan. Now. It's all 'Friends', all the time. I stood in the street -- and by that I mean the only street -- and was able to see four different episodes playing simultaneously in four different restaurants. Wacky hijinks ensued in every direction.

Getting around Thailand has been astonishingly easy. I just happened to arrive Bangkok in the middle of a royal funeral. The king's sister died in January but they were kind enough wait until I got here to shut down the city and lay her to rest. That was nice of them.

But even in the midst of the funeral getting to the islands was a breeze. There's a company that arranges door-to-door service. My guest house arranged a taxi to the bus station, a bus to the port, a ferry to Ko Samui and a taxi to my guest house for about $30.

The company has fast catamaran shuttles they use to get people back and forth between the islands. The shuttles each have a snack bar and show movies. Seats are comfortable and the staff is efficient and professional.

All of which counts for doodly-squat in a monsoon. The hour or so it took to get from Ko Pha Ngan to where I am now, the island of Ko Tao, was like something out of a made-for-TV movie.

Fear Ferry!

The staff simply could not hand out barf bags and tissue fast enough. Easily two-thirds of the people on the boat were sick. Women were crying hysterically and men were curled up on the deck in their own vomit.

In retrospect, yours truly should not have had that last bottle of Singha beer at the restaurant the previous night while watching 'Team America: World Police' for the 50th time. I unintentionally ended up re-enacting the scene from the movie where Gary vomits continuously for almost a minute. By the end of the trip I had purged my digestive system so completely -- two bags' worth -- I thought I was going to throw up the soles of my shoes.

It should be noted that we were perfectly safe and dry on a fairly state-of-the-art vessel, but this vessel just happened to be navigating some choppy seas. I think if there had been any danger the crew probably would have paused the movie. Even as I was puking my guts out I found it funny that the retching was so loud it was drowning out the subtler plot points of what seemed to be a straight-to-video teen comedy starring Jack Bauer's daughter from "24".

I arrived on Ko Tao the kind of weather that inspires men to build arks. I had planned on spending the morning wandering around comparing prices on guest houses and scuba shops. Instead I went to the first place I saw.

I took a half-day scuba refresher course to make sure I still remembered how to put on my gear, clear my mask underwater and um, you know, not drown and whatnot, and then went on two fun dives in the afternoon. It was great to be back in the water. There were lively reefs with millions of fish. But it was raining and visibility was poor.

So I'm in Bangkok to make arrangements to move on. I've already done the top three items on my "to do" list for the trip: See Mount Everest, walk on the Great Wall and ride the Trans-Siberian. It's time go to Cambodia and check off number four: Angkor Wat.

The protests here have stranded thousands of travelers but I'll be traveling overland so hopefully I won't be affected.

Scuba diving in Siberia

I finally got to see Lake Baikal today. Here it is from the town of Listvyanka.



Not only did I see the lake from the top looking down, I saw it from the bottom looking up. I went scuba diving.

I knew I wouldn't see much, and I figured the cold would be excruciating, but I wanted to be able to say I went diving in the world's deepest lake.

Baikal is famous for how clear its water is. People get vertigo because they can see the bottom when the water is quite deep. But there was a storm yesterday, which stirred up the water, and we didn't go far from shore. This is an artist's rendering (mine) of what I saw:



We wore thick wet suits and the water near the shore wasn't terribly cold. My guide said it was 15 degrees, or about 59 degrees Fahrenheit. That's cold, but not unbearable. We eventually got down to about 20 meters below the surface. To do so we passed through a thermocline, a layer of much colder water.

Using my keen scientific intellect I estimated the water temperature there to be about 875 degrees below zero, but my guide said it was actually 5 Celsius, or about 41 Fahrenheit. That's still pretty cold.

The night I left Moscow it was quite chilly. That was the only time on the trip thus far that I have had to wear a jacket. It's still quite warm in Siberia. I took this self-portrait before suiting up to go in the water, and I was perfectly comfortable in shorts and no shirt.

Unorthodox travel methods

One of the hassles of traveling, anywhere, is getting to and from the airport. The airport in Bocas del Toro is pretty convenient, all in all. My hostel is five blocks away from the airport.

The picture below was taken from the main intersection in town on Isla Colon. Three blocks away you can see a gate. Beyond that gate is the runway. The young men walking in that direction are going to the airport so they can be there when the next flight arrives. They´re touts, people who 'help' arriving tourists finding lodging, tours, etc.




I finished my Advanced Open Water scuba certification today. I went on my first night dive last night, which I can´t say I really enjoyed. It was pretty spooky, and I burned through my air pretty quickly. Today I went on my first shipwreck dive, which was more to my liking. I saw a school of squid, maybe 200 or so, the largest group my instructor has ever seen.

I have 2 days left in Central America. Saturday I leave the island for Panama City, then fly to Marrakech, Morocco the following day. As tough as it can be communicating in a Spanish-speaking country, at least I can sound out the words. In Morocco I won't even be able to read the alphabet. I bought a book-CD combination for Arabic so that I can at least say the key phrases. Then I need to do the same in Russian. And Mongolian. And Mandarin. And Thai...

You can only get to Bocas by boat or plane. I flew in, but I´ve heard that the boat ride to-from Changuinola is beautiful, through canals used by the old banana plantations. It´s $6 for an hour boat ride. So I looked into what it would cost to fly from there as compared to here. The cost is the same. And the flight from Changuinola connects here (after a 15-minute flight). So I´m taking the boat to Changuinola, then flying back here, then flying to Panama City. Not the way I would have planned it!

Bocas del Toro

I took a puddle jumper flight from Panama City to Bocas del Toro, a group of islands on the Caribbean near the Costa Rican border. It's supposed to be a good, cheap place to take scuba classes, so tomorrow I hope to start an Advanced Open Water class, which will certify me to dive deeper, explore wrecks, and dive at night, which I have to admit kinda gives me the willies.

This is the view from the balcony of my hostel. It's a dorm room for $10 per night. I've only been here a few hours but those real estate signs are tempting...

Goodbye, Utila

It's official: I'm a scuba diver! I finished class yesterday and I have to say I enjoy it a lot more than I expected to. I'm considering taking another course in Bocas del Toro in Panama, but we'll see.

Utila has the coolest restaurant I've ever seen, called The Jade Seahorse. There's an upstairs bar called the Tree Tanic, and it's like a treehouse. Over 17 years the owner has built further and further back so that it's now a huge complex of fairytale architecture and art. It's like a combination of Neverland, Ewok village and Rivendell. The decor reminds me very much of the Gaudi buildings in Barcelona.






This is the view from the deck of the dive shop where I took my class. You can see the mountains of the Honduras coast in the background. It's been a great week here. I expect I'll come back in the future to dive with whale sharks, since I just missed the season this time. Tomorrow I leave for Copan, a Mayan ruins site in western Honduras, and then I'll head south to Costa Rica.

Utila

This is the main street on Utila, which they've torn up to install a new "sewer system," which is a fancy name for plastic pipe under the concrete. You'll notice the internet cafe (where I am now) says Caye Caulker, which is actually in Belize. Who knows...



The first night we were here we went to perhaps the coolest restaurant I've ever been to (pix to come) where a couple guys from the dive shop were celebrating being certified as instructors. The "final exam" is the snorkel test, where they put on a snorkel and random people dump random liquids down the snorkel and they're supposed to chug as much as they can. I don't know what poor Marco here was trying to drink but it looked like mouthwash and smelled like Windex. I think I'll skip that class.