Remember the woman I taught to spin in the bus station on the way to Ko Chang, and gave my spare drop spindle to? Well, I sent her some of the acrylic roving Mr. Wu gave me, and just got an email from her daughter–she wants to send me a return gift, and/or start a correspondence. Isn’t that cool? You never know what will happen. I have no idea what she does, but anyone who’s interested in craft is (by definition) interesting, especially if they live in Thailand. 🙂

(Mary Beth–that was the big pink whorl with the holes in it, if you remember making that one. Congrats–it’s now with a new spinner, somewhere in Asia.)

Nothing too exciting today–mostly resting and relaxing, and trying to get the world to stop swaying. Said goodbye to Mike (my instructor) and Celso (?), our Spanish divemaster–they’re both going back out on diving trips today. Mike was very sorry to be leaving and i was sorry to see her go–she and I are going to try staying in touch, and I may come back here for Christmas. We got along really well, I’m sorry I didn’t get more time to hang out with her.

(Yeah, yeah, I think she’s cute, but we actually get along quite well: she’s had a very interesting life, and we’re quite similar, personality-wise. (For example, a guy was picking a fight with her S.O. in the bar and the two of us very nearly decked him.) Besides, we bonded over the folding of an origami sea turtle. I’m amazed how fast she picked it up–most people are (sorry) hopeless when it comes to origami, but she “got” it almost immediately. I’m almost tempted to try teaching her the blue crab, all 93 steps of it. I just wish I’d memorized the lionfish before coming out here, but you really can’t have everything.)

Also had another very interesting and long conversation with Brian, the Canadian guy in the office, on the sociology of Silicon Valley, Zen Buddhism, and Thailand. He’d loaned me his favorite book on Zen Buddhism, which I liked a lot and actually spent the afternoon photocopying. Too bad I’m not going by Japan, it would be interesting to take a look at the philosophy of Zen, and compare/contrast it with Theravada and Tibetan Buddhism.

It’s fascinating looking at the different interpretations springing up from the same base texts–Osho’s Zen interpretation of “no self, no ego” is totally different from, say, Wat Suon Mok’s perspective. (Osho is something of a hedonist, and Suan Mok is ascetic.) Both are quite different from actual Thai practice, which seems to be a mix of Buddhism, a little Hinduism, and animism. For example, every structure in Thailand (boat, house, hotel, etc.) has its own little spirit house, which looks like a miniature temple crossed with a birdhouse (it’s mounted on a pole like a birdhouse). Daily offerings are given to the spirits to keep them happy, and they’re given their own house to keep them from living in the house proper. This, needless to say, has nothing to do with Buddhist philosophy per se, but is a lovely tradition.

(They even had it on the boat: the bow of the boat was decorated with an elaborate fresh-flower arrangement every morning, and a glass of water and a little dish of food was set out for the boat spirits. laugh if you like, but it sure beats fuzzy dice, the American alternative. I’m not sure what spirits like fuzzy dice or air fresheners, but I suspect they’re evil gremlins. 😉 )

Buses in Thailand also have lots and lots of floral offerings to bus and road spirits–usually plastered all over the dashboard and the rearview mirror. Unfortunately, in the case of buses it makes a great deal of sense: most of the drivers are strung out on crystal meth (so they can stay up all night and drive faster), and they drive at insane speeds, overtake around blind curves, and so on. Accidents, including fatalities, are quite common. Nonetheless it’s still a pretty nice way to travel, as long as you steadfastly ignore whatever the bus driver is doing with oncoming traffic. Traffic in Thailand mostly resembles a continuous game of chicken–the bigger vehicle has the right of way no matter what lane it’s supposed to be in or what the “normal” flow of traffic would be. The net effect is that the bus drives in whatever lane it wants to (including oncoming-traffic lanes), and smaller cars have to swerve out of its way. They don’t always succeed…I’m surprised SUVs aren’t more popular here.

I’m not doing my cycling training on any highway in Thailand, that’s for sure. Besides, I’ve already decided to do ALC2 on an elephant. (If only to watch the sweep vehicles try to “sag” an elephant. Stephen, you *are* getting that 18-wheeler sag wagon for me, right? 😉 )

Tien

(Sketchy notes are taking longer to fill out than expected. hopefully I can get them down before I forget everything…)

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11/16 (Saturday) Well, we’re off to the Similans…It’s rather a nice boat, 36 meters long, with an upper deck (kitchen, food, lounge) and a lower one (cabins, dive deck, saloon/TV room). By some miracle, I’ve been assigned the only single–everyone else is sharing. I’m glad I have it; me and one other person in a 30-sq-ft space might very well result in a single by the time I got back. (In fact I suspect they put me in it because I’m the only novice on the dive, so they decided to spare the more experienced divers from rooming with me. Or maybe I just got lucky.)

Nothing much to report, except that the showers are lukewarm (but not cold!). Trying to read the screen with the ship moving is giving me a headache, so I think I’ll quit now.

11/17 (Sunday)

Jesus. The Similans are Paradise. It’s amazing.

Where to start? Well, the diving–it’s hard to describe the diving. Take your National Geographic photos and double the amount of sea life. (Rob: forget the Antarctic trip, and come dive here; you’ll flip over it. Promise.) I’ve been “stuck” at 12 meter depth since I’m not certified for open water yet–but this is hardly suffering: the reefs are fantastic. Giant sea fans (three or four kinds at least–some three meters across), corals in all shapes/colors, baroquely tasseled purple sea cucumbers a foot and a half long, tubeworms that look just like little purple flowers blossoming on coral, until they vanish, yanked back into holes in the rock. Giant purple-and-black crown-of-thorns starfish, shaped like an eight-armed starfish with sea urchin spines. Sea cushions, starfish shaped like pentagonal cushions.

And the fish! They’re everywhere. Flocks of bright orange fish, the size of three fingers, flutter about, punctuated by slim black-and-turquoise cleaner fish; clouds of minnows school about the coral. First in shapeless clouds of brown fish; then a bigger fish frightens them, and the cloud instantly snaps into a school, swimming away in perfect formation. It looks almost like rain, the way they fall away in silver sheets.

Bigger fish, too: gaudy parrotfish, green, blue, and orange, nipping at coral with their hard beaks; lumpy boxfish, brown and white; graceful triggerfish, black and turquoise ovals rippling through the water, swimming with their dorsal fins.

A giant napoleon lurks closer, a dark shadow with a distinctively humpbacked head, visible only in five-foot profile. A gorgeous lionfish, zebra-striped, all fluttery fins and long, graceful spines. Clownfish, orange, black and white, hiding in anemones; and a big clown triggerfish, with giant head and mouth, impossibly striking, like an abstract artists’ piece.

That really doesn’t capture it; it’s impossible to capture in words. At any given point, there were several hundred fish in sight, and usually at least fifteen or sixteen species; I gave up counting, I couldn’t keep track of them. I wish I knew more about maritime ecology; the only fish book on board is in German, so all I can get from it is their common names, not habitat or any deeper understanding of what they’re about.

And the landscape! The Similans are known for their reefs, but famous (says our divemaster) for the rocks: giant smooth boulders, jutting out of the floor like a tumbled-over Stonehenge, 40, 50 meters or more. They’re visible on top of the islands as well; I’ll try to take a picture abovewater, but it won’t give you the seascape. Unfortunately I missed most of the good seascape; it’s mostly at depths of 25-30 meters, and I’m “stuck” at 12. Still, I’m not complaining.

I forgot to mention a really cool starfish I saw. Actually, I’m not sure “starfish” is the right descriptor: it looks like a cross between a sea urchin and a starfish gone mad, 18″ across, with eight or nine or ten purple arms studded with sharp, dark-purple sea-urchin spines. It’s called a crown-of-thorns starfish, and feeds on coral. I really wondered if I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw it, but it’s very, very cool.

So anyway, that’s a brief description of the reef diving. But you really need to be there, to really appreciate it; words can only go so far. I really wish I had a camera.

Above water, on the other hand, it’s delightful as well. The water is sapphire–and I *mean* sapphire; not the dirty sea-green you get in California. I hadn’t realized water actually came that blue; photos in Hawaii are obviously taken with filters to make the water *look* blue, but this really *is* the shade you see in travel brochures. Even the water off Ko Chang wasn’t this nice. I wonder what makes it like that? At any rate, it’s gorgeous.

The sand is white and powdery (apparently common to coral beaches); the perfect sand for walking, it starts out smooth and untouched, flat and pristine, then molds itself to your feet as you walk. No abrasion; it’s soft, not sandy. Just enough support that your feet don’t sink in, and no gritty feel. I *love* the beaches. If the diving weren’t so spectacular, I’d spend entire days just walking up and down the beach, especially with the startlingly turquoise shallows. Tiny white ghost crabs run up and down the white sand; move slowly enough, and you can walk right up to them. Hermit crabs, too; and some very pretty spiral snails in the crevices of the rock.

In the interior of the island we stopped on, there’s some sort of rainforest, with flying foxes, giant land crabs, and about a million different species of plants. I didn’t see the foxes, but I did spot a two-foot monitor lizard, brownish-gray, with the waddling gait and side-to-side neck movements distinctive to monitors. I wish I’d kept that field guide to Thai reptiles; maybe I’ll buy another one. I tried getting up for a closer look, but it climbed a tree, then ran off. Anyway, it was neat getting to look at a monitor in the wild.

I did watch for snakes, but (alas) didn’t see any. it’s possible they haven’t made it out from the mainland, it’s 40 km or so away. Mike (my instructor) says there are sea snakes in the water, and we’ll probably see one–I hope so, they’re very beautiful. (Also highly neurotoxic, but what are you doing messing with one, anyway?)

I think, though, that on the whole the best part so far was the lionfish. It was gorgeous–white-and-black feathery plumes everywhere. I could have watched it for hours.

Dive-wise, we did three dives today. The first was on a coral reef; everyone else went down to 26 meters, but Mike and I stayed at 12 meters and did some confined-water exercises before cruising around the reef. Almost no current, beautiful view. I had some trouble breathing initially, but eventually settled down.

Second dive was mostly a rock-landscape dive, so I missed that part (too deep for me); there was a strong current, too, which we could have avoided by going to the bottom, but I couldn’t go that deep, so we simply hung onto the mooring line at 12 meters for twenty minutes or so, looking at the nearby coral and watching the fish schooling. Oddly enough I wasn’t bored; there was plenty of action to watch on the corals, with little fish darting in and out, flurries of “minnows” forming and exploding, and the odd sea cucumber/sea fan to investigate.

The third dive was a reef dive; the others went around the north and south side of the reef, but we stayed on the reef, at 12-14 meters. This is where I saw the lionfish, and the clown triggerfish; it’s also where I spotted the napoleon, a giant fish way bigger than me (!). It feeds on invertebrates mostly, and its meat is very highly prized, apparently fetching over $100/lb in Hong Kong (!). The lips of the napoleon are considered an aphrodesiac and fetch very high prices in Southeast Asia. All of which is a real pity, because it was a very beautiful and impressive giant fish. Fortunately the Similans are a maritime preserve, so fishing et al is illegal here. (The restrictions may even be enforced, which is (unfortunately) rare in Thailand.)

There are supposed to be leopard sharks here too, but I haven’t seen any.

I should also mention that the two-legged scenery doesn’t suck, either. There are fourteen other passengers on the boat, and four or five instructors/staff, most of whom are quite enjoyable to look at. In fact, when I get back, I’m going to write a book titled “All I Need To Know About Ogling Men I Learned From My AIDS Lifecycle Tentmate.” (Hey, if you’re going to learn about these things, learn from a pro. 😉 )

At any rate, despite all that, the real beauty is under the water.

Anyway, it’s getting late, and tomorrow we start diving again at 8am. Good night.

Tien

The Similans are Paradise.

Just got off the boat from the trip, so this is going to be a short email–I still have my “sea legs” so everything is still swaying back and forth, and I’m getting seasick sitting here and looking at a stationary monitor. But the Similans are just amazing…coral reefs beyond anything I’ve seen in photos or even fanciful artists’ representations, crammed with brightly colored tropical fish and more exotic sealife (lionfish, scorpionfish, barracuda, giant sea turtles, manta rays, etc.). I kept a trip diary which I will clean up and send off as soon as everything stops swaying (hopefully tomorrow morning). Unfortunately my visual memory is about the size of a peanut (I think in language), and it’s impossible to do justice to the sight in words, anyway–but I’ll give it a try. It really was amazing.

Note: anyone who wants to spend Xmas in Southeast Asia, drop me an email and let’s go diving together. Sherry, this means you. 😉 I can’t imagine any better place to spend Christmas–I’d do it again in a flash.

off for dinner at the pizza place, and to pick up my custom-tailored silk clothes–tomorrow I’ll try to get the diary updated. Thurs or Fri I leave for Bangkok…

Tien

First, I have AOL IM on my laptop now, so if you see me pop up, feel free to chat…I’m most likely to be logged on in the late evening, U.S. time (9am Thailand = 6pm US).

Nothing much to report the last few days–Khao Lak is a pretty small town, mostly a stop on the way to the Similan Islands. I’m enjoying it anyway–I’ve been a little homesick the last few days, so I’m enjoying being someplace I can buy a cheeseburger and eat spaghetti. It’s actually less homesickness than culture shock–communicating in pidgin English, not being understood, and eating strange food wears on you after awhile. So tonight I plan to eat pizza at the Italian joint, which claims to be run by an Italian. I must say, it’s really nice to be in a place where you can have conversations with people at a higher level than “Food. Chicken. How much?” (And that’s advanced English; usually it’s point and “How much?”)

On the other hand, there are worse fates than cold showers and lack of conversation; from the email I’ve been getting lately, Silicon Valley is one of them. The upside to traveling, besides the free wildlife safaris inside your bathroom (today it was a frog; last week it was giant spiders, and I’m not even counting the roaches), is that you really dont’ have to worry about anything: anything that’s happening next week is irrelevant, you can pretty much do whatever you want. In fact, you’re pretty much *forced* to live in the present; you can’t fit anything extra in your pack, and you can’t communicate well enough to plan, so you *have* to live day to day. It’s really relaxing, after the initial frustration.

(There is this Western myth that one has to plan one’s life far in advance, and that one’s life/career ought to be linear, and headed somewhere. The more I think about this, the more bogus it seems; it’s probably an outcrop of the Christian focus on the afterlife, which encourages spending one’s life planning for the future. Or maybe not; I’m not sure. It is clear to me, though, that Asian cultures have a very different view of time, and that this is probably correlated to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs in reincarnation. Life looks very different when you have infinite lives to correct things, rather than just one lifetime that determines eternity. It’s been really interesting seeing how religious philosophy/theology plus ambient weather shapes culture–I may write a short essay on that, if I get the time.)

At any rate, I’m enjoying just living day to day, without worrying about the future. This isn’t something you can do on vacation; on vacation, there’s still that sense of urgency. Even if you’ve put it out of your head, somewhere in the back of your mind the ticker is still counting: you need to be back, people are depending on you, you have deliverables, you have 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 days of vacation left. This kind of travel is totally unlike that; I’m going where I want to, I’ll turn up when I feel like it, and no one has a hold on me. This is something totally inconceivable in high-tech.

Not only does the past not hold me, tomorrow isn’t there either. There’s no point in planning, I don’t know enough about the area to make decent plans. There’s no point in worrying about abstracts, because I can’t communicate anything but immediate needs. I can’t ask if the bus leaves tomorrow–most Thai don’t speak English that well. I can only turn up, and see if it’s there. This is initially extremely frustrating. After that, it’s great…I don’t know what’s going to happen next, I don’t know if it will be two minutes or four hours until the bus appears; I only know that someone pointed me in this direction. If I wait, a bus (or a pickup-taxi, motorcycle-taxi, or train) will probably appear; it will be headed in some direction, and I’ll flag it down. Maybe it’ll go there, maybe not. I’ve got no way of knowing; I can only give them my general destination, and hope they get me there.

This sounds awful, but it’s actually fun. I don’t have to bear the burden of worrying, or planning. I don’t have to control what’s happening (it’s futile even to try). I have a general idea; it might happen, it might not; if it doesn’t happen, something else will crop up, that might be interesting. Whatever happens, it will be OK. (This is pretty close to the translation of “Mai pen rai,” Thailand’s unofficial motto.)

It does help to bring a good book, or a small project to work on while waiting for the bus. This makes patience a lot easier. 🙂

So, about scuba training: it’s been very uneventful so far. I have only two comments: first, spending ten days practicing deep breathing through your nose, then learning scuba, results in inhaling a surprising amount of water. Do your meditation retreat *after* diving! Second, if you’re taking a motorcycle taxi in a sarong, hold down *both* sides of your skirt. (OK, that probably *was* funny, if you weren’t involved. But, let’s just leave it there.)

My dive instructor, on the other hand, is worth mentioning: a tall, lithe, utterly gorgeous blonde woman named Mike. Now, in San Francisco, one would make certain natural assumptions upon meeting a woman in a crew-cut named Mike (and the thought did cross my mind, along with “Has she got a girlfriend?”), but (alas) she’s traveling with her partner, a Dutch-Canadian guy named Pete. It was amusing watching them over dinner–Pete clearly thinks she’s his wife, and she just as clearly thinks he’s her partner/SO/traveling companion. I predict interesting times in their future. Oh well.

Anyway, we did three hours of pool exercises yesterday, and watched a bunch of the PADI videos the day before. PADI videos are mostly an exercise in shameless self-promotion; fortunately, Mike agreed I could skip the rest of them (thank goodness). Tonight at 6pm the boat will pick me up, and then it’s off to the Similans. I’ll do one more set of confined-water exercises in the sea off the island, and then it’s off for two days of supervised diving, then two days of regular diving. I’m really looking forward to it, though I’m miffed that I can’t get an underwater camera. Apparently the dive company’s last two underwater cameras both got ruined last week, and there aren’t any others in town.

But, that’s probably not a bad thing–it means I’ll get to see things while diving, instead of thinking compositionally–and they will have a professional videographer with the boat, so maybe I can use some of the stills. And if I really want to, of course, I can always come back later.

OK, it’s nearly noon and I’m hungry–so it’s off to the Italian place for some pizza or ravioli, then to the market in Ban Niang, to look around, and maybe see if they have beads for my shawl.

Tien P.S. Why does tourist kitsch look the same all around the world? I suspect convergent evolution…you think I could get NSF grant money to study it? 🙂

So, I had a little temper tantrum yesterday after getting to my hotel (the Asia Hotel, fan-cooled room) and discovering yet another primitive bathroom. OK–this one had running water, and the toilet actually flushed (instead of dumping water down it to flush it) but since it didn’t feature toilet paper or…oh, never mind. You don’t want to know the details.

Anyway, that in itself wasn’t so bad, but when I found out the sink leaked all over the floor (which was nominally OK since the cold shower sprayed the entire bathroom floor with water anyway) and the room hadn’t been repainted since the days of Chairman Mao, well, I decided I’d had enough. If I had to take one more cold shower or deal with a dubious toilet for one more day…so I packed my bags, caught a songtao (pickup-taxi), and checked into the Jansom Thara Hotel, the best hotel in Ranong.

And, in fact, it was pure luxury. (About on par with a Motel 6.) 1200 baht a night gets you miracles: running water (HOT running water!), air conditioning, a TV, and actual ELECTRICAL OUTLETS in the rooms!! Also access to their hot springs and a free breakfast. But forget all that. The important thing was the shower. OK, it wasn’t hot, it was lukewarm at best–but it wasn’t cold, and that was what counted.

I don’t know what it is about hot showers. It’s warm enough in Thailand that cold showers really aren’t bad, and you can get perfectly clean in cold water. But there’s something reassuring about a hot shower that has nothing to do with practicality.

Anyway, the second thing I did, of course, was to sit down and plug in my laptop. I’m embarrassed to admit it (especially since I came here to get away from all that), but I’m now traveling with digital camera, laptop, and cell phone. *sigh* So much for the simple life. But, it is allowing me to process photos, so I should have photos on my website in a day or two. (Sherry: did you get the photo CD and prints? and Jim, did you get the negatives?)

I spent most of last night working on web pages; which is just as well, since there isn’t much to see in Ranong. I also took a bath–not because a lukewarm bath is much fun, but it was the first bathtub I’d seen since my arrival, and dammit, I was *going* to soak in (lukewarm) water while I had a bathtub. I even turned on the TV, although I didn’t watch it. It’s the principle of the thing. 🙂

I also sent out the laundry (luxury!). On top of the awful gruel, it had also poured continuously for nine days at Suan Mok. This made the cisterns muddy–so on top of the awful gruel, I’d been washing my laundry (and myself) in muddy water for five days, with about the results you’d expect. I was GOING to have clean shirts and underwear, dammit. More, I was going to have clean clothes WITHOUT washing things in the sink myself, dammit. And, in fact, I actually have clean clothes today–yippee! It’s so nice to be without wrinkles, even if only temporarily.

Anyway, I arrived at the Burmese crossing-point determined to play wealthy Western tourist for a day. Which turned out to be a good thing, since the crossing-point exists solely for the purpose of fleecing Western tourists renewing their Thai visas. After Thai immigration, I went to the dock, where a young boy named Ali directed me into a longtail boat.

The longtail boats deserve description because they’re both brilliant in conception and absolutely terrifying. Take a thin boat about thirty feet long. In the back, attach a fifteen-foot pole with a propeller at the end. That’s it. The boatman sticks the propeller in the water to get the boat moving, and puts the propeller to the side if he wants to turn the boat. The overall effect is exactly that of a boat being driven by a gigantic weed whacker. When you’re looking at extensive dry rot, wormholes, and roaches inside the boat, it’s not very reassuring. But it is picturesque.

Anyway, Ali offered to show me around. I asked how much, and he said, “Afterwards–whatever you want to pay.” At this point (I’m somewhat dense) I realized he was a tout–someone who makes money by steering tourists to overpriced shops and tourist attractions and then collecting a commission. But what the hell–I was looking for the rich Western tourist experience, so I figured i might as well go get myself fleeced. Try everything once, right?

Anyway, we cleared immigration (you would not have believed Burmese immigration–a little shack on stilts in the water, with an immigration officer stamping papers in his undershirt, smoking a cigarette while chickens ran around behind him–I took a photo). As soon as I set foot on the dock, another flock of touts descended. Within thirty seconds I had not one but FOUR “guides”–Ali, the original one, a Thai friend of his, and two other Burmese teens who came along as “bodyguards” for ten baht an hour. So I figured what the hell–I was enjoying the absurdity of being a Western tourist, and could certainly afford an extra fifty cents. (Needless to say I didn’t actually *need* bodyguards–the area was perfectly safe–besides which, I could have beaten the lot of them up without breaking a sweat, and I imagine any serious mugger could have, too.)

Well, the rest of the trip was quite amusing–they dragged me to a temple where I paid an outrageous 120 baht “admission fee and camera fee”, followed by a trip through the market and lots of overpriced jewelry stores, where they urged me to buy cow horns shaped into sharp points for cockfighting. (I did buy some button pearls, just to get into the spirit of the thing. It wouldn’t have been a full experience without getting massively overcharged for *something, after all.) Then I paid them off, and got my passport stamped, giving me 30 more days in Thailand.

The following morning, after a few misadventures, I got to Khao Lak, which is about halfway down the peninsula, very near the Similan Islands. The bus dropped me off by the side of the road, and out of curiosity, I dropped into the dive shop across the street. There I got into a three-hour conversation with the dive shop manager covering everything from Buddhist philosophy to prostitution to Thai rainforest ecology, after which he told me that the place I was going to stay had been razed three months ago and was no good anymore, recommended a different hotel, pointed me at a good restaurant and tailor, and signed me up for his PADI open-water course and a four-day trip to the Similan Islands. (Jim: you will see three withdrawals in the next few days; they’re legit.)

The dive shop guy also loaned me a book on Zen Buddhism which looks very very interesting–I’ll probably read it on the dive boat, and I’ll try to lay hands on a copy at home, too. Much more Western-friendly than the version I got at Suan Mok.

So, I’m taking diving classes the next two days, then leaving on the 16th for the Similans. The boat is a leaky, rusted–actually, no, it’s quite a modern boat, with electricity in all the cabins. (More luxury!) I’m looking forward to catching up on my writing while I’m there. (Yes, I’m bringing my laptop and digital camera with me.) If they have hot showers, too, I’ll be in heaven. 🙂

And now, off for dinner–I haven’t eaten since breakfast, so I’m pretty hungry.

I’ll try to post my photos tonight, but it may not happen until tomorrow.

Tien