Around the World in 4 Months

Here it is

2006-07-09T15:15:00.000+09:00

It is hard to believe this four month trip has finally come to an end. We are flying somewhere over Indiana on our last flight. When we landed in Cinncinati to catch this flight, we looked around with fresh and wide open eyes. Signs in English! Prices in US dollars! The chance of turning a corner and spying a taco bell! Magazines about American movies stars in english! Electrical outlets that we can plug our electronics into without an adaptor! The treasures were endless.

There are so many things we learned and experienced on this journey. It has changed us. How? I am not quite sure. Maybe sometime down the road it will be more clear. But for now, we know that the thirst for travel can never be quenched. We also know that flying never gets less frightening. You still say a prayer during take off and grip the arm rests and clench your teeth during landing. Even after taking over 25 flights in the last 4 months, I still look out the plane window and feel amazed at the fact that such flimsy looking wings are able to keep such a giant object above the clouds. We are now flying over University of Notre Dame. Seems so wierd that all these different places we visited, along with the people at home, keep existing even when we aren't there. While I'm sitting here in the plane flying over Notre Dame, Clayton in Palau may be chewing betel nut, tuk-tuk drivers all over Thailand are overcharging hapless tourists, Yen the tailor is charming a customer in Hoi An Vietnam, the helpful dog in Koh tao is swimming with snorklers, Neo is smiling and cooing in his hospital crib in Lesotho, the sun is setting over the castle in Bled Slovenia, someone is feeding iguanas on the same porch we did in Bonaire, and our family is waiting to meet us at the airport. Right at this moment.

We are close to landing and my heart is starting to beat harder. However, I am strangly calm about facing life. Yes, normal everyday life. We haven't really experienced that for a long time. But in a way it is comforting. Knowing that in 15 minutes we will be seeing our friends and family is also comforting. Another thing we learned. There are so many fun things in life, but so many of them have less meaning if you don't have someone to share them with. Luckily, Jason and I have each other. But there were many times when we would say, "Man, I wish so-and so could see this!"

So we have learned a lot about other cultures and countries. But somehow when you travel, you learn about your own country as well. It is great to be back in America.

The is the last of the world-in-4-months blog. You are welcome to check out Larissa's blog at http://selfglasslooking.blogspot.com. There probably isn't much new there now, but updates should be coming soon.

Thanks so much for following us on our trip, and letting us connect a bit with home along the way.

The post to end all posts.... almost

2006-06-19T10:58:00.000+09:00

Jason and Larissa are proud to present "Around the world in 4 months" awards and statistics! As we traveled, we kept track of many interestings tidbits that we thought we would share with you. We also wrote down some awards we would give if we were in a position to give awards. I have been looking forward to this post for awhile now because it will hopefully answer those "So...what was the favorite part of your trip?" questions that everyone seems to ask. So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here are our stats and awards....

Statistics

Total hours spent in airports: 90 hours!

Longest time spent in an airport during a single layover: 14 hours in Seoul, South Korea

Total time spent in airplanes: 119 hours!

Longest flight: 13 hours from Singapore to Paris

Total number of flights: 25

Countries visited with a stay of longer than two days: Palau, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Lesotho, South Africa, Slovenia, Hungary, The Netherlands, The Netherland Antilles (Bonaire).

Awards

Cheapest place to buy avocadoes: Cape Town, South Africa, 30 cents each

Cheapest place to eat out: Vietnam, avg meal for two $4.00

Cheapest hot meal: Kao San Road, Thailand, Veggie Phad Thai for two 75 cents

Most expensive diving: Palau, $100 per person for 2 dives

Cheapest place to dive: Bonaire, under $10 per dive

Best public transportation: Singapore

Worst public transportation: Palau

Friendliest people: Lesotho, Africa
Best scuba diving: Palau

Cheapest place to grocery shop: South Africa

Fastest internet: Cape town, South Africa

Slowest internet: Johannesburg, South Africa

Cheapest internet: Vietnam, 25 cents/hour

Best dessert: Kremna Rezina (cream cake), Bled, Slovenia

Best pastries: Hoi An, Vietnam
City with most haggling: Hoi An, Vietnam

City with least haggling: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Best bang for your buck suvenior/treasure shopping: Hoi An, Vietnam

Best in-flight magazine: South African Airlink

Most expensive internet: Bonaire, $8.00/hour

Best single dive: German channel, Palau

Worst single dive: German channel, Palau (different day)
Best produce: Central market, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Best airplane meal: KLM from Amsterdam to Bonaire

Least expensive island: Koh Tao, Thailand

Most comfy bed: Jason says- Patong towers, Thailand Larissa says-Farm Frcej, Slovenia

Best shore diving: Bonaire

Best outdoor market: Ljublijana, Slovenia

Best indoor market: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Most photogenic people: Lesotho, Africa

Most photogenic daily scenes: Vietnam

Best airline service: Air France

Worst airline service: Northwest

Scariest airplane landing: Bonaire

Dodgiest boat ride: ALL of them!

Most overpriced, boring, ugly airport: Charles de Gaul airport; Paris, France

Dodgiest airport: Yap, Micronesia
Creepiest food moment: "Vegetarian snails", Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Larissa's top three favorite countries on this trip: 1. Slovenia 2. Palau 3. Lesotho

Jason's top three favorite countries on this trip: 1. Palau 2. Slovenia 3. Lesotho

Most evil gem store: Piyamanee; Bangkok, Thailand

There ya go! If you are going to be traveling to any of these places and want advice whether it be about hotels or cities, we would be happy to share our knowledge! One more post left....

Bonaire the Beautiful...

2006-06-01T21:40:00.000+09:00

I am happy to report that diving is going well. We completed 4 dives today, which brings us up to 19 total dives for our time on Bonaire. Larissa has been good about supporting my insatiable appetite for going underwater. We have not had one day yet without going on 3 dives with the exception of the one day we skipped diving entirely. Today we got into the water, put on all of our gear, put our heads under water and only then realized that we were in a huge school of jellyfish. We froze immediately but we hadn’t been feeling any stings so we went down anyway. Swimming through the jellyfish was a different story. I guess they have motion sensors in them because as soon as we started swimming, we felt the stings. They didn’t do much but really annoy us though so we swam downward until we could look up and see the huge field of them. It was disconcerting knowing that we would have to swim through them on the way back as well. Unfortunately, it was a very large school of jellyfish because we had to endure them on every dive today. Hopefully they will be gone tomorrow. We have seen some pretty cool things underwater though. Here is Larissa and a turtle:

This is one of my favorite fish. There are a lot of these around.

We haven’t suffered anymore break-ins, probably because we have been leaving all of the windows down. We have been diving stress free, with the “club” locked on the steering wheel and the car free of valuables. We have been leaving some cookies in the car for a thief that comes by and really wants to steal something. We took the day off from diving yesterday so that we could explore the island a bit. It turned out to be Dia Del Rincon, a day that celebrates the oldest town on Bonaire. We enjoyed going to the celebration but didn’t see much besides some booths

and the forming of a parade:

People in Rincon love to celebrate.

We read that the town, while not Bonaire’s largest, tends to be the place to be for partying no matter what the holiday.
We wanted to check out the national park, just north of Rincon. It boasts a good population of donkeys, pink flamingos,

and cacti, but it was unfortunately closed due to the holiday. We did get a chance to enjoy the parks bathrooms however. At first I didn’t know which one to go into, but then I realized that they had used unconventional signs for designating which bathrooms were reserved for which sex.

We drove back to Kralendijk for lunch, scouting dive sites and watching lizards along the way. After hanging around for the early part of the afternoon, Larissa decided that we had better do some more exploring. We decided to take the road around the southern part of the island. The eastern coastline of Bonaire is jagged and barren

but beautiful in places. Larissa admits that she cannot appreciate desert beauty, which Bonaire is.

In fact, it is so much of a desert, they make their fences out of cacti.

She got more excited than she had been all day when we came to a beach almost completely covered with trash that had washed ashore. While I saw an unsightly beach, she saw an opportunity for a treasure hunt. She immediately announced that we would have a competition to see who could find the most unique object. We went off on our separate ways. I noticed a lot of shoes and plastic bottles, among a lot of uninteresting trash. I lost interest rather quickly, though I was mindful of Larissa’s clever attempt to keep my attention by making a competition out of it. I decided, hard as it was, that I would lose this competition. A short while later Larissa arrived with her treasures. Two matching baby stroller wheels found on separate sections of the beach, a high quality toddler’s shoe and, a compact hairbrush and a toilet seat.

I told her that I had seen the toilet seat but had had no interest in picking it up. As we were pulling away from the beach Larissa commented, “…And you know what I’m pissed about? Out of all those thousands of bottles on the beach, not one of them had the decency to be a message in a bottle.”

At the town house, we were inside watching TV when we saw a green flash on the porch. We went outside and found a HUGE iguana.

We had only seen little iguanas up until then but this one was a monster. We fed him bits of bread and tons of other little iguanas came to feast as well.

Well, we have really loved Bonaire but tomorrow is our last day. I think Larissa will let us dive four times as it is our last day and everything. Keep your fingers crossed.

A Quick Note

2006-05-28T16:14:00.000+09:00

We promise that VERY soon will will finish this blog on our adventures. Please don't stop reading now, because there are only a couple posts left and they are good ones! Jason is working for a few days in a row and I can't read his handwriting on paper that he wrote the blog post on. I am very sorry. I am also very sorry for his future nurses who have to translate that handwriting.

Talk to you soon! Promise....

Window: Rest in Pieces

2006-05-18T19:38:00.000+09:00

Today's events broke up the monotony that I (Larissa) feared would have to be the subject of our blog post. Of course, don't feel too sorry for us. It would only have been a monotonous blog post because all we could have said was “We ate, we dove, we hung out”. Now we can add a little more to the repertoire. This morning, we ate and we finally broke down and bought some booties. How they can rent fins on this island that don't include booties is beyond me. Every dive, you have to walk down a rocky ouchy shore and then dodge sea urchins until you get far enough in the water to swim. Jason and I tried to make do with socks but all we got out of that was blisters from the rubbing of the sand stuck in our socks. Anyway, we finally broke down and bought a pair for each of us. We really didn't want to buy them because we already have booties at home that we didn't bring with us to save space. After we bought the booties though, we weren't sure how we survived without them. I also bought a little bag of 300 hair bands because I had managed to lose all of mine on the course of this trip. And scuba diving without a hair band is just a bad idea.

So was that the excitement I was going to tell you about? Of course not. After emerging from the water on our third dive of the day, we walked back to the car. That was when we noticed that the side window of the van was shattered out.

Someone had taken a big piece of coral and thrown it through our window. Our first thought was “Thank goodness” because right before we were going to swim off into the distance, Jason realized we had left the underwater camera in the car and he went to grab it. There were no other valuables in the car. Everyone we had talked to had told us that we shouldn't leave any valuables in the car and lock it up every time we left it. We followed their advice religiously. That car was locked, we put the club on,

no valuables were to be found. So we felt pretty safe. Jason had left his wallet in the car and for a few heart thudding moments, we though they might have found it. I felt under the passenger seat and lo and behold, there it was, wedged up under the seat into the cushiony part of the chair. They had missed it! They had found the keys to our townhouse though but Benny had wisely put a generic key chain on it so they didn't know what the keys opened. So anyway, no valuables were stolen out of the car. They had, I soon realized, stolen my 299 hair bands. AND to add further insult to injury, they got into our butter cookies and ate all my favorite ones (the sugar topped ones)!

Boy I was mad. Not only had they had the indecency to BREAK OUR WINDOW, they had eaten our cookies after failing to find anything else of value. The people who parked next to us said that their truck was searched but they had left the windows down so no windows were broken. Jason and I, devastated, checked our map for the nearest police station and headed that way. I realized that they probably had their grimy little fingerprints all over the cookie tin so I told Jason to be sure to mention it to the officer. I felt a shot of adrenaline as I pictured the police officer putting handcuffs on the bad guy and saying “Bet you wish you hadn't taken those cookies now, huh tough guy”. Jason went in to fill out a police report while I stayed in the car in my swimsuit fuming about the injustice of it all. The injustice only got worse.

The police officer filled out the top portion of the police report a few times before getting it right. This is the conversation that followed:

POLICE OFFICER: What items were stolen out of the car?

JASON: Oh, nothing valuable. Heh, they just got some of my wife's hair bands and ate some of our cookies.

POLICE OFFICER: What type of cookies were stolen?

JASON: Uh.. some butter cookies, but that's not a big deal, we just-

POLICE OFFICER: What brand of butter cookies were they?

JASON: Oh well, I dunno. But the window is our main-

POLICE OFFICER: I am going to need to know the brand, just in case the dispatcher happens to see them somewhere.

JASON: (speechless, so he is just thinking this line) Well, I think they ate them you idiot.

At this point Jason comes out of the building and asks me for the cookie tin. Thinking they are going to catch the guy from the fingerprint, I sit quite happily outside dreaming about how smart I am to have thought of the whole fingerprint thing in the first place.

POLICE OFFICER: Classico butter cookies. Ok. How many would say were stolen?

JASON: Uh, I dunno. About half the cookies.

POLICE OFFICER: Well how many cookies were in the tin to begin with?

-Jason looks on the side of the tin and sees no indication of the number of cookies-

JASON: Well it only has how many grams total.

POLICE OFFICER: Ok, so how much does each cookie weigh?

JASON: You know what, I think they probably took about 10 cookies. Yes, it is all coming back to me now.

POLICE OFFICER: What brand of hair bands were stolen?

JASON: I don't know, they took the whole bag.

POLICE OFFICER: (sigh) Alright, how many were stolen?

JASON: 300. You know, I am mostly worried about the window being smashed out. Did you put anything about the in there?

POLICE OFFICER: Yeah, here you go

Jason read over the police report but didn't really because it was all in dutch. The only think he could read was “Classico Butter Cookies......10” and “Rubber Hairbands.......300”. Jason thought he better get out of there before he went crazy. But figured he should at least try to ask about the fingerprints or else I would be mad.

JASON: Uh, do you guys do fingerprints here?

POLICE OFFICER: (snorts) Nope.

As Jason was leaving, another guy was just walking in and telling the front desk lady that his car had been broken into just one site up from us. I guess these jerks just made their way along the road, vandalizing as they went. The police station was a waste of time but we had to get the police report for insurance purposes. I guess Jason used his Visa to rent the car so it was covered under Visa insurance. We were quite relieved to find that out.

The rental lady was pretty nice. I guess it happens a lot. She said that the best thing to do is to keep your car windows rolled down. Well now she tells us! That was frustrating because most people we talked to told us to lock it up and don't leave any valuables. But then afterwards, they tell us we should leave the windows down. So that was our day in a nutshell. Hope that was more entertaining than eat, dive, hang out.

A Diver's Paradise

2006-05-12T03:49:00.000+09:00

After a 10 hour flight from Amsterdam, we arrived at the bright pink Flamingo Airport in Bonaire.

The plane landing was a terrifying experience. The runway starts basically at the beach, so we came in to land low, very low. I (Jason) thought that we would all die. It looked like we were going to land in the water. When we landed, everyone cheered. That pilot must get that a lot.

We were met at the aiport by our landlord, Benny. He showed us to our car rental agency. After we signed some papers and handed over our visa, we were ablt to transfer our lunggage to a nice little van. From there we followed Benny to our Bungalow.

We were immediately impressed. It is set back in some tropical landscaping, where a hammock hangs on the porch.

We were introduced to the Bungalow's many luxuries: an air-conditioned bedroom, a screen door on the living room, cable TV, gas range, microwave, toaster oven, rice cooker, etc, etc, etc. I was particularly happy to see the racks for hanging our scuba gear after we rinsed it.

When Benny found out that we were excited about scuba diving, he showed us to his shed, where he had some equipment stored. He offered to let us borrow whatever we needed. I gratefully accepted a BCD, regulator, and fins. Larissa took some fins and a wetsuit. Less gear to rent! Needless to say, we were already impressed with his hospitality and generosity. After getting our place organized, Benny wanted to make sure that we got a tour around town. He hopped into his pickup and drove to Bonaire's main waterfront streets in the town of Kralendijk. It is colorful and very islandy. From there he showed us some dive shops and the main supermarket while reccomending some restaurants along the way.

Written on the lisence plates of Bonaire are the words "Diver's Paradise", which explains why we had to come here.

This place is often referred to as the shorediving capital of the world. Dive sites around the island are only a few meters off-shore, and thus are ideal for shore access. The popular thing to do here is sign up for an unlimited shore diving package. With such a package on is provided with unlimited tanks, along with a weightbelt and weights. All you have to do is drive you car through the drive-through,
load up with tanks, go do a couple dives, and return to the shop to trade out the empties.

The morning after our arrival we bought a 7 day package from the photo tour dive shop. We chose them because they have a network of shops around the island where you can pick-up and return tanks. Oh, and they give a discount to people who stay at Bonaire Townhomes, where we are staying.

Before going on our first dive we were obligated to undergo a Bonaire Marine Park Orientation. Dive tourism is huge here, so they have put a big priority on protecting their reefs. No spearfishing, no collecting, no touching whatsoever.

Shorediving Bonaire has been made quite simple. All of the dive sights have been named and numbered and are all marked by yellow painted stones along the road.

After doing an orientation checkout dive near town, we headed down south to partake in a couple more dives. We had a great time comparing the sights and creatures of the Bonaire underwater world with that of the other places we have visited on our trip.

Groceries are quite expensive here. We would just eat rice and potatoes, but potatoes here are actually very expensive so we have to stick to rice. We were interested to see that Worthington veggie meat products are sold here, though they are way out of our price range.

We did splurge on a tin of Danish butter cookies. I figured it would be a good idea to get Larissa to associate one of her favorite foods with diving. We instituted a program where each of us would award ourselves with a few butter cookies following each dive. This soon proved to be a successful system. On our third dive, the first words out of Larissa's mouth were "Cookie time!"

So we have settled into our new home quite nicely, and are enjoying the last days of our honeymoon as much as possible.

Holland

2006-05-09T01:13:00.000+09:00

Early in the planning of this trip we did some internet research on accommodation in Amsterdam. We found many options of interest, foremost among them a houseboat in the Jordaan district which offered use of a dingy for canal exploration. We held off booking anything; however, because we figured that with a little more research, we may be able to do better on price.

Unfortunately, we never got around to doing this research. While at our timeshare in Hungary we decided to head down to the internet café to take care of our Amsterdam accommodation needs once and for all. We soon found out that we would have to pay for our procrastination. There was virtually no availability. We guessed that this was because of the tulip bloom. Instead of spending an arm and a leg to stay in a five star hotel in Amsterdam (even 40 bed hostel rooms were booked) we opted to spend an arm for a place in Gouda, which is about an hour away from Amsterdam by train.

We really didn’t have any idea how to get to our hotel when we arrived in Gouda. We did not have the option of taking a taxi, as they were very expensive. The train station was all but dead when we arrived well after dark. After a few failed attempts to phone the hotel, Larissa found a helpful girl at the snack stand who provided just the right instructions: “Take bus number 178 toward Bodegraven, after about ten minutes you will see McDonalds, next to which is your hotel.”

As it turns out, our hotel, while technically in Gouda, is actually closer (much closer) to the Bodegraven city center. The hotel was quite nice, though a bit out of the way of things. Here is the beautiful view from our room. As you can see, the hotel was indeed very close to McDonalds.

When we woke up Saturday morning we thought we’d head out to find some tulip fields. We asked the lady at the front desk where we might find some. She informed us that we had arrived on the busiest tourism weekend of the year for the Netherlands. She told us that people come every year, from all over, to se the famous flower parade. Within about 5 minutes she had helped us plan our whole day. We would take a train to the town of Leiden, from where we would take a bus to Lisse, where the world famous Keukenhof Gardens are located. Lisse is also on the flower parade route. The lady told us that the bloom had started a couple of weeks late due to cold weather, but that both the tulips and daffodils were now in bloom.

We walked to the Bodegraven train station, disappointed with the cold dreary weather. Before taking a train to Leiden, we took some time to tour the streets of Bodegraven. The compact streets lined with bakeries, pastry and cheese shops, and fruit stands charmed both of us. We bought and avacado and a disc-shaped loaf of bread and then made our way along a canal en route to the train station.

When we got to Leiden it became immediately apparent that pretty much everyone was going to the same place we were. There was a huge line for the ticket stand where combination Bus/Park Entrance tickets were sold. After exploring other potential ways to get to the flowers, we got in line with the rest of the tourists.
All of the Buses doing the Leiden to Keukenhof route were jam packed with people, and ours was no exception. We enjoyed the 20 minute ride nonetheless, as we were treated to flashes of color as we passed by various flower fields.

When we arrived at Keukenhof Flower Gardens, a 32-hectare park which exports more tulips around the world than anyone, we noticed that we were just about the youngest tourists around. We questioned whether it was natural for us, each of us at only 23 years old, to be so interested in fields of flowers. We didn’t come to any conclusions, but decided not to let our self-awareness hinder our excitement.

We enjoyed a small portion of the gardens for an hour or so before following hoards of people back into town so that we could take up our positions for the parade. We arrived far earlier than we needed to. We got bored waiting, and became complacent. Unfortunately, as we lost focus, we also lost our prime street side positions.
The floats were impressive. Everything from elephants, to grand pianos, to space shuttles, to china sets had been crafted out of flowers.

We enjoyed what we figured was most of the parade before leaving a bit early to beat the crowds back to Keukenhof. We agreed that we would have stayed longer had they been throwing anything edible into the crowds.
Shortly after returning to the gardens, Larissa informed me that her new favorite flower was the hyacinth. She told me that she would plant them in our own garden soon. I told her that we probably wont have our own garden anytime soon.
There is a nice windmill on the property, from which there was a nice view. Within the gated part of the park were mostly manicured gardens. We had our fun there, but wanted to dance a bit in the vast flower fields. We exited the park gates and took a short walk to a daffodil field, and then to a tulip field.

We came home that night satisfied with ourselves. Though we had dome some very touristy things, at least we had done the most touristy things in Holland. With this satisfaction, and budgetary concerns in mind, we made the decision to hang around Gouda on Sunday rather than making the trip into Amsterdam.
Unfortunately, Sundays in the smaller towns of the Netherlands mean that almost everything is closed. We had hoped to eat bread and cheese all day, so that we could save a buck or two, but all of the bread and cheese places were closed. Fortunately McDonalds and Subway were open. For breakfast we had two large fries and two ice cream cones. For lunch we split a veggie delight sandwich and each had another ice cream cone. Feeling sufficiently satiated, we committed to skip dinner that night.

Gouda is a nice little town with canal-lined streets and interesting architecture. It also has a few classic-looking windmills. We spent the morning and early afternoon touring the city center and some peripheral areas. Much of the place looked like a ghost town in the morning, but things livened up a bit later on, when church let out.

I guess Gouda is the birthplace of Gouda cheese, though due to the fact that everything was closed, we weren’t able to get much history on this. A guy at subway told us that Gouda is no longer made in Gouda. We had read somewhere that there is a cheese museum and tastery somewhere around, but we didn’t find it. We were sure to have Gouda on our sandwich at least.
When we got back to the hotel, mid-afternoon, hunger was already setting in. We were able to distract ourselves with a movie, but eventually we went downstairs to get a snack. We saw that Twix bars were offered at the best price per kilogram, so that is what we got. Add that to our earlier meals, and you’re not looking at a very healthy day. Funny how when most places are closed, your most inexpensive food options are also the most unhealthy.
This morning we walked back to Bodegraven to catch a train to the airport, which cost around $10 each. As expected, Amsterdam proved to be our most expensive stop yet. Europe as a whole was not kind to us financially. We are now well over budget, but still optimistic that this trip won’t put us into debt.

When we checked in for our flight to Bonaire we were told that the flight was over-booked and that we did not have seat assignments. This was particularly stressful because as far as we knew, there was only one flight per week from Amsterdam to Bonaire. The only other way to get to Bonaire using the SkyTeam alliance is to fly on Continental from Houston, also a weekly flight. So, we spent a stressful hour and a half trouble-shooting and going on over our options. Fortunately, some people didn’t show up for the flight, so we were able to get on. We were also fortunate that the person who was supposed to sit in Larissa’s seat had ordered a vegetarian meal. They found another one for me. For lunch we had couscous with some sort of eggplant curry. We were also served fresh warm rolls and a warm chocolate dessert. For a mid-flight snack we were served chocolate chunk ice cream. For dinner we had chocolate mousse, Italian salad, a calzone, and a roasted pepper sandwich. Anyway, we were very impressed with the food.

Time to Continue

2006-05-07T11:39:00.000+09:00

Hello faithful blog readers. We are sorry that we have not been able to keep you updated on our wherebouts. We have made it safely back to the states, as many of you already know, but still plan on filling you in on the activities of the last few weeks of our vacation. Even though we couldn't make any posts for awhile, we kept track of our activities in our notebook so that we could type them up later. We plan to make several posts, written as if we are still travelling, to bring you up to date.

Short Post

2006-04-27T03:25:00.000+09:00

So this wil be a short post because the internet is MEGA expensive here! Like, 8 dollars an hour. Ridiculous huh? Luckily, Jason and I each found a coupon for 15 free minutes. So that is what we are using right now. We are in Bonaire. It is a little island next to Aruba. Unfortunately, it looks like we won't be able to post while we are here! BUT we will be writing blog posts in a notebook and transfer them to the net when we get back to the states. So, please check back in a few days because there is a lot we want to tell you before signing off of our blog. Thank you for reading!

Canyoning!

2006-04-20T01:58:00.000+09:00

For my birthday, Jason took me canyoning! In the US, they call it canyoneering. I am not sure about the spelling.
This is about the most fun I have had in my life. Canyoning is basically following a creek up or down a canyon. We followed the canyon down river. SO much fun. Jason saw the poster and knew immediately that I would love it. Many times we have passed a creek and I have said, "Man, I wish I could just follow that creek......in the the creek." That is exactly what we did. It was really cold water but we had thick wetsuits and hoods and gloves and wetsuit socks. So we were fine. Jason's hat didn't fit over his gigantic noggin.

There were some parts that we had to repel down.

Other times, we jumped

or slid on our bellies

or bums.

I think I may have a new hobby.

Unfortunately, canyoning used to be popular in the US about 15 years ago but now it isn't as popular. Maybe we can change that yes?

Don't worry about that blood, it is just from the pressure of the water. He wasn't injured.

Today was finally sunny! We got some great pictures around Bled. Here is a nice spring picture:

Here is the island with the church and the castle is on the cliff in the background. Those are the Julian Alps in the background.

Jason decided to go ahead and go kayaking. He went with the same people who took us canyoning. They are a really great outdoor adventure agency. They have good prices and the people are really laid back and nice. Compared to Vietnam and Thailand, they are AMAZING! Here is their website. So if you ever come to Slovenia, look them up! Anyway, Jason said it was an amazing time. The water was crystal clear and he went down the river with a really good guide. Jason said he can do tons of amazing tricks. I only saw him do a cartwheel which I got a picture of Jason doing.

Jason said he messed up in this picture but I can't tell. He got to float passed a couple cool river villages and got to go down come class 3 and 4 rapids.
Thank you for all your happy birthday comments! See you soon!

"Wann der Fruhling kommt..."

2006-04-18T23:13:00.000+09:00

The title of this blog is "When Spring Comes..." in German. Spring is indeed what we are waiting for here in the Julian Alps. We saw pleny of spring on the train from Kezsthely to Ljubliana. The flowers were blooming, the rivers were overflowing, the trees were beginning to bud, the hills were covered with bright green grass and yes, we even saw some pure white lambs sitting in that grass. We are now in the Julian Alps however where spring is a little bit harder to find. The grass is very green here but we seem to be stuck in that period between winter and spring where it rains a lot but there isn't much to show for it yet. It is still incredibly beautiful.

We arrived at the Lesce-Bled train station just before dark. We had made arrangements to stay in a tourist farm right outside of Bled in a little village called Gorje. The only directions we had was the address and "the farm is on the road to P------, you can't miss it!" So we walked to the nearest bus stop and and waited for a bus to Bled from which we planned to walk or something..... A few minutes before the bus was to come, a little car pulled up and let out a passenger. Then the driver looked at us and said something in Slovene. When he realized we didn't speak Slovene, he asked in English, "Are you going to Bled?" He offered us a ride so we stuffed our huge bags into his tiny car and off we went. I (Larissa) showed him the paper where I written the down the address. "OH!" He sucked in his breath, "This is a long way from Bled, I am supposed to meet a friend for coffee but I guess he can wait. We call the people who live in this village 'rednecks' because they live so far out of town." I asked just how far out of Bled they the village was and he said, "Oh, about 5 kilometers!" Slovenia is a small country so their wense of distance is quite a bit different than ours in America. He dropped us off right at at the front door and turned down our offers to pay for his gas.
We rang the doorbell and an elderly gentleman opened the door. He seemed to understand us when we said we had reservations and all that but when he replied, it was in a mixture of English and German. He invited us in to the house and we were very ecited to finally see the inside of a Slovene house. This of course is a very traditional farm house but we liked it. We sat down to wait for his son who was going to show us our room. We sat in awkward silence sometimes interrupted by with his occasionally speaking to me in german. I asked if he was from Austria and he said no that he learned german for the tourists that come there to stay. He also speaks Italian. So we started speaking in Italian. English seemed to be the language he knew the least of. His son Tony finally arrived and he seemed releived to let him take over obviously thinking Tony spoke much better English than he did. Tony, who's every third word was "Ayoh" (I am not sure what that means yet), is not very good at English actually. He speaks it very fast so we think that he probably knows it really well, it is just his pronounciation that needs help. On the way to our room, Jason told Tony that we are on our honeymoon. That may be why he gave us such a great room. It isn't really a room. It is an apartment. It has a kitchen, a table, a TV and it can sleep 5 people. For 17 euro a person per night, it is quite a deal around here. We slept fitfully, because the next day was Easter Sunday and the church bell seemed to ring all night. The next morning we sat down to a Slovenian Easter breakfast (which is included in the price) of cheese, bread, plum marmalade, butter, peppers, and tomatoes. Keep in mind that most of these were either homemade or homegrown. We were intent on eating all that we could, as we wanted to get our money's worth. I don't think I have ever eaten that much havaarti, swiss, and mozzarella cheese in my life. Tony's mom is the master of all the homemade things. She is a very excited person who speaks English/German just like her husband. After our breakfast that morning, I was talking to her cows when I turned around to see her coming towards me. "Missus!" She looked like she was about to jump up and down with joy, "I haf da donkey too!" She showed me where her donkey was and just like her, he had quite the personality. AS I walked up, he was vigourously scratching his body against the side of his wooden manger which liked it wasn't going to stand up to such abuse much longer. When it saw Jason and I though, he came trotting over and was especially interested in Jason's camera

.We often heard him hee-hawing and once I looked out the window to see him running and trying to buck something invisible off his back.

Anyway, we had a pleasant walk to to the town of Bled which is home to a beautiful lake with a picturesque island in the middle. The island has a church and it is probably one of the main reasons Bled is visited by millions of people every year.

As you can wee, the weather wasn't very clear that day. You can't even see the mountains in the background. Here is a picture that I grabbed from the internet of Bled Lake.

Also one of Bled's claims to fame is it's castle which stands at the very top of a cliff over looking the lake. There is a foot path that goes aroung the lake and we headed for that. Jason pointed out plenty of fish in the lake. There were beautiful char and lake trout in the water and Jason was very dissapointed not to have a fishing rod and equipment. It was a great walk but we were hungry and the walk was longer than we thought it would be . When we completed the loop, we rewarded ourselves with Bled's specialty, Cream Cake. It is our new obsession and I WILL learn how to make it. Coming soon to a potluck near you. We ate the best way, as in dessert first. For lunch I talked Jason into going to a traditional Slovenian restaurant by telling him they made pizza too. Turns out the pizzeria was a separate restaurant upstairs. Jason was very upset so I told him that I would order enough for one person, we would share that then share a pizza. I ordered mushroom soup, roast potatoes, and bread dumplings. Everything was superb! Except the bread dumplings which were questionable. After we ate that, we were so full we skipped the pizza.

After lunch we started walking towards Vintgar Gorge. Vintgar Gorge is another famous sight in Slovenia and it is only a couple kilometers away from our tourist farm. When we got to the entrance, we saw these signs in the path. It wasn't in our language so we weren't exactly sure what they were trying to tell us.

Going by the signs posted, it became clear that to us theat they were trying to prevent us from throwing rocks at hammers, wearing hats, or wearing all black. We didn't have any problems with these rules so we jumped over the barracade and went on our merry way. We passed a few people coming the other direction and one guy had a hat on so we knew he was a law breaker. This gorge is beautiful. The water is clear and in deep spots, incredibly blue. The boardwalk was built in 1893 and follows the river for almost 2 km in a rock gorge. Behind us, a little family of four was walking. A mom, dad, a baby and a 3 years old. We finally got to a place that felt a little too unsafe to travel over and we turned around. This picture is actually a place that we walked across.
We were a little dismayed to see the 3 year old make it over the section where we turned back. But no matter. It was a good day with lots of walking and my legs were quite sore. This all took place on Easter so not much was open. Here they celebrate Easter Friday through Monday. I did not take this picture.Here is a picture of a traditional painted egg we saw a lot of.

The next morning we woke up and after breakfast, headed to the train station. We wanted to go to lake Bohinj. When we got to the train station, it was shut up tight and nobody was around. We looked at the timetable and there was a train going at 11:30. Which was in about an hour. We sat outside and looked out over the lake. We vould see people rowing crew boast on the lake and it was just a beautiful day and beautiful sight. Jason innocently asked, "So do you think you could beat me in a crew race if we went right now?" After I stopped laughing, I informed him that I didn't think anything, I knew that if I raced him in a crew boat, I would win. He was quite surprised at the strength of my assuredness and said "Yeah, but I am stronger than you!" After I stopped laughing again, I told him that it didn't matter how strong you were if you didn't know hor to balance the boat or work the oars. Even after that, He still said he was pretty confident that he could beat me in a race then and there. That's when it turned into a full blown argument. For those of you who don't know, I raced crew boats for a year so I took it as an insult to my skill as a rower. I probably shouldn't have felt insulted by Jason's naivete because he obviously didn't mean to insinuate anything. BUt anyway, is there anyone out there who has ever been in a crew boat that can back me up on this one? I realize I am speaking to a very small percentile here. Maybe I am just speaking to my brother, but can someone please tell Jason that rowing a crew boat is quite different than rowing a drift boat and it is harder than it looks?

Anyway, we finally got on a train. The whole way, we followed the beautiful Sava River. We passed Kayakers, canoeists and fly fishermen in abundance. Jason started to feel very sorry for himself. I promised we could come back some time and he could bring his fly fishing gear and we could rent a kayak for him. Fishing liscences are quite expensive here but there are lost os beautiful trout in the rivers and lakes here.

We arrived at Bohinj Bistrica after about a 20 minute ride. IT is a town about 6 km from the lake. Our goal, Lake Bohinj. The bike rental place was closed (according to the toursit center guy) so we decided to walk along the river until we reached the lake. There was a hiking trail on our map that we decided to follow. It was warm and sunny so I took my fleece off and it was still hot. We walked and walk and then it started to rain. We put on our useless ponchos. The rain seemed to get harder. It seemed like we had been walking for ages. My legs, still sore from the day before werenow achin. Jason was limping because his knee was hurting and we were both basically pathetic. We got to a meadow that had many little huts. One hut had a little sheltered eating area that we decided to stop at and wait for the rain to stop. It just seemed to rain harder so we ended up just eating our lunch. The rain still hadn't let up so we decided to just walk on. Our previously beautiful gravel trail turned into a big clay mud bogg. After hours of walking, we finally emerged on to the green grass park surrounding part of the lake. We made it!! It was beautiful but we were wet and cold. Bohinj is bigger and less developed than Bled. It doesn't have a cool island but it is truly majestic.

There isn't much stuff to do that doesn't involve outdoor activites so we decided to head back to the train station. The bus ride back was so quick!! We thought of our hours of walking...but it was definitely worth it.

We bought train tickets to vintgar thinking how smart we were "yesterday we walked fromVintgar gorge to our house and it only took 10 minutes. Vintgar station can't be too far from there right?" We began to grow concerned when right after we left the stop before ours, we started going through a long tunnel. After about a minutetunnel ride, we came to our stop. It was dark and nobody got off the train with us. We didn't recognize anything and there was no map and it was dark. We walked acrodd the street to the bar to ask directions so we could start walking. When I asked, the lady's eyes got big and she said "you have a car?" when she heard we were planning to walk, she told that it would take an hour and a half at least. We had missed that last train and there wasn't a busin sight. We asked her if she could call us a taxi and from the incredulous look on people's faces, we realized it wasn't really an option. "Here, I will just drive you" We asked if we could pay her and she just waved us away. I looked back at the bar as we were leaving and was realieved to see that there was just a coffee cup at her spot.

We started driving and WOW! an hour and a half walk would have been more of a run. We zigzagged our way up a mountain and down the other side. When she dropped us off, she refused our money so Jason told her "Next time you are in America, we will give you a ride when you are lost" As you can see, people are very nice here.

Well, today is my birthday and we are in an outdoor store buying a trip to take tomorrow. We just hung out today and rested our poor legs. Jason bought me a Vienetta. I love those things. We are taking a canyoneering trip. I am so excited because I have always wanted to try it. We will take our underwater camera and tell you all about it. Jason might break down and take a kayaking trip in a couple days too. Thank you for your comments. Hope you enjoy our extra long blog!

Take That!

2006-04-14T18:27:00.000+09:00

So Jason has gotten the chance to tell you all some embarrassing things about me lately so I thought I would return the favor. Everytime one of us does something stupid, the other will say ....I am going to put that in the blog! ....
We like this internet place but we thought we might be able to find another place that was cheaper. So as we were walking around town, we were keeping our eyes open for other internet places. Everyonce in awhile, Jason would say (I can't make the quotation marks work on this keyboard) ....That place says geo-net or something, do you think that means a type of internet?.... I didn't see what he was talking about and we kept walking. After he had seen it a few times he thought maybe we should go into one of the stores. I asked him where he was seeing this sign for geo-net. He pointed at a store and there in the window was a sign that said geöffnet. The german word for OPEN.

This morning, I made him a grilled cheese sandwhich. He was reading so he ignored the sandwhich for awhile. Finally, I started to grab it and pretend to start eating it. He said ....Hey! Gimmee my grilled cheese!.... It struck me as funny, so I said.....Leggo my eggo.... He was silent for a second and then said.....I just got that. I always wondered what they were talking about on those commercials when they said Leggo my eggo.... HA!

Anyway, I thought it was a little funny. If you don't, then you know that we have had a lack of things to write about because we haven't got out much in the last couple days.

Good luck on taxes everyone. I am doing mine today. Jason got his done months ago. But I get a refund and he doesn't. :] Thank you for commenting, we like hearing from you all. It really does make our day.

Heviz, Criminal Children, and Budapest

2006-04-12T18:26:00.000+09:00

On Monday we took a short bus ride to Heviz. The bus terminated within feet of the thermal lake, which is really the only reason that the town is on the map. We hiked around most of the lake, and stopped in the ticket center (an admission fee is required to actually swim in the lake) where we learned that this particular lake is the second largest thermal lake in the world. We will probably return to the charming little town in the near future, and perhaps even pay to enter the healing (and reportedly radioactive) waters.

That same day, as we were strolling up the main walking street in Keszthely, we were assaulted by two girls and a boy, none of which could have been any older than eight. They first approached us, speaking Hungarian, then German, apparently trying to sell us some yellow tree branches that they had surely ripped off some nearby tree. We politely indicated that we were not interested. Then, two of the kids dropped their branches as the three continued to follow us closely. As they started to grab at us, we said no more firmly. At this point the oldest girl started trying to steel things out of Larissas backpack. We both turned around in defense, demanded that they stop, and then turned around and continued walking. At this point, the oldest girl used her branches to hit Larissa's back, and the little boy drove his fist into my back. None of this was painful, but we were startled. As they ran off, the little boy smiling and laughing, we were extremely tempted to round them up and give them individual spankings. At the same moment; however, we realized how it might look for foreigners to be off in some alley beating on some poor innocent kids. The language barrier would undoubtedly make things even worse. We were glad to see some locals scold them a bit, but were saddened by the kids' attitude towards tourists, and what they would resort to for some cash.

We woke up yesterday morning to the sound of raindrops outside. Since we already had our train tickets to Budapest, we didn't have the option of staying in our room. We felt sorry for ourselves as we hiked in the cold rainy weather to the train station, even before it was light outside.

For the first couple of hours we travelled along the shores of Lake Balaton. I counted pheasants between naps, and Larissa read most of the way. After just over three hours, we arrived at the Budapest Deli station. We had a map that showed many of the main tourist sights in town. They looked like they were just close enough to the train station, and close enough together, that we wouldn't have to rely on public transportation to see them. It was still cold and rainy as we made our way through a beautiful park en route to the Buda Castle district. Budapest used to be two cities, separated by the Danube river. We started our exploration on the Buda side. The Buda Castle is a large walled-in compound atop a hill. It includes three churches, several museums, hotels, many historical buildings, and even some private residences. The first main sight we came to was the Matthias Church. I guess Matthias was a former king. The church was beautiful, but apparently undergoing repairs as it was covered in scaffolding. On the river side of the church stands the Fisherman's Bastion, seven towers built atop medieval walls.

The view from the towers was amazing, even though visibility was not good.

The most impressive building sitting on the Pest side of the river is the Parliament, built in a neo-gothic style.

The high vantage point helped us get some perspective on distances, and also confirmed some of the places that we wanted to visit. We hiked down the castle hill to the Danube river, and the historic Chain Bridge.

Its' construction was originally completed in 1849, but it had to be rebuilt in 1949 after being destroyed in WWII.

We decided to walk along the Danube up to the next bridge, and then use the Chain bridge to return in the afternoon. It was obvious that the river was far higher than usual, and there were indications that it had, within the past few days, been much higher. We noticed several docks that had been damaged by debri, and riverside shrubs and trees that had been destroyed by the high water. Since we had never seen the place before; however, it was hard to guage exactly how much damage had been done. Later that day we read in the paper that water levels in Hungary, just a couple of days prior, had been higher than ever had been recorded. There was flooding in Budapest in 2002, and as a result the containment walls were made taller. This flood breeched even the new walls, and is reported to have caused millions of dollars in damage. The river levels must be expected to go down rather than up, as riverside streets are open to traffic, and riverside parking spaces are occupied by cars; all of this while the water level is only inches below the containment walls.

This is the river-level view of Parliament, one side of which was covered in yellow scaffolding. I tried to cover it up with Larissa's head as much as possible.

By the time we made it to the other bridge, I was really needing to find a bathrooms somewhere. It was probably due to watching all of that gushing water. The vast majority of bathrooms around here require a small payment before entering. I am not sure what this money goes towards, as they bathrooms certainly don't show signs of being well maintained or cleaned. For some reason I really don't like going to the pay-per-pee bathrooms, which may have been another reason why I was needing one rather urgently. Across the bridge was a huge McDonalds sign. I have come to associate McDonalds not only with reliably good french fries and cheap ice cream cones, but also with free and relatively clean bathrooms. This McDonalds even offered internet access.

After our stop at McDonalds, we made our way up the Pest side of the river for a closer look at the Parliament. It is a very unique structure. We wanted to take a tour of the inside, but we were feeling too strapped on time and cash. Instead we started walking up the historic (a UNESCO world heritage sight, as well as the Parliament and the Castle District) Andrassy avenue. We could tell that this street was were the money was, both now and in the past. It is lined with beautiful stone buildings with elaborate facades. On our way to finding a pizza place we enjoyed visiting St. Stephens Basillica and the Opera house.

After pizza we continued up Andrassy avenue all the way to a park at its' end.

There stands the Vajdahayad Castle. I had mixed feelings about the place. It was a charming structure, though it had sections rebuilt in different styles, but I was annoyed that much of the former moat and castle-side pond had been drained. As far as we could tell, the drained portion was being transformed into tennis courts. We couldn't understand who would prefer tennis courts to a castl moat. We chose the side of the castle still protected by some water for our photos. On the other side of the street from the castle are the Syechenyi Spa Baths.

We had been excited about visiting them because of the beautiful building that housed them, and their unique setting. There is no photography allowed inside the courtyard, which houses the outdoor pools, so we cannot show you the place. For the same reason, there are few photos of the place on the internet. I did find a couple, but trying to figure out how to get them into the blog proved to be challenging as the menus are in Hungarian. We thoroughly enjoyed the bath experience, which somewhat surprised me. There were several pools, one of which featured several chess boards. What could be better than playing chess in the hot tub? There was also a whirlpool. There was a center hot tub surrounded by a ring shaped pool. The jets were on the outer wall, and all pointed to one side. Larissa was convinced that she was an expert at catching the jets of water. She actually informed me that she had become too good at letting the jets accelerate here, as she was starting to swallow too much water. She wanted to race me to prove that she was a faster whirlpooler. I agreed, but just as we started our race the jets turned off.

When we were finished at the baths, it was getting to be late afternoon, and we needed to start heading back to the train station. We thought it might be nice to take the subway to the train station, but after the ticket machine would not accept our bills, we decided to walk.

We arrived back in Keszthely at around 11:00pm, and once again felt sorry for ourselves as we had to run home in some really cold wind and rain.

The whether is not much better today, so we will split our time between our room, the grocery store, the hot tub, sauna, and the internet cafe.

Keszthely

2006-04-10T17:59:00.000+09:00

As we mentioned before, our train ride from Ljubljana to Keszthely was very enjoyable. For the Slovenia segment we enjoyed mountain views while travelling along a river in a deep valley. Larissa fell in love with many of the small mountain towns we passed. Then we passed through the Croatian town of Zagreb, which looked larger than we had expected. It had many unique looking buildings, and we decided that we'll need to pay it a visit someday. As we entered Hungary the landscape became less mountainous. The fields and forrests here remind me of Michigan. Spring has arrived arrived here, as things look to be ready to bloom and blossom any day now.

It was almost dark when our train pulled into the Keszthely station. We didn't have any money in the right currency, and there wasn't an exchange or ATM at the train station. We did not know how to get to where we were to stay either, but we knew it was supposed to be close to the center of town. Since we didn't really have a choice, we just started walking towards town in hopes of finding something useful. Fortunately we came across a large sign showing a labeled map of the city. Eventually, just after dark, we found what we were looking for.

Keszthely is a resort town, situated on southwestern shores of Lake Balaton, which is Central Europe's largest lake. The lake is a popular summer vacation spot for all sorts of water activities, and Keszthely sees much of the action as it is the lake's biggest town. We are not here in summer, so the place is rather devoid of tourists. It is nonetheless a nice place to be.

There are hot springs all over Hungary. Many people believe the waters to possess healing characteristics. This among other factors have made thermal baths popular all over the country. Some of the most popular baths are located in the town of Heviz, which is a close neighbor of Keszthely. Thermal bath tourism is year-round, so many of the few tourists who are in Keszthely right now are likely here for the baths. Larissa and I have yet to explore Heviz, but we may get over there today.

We are staying in another timeshare, very generously provided by my Grandma. We are very happy with the place. The two windows on the middle-right belong to us.

We have a nice courtyard view.

We have a kitchen and a tv, which we really appreciate. We are indeed centrally located, within 100meters of the town's center walking streets. On the other side of us is a nice park which has some beautiful trails leading down to the lake.

We also have grocery stores and many restaurants within short walking distance. I got a large pizza yesterday for less than three dollars. From what we have read Hungary is around 30% cheaper for travellers than Slovenia. Our experience so far has led us to believe that this is the case.

We have already explored most of the town. The main place to visit here is the city's castle. We toured the castle grounds yesterday, while opting out of visiting its' several museums, one of which is the caste's wine cellar offering a taste of around 50 wines. Maybe if we could taste 50 kinds of salsa instead.

We are within few hours train ride of Vienna and Budapest. We are hoping to get to Budapest tomorrow, and perhaps Vienna on Thursday if our budget permits.

Larissa picked up a small Slovenian cookbook the other day. Last night she made some mushroom potato soup that turned out very good. I was impressed with her ability to make something so good with so few ingredients. There are many foods around here that we would like to try, but we are frustrated at not being able to read the ingredients first. Some things are in German, so Larissa can help us there, but otherwise we are in the dark. One way or another we will survive though. I am comforted at the fact that there are numerous pizza places around.

Hopefully we will be able to give you a trip report for Budapest and Heviz soon. Until then, thanks for reading and posting your comments.

Ljubljana

2006-04-08T18:58:00.000+09:00

We are now in Hungary. This post is about our time in Ljubljana. So that you can appreciate this post as much as possible, you must realize the difficulty I am having preparing it. It took me close to a minute to type that last sentance. I am typing on a European keyboard, so some of the keys are in the wrong place. If zou see some zs in the place of ys, please don't get too upset. Correct punctuation is also hard to achieve.

We arrived at the Llubljana airport Wednesday afternoon. Our bags did not arrive with our flight, which was quite worrisome for Larissa since her checked bag contained all of her warm clothes. She felt foolish wearing a short-sleeved shirt and flip flops when the temperature outside was just above freezing. While we waited for our bags to come (fortunately they came on the next flight, less than one hour later) a helpful girl at the airport tourist information desk helped us get our orientation and game plan for getting to our apartment. It turns out that there are tourist information centers at various places around the city. We have found them to be quite valuable. The airport was quite small, with only one gate.

The bus ride into the city was very scenic. We passed through some quaint little towns surrounded by farmland bordered by mountains of which we could only see the foothills. Larissa was obviously very glad to be in Europe, as she let out a controlled squeal every few minutes. We met an interesting lady on the bus from Romania. She was a chemist for the EPA in Slovenia on business. I was immediately uncomfortable by her presence as she tried to start up a conversation with Larissa about how there were "Nice men here." She assured us that she knew, because she had been looking carefully. She asked us where we had travelled from. Trying to keep things simple, we told her that we had come from the states. "And you come here?" she questioned, "I just hope that you are not on your honeymoon." When we told her that we were indeed on our honeymoon, she told us that we were for sure too young to be married.
Eventually we arrived at the central bus station, from where we managed to find our way to the tour agency through which we had booked our apartment. We were given a quick lift to our new home.

The lady who owns the place, and who lives next door, came and introduced herself and helped us get settled. It was a nice one bedroom bright place with a clean and well equipped kitchen. It also had satellite TV, but most of the channels were pay-per-view, or in the wrong language. We ended up watching a lot of CNN and the Travel Channel, which were our main English options. We were a little disturbed to be reminded that we still haven't shaken the travel bug. There are so many places we still need to go.

The next morning, despite the fact that it was snowing and raining, we were eager to get out and explore the city. We armed ourselves with our non-waterproof rain ponchos and our only sweaters, which seemed way to thin to get us through the hardships to come.

While we froze riding around town, we found the place to be very friendly to bicyclists. There are bike lanes on all the major roads, complete with little bike stop lights. There are also places to lock the bikes up wherever you might need them. Ljubljana is not a very big city. Its population is around 270,000. We found it easy to familiarize ourselves with the place, while seeing some of the major sights. This is the Ljubljanica river, which goes right through town.

One of the first places we stopped was a candy store. Larissa was a bit too tall for there overhead decorations, and managed to break a beautifully decorated egg. We felt obligated to buy some chocolate. We got some chocolate covered apples, peanuts, and some other kind of nuts. We also got what we thought to be chocolate covered strawberries, which turned out to be figs. We parked our bikes at the central market, which had very nice produce, and then enjoyed walking along the riverfront. The rivers around here, and much of central and eastern Europe are quite swelled right now. Fortunately Ljubljana is not having the flooding problems of many of the other cities around. For those of you who might be interested, there is apparently some good trout fishing in Slovenia. The most sought after species is the Soca Trout of the Soca river. Unfortunately a fishing liscense runs around 70 euro per day. I would be feeling really left out if the rivers were in fishable condition. Eventually we stopped in for Pizza at Pizzeria Ljubljanskia, or something like that. By this point in the day we were feeling quite rude for not being able to even get out a greeting in Slovene. We were determined to learn at least a few words while we were waiting for our family sized pizza to come. Larissa proved more resolute in learning the language than me. That is, she demanded that the book be centered in front of her, which happened to put it upside down for me. She would practice a word a few times, and then put the book at an angle so that I could try to learn the word in about a tenth of the time that she had had. Anyway, Larissa developed a useable vocabulary, while I never got past hello. It turned out that knowing how to say hello in Slovene (doberdan) proved not to be very helpful, as people would invariably rattle off some Slovene reply. The family sized pizza turned out to be truly family sized, the largest we have seen yet on our honeymoon.

We were both glad that both our lunch and our breakfast was taken care of. Unfortunately, we are big eaters, and around fifteen minutes later we were to heavy to move. Even after stuffing ourselves, we thought it necessary to stop by the grocery store on the way home for dessert supplies. That night we enjoyed some strawberries (very inexpensive at the Ljubljana central market) dipped in chocolata densa and custard.

We woke up to the sun breaking through the clouds. Our dreams had come true. We got out of the apartment as fast as possible and started our bikeride to the city castle, which stands atop a prominent hill.

We enjoyed climbing the castle tower for some excellent views of the city.

The snowpeaked mountains, unfortunately, were still covered by clouds. It was nice touring around the city in the sunshine.

We were in such good moods when we were heading home that we decided to stop in and grab some desserts. We got some Tiramisu and an apple strudel. So, we rode home contentedly, whith 2kgs of strawberries and a couple of desserts in tote.

The next day we decided to take a bike tour of some of the city's outskirts. There was a brightly colored hilltop church off in the distance that we were particularly interested in going to. Our ride soon tookus by a beautiful mansions that we both wanted a picture of. We noticed an American flag out-front, and then realized that it was the U.S. embassy. Larissa had the camera, so as always I put in my two cents in regard to what the best shooting angle would be. She was nervous though, asking "are you sure we can take pictures here," I laughed and poked fun at her a bit, just before an armed guard came up and politely told us that no pictures would be allowed.

We were able to ride most of the way to the hill-top church in Tivoli park, large well kept forrested area with nice trails.

There were a lot of people out and about, much different from the colder days before. We eventually made it to the church, which was nice, but prettier from afar.

We spent the rest of the day riding around various neighborhoods and enjoying the nice weather.

We had one more morning in Ljubljana before heading off to Hungary. The market was particularly lively. We enjoyed some traditional music and dance. We also bought a lot more fruit and vegetables. Many slovenes can speak German or Italian, so Larissa was having a great time at the market. I soon got frustrated, so I had to send her on purchasing missions for me. Here I am eating some Slovene fast food, a Burek, which is a cheese filled pastry type thing. It was quite hot, which is why my mouth looks deformed. Larissa ordered it in Slovene, which she is sure to remind me of often.

We also got some more fruits and vegetables. Larissa was particularly happy to get some blood oranges. She likes to rip apart the wedges and pretend that they are pieces of flesh. I guess everyone has carnivorous tendancies.

Early that afternoon we boarded an Italian train enroute to Budapest. We couldn't see any indication of class on our tickets, so we made ourselves comfortable in a first class compartment. About two hours later, after the best of the scenery had passed, we were told to move back to second class.

Prague Airport

2006-04-05T17:39:00.000+09:00

We have successfully made our way from Cape Town to Johannesburg through Paris, and now to Prague. We have a few hours here before flying to Slovenia. We have found a nice little internet cafe here at the airport. The only thing that is required for use of the internet is the purchase of a drink. Unfortunately, it is a coffee place, and neither Larissa or I have learned to like coffee. I am uneducated when it comes to distinguishing between the various coffee drinks that are available. I knew that I had a mild liking for either espressos or cappucinos, but wasn't sure which. Larissa took off to look at some magazines or something just as I was ready to pick out a drink, so I was left without any counsel. I took a guess and ordered the espresso, which turned out to be the wrong guess. I don't know whether it is required of a patron to actually drink what he or she orders to be able to use the internet, but we have tried our best to down the drink just in case.

We would like to inform you of some very happy news in regard to some stupid mistakes we have made recently. I told you about my scraping up the bumper of our rental car. It turns out that the rental agency was not concerned about it, so we were not held responsible. Yesterday we showed up at the Cape Town airport a full hour after our flight had departed. For some reason we both thought that our flight was leaving at noon rather than at 10:00am. I think we are becoming a bit complacent in our fulfilling our travel duties, like double checking flight times. Larissa put on a good act at the ticketing counter, convincing the agent that we were very surprised that there was not a flight leaving at noon, and that we had missed the flight that we were booked for. When she dropped her head and gasped I think that the agent felt some sympathy for us, as she proved to be very helpful in getting us on the next flight. Fortunately we made it to Johannesburg in time to catch our flight to Paris.

We will be staying in an apartment in Ljubljana (pronounced Lee-yoob-lee-yana) for the next three nights before heading to Hungary. The place is supposed to have a washer and dryer (very exciting) and four bicycles for us to use to get around town. So, if there is anyone who would like to join us, we should have an extra bed and some extra sets of wheels.

Cape Town Update

2006-04-04T03:29:00.000+09:00

We are again writing from Cape Town, where we have thouroughly enjoyed our time thus far, with the exception of a couple of drawbacks. Yesterday, as promised, we made our way to Table Mountain with the goal of hiking to the summit. There are several routes to the top. We decided to take the steeper route, which was also supposed to be quicker.

I don't know how to spell the name of the trail, but it is named after the gorge that it runs up through. I think it is something like Pradaledijk. This area has been suffering from some severe drought. Much of the landscape around is charred from fires. There are some very nice stands of trees at the base of the Mountain that were completely ruined in recent fires. Despite the brown landscape, the area is still very scenic. Here I am near the bottom of the trail just after I started my stopwatch. The trail guide claimed that we should allow around 2.5 hours to get to the top, so I wanted to be sure that we would do it in much less time. Larissa was hoping for more of a relaxing time. It was quite hot, and very sunny, and we soon got overheated. For some reason Larissa was not sweating at all, so she got overheated much worse than I did. We had to take our time to the top, but I was happy to see that we made it in well under two hours. The view from the 3000ft.+ summit is very nice. On one side of the plateau (which is surprisingly green on top) there are excellent views of Cape town,

and on the other side are views of the penninsula. At the top there were many dussies scurrying around. They look like your average rodent, but they are apparently fairly closely related to elephants.

Elephants used to live around here, but the Dussie is said to be the closest remaining relative. I think that dussies are probably the sort of thing that locals are annoyed with, but tourists are excited about. We enjoyed them. Not wanting to be too hard on our knees, we decided to take the cable car down, which turned out to be a very quick but enjoyable way to get down and spend $20.

This morning we picked up a rental car with the intention of exploring Table Mountain National Park and Cape Point. We enjoyed the morning part of our drive, as it was very scenic, and the weather was very nice. I told Larissa that I had seen some clouds billowing over Table Mountain this morning. She told me that this sight is reffered to as the Tablecloth. A few seconds later she admitted that she just realized what that meant. It indeed looks like the mountain is draped with a white tablecloth.

Here is one of the sights we enjoyed on our drive:

We eventually reached the entrance to the national park. Unfortunately there was an entrance fee that we had not expected, around $15 for both of us. When you are trying to live on $50 a day, which needs to cover food and lodging, $15 is an intimidating expense. We sat in the car for awhile at the entrance trying to decide what to do. We weren't quite sure why, but cars kept pulling off the road right next to us. They would stop for awhile, and then move on. We didn't pay to much attention to it. Just as we were ready to make a decision on whether we would enter, we noticed a few zebras grazing next to us. All the people were stopping to look and take pictures. So, the zebras convinced us to suck it up and pay the entrance fee. Later we noticed that they are enclosed by a small fence, so are essentially zoo animals, but oh well. There is quite a bit of wildlife in the park. We bumped into many ostriches, antelopes, and baboons, the latter of which are quite a nuissance around here. People have fed them enough that they equate humans with an opportunity to eat. They are not shy about trying to get what they want.

By the time we entered the park the weather had turned sour. It was very windy and the area was covered in a blanket of fog. We could tell that there were some great views around, but it was hard to tell just how great they were.

We were sure to visit the Cape of Good Hope, which is the Southwestern most point of Africa.

Larissa picked out the pictures for this post, so I am the subject in this picture as well as most of the others. There were a lot of dussies at this spot. I wanted Larissa to pose for a picture while they crawled around her and on her lap. Unfortunately, they thought that her arms and especially her toes would make a great meal. She did not want to let them do more than taste, as could be a really bad thing. Apparently these guys are used to being fed by humans as well.

We started driving back on the other side of the Penninsula in the mid-afternoon. We stopped by a place that is known as "The Boulders," which hosts one of the only two land based colonies of penguins in Africa. They are known most commonly as Jackass Penguins due to their call, which resembles the hee-haa of a donkey. I guess there has been a push to refer to them as African Penguins. They hang out on the indian ocean side of the penninsula, which is smart because the water is much warmer there than on the atlantic ocean side.

It is nesting season right now, so many of the penquins were up in the bushes looking after there eggs. They did not seem to be intimidated by our presence.

We had hoped to get to visit the Adventist College near here, but by the time we visited all of these sights, and endured some traffic heading back to Cape Town, it was already near dark. We really enjoyed our day, but we are both a bit worried about how much we will have to pay for a little mistake I made. I thought that driving on the wrong side of the road would be the main risk to our rental vehicle, but it turned out to be a high rocky curb. When backing out of a parking space I swung the wheel too tight and rubbed one side of the bumper pretty raw.

It looks wose in real life than it does in the picture, the car that is. One thing is for sure, we will be well over budget for Cape Town.

Just in case you need help figuring out where we have been, I borrowed a map. In white is the landlocked country of Lesotho where we spent almost two weeks. From there we took a bus to the southwestern portion of South Africa where Cape Town is located. That little finger you see there next to Cape Town is what we explored today. Tomorrow we are going to fly back to Johannesburg, and then on the Paris and then Prague. Wish us luck with the car agency, and with our travels.

Introduction to Cape Town

2006-04-02T17:05:00.000+09:00

Hello from Cape Town! We left Lesotho late Friday night and managed to get here by around 2:00pm the next day. We came by bus, a mode of transportation that we always swear we will refuse to endure again. This experience was no better than some of those we had in Vietnam or Thailand. Anyway, we made it safely, which is most important.

We made our way from the Bus station to the main backpackers area of Cape Town, which is centered around Long Street. We walked around for a long time before finding a suitable place to stay that had a room available. The place we decided on is called Traveller's Inn.

The staff is nice, and the price is better than some, but we have decided to move to another spot for tonight because it was really loud, and we couldn't be sure that the sheets had been cleaned.

Yesterday evening we walked down to the Waterfront district. It has many nice dockside shops and good places to eat. We spent more time eating than shopping. Here is a picture of some of the docks, with Table Mountain (the most dominant landmark around) in the background.

We happened to get here on the last day of a Jazz festival, so the place was very crowded. There was a cool sign showing the distances from here to various cities around the world. Looks like we are indeed getting closer to home.

Today we plan to hike up Table Mountain. It isn't supposed to take more than a couple of hours to hike to the top. A cable car can also take you up, but it is too expensive. Either that, or we are too cheap. Tomorrow we hope to take a tour (probably a self-tour) of Cape Point.

The internet connection here is blazing fast, but more expensive than we became accustomed to in Thailand and Vietnam. We'll be able to keep you more updated on our travels than we were able to do while we were in Lesotho. Speaking of Lesotho, you can check out the previous post for many recently added pictures. We think that they make the post a lot more exciting to read.

A long post...

2006-03-27T04:30:00.000+09:00

Well we have been away from an internet source for so long, we have almost forgotten how to post on our blog! But now we are able to use the internet here at the hospital, though rarely. So we will try to catch you up on our lives. There is quite a line stacking up here in the internet place as there is only one computer that has an internet connection. Combine that with the fact that there are plenty of American medical students here itching to check their email. So where to begin?

That first night when we got here, we stayed in the house of the head doctor here and his wife. He is the one that is related to our friends who recommended this place. Anyway, they have a lovely house! They have an amazing view! I (Larissa) wish we could attach some pictures but this connection is so slow, I don’t know if we will even try. Plus it would be hard to pick so few pictures. The scenery here looks kind of like Italy. It has green rolling hills but it also has very cool and very dramatic mountainy plateaus of limestone.
Hard to explain but very beautiful. All the houses are built with lots of windows to take it the lovely view. We moved into our house.
We are very happy with it. We get to live in it all by ourselves which is really nice. It has three bedrooms and is very comfy. I am sure you want to hear about other things.

Jason was immediately commissioned to start helping some other fellows build a toilet. The people who come to the emergency room have had to walk down a trail to some outhouses so this toilet was very much in need. I didn’t really have a job yet so I went to work on the tennis court. Yes there is a tennis court. And a volleyball court and a basketball court. They are all the same court but it is horribly overgrown with weeds. So I got to work with a shovel. Some little girls were playing in the courts and they got curious and came over to see what I was doing. They conferred among themselves for awhile and then one brave soul spoke up in halting English. “May we help you?” I turned around and smiled and said yes. They were so excited to get the sentence right, they giggled and laughed and ran off to help pull weeds. Actually, I thought they were just going to collect the weeds that I had already pulled up. But then they ran off and grabbed the tools I had brought up with me. This worried me because they were sharp and scary looking and I wasn’t even sure how to use them and they were swinging them around everywhere. I watched them carefully but they were fine. Jason made friends with a Sotho guy who is helping them build the toilets. His name is James. The first day they met, James told Jason he wants an American wife. He is trying to talk Jason into bringing him one. A couple days ago, Jason asked James how old he was. We weren’t sure. He could have been 18 or 25. It turned out he was 23. He asked Jason how old he was and when Jason answered “23” James laughed and laughed! He acted like he couldn’t believe it. Jason said “What, how old did you think I was?” James answered “ I thought you were like…. 22!!!!” And laughed some more. James told Jason he really liked basketball but there wasn’t a basketball around to play with. Jason told him that when he went to town, he would try to find one. Jason found one in town and James and he played a good game of basketball. Jason won but he wasn’t that proud of it since James was playing in flip-flops and then later in barefeet. He would come down on a rock and say “ow” and keep playing.
Jason is also building the toilets with a guy from CA named Hale. He used to be a Peace Corps volunteer here about 15 years ago. He is almost fluent in Sotho. The other day he took us on a hike. It was a village about an hour from here. We took a taxi most of the way there which was quite an experience in itself. We stopped in this little village and then started walking. We were waiting for the taxi that was going to the next village but it was taking so long that we decided to start walking. It was a beautiful walk.
One thing that made it so great was that we passed through little homesteads, and Hale would speak to the people for us and it was so wonderful to be able to converse just little with the people. It made everything way more interesting. Another WONDERFUL thing is that people LOVE having their picture taken. Sometimes, they will stop you ask for you to take their picture. Makes us glad that we have digital. IT is extra good because after we take the picture, we can show them their picture on the back of our camera. They see it and then they shriek with laughter! Kids, adults, everyone loves it. In fact, the kids follow you around and pose so you will take their picture.
It was hard on our hike because sometimes we wanted to take a picture of scenery without out naked children posing in the middle of it. :]

There were a couple places when we were walking on the road where we had to walk over the water. Instead of making a bridge to go over the water, the build a “bridge” that stays under the water and is very strong that way.

Anyway, there was one where we had to cross kind of a strong current. There was a huge crowd of children following us out of curiosity, like usual. Hardly anybody around here knows how to swim so when the children tried to follow us through the river, Hale yelled at them to stay back. Some tried to come anyway but Hale got a stick and told them that if they came to the other side he would beat them. Of course he wouldn’t have but they didn’t know that so they stayed on the other side. Once we crossed the river, we came across a group of musicians who were sitting on the side of a hill playing an accordion and singing.

It was so cool to hear them. They got so caught up in it that they started dancing too. We had our own private musical show.

This is a typical Basotho house. They are called Rondovels (have no idea of the spelling). They are made from clay or sandstone bricks with grass roofs.

It was a beautiful day for our hike and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves except for the massive blister on my foot that kept reminding me of its existence. On the way back, we rode a taxi. The driver had the music all the way up and the African beat was blaring. Inside the minivan, all types of people going home for the night bounced their shoulders up and down and some moved their whole upper body all around. The party didn’t stop inside the van though. The taxi had to go relatively slow because of the muddy, pitted road. This gave the music plenty of time to be heard all around us. On the side of the road, there was a cluster of children that made the best of the passing party. All of them began to dance from the eldest who looked about 7 years old, to the youngest who looked all of 2. The 2 year old wore such a serious expression as she wiggled her little hips to and fro. Both Jason and I saw it and burst out laughing! I will never forget that as long as I live. It was so cute! I wish I had a video camera to capture it for everyone. Alas, we didn’t even get a picture.

The people around here wear blankets. Almost everyone does. I guess a British official gave one as a gift to an ancient Sotho ruler. It was one of his most prized possessions and soon, the British couldn’t import blankets fast enough to satisfy the appetite of the Sotho. They wear them in all kinds of weather. They wrap it around them and then fasten it with a giant safety pin. Hopefully you will get to see some pictures soon and you will see what I am talking about. The carry their babies around on their backs and the keep them there with a towel. They safety pin the towel as to hold the baby safely. I don’t know if I will ever get used to the women bending over, and slinging their 2 month old babies onto their back and the letting them lay there without supporting them while they grab the towel to fasten it. It almost gives me a heart attack every time.

I got to shadow a doctor from the Congo around the other day. He is really nice and he speaks 7 languages. His goal is to speak 10. He learned Sotho in 4 months. He asked us how to get to work in America. Many people have asked us that since we have come here. This guy at least has the qualifications. Anyway, I followed him around and at first I was helping a little bit. Well, I was almost helping. He told me I could do a blood pressure and I took his stethoscope confidently and then grabbed the cuff. That is when I began to feel uneasy. There was no way to fasten it. It was a long piece of fabric so I just wrapped it around the guys arm until it wouldn’t go anymore and then tried to take the reading. It didn’t hear ANYTHING. I tried again, still nothing. The doctor told me that you have to tie the end. So I tied the cuff on to him and tried again. This time I got a reading but just barely. It seemed like the doctor was going to let me try to draw blood but when I saw the equipment they still use I decided it might not be the best decision. They draw the blood up with a syringe and then they take it out and squirt it into a test tube. This is especially risky since you have to unscrew the needle instead of being able to just pop it off into the sharps container. A lot of people have HIV and AIDS here too so I don’t think I will take the risk.

After we looked at the blood drawing facilities, he took me to the wellness center which is where the patients with HIV/AIDS come for their specialized treatment. The second patient was a year and a half old baby. When the mother took him off her back, I almost couldn’t help gasping. It just a little skeleton baby. His cheeks were sunken in and his arms were like toothpicks. He was whimpering and crying weakly while the doctor examined him. His cries where what got to me; my eyes started to fill up with tears and I had to look away and try thinking of something else. This baby had AIDS and had even been started out on ARVs two weeks prior to his visit. Both of his parents were HIV positive but they looked healthy enough at the moment. The baby had thrush in his mouth and it was just so pitiful. I just started thinking that if the cry of a sick baby can make it so I can’t do anything with out crying, then it was hopeless to become a PA. I left that office very depressed.

There is a medical student here from Boston University and also a pediatric resident in his last year from BU. I guess Lesotho has a partnership with BU or something because all together there are about 5 people here from there. I shadowed the pediatric resident around on Sunday which is about the busiest day here. The waiting room was full of kids that day. I stood quietly while the doc saw the patients and watched. Jason shadowed the medical student around as he saw patients. As Jason mentioned to me, it was rather inspiring. So it made up for the AIDS baby experience. Of course then the resident told me that that baby that I was sad about died a couple days later.

Dr.Carter (the resident), had a translator for a nurse and it was quite an interesting experience. We had one nurse at first and she was translating. A mother came in with a baby that had inflamed eyes and a cold. Dr.Carter heard the symptoms and realized that it was a viral infection. So he told the mother breastfeed her baby a lot and come back in two days so he could check that the eyes were getting better. When the translator heard that, she didn’t tell the mother what he said but asked Dr. Carter, “That’s it? You aren’t going to give her anything?” Dr. Carter told her that it was a viral infection so antibiotics would help it all. The translator asked him if he wanted a second opinion. He said no, that he was sure about his diagnosis but if she wanted a second opinion, she was welcome to get one. She was worried because they have to pay to see a doctor and to just send them away without any medicine seemed like it was a waste of money. Dr.Carter compromised and sent the mother and baby to the ophthalmologist down the hall. I thought it was silly because they would have had to pay for medicine as well so I am sure they would prefer just the doctor’s visit cost. The nurse was nice about it but it was interesting.

We got a different translator for the next couple patients, who was also nurse. She was not a happy person. We thought she was just mad at us but then it became apparent she wasn’t being very nice to the patients either. She just glared off to the side and didn’t make eye contact with anyone. She wouldn’t translate until Dr.Carter prodded her and then she gave a big sigh. It got especially bad with one patient. A baby was very sick and the doc wanted to admit him into the hospital. He gave the parents lots of instructions about where to go for some lab tests, what he thought was wrong with the baby and what to expect when the baby was being admitted. When the nurse went to translate it sounded something like this, “blah blah blah blah blah”. There was a long silence while we waited for her to finish but that was all she said. Finally Dr.Carter asked, “Did you tell them all that?” She said yes and he said “You told them all that in the five words you just said?” She said she had so he looked her in the eye and said, “Ok, I want you to tell the parents to tell me back everything that I just explained to them. I want to make sure they understand.” She passed along the message and you could tell the parents were upset. They spoke rapid fire for a bit and then she said with a disdainfully straight face, “They are very frustrated because you are asking them all these questions but you never told them any information. You haven’t explained anything for them to explain back.” Dr.Carter got a little red in the face, but soon the conflict was dealt with. Sheesh. I would have lost my patience so much sooner. Anyway, Jason and I were very inspired after watching the doctors’ work and I felt much better about becoming a PA.

I have been typing a lot and Jason has gotten very good at the construction work that he is helping with. In fact, he has gotten so good at it that everyone just stands around and watches him work now. Not quite, but his is doing a lot more than everyone else and he does a very good job. He has been going up there at 7am and coming back at 5:30pm.

Neo is doing well. I saw him today. The last couple times I have gone to see him, he has been sleeping. So today I saw him and he was in such a good mood. Cooing and making all sorts of cute little noises. He likes to imitate things now. I made a kissing noise the other day and he made a smacking noise back. Then I blew air through loose lips and make a plblblblblblbb noise and he tried to do it too but he couldn’t quite get it. I whistled and he laughed SO loud! Of course, I couldn’t whistle anymore because I was smiling but oh well. If Jason and I were older and more settled, it would be hard not to take him home. But che sara sara.

On Sabbath we went on another hike. Here are some flowers that covered the valley as we were hiking. They are called Cosmos:

There is a big beautiful hill that is just perfectly shaped to climb. They call it the mole hill.
I guess it is kind of shaped like one. Anyway, there aren’t really any fences here so when you want to hike, you just set out on one of the many trails winding around. This place is very wide and open

I am pretty proud of myself. I am going to brag a little. I have gotten Jason to like a lot of food since we started dating. Here is a list: avocados, tomatoes (almost), artichokes, and mangoes. This trip has been mostly useful for him to start liking mangoes. I got a case of 6 big beautiful ones at the supermarket for 2 dollars (we also bought a whole bunch of Passion fruit too which cost like only 75 cents for 4). It seems that Jason has gotten addicted to having them on his cereal. In fact, the other day when we were out of mangoes, he almost made me go out in a huge thunderstorm to buy some more mangoes. I refused and he was quite crestfallen. He loves mangoes now. But he refuses to learn how to cut them (he doesn’t like getting juice all over his hands) so I have get up at 6:30 with him to cut the mangoes for cereal. Hah!

We are leaving for Cape Town, South Africa on Friday evening. We are taking another bus. I can’t believe that our adventure here is almost done. We have had really good time. I hope that once we get to Europe, we will have more reliable internet service. I really like being able to write everyday so I can get everything off my chest and share it with you guys. Much love and see you all soon!

Lesotho

2006-03-20T16:35:00.000+09:00

We had a very nice and restful time in South Africa. It was nice having a Sabbath at a home. On Sabbath, we went to their church. It is called the Southern Suburbs church and it was their 70th Anniversary. They had a special potluck service and it was quite good. Then Pastor Harris' son took us to the airport. We had a wonderful time and the Harris' made everything so restful and nice for us. Pastor Harris' wife, Alet gave me some recipes that I got to try while we were there. She makes some amazing things. Like carob bars! Usually I don't like carob but WOW! These were good, I would rather eat them than real chocolate! Anyway, we got on our plane and headed off to Lesotho (pronounced Less-oo-too). We landed safely and wen through customs but there was no one there to meet us. We didn't mind and we were just going to sit there and wait but then the lady told us they were closing the airport at 6 pm. That was only 15 minutes away!! We had forgotten to get the hospitals number and the phones didn't work anyway so we were in trouble. There was a nice man in the back though that let us use the airport special phone and we got a hold of the doctor in Maluti. He said someone should be there shortly. They were and we had a long trip to the hospital. I have to type fast because the connection ehre is incredibly slow but really expensive.

Yesterday we got a tour around the facilities here and got to meet Neo. He was abondoned by his mother and came to the hospital when he was 9 months old. He is now a little over a year old. He is HIV negative. They don't have an adoption serivce here in Lesotho so they are just keeping him at the hospital until they figure out something to do with him. A lady with an orphanage wants to take him because she gets money for every baby in there but they checked out her facilites and decided it was too bad of a place for him. He is a sweetie. I wish I could include a picture but it isn't letting me. It is very annoying. If you want a picture of him I can email you one but it isn't letting me upload pictures. I don't know if it will let me post this even. Well, we will try to write more later.

South Africa ....and Beyond!

2006-03-17T21:05:00.000+09:00

We had two very long flights in the last two days. The first was 13 hours from Singapore to Paris, the second was 11 hours from Paris to Johannesburg. They were both overnight flights so we slept in the plane. Air France has VERY nice service though so we slept rather well! I (Larissa) was surprised at myself. I think I slept about 8 hours the first night. When I woke up Jason said, "I am so proud of you! You just laid your head back and went to sleep like a mature old women. Instead of getting into all these weird positions first." I made sure that was a compliment.

We sat in the Paris airpot for about 12 hours. We could have taken the train into the city for not much money but we had both forgotten that cold existed so we packed we only had sandals and shorts/skirt on. The rest was in our checked baggage alas. We didn't think we would have much fun walking around Paris when it was below freezing out. Anyway, we stop back through Paris for a couple days on the way back so we should get some good sightseeing in then.

We ate our chips and salsa in the airport because all the food was WAY too expensive to stomach. For example: You know those 1/4 can of pringles? Those would have cost us around 3 euro! which is like... almost 4 dollars. An average slice of pizza was 5 euro. So we ignored our stomachs and then finally gave in to eating our chips and salsa and it was heaven.

We are here in Johannesburg now! Our good South African-American friends got this medical mission trip set up for us and for that we are very grateful! They thought they could have a friend of theirs meet us but they were going to get back to us to let us know for sure. Unfortunately, we weren't able to check our email in Paris so we didn't know whether anyone would be there to meet us or not. We walked out of the terminal and immediately saw a man holding a sign with the words "Around the World in 4 Months Jason and Larissa"underneath which he held the latest copy of the Adventist Review. We knew this was our man and we were VERY happy to see someone! Eddie is his name and he works at the SDA conference here. Jason will continue this post from here on out since I am running out of time on my internet.

So we have enjoyed touring around parts of Johannesburg. We went to a flee market earlier that had lots of nice African crafts and such. Then we toured a food donation center, where were met with great hospitality. After recieving a nice tour of the facilities, and told numerous stories of generous donations, we were treated to a very nice meal. I was especially excited to get to eat a few apples, something that we have had to do without for awhile.

Looks like we are going to do some more looking around and then head back to the Pastor's house. Tomorrow we will be off to Lesotho, which we just found out is pronounced Lesootoo, or close to it.

Home internet access is by the minute, and apparently very expensive, so we may not be able to post from Lesotho. If not, be assured that we are thinking of you all, and having a great time.

Four Cities, Four Days, and Four Currencies in My Wallet

2006-03-15T19:33:00.000+09:00

We had nice upper-level sleepers for the train trip from Bangkok to Hat Yai.

Unfortunately, the other people riding in our car were not as intent upon sleeping as we were. Their talking and laughing, combined with the fact that the car's doors didn't work (so it sounded like we were travelling through a hurricane) meant that we weren't able to get a lot of sleep that night. Nonetheless, we arrived in Hat Yai safely, which was our primary goal. As soon as we arrived I nervously approached the ticket counter. You see, we had not yet been able to get tickets to Kuala Lumpur. The only place in Thailand you can book these tickets (unless you have planned far ahead and used a booking agency) is in Hat Yai. Fortunately there was room for us on the train. Unfortunately, the sleeping berths were not available. Oh well, we thought, at least we'll get there.

Hat Yai is located deep in the south of Thailand. While Thailand's predominating religion is Buddism, the majority of the people in the south practice Islam. In recent years there has been a separatist movement on the part of some Muslims in southern Thailand. They have expressed their dissatisfaction in the form of terrorism. Last year they bombed the airport in Hat Yai, and the year before they were responsible for hundreds of deaths in bombings throughout the neighboring provinces. Needless to say, we were a bit concerned about travelling here. We were happy to read; however, that Americans and other foreigners are not currently being targeted.
We set up camp in the heavily guarded train station. There were barricades out front, and a large number of highly armed guards. I thought they were a little careless with there guns, but I was still happy that they had them.

We decided that it would be too much of a bother for both of us to go into town. So, at no time during our seven hour layover did both of us leave the station. I was the first to explore the city. I went looking for food, internet access, and of course (upon Larissa's request) bookstores. I found all of these necessities, and even stumbled accross a national Hula competition. I went back to get Larissa, who went to watch the show and get some pictures.

All in all, we enjoyed our time in Hat Yai. Outside of the train station it actually seemed like quite a friendly place.

In the early afternoon we boarded the train. We found our second class seats to be comfortable, but soon realized that they would not be comfortable enough for the 16 hours we would have to spend sitting in them. Again, I will make an appeal for sympathy: We didn't sleep much that night.

Finally, early the next morning, we arrived at Kuala Lumpur's beautiful and modern Sentral Station (their spelling). At Sentral Station, the trains, subway, sky-rail, monorail, and bus lines all converge. We took the monorail to the station nearest our hostel, which we had booked online while in Hat Yai. Since it was to early to check in to our room, we left our bags at the hostel and headed out on the town. We were most excited to visit the Petronas Towers, so that is where we headed first. These are the highest twin towers in the world, and were officially the tallest buildings in the world until the completion of the Tapei 101 building in 2004. We took the monorail within short walking distance of the towers. There is a double-decker bridge at the 42nd floor that spans the gap between the buildings. The upper level is used for workers (50,000 people work in the there) to get between the buildings, while the lower level is used for tourism. We immediately went down to get our free tickets to the skybridge. Only so many tickets are issued each day, so we wanted to be sure that we were able to get ahold of two of them. The elevator ride to the 42nd floor only took around 40 seconds. We bravely made our way out onto the bridge, taking comfort in the fact that the towers were designed by an American. In the middle of the bridge there are two outcroppings, one on each side. I will admit that I got a little weak in the knees when I stepped out onto one of them. I decided that it was not a place that I wanted to stay very long. Larissa managed to capture my sheepish demeanor before I leaped back to safety.

In the lower levels of one of the towers is a massive shopping mall. While I don't really like going to malls at home, I enjoyed our time in this one. We could almost trick ourselves into thinking we were back in America. We enjoyed some delicious veggie burgers at McDonalds, and returned that evening to catch the movie Tristan and Isolde. The towers were beautiful at night.

The rest of the day was spent touring the city of Kuala Lumpur. We were very impressed with both the cleanliness of the city, and with its' comprehensive public transportation network, the former in stark contrast to Bangkok. We used the subway, skyrail, monorail, and buses with ease. It was nice to be in a city without Tuk Tuk drivers hassling us. In fact, no one really hassled us. We are a bit jaded after enduring the Tuk Tuk drivers in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand. We are suspicious of anyone who approaches us. Yesterday, a man started talking to us on the street, we tuned him out and said "No Thank You," and promptly walked in the middle of a movie filming. All he was trying to do was to get us to walk around the set.

We toured Chinatown and Little india, coming accross a couple of beautiful mosques along the way. The official religion of Malaysia is Islam, though freedom of religion is practiced. Therefore, we have left the land of Wats, and entered the land of Mosques.

The next morning we took the train to Singapore. The ride was only supposed to take six hours, but some of the passengers got hung up in customs, and the train waited for them. Singapore is known for being a very clean place. To uphold this reputation, Gum, other than a pack or two in your pocket, cannot be imported. The Malaysian train dropped us a bit out of town, but we were able to hike to a subway station so that we could travel to our hostel. After about an hour, we made it to the Backpacker's Cozy Corner Hostel, which is in the Arab district of Singapore. We hope to explore this area today. Nearby are streets with names such as Baghdad and Khandahar. The hostel offers free breakfast, and free internet. Free breakfast turned out to be basically just free toast, and the internet has been too crowded to use. The only reason I have been able to get on is because the internet is down right now. I am just typing this out hoping that the connection will come back.

Last night we went to explore the primary shopping district of the city, centered around Orchard Road. There was shopping plaza after shopping plaza filled with things I didn't really want or couldn't really afford. One plaza, called Lucky plaza, was filled with photographic equipment stores. So, in this case, the plaza was filled with things that I wanted, but still couldn't afford. Apparently Singapore used to be THE place to buy photographic equipment. I guess it is not the deal it once was; however, because all of the prices I was quoted (and bargained for) were higher than those in the States.

Larissa is apparently feeling better, because she is once again demanding that we start eating local foods, rather than fries from McDonalds or Pringles from 7-11. I am not really ready to go back to ramen. So, last night, we comprimised. I ate at McDonalds, and she ate some kind of mushroom noodle soup.

We are impressed with Singapore thus far. It is indeed a clean place, though probably no cleaner than Kuala Lumpur. It also has a very extensive public transportation network. We are going to explore as much as possible today, before having to catch our flight to Paris tonight.
Okay, I wrote the above paragraphs this morning, it is late afternoon now. The internet never did come back up, so I will update you on the day now.
First we took a walking tour of Singapore's Arab district. It was quaint, clean, and well planned. The nicest mosque we have seen thus far is located near Baghdad Street,

it is called Sultan Mosque. We wanted to go inside, but I had an immodestly dressed wife by mosque standards.

Then we took the subway to Little India. This seemed like a poor neighborhood in comparison to the Arab district. It was dirty, and the buildings were not nearly as nice. Unfortunately, it was lunch time, and we were both getting hungry, and a bit cranky. Not really the place to be, seeing as how we had both vowed to avoid Indian food for awhile. After buying some oranges at the market, we broke down and entered a vegetarian Indian restaurant. I thought we'd just get some naan and samosas. We ended up getting a full meal, even though we thought we had just ordered a couple of appetizers. I am happy to report that are stomachs are feeling fine.

After little India, we made our way to Chinatown. There we walked to some nice temples, and Larissa enjoyed looking in some shops. Then we went to the Singapore river, and to the local bay. This was the best place to take in the views of the city.

During our walk Larissa noticed a huge sign indicating that there was a book fair going on.

She jumped up and down excitedly and informed me that I was in big trouble. I knew what she meant. We would be spending lots of time, and lots of money at this book fair. There was indeed a lot of books at this fair and they were priced very reasonably. Fortunately for our budget, and for our time constraints, many of the books were written in Chinese. I was proud of Larissa. She only bought one book, and we were in and out of there in less than an hour.

We enjoyed a nice celebratory dinner following our departure from the book fair. Larissa had fungi pasta and a Mango shake, and I had fungi pizza and a blueberry muffin. It was our most expensive meal since eating at an Indian place in Palau. Prices in Singapore are comparable, though probably slightly less than those in American cities. While we have enjoyed ourselves here, we are glad that we didn't stay here very long. The only things we can really afford here is transportation, eating, and walking.

Yesterday we broke down and bought some chips and salsa. We are waiting for the perfect moment to dig in. The time will probably come sometime in the middle of the night when we are bored, hungry, and tired of flying.

Our journey from Bangkok to Singapore has turned out to be an experience to remember. We are proud of completing the 1500 some kilometers by the land route. It will take us much less time to travel the thousands of miles from here to South Africa.

Soon we will be taking the subway to the airport. I think we are looking at about a twelve hour flight to Paris. We will have a pretty full day there before boarding our flight to Johannesburg. We will then have over twenty-four hours in Johannesburg before flying to Lesotho.

Larissa wanted to add a few of her observations, which will hopefully be more entertaining and to the point than mine have been.

Well, I don't think that will happen! Anyway, I just wanted to say a couple things about the cities that we went to. Kuala Lumpur has the distinction of being a democratic Muslim city. Everywhere we went, there were women wearing head scarves. You could also see the men wearing the lace caps they wear if they have made the pilgramage to Mecca. It was interesting because while the younger generations still seemed to be traditional in the sense that they wore head scarves, many of the young women would wear very stylish and sometimes sexy clothing. There headscarves were defintely not dowdy. They fastened them with beautiful brooches and they mostly looked very trendy.

Kuala Lumpur was a very trendy city indeed. Everything seemed new and big and clean and very busy. The streets were wide but beautiful with trees and bushes lining them everywhere. The traffic wasn't bad at all. It was obvious that Islam is a very important part of life there. The sidewalk tiles each have the intertwined squares of Islam. Indeed, even the Petronas towers design is based on the Islamic intertwined squares.

Everyone was really nice to us. I went to get a sandwhich and the two Muslim women who worked there asked me all about my vegetarianism. They were very impressed. And they gave me extra avacado on my sandwhich. :]

Singapore is amazing! When we walked out of the train station, I wasn't too imporessed and I thought that I would like Kuala Lumpur better. But Singapore grew on me and now I really love it. It has a more sedate stlye than Kuala Lumpur. It is high class and bustling but much more relaxed. Both cities are very clean and it is hard to decide which one is cleaner. The river is not clear but it is clean and Jaosn and I witnessed how that came to be. We were standing on a bridge when we saw this weird contraption in the water. It was the boat thing with a conveyor belt. It goes around and scoops leaves and other junk out of the water. That is how is stays so clean. I thought that was really cool. More cities should do that.

Traffic seems to be almost non-existant here as well. Public Trans must really help . I have never ever experienced a city with so little traffic.

By the way, Singapore is a country but also a city. I was confused but I fianlly figured it out. Anyway, there are tons of cute kids here. Yesterday there were a bunch of kids playing in a fountain and I got a picture of an especially cute little girl:

Well, hopefully we will be able to write more soon but we don't know the internet situation in Lesotho. Good to hear from you all!

Ocean World and Khao San

2006-03-11T14:29:00.000+09:00

Well yesterday we took care of some very necessary things on the internet (Jason filed his taxes and FASFA) and then we were off! We went to the huge new mall that we went to before that had the great bread. There we shopped to our hearts' content. Jason found some salsa again and it was on sale for $4.50, down from $5.00. Still too much though, so he sucked it up and put it back on the shelf.

Then we bought some hot gourmet soup. I had asparagus & Leek cream soup and Jason had mushroom and broccoli! So good, especially because we bought some bread to dip in it. After we ate, Jason came over to me with a sheepish smile and said "I REALLY want to go here" and handed me a brochure to the new aquarium that was in the bottom of the mall (its a nice mall!) I asked Jason, "Well would you like to go to this aquarium instead of the one in Singapore?" He said "I was hoping you weren't go to ask me that" After much ado, I agreed (it was over our budget). We bought our tickets and noticed that it was right at the time when the shark feeding was supposed to happen. So we RAN through the whole aquarium until we found the shark tank. Nothing much seemed to be happening, so we figured we missed it, walked back to to the beginning of the aquarium and started our journey through the sea!

They have this special glass bottom boat ride where you get to be on a glass bottom boat on top of the main tank. We didn't see anything more special than if we had just walked through the glass tube through the main tank. But that's ok because I got to see Jason wear a really cool bright orange life jacket!

At the end of the aquarium, we came to an "aquarium car". It was a car that was filled with water and had gold fish in it. You could toss coins in there and Jason quickly deposited three. Here he is:

After that we came back and went to Khao San road, this is the road we are staying on and where many backpackers come to stay. There is tons to buy but Jason and I just got a banana & chocolate crepe. Mmmm.

This street is pretty cool at night, here is a picture of all the people milling around. Pretty busy place.

Today we are taking an overnight train down to southern Thailand. And then we are off to Kuala Lumpur on another train. So, it may be awhile until we can post again. Best case scenario, we can post in southern Thailand. Not that there will be anything to say....

Elephants, etc.

2006-03-09T21:56:00.000+09:00

What a fun time we had! Yesterday we had quite a trek. It started out with a hot hike up a mountain to visit a hill tribe (the Mhong people I think). It is the beginning of the hottest season here and you can certainly see it when you look around. Everything is pretty brown. The trees are all mostly dead and there are small fires daily that burn up the underbrush. Things are pretty hazy everywhere because of all of the fires. Soon we got to a very beautiful river. The clear water was surrounded by picturesque rocks and trees. Here is a picture:

And here is a picture of the bamboo bridge we had to walk over to get to the other side: It was fun! Don't worry, despite appearances, it is a safe bridge. The hill tribe was pretty cool too. These people came over from China a couple centuries ago. Here is a picture of a cute little boy that I (Larissa) saw:

The people of the tribe sell various things like handmade scarves and jewelry to supplement their main income, which is derived from farming. We didn't buy anything, but enjoyed walking around the village instead of spending our time bargaining. When we left a village lady sold us some bananas. We didn't really want the bananas, but it the sale gave Jason the go ahead to point the camera at her for a few shots. Here is a picture of me buying them from her:

Then it was off to the elephant rides. We don't have a picture of Jason and I on the elephant but Jason ran around the side and took this as I was boarding the elephant:

We both really liked our elephant. He was a big, gentle giant. One of the tourists had given him a cocnut before we left and he happily munched it as we walked. Not all of the elephants were as well behaved as ours. The one behind us liked to snort up dust in his trunk and then mix it with a good dose of saliva before spraying it on his forhead. Of course, this sometimes coated the passengers as well. His trainer knew about this habit and I suppose that is why he lead the animal from the ground instead of sitting on his head like most of the other trainers. We assumed that all of the elephants must have been feeling very hot. When we got to the water buckets for them to cool down; however, our elephant didn't even seem interested. The naughty elephant on the other hand, had a hay day. His slurped up the water and sprayed it everywhere, narrowly sparing the riders from a full on spray. It turns out this elephant was still young so he wasn't fully trained yet. Apparently, he was only 20 years old instead of 30-40 years old like most of the other elephants. The law makes it so the elephants must be retired at age 60. Then they are let into the wild. They often live until they are 80 years old.

Next it was off to lunch. Jason and I are proud to announce we were able to eat Thai food without any major setbacks. Ever since we got sick, even thinking about eating Thai or Indian food made us feel like throwing up. So we were glad to eat a full meal and get through it just fine.

Then it was off to the waterfall. Here is a picture of it:

The guide had us jump in the water near the base of it. It was just a sand bar under the water that we could stand on. Then we swam to the right of the waterfall and jumped off that little cliff there. Don't worry, we had the guide do everything first, although both Jason and I reported that we had touched the sandy bottom just a little upon plunging into the water. Our guide then took us around the right side of the waterfall and showed us how to go behind it. To get behind it, you had to go through some pretty strong spray and it almost pummeled me to death! But it was a pretty cool view from behind the waterfall. Imagine our surprise when our guide dove through the waterfall into the water below! We were supposed to follow!! Well, we finally got up the nerve to jump out through the falling water. Our dives were not graceful, but at least we cleared the rocks to land in the cushiony foam below. We regret not bringing our underwater camera. No action shots to share with you this time.

Larissa had to go back to our room, she said she is feeling ill again. She wanted me to finish this post before coming to check on her.

After the waterfall we took a short drive back to the river (the Mae Wang) pictured above. Once there, we were assigned to a bamboo raft. The rafts are about 30 feet in length, and 3 feet in width. They are maneuvered by two people holding bamboo poles, one standing in front, and one in back. I volunteered to be in charge of the back pole. Larissa sat on a simple, but as it turned out, surprisingly comfortable seat in the middle of the raft. Since we didn't have our camera at this point, I'll have to borrow a picture from so that you can see what the rafts look like: We greatly enjoyed our trip down the river. I was impressed with how well the craft was suited to handle whitewater. As we were drifting, I was drawing up plans of how I might get a raft like this in the states. It may be awhile before I can have one, as I'll probably have to grow a forest of bamboo trees first.

The Mae Wang river is enjoyed by many locals who want to escape the heat. Just as we take innertubes down the river in the States, they take their bamboo rafts. We saw a lot of teenagers having floating parties, complete with floating beverage service. Most of them splashed us as we went by. It didn't take us long to figure out that our guide was instructing them to do so as we approached.

Frequently during the drift we got to watch elephants going about their business on shore. Near the end of the drift, we got to watch an elephant bathing in the river with his owner. Both of them looked to be fully enjoying themselves. Not the sight of your typical canoe trip. I think that the rafting was the highlight of the day for me. I would like to plan a multi-day trip on a larger river.

We said goodbye to Chiang Mai feeling like we left it unexplored. At least we were able to get out for one day of fun in the woods. The cheapest way to get back to Bangkok was by bus, so that is how we did it. So, you get to here about another horrible bus ride. We boarded the overnight bus at around 7:30pm. It was very full, and the only seats we could find together were at the very back. It didn't take us long to notices that were few very annoying things about these seats. First, they were the only only ones on the bus that did not recline. Second, they were so high off the floor that we could only barely touch it with our toes. Third, the little twisty things that are supposed to be in place for regulating air-flow were broken out of their sockets. Therefore, we were sitting in a windstorm of cold air. It wasn't long before we realized that we weren't going to get any sleep if we both stayed up on the seats. I soon crammed myself between our seats and those in front of us for a night on the floor. Meanwhile Larissa fought for sleeping space with a girl across from us (there are 5 seats in a row in th back, instead of 4 with an aisle between them). Both of us froze, and neither of us slept well. We were both looking for sympathy when we arrived in Bangkok.

We are staying in a bright clean air-conditioned room. We have a mattress that actually feels like a matress, rather than a warped wood plank like the last one that we were sleeping on. We will be here one more full day before starting our trip down to Singapore, and then on to Africa. We have no idea what kind of internet access we will have during this trip, and during our time in Africa. Just know that we will do our best to keep you informed of our travels. Thank you for reading so faithfully.

I'd better go see how Larissa is doing.

Out and About!

2006-03-07T23:01:00.000+09:00

Yesterday, Jason optimistically went out and booked us a one-day tour for today. About 2 hours after he did so, I was spending quality time hugging the toilet bowl. Jason was very compassionate and kept saying how sorry he was that I was throwing up. Then he went and postponed our tour until tomorrow. Hopefully, neither of us will be feeling under-the-weather tomorrow as this is our last chance to go on a tour. We are leaving on the overnight bus to Bangkok tomorrow right after we get back from the tour. We get to ride elephants, go bamboo rafting and visit a hilltribe village. I think there is a waterfall visit too.

Hopefully we will get some good photo documentation of this outing since we haven't gotten much during our stay in Chaing Mai. I take that back. After Jason vomited the first time and was still hugging the trash can, he told me "Hey, take a picture!" So I guess we have documented what we have really spent our time doing.

Today at about 11am, we were feeling well enough (or should I say desperate enough?) to get out and do something. We had been confined to a stinky hotel room and stinky road long enough. So we went to the mall! It is a beautiful 4 story building with starbucks and Pizza Hut. Not that we ate at either place. Hey, we even saw a sign for Intel on the way to the mall. Mahi, I guess you could get a job here! Anyway, we bought some sunkist oranges (they were the best ever!!), some mentos, some pringles, and some applesauce. Then we went and watched a movie with Harrison Ford, Firewall. Talk about suspenseful! I guess you can tell from our days activities that we are a little homesick! Movies here only cost $2 so we have seen two. We saw Fun with Dick and Jane. That was a much funnier/better movie than I thought it would be. Anyway, enough rambling. We wanted to update you on all the things we aren't doing but also let you know that things will soon change! Promise!

Still Mending...

2006-03-05T16:46:00.000+09:00

Well Jason is on the mend at least. Less vomiting/more singing. He has eaten a few bananas.
I was just telling him that there is nothing more lonely than being sick by yourself in a foriegn country where no one loves you. At least we have each other! Awwww......
Anyway, we discussed how much we love America and miss our family and friends. As I was closing the door to the hotel room on my way out, I heard him start singing "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..." :]
We have been laying in bed all day today, and the poor cleaning lady was beside herself because she couldn't do her job so I accepted some clean towels and a couple water bottles through the crack in our chain locked door.
I am off to find us some food that might be edible to Jason. Thank you for reading.

Sickness Abounds

2006-03-04T21:02:00.000+09:00

Well, for those of you who thought my illness might be morning sickness, sorry to dissapoint you! Jason has just come down with my virus, while I am only feeling a little naseous today. Actually, Jason is feeling a lot worse than I ever did. He has vomited a couple times poor thing. I just felt like vomiting. His sickness came on around 11am. He has been rolling around on the bed moaning about dying and I have been trying to nurse him. He has a fever now but I gave him some tylenol to help with it. I was worried enough to wake up his dad (a doctor) around 3 oclock in the morning. Sorry! But he sounded glad to hear from me, and it was nice to hear his voice. So pray for Jason's quick recovery. I am not sure what he is the most upset about; his stomach or the fact that we won't get to go on a 3 day trek. I just left to get something to eat and update you all on poor Jason. I should be getting back to nursing him now.

Cooking Class

2006-03-03T18:13:00.000+09:00

Around 9:30 this morning Larissa and I walked over to the indian restaurant to check in for her class. We were welcomed in, and promptly served tea, water, and potato naan. It wasn't long until Larissa was presented with a red and white apron (which she was quite excited about) and put to work cutting and peeling vegetables. I thought that this would be a good time for me to take off for awhile. While Larissa did some prep. work, I interviewed a few tour agents to get an idea of what might be the best trek to embark upon.

Eventually, I came back so that I could sit and watch some tv, and drink a soda or something. This was not in the cards; however, as I was promptly put to work peeling potatoes. While I slaved away, Larissa and her Indian teacher went off to the kitchen to start cooking. The kitchen was nice enough, though now that I think of it I would never eat at a place that looked like that in the states.

After I peeled a mountain of potatoes, I was free to roam the streets again. I returned periodically over the next couple of hours to try the latest dish. Here is Larissa presenting Masala Dosa, Yello Dahl, and a tamarind dipping sauce.

All of the recipes were delicious. I think Larissa kept accurate enough notes so that she should be able to repeat them when we return home. Unfortunately, Larissa is still feeling a bit sick today. She didn't really feel like eating a lot of the food that she made. After learning nine recipes, she was ready to go back to the hotel to lay down for awhile. I stayed back at the restaurant to learn how to make garlic naan and samosas. This lady really has things figured out. She basically gets people to pay her to work for her. My samosa making went very well, well enough that she had me make enough to fill the lunch orders. I was sent home with seven or eight different dishes for Larissa and I to enjoy in the hotel room. While Larissa was able to eat a little bit, it was mostly me doing the enjoying. Here is me proudly holding a samosa of my own making. They are filled mainly with potatoes and cilantro.

Overall we were both very pleased with the cooking class experience. For the price of an average dinner at an average American restaurant, we got to learn some recipes and come away completely stuffed.

Hopefully we will able to go on a trek soon. We are most interested in a 3 day tour in a national park north of here. We will be able to sleep in hill tribe villages, take an elephant ride, go whitewater and bamboo rafting, and enjoy vegetarian meals cooked by our guide. It is actually cheaper for us to go on a tour like this than it is to eat and do a bit of sightseeing around the city.

We are leaning more and more towards taking the train from Bangkok to Singapore. While we could actually fly down there cheaper, we think that spending a few days on the train will have a more positive overall effect on our budget. We plan on stopping for a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur to see the sights of the city, mainly the Petronas Towers. After that we hope to have a day or two in Singapore. If any of you know of some must see sights in these areas, please let us know.

First Day in Chiang Mai

2006-03-02T14:23:00.000+09:00

We managed to make it safely from Koh Tao to Chiang Mai. From Koh Tao, we took an enjoyable three hour boat ride to Chumpon. The ride took us through many beautiful islands of the Gulf of Thailand. We definately prefer this express boat to the overnight boat. It was interesting to see that there were two classes of service on the boat. We paid for the economy class, which entitled us to be anywhere on the upper-deck, or sit on hard seats below. For an extra $1.50 per person, we had the option to sit in plush seats in a small room on the upper deck. After a bit of deliberation, we decided to stick with the lower class of service. Both sitting rooms had TVs, which happened to be showing King Kong on this particular trip. In the lower sitting area, where we spent most of our time, the volume was turned just high enough that it was hard to look away from the TVs, but just low enough to where you couldn't catch a lot of what was being said. I think that this was meant to persuade people to go upstairs and pay for the VIP room, where the sound was sure to be excellent. We pulled out the Archos and watched Around the World in 80 Days, starring Jackie Chan.

We had three hours in Chumpon before our bus left to Bangkok. We walked around town for awhile, exploring several markets, and then stopped at a Japanese restaurant called Sukiyaki for dinner. For an appetizer we had a banana split. Larissa ordered some fried noodles with vegetables, and I proudly ordered Sukiyaki, not knowing what it was. The waitress seemed to understand my request for the vegetarian version. I was happy to see that the dish that I got had no meat, but rather tofu. While Larissa's dish tasted better, we were glad to have learned what Sukiyaki is.

A very nice bus showed up to pick us up in Chumpon, and it was a comfortable overnight ride to Bangkok. Once in Bangkok, we put another bag in storage, hoping to lighten our load for our trip up to Chiang Mai.

Three hours later, we boarded the "Express Train" to Chiang Mai. We found our seats in the front of the train. The car was airconditioned and plenty spacious. The ride was to take about 11 hours, so Larissa settled into reading and I settled into sleeping. Every couple of hours we were served a light meal and given a choice between Coke, Water, or Orange Juice, which looked and tasted like Tang. Everything went smoothly until we reached the hills leading to Chiang Mai. The train stalled several times, and refused to make it up the hill. We backed down several times in an attempt to get a running start at it, but to no avail. Of course during the hour or so that the conductor and crew were trying to figure out how to resolve the problem, none of the passengers were told what the problem was. Since I was watching the situation very closely (I think I must get more stressed about this sort of thing than most people), the people sitting next to us asked me what was going on. I told them what my best guess was, and they seemed to buy it. Anyway, we ended up back-tracking about 45 minutes to the last train station, where we linked up with another train. This train, while equipped with enough power to get over the hill, was certainly not an express train.

We made it to Chiang Mai at around 10:30pm, only about 3 hours late. We managed to get a hotel in the old part of town, which is surrounded by a square-shaped moat. Our guidebook claims that our hotel is the best bargain in this part of town. We are paying about $6.25 per night. Larissa was a bit disgusted that we opted out of the warm water, which would have put us back about another $1.50 per night. She was just as much a part of the decision as I was though, so don't let her make you think that she is any less cheap than I am. Besides, the cold shower was refreshing.

This morning we woke up starving, after not eating well for the past couple of days. We made our way to a vegetarian Indian restaurant, which was conveniently called "Vegetarian Indian Restaurant." We had one of the best meals of our trip so far. Many of the places we ate at in Koh Tao had low tables, and mats instead of chairs. We wished we had some of those mats this morning. We have found that a little nap after thoroughly gourging ourselves is much prefferable to sitting in a wooden chair for awhile.

We like the food so much that we signed up (rather Larissa signed up) for a cooking class tomorrow morning. She will learn how to make around ten indian dishes, and will come home with the recipes for all of them. While she is taking the class, I will get to try the food she makes, drink a couple of fantas, and take some pictures.

Unfortunately, Larissa was not feeling good following our meal this morning. We both hope that she just ate too much. She is back at the hotel right now taking a little rest.

Chiang Mai is the starting point for various trekking tours all over northern Thailand. We are looking into embarking on a trek to include a visit to one of the long-neck villages, an elephant ride, and a trip down a river on a bamboo raft. There are many other interesting offerings also, so we will have to do our research.

Internet access is pretty cheap here, so we should be able to keep you all well updated on what we are up to.

Here we are...and now we are gone

2006-02-27T22:27:00.000+09:00

Here we are in a cheap internet cafe in Koh Tao. We are leaving tomorrow to go back to Bangkok and then up to Chaing Mai. We thought we would post about Koh Tao before we left though because it is DEFINITELY worth mentioning. Here is a map of the gulf of Thailand so you can see exactly where we are:

We took a relatively uneventful bus ride from Phuket to Suratthani on Friday afternoon. We were to leave on an overnight boat from there at around 11pm. So first we walked around town. It was a pretty cool town beacause not many tourists make it there so there wasn't as much hassling. We found a really cool market. The best we have been to yet. I(Larissa), think it was so cool because it wasn't dependent on tourists. In fact, we were about the only white people there. It was such a cool market. It reminded me of a carnival. I wish the US would have markets like this. We have Farmers markets but those seem to have become something that only rich people can afford to go to on a regular basis. It really is too bad. Here is a picture of me wandering through the market:

We took the overnight boat because it was cheaper and we figured it would be a cool adventure. The boat was pretty cool. It was composed of a floor with mattresses. These mattresses had numbers above them and there was a corresponding number on your ticket. This is definately one of those times that I am glad to be traveling with someone. The mattresses had two numbers per mattress so if the boat was full and you were traveling by yourself, you would have to sleep in the same bed with a stranger. Here is me perched on our mattress:

I slept rather well actually. The only thing was bothersome was the little kid sleeping the next mattress over. He migrated and writhed in his sleep and smacked me in the face with his hand several times. When we woke up at the dock in the morning, we got off only to be immediately barraged with taxi drivers saying "Hello! Where you go? Taxi?" As I mentioned before, we find this quite annoying as we have to tell each and every driver "no" since they can't seem to hear us say no to the other drivers. We were very glad at that moment to know that our dive resort was going to meet us at the dock to take us and our bags to the resort. After coldly saying no to all the taxi drivers, we walked down the pier looking for our people. They never came. Jason went and bought a calling card and called them. They didn't answer. Finally, about 45 minutes after we arrived, Jason reached them on the phone. They said "oh, uh... just take a taxi and we will reimburse you" ARGH! So "tail between our legs" we had to approach a taxi driver we had refused before because "we already had a ride".

We arrived at our resort and the beach bungalow we had reserved had been filled by someone else, so the put us in a little room. Jason complained and so they kicked some guy out of his bungalow so we could have it. Jason insisted that they didn't have to do that! They said, "Oh he is happy, we moved him to an nice big air-conditioned room." Oh. This bungalow turned out to be not inside the resort grounds but down the road and around the corner. Definitely not on the beach. But very close to this internet cafe so we are happy. heh. Here is a picture of our little place:

After we got settled we immediately went off to explore the island. From our map, it looked like there is a trail that goes from one side of the island, over a mountain, to the other side. Off we went. Right as we reached the edge of town, a dog joined us. He seemed to think he was leading us. He would trot off ahead of us and then wait for us to catch up. He seemed to have hardly any trouble with the hike, while Jason and I quickly guzzled our water almost gone. Sometime on the other side of the mountain a bright green snake slithered across the road in front of us. Jason went running after it of course and I had to scream at him not to touch it. I let him take a picture though (but not too close). Not a great picture but anyway...

We also saw 4 monitor lizards and a sugar glider! That was pretty cool. We got the other side of the island HOT and exhausted and were greeted by our doggie friend. He went snorkeling with us for awhile. Here is a picture of swimming Fido:

We saw some cool things. Like some cuttlefish. Then we started our hike back. We noticed a trail on the map that would take us to "Two View". We assumed this was a lookout point so we checked our water supply (dangerously low) and decided to go for it!

It was an awfully long hike and we were weren't sure it was going to be worth it. We finally made it to the top after a couple of false views (we kept thinking "this is it??"). Here is the view from two views.

Pretty huh? I was completely done at this point and didn't even want to think about hiking all the way BACK. Jason on the other hand got this sickening second wind and announced that he was going to find the "third view". He launched into a spiel about how "the locals are the only ones who know about it!!" while marching through the underbrush. The view at the third views was a couple of trees. Very worth it.... Here is a picture of where we hiked, taken from the beach.

We got lost trying to get down the mountain. We were out of water and very tired and thirsty. Speaking of which, Larissa is tired and thirsty right now, so I (Jason) will take over the writing from here. Larissa had the brilliant idea of breaking open a coconut. Without any hesitation, we started investing the last of our energy into extracting any food or milk that we could from a coconut. It didn't take us more than a couple of minutes to crack it open, our Palau training coming in handy. Unfortunately, it was fairly old, and the milk had turned to a spongy paste. We were told in Palau that this was a delicacy, but neither of us has been able to develop a taste for it. Nonetheless, we were content eating the nut part. Eventually we found the right trail, and made it down the mountain. I thought that it was a great hiking experience. Dense jungle, no crowds (in fact, no other hikers), wildlife, nice views, cool water at the end, what could be better?

We got back to our bungalo having completely exhausted ourselves. I am always wary of these moments because we tend reward ourselves with an excess of cold sweets. No harm done this time though, I think we settled for a couple of fruit shakes at a little place down on the beach.

Koh Tao is our kind of place. It is layed back like you expect islands to be, but it is full of things to do. Diving is at the forefront of activities around here, and is essentially the reason that Koh Tao is on the tourist circuit in the first place. We read a bit about the history of this place. Only a decade ago there were virtually no accomodations available here, neither were there any dive operators on the island. Eventually, dive boats from the neighboring Ko Phangnan started exploring some sites around Koh Tao. These sites proved to be some of the best dives sights in the entire Gulf, so dive operations started to become established on the island. Along with this development came the bungalo craze. There aren't any high rise buildings here, but there are lots and lots of bungalos. We have found it quite charming. Because the quality of the diving, the inexpensive cost of living, and the relaxing atmosphere, Koh Tao has become the mecca for diver training in S.E. Asia.

There are a few restaurants around that show a few movies each night, free of charge. Both Larissa and I have taken quite a liking to this. I like it because I can take her out to a movie for free, and she likes it because I can take her out to a movie without complaining about the cost of the tickets. Last night we ordered a pizza, which was ready shortly after the movie began.

Yesterday we went out to Chumphon Pinnacle, the first dive site we would see in Ko Tao. The visibility was not great, but we did manage to see some cool stuff. Here is a Blue-Spotted Stingray: Here is the dive boat:
It is convenient to get to the dive sites around here. The boats leave right from the beach, and it is less than a forty minute boat ride to most sites. We did two dives yesterday, and three more today. Todays first dive was at Sail Rock, supposedly the Gulf's best dive site. Unfortunately for us, the visibility was really low today. We did see some good stuff though, like a few huge schools of Barraccuda, some of them around 6 feet long.

While we are very fond of this place, our time in Thailand is growing shorter, and we have a lot left to explore.

For now, its back to the bungalo. We'll leave you with a beautiful Sairee Beach Sunset.

Safe, Happy, But too Poor to Post

2006-02-26T17:12:00.000+09:00

Hello faithful readers. We are safe and content on Koh Tao. It turns out that there is broadband internet access here. This is good for some, but not for us, as it is to expensive for our budget. There is one place offering reasonable prices, but their server went down today. We had planned a to make a grand post with lots of pretty pictures, quality humor, drama, and suspense. Hopefully we will be able to come through for you on that a little later. We also plan to get to some of your emails. Please cross your fingers that the inexpesive internet place opens again soon.

Three Hours Underwater

2006-02-23T21:47:00.000+09:00

I am writing from a new internet cafe, at least new to us. We have been using one that is near our hotel. It offers competetive prices, and a nice atmosphere, but we have grown tired of passing the massage parlor on the way. Without fail, a tall, broad-shouldered Man-Woman repeats in a raspy voice "You want masaaaaaaggge"? It does not speak well of the kind of place this is, that a massage parlour would put that kind of person out on the street as its saleswomanman.

Today we got to go scuba diving. We were picked up right on time at our hotel by the dive company's pickup truck loaded with bench seats. We were transferred to Chalong Bay, where we were shown to the boat. It was the most beautiful boat in sight, and we felt fortunate to board it. The tour guide gave us a good description of the boat so that we could make full use of it. On front half of the upper deck of the boat were placed several foam mats. Larissa immediately set off to find some lost sleep. In fact, she used more than one mat for awhile. Maybe she was just saving one for me.

It was a very comfortable one and a half hour ride out to the first of three dive sites. Anenome Reef was the first place we stopped. It is a pinnacle that rises from about 65ft. up to within a few feet of the surface of the water. After being briefed about the dive site, we entered the water to find that the site had been aptly named. Everything in sight was covered with various colored anenomes, waving in the slightly surging current. We enjoyed circling around the pinnacle a couple of times.

Once reboarding the boat, we were met with fresh fruit and drinks. The surface interval was well spent eating, drinking, and napping. It wasn't long until we were ready for the next dive site, Shark Point. While shark point was given its name because of the leopard sharks found around the site's two pinnacles, the tour guide warned us that it is now often referred to as "No Sharks Point." I guess the likelihood of shark sightings here has gone down in recent years. While we did not see a leopard shark, it turned out to be a great dive. Among the dives highlight sightings was an Ornate Ghost Pipefish.

After a very nice vegetarian lunch, identifying some of the fish we saw in our book, and another short nap, we jumped in the water at the day's third dive site, Koh Doc Mai. Koh Doc Mai is an island (Koh means island) that is somewhere between the Phi Phi islands and Phuket. The dive site just looks like the island, upside down, and covered with corals instead of trees.

The site had quite good visibility, and the colors were stunning. Sorry, I forgot to bring any underwater pictures, or pictures of the boat. We'll see if I can post them at a later date.

Today was a great day. Larissa is feeling very comfortable with diving now. She says that she is enjoying the scenery much more than she is worrying about potential dive equipment failure or being eaten by unknown creatures. We are glad to be headed for the relaxed Koh Tao. Koh Tao looks to be a place small enough for us to explore without relying on too many taxis, and the dive site are only a small ride off shore. We leave Phuket tomorrow. If all goes well, we will be on Koh Tao the next day. There is internet access there, but we doubt that it the connection is very fast. We'll probably be able to post from there, but I wouldn't count on getting many pictures. We have arranged for a beach bungalo, conveniently priced at a %50 discount for divers, which brings it down to around $5 per night.

While we are excited to explore a new island, we are going to miss our wonderful room. We are going to go back and watch some TV over a ramen and bread dinner. We miss you all.

Hello, you are fat....

2006-02-22T18:40:00.000+09:00

Oddly Jason and I are sick of people yelling hello to us. Shop owners will yell "hello" to get your attention so you will come in their shop. Taxi and tuk-tuk drivers will even yell across the road "Hello! Taxi?" Taxi drivers sit around on the street next to their cars about every two feet, so you can imagine that we are SICK of the words hello, taxi, and tuk-tuk. I personally am also sick of people thinking I am a big fattie.

In Vietnam, I asked Jason's favorite tailor, Yen, to make me some courderoy pants. I wanted them to have buckly type things in the front but she immediately resisited. "No, too busy. That is only for people with small bellies. Too much in front. You have to have a small stomach to have buckles." Blushing a bit, I said I wanted them anyway but she insisted that my stomach was too big. Even though she took my measurments, the first time I tried the pants on, I could fit a bowling ball down the front of them. She must not have trusted her measurements to be correct for such a giant. Luckily she fixed them up for me after I had a good time telling her that they were way to big!

Today, Jason and I went to book our scuba diving trip for tomorrow and the lady was getting our sizes for our BCDs (those vest things that you wear while diving). She eyed Jason and said, "Probably a medium because you are slender" After staring at my scuba card for a long while to make sure it wasn't fake, she looked at me and guffawed "You are bigger than Jason!! We can probably squeeze you into a medium! HA HA HA!!" She said it so nonchalantly, like it wasn't untactful at all.

Don't worry, I don't need reassurance that I am slender. Although, Jason and I were just talking about how much less healthfully we are eating here in Thailand than we did in Vietnam. We are in a more expensive part of Thailand. So we don't go out to eat very much (no Phad Thai booths). Luckily, our great room has a partial kitchen. It has a microwave, a sink and a toaster. Unfortunately, the local "supermarket (read: minimart)" is woefully undertstocked and we can't buy much more than ramen and bread. I made ramen and it was so spicey that even Jason said it was inedible. The next time I made it, I used only a quarter of the spice packet and it still nearly killed us. Cheese here is expensive but Jason and I have been living off of it. We get the processed kind (the cheapest) and microwave little grilled cheese sandwhiches for ourselves. We are on our third cheese packet and 5th loaf of bread. Wow. Today Jason bought me some Nutella (bless his heart) and made me nutella/banana toast! yum yum.

So who knows, maybe sometime soon, their "hello, you are fat" comments will have more merit.

We Went Phi Phi

2006-02-21T20:49:00.000+09:00

We are especially glad to be able to make a post this afternoon. The reason that we are glad to be posting has to do with our being unsure whether or not we would have cash anymore. Unfortunately, our ATM card stopped working. We don't know when it stopped working, we've only used in once in Thailand, the first day we were here. We have been conserving cash as much as possible until we could get things figured out. I (Jason) emailed Wells Fargo yesterday to see what the issue might be. Fortunately, they have replied quickly with good news. Apparently some terminals associated with Cirrus, Pulse, and Plus are experiencing some problems. Wells Fargo has agreed for us to use the card for cash advances as needed, free of charge. This is a huge load off our shoulders.

Yesterday booked tickets for today's tour of the Phi Phi and Khai islands. The tour agent was quite a salesman. We must have a cheap look about us, because he bargained himself down %50 from the published tour price in about a minute and a half. While his offer was the best price we had found, it made us suspicious of the quality of the tour we would get. We decided to risk it since he would accept a credit card for payment.

This morning we were picked up at our hotel, right on time. So far, so good. It was nice to be able to describe our place of residence for once. Usually, when someone asks where we are staying, we shrugg our shoulders "Well, it is very small, I am not sure of its' name, it is on a back alley near here."

We were transferred to Chalong Bay, where we were to board our boat. We were happy to see that the boat was as described. The ride out to Phi Phi Ley, the first of the two Phi Phi islands we were to visit, took about an hour and a half. The seas were rough. While I find all the bouncing about rather painful, Larissa seems to delight in it. We were sitting in the front of the boat, along with four other people. Most of us were groaning in discomfort, but Larissa was having a giggling fit. I was glad that she was content.

Phi Phi Ley is known for Maya Bay, which is now often referred to as "The Beach," after the movie of the same name starring Leonardo DiCaprio made the place famous. The Beach was our first stop. It was almost as beautiful as it was in the movie, but far more crowded. The actual beach is a bit right of this shot. I avoided pictures of the actual beach because it was so littered with boats and people. We enjoyed the sights for awhile, and then went to a different bay for some snorkeling.

We didn't have high hopes for the quality of the snorkeling here. While the bay was beautiful, it was crowded with other boats.
We were pleasantly surprised when we entered the water. While some of the coral was damaged, large areas were virtually covered in different colored anenomes. We saw a baby sea snake and some false clown anenome fish, among many other colorful fishies.

This snorkeling session was really good for my health. As all of you have been made aware, I have been a bit sick in recent days. Well, I am happy to report that I am now coughing and sniffling very rarely, and can breathe easily through my nose. Before this special snorkel I could not have made the same claims. Anyway, I have given myself the all-clear for scuba diving on Thursday.

We left Phi Phi Ley to make the short trip to Phi Phi Don. We first stopped at a place called Monkey Beach. I didn't know anything about this place, but Larissa told me that there were monkeys there. I suppose I should have assumed as much. Sure enough, we could see monkeys scurrying around even before we made it all the way to shore. Larissa gave me a little talk before we made it to shore: "Jason, the monkeys here bite sometimes, they can have rabies, so be careful." We were surprised at how tame the monkeys were. They were happy to receive hand-fed bananas. You can tell that they have been fed a little bit too much though, because most of the time they took one bite of each banana, and threw the rest aside. Here is Larissa with one of them,
and here is one that is too polite to throw away any of his food.

After playing with the monkeys while managing not to contract rabies, we made our way to the water for some more snorkeling. You may have noticed that we really like the water. Larissa wasn't quite as ready to leave the monkeys as me though. She seemed a bit taken back "You like fish more than monkeys don't you?" Yeah, I guess I do. We saw some Clown Anenome Fish. They are different from the False Clown Anenome fish in that they have black lines outlining their stripes.
We took a short boat ride to a second beach on Phi Phi Don. Upon arrival on the beach, we were shown to a beautiful deck on a small cliff overlooking the water. We were delighted to see a full buffet spread before us. The buffet was a mix between Thai and Italian food, we decided to eat both. Keep in mind that we still didn't know whether we would be able to get cash when we got back, so we were intent on filling up as much as possible. I was doing my best to get Larissa to gorge herself to the max, just in case I couldn't be a good provider tonight.

Then we were off to Khai Island. Khai Island is very small, about a kilometer in circumference. We enjoyed snorkeling around its' perimeter. We found some cool caves,

and came across an adult sea snake. We also managed to find a field of jellyfish. Fortunately their tentacles did not seem to be poisonous. All in all, we were very happy with our tour. It was even better than described.

Sitting Around on Patong Beach

2006-02-19T15:51:00.000+09:00

We really have just been chilling. Not really on the beach much but in our wonderful room with the great view and air conditioning. Poor Jason is still feeling sick and he is hoping he will be well enough to go scuba diving while we are here. He was remarking that out of all the places to be sick, this is the best place since he wouldn't have wanted to spend that much time in our other hotel rooms.
We don't have to much to talk about. We have been able to watch Fox News a bit and it is nice to be able to know what is happening in the world. Actually it isn't very nice to know. All the rioting about cartoons, bird flu scares and landslides don't make for happy viewing. Butwhen we get sick of the news, we turn over to the olympics. But we have yet to see any events where the United States has won anything. Plus there is no handy dandy box that gives you a running update on how many medals the US has. It just isn't as fun when you don't get to cheer for your country. we also look out the window at our beautiful view a lot. Here is the sunset we saw last night.

We have been buying some fruit here though it is dissapointingly expensive. This is Mangosteen and we bought it on our dear friend Danelle's suggestion.

Here is my thumbnail making the initial incision:

It doesn't turn out as well when I try to open it. The lady who opened one for us to try at the fruit stand made it look SO easy! SHe just broke it right open.
Here I finally get it open to display the yummy fruit inside. You only eat the white part:
I know it looks like a nut but it is not crunchy at all. It has the consistancy of a grape mixed with a necterine. It tastes like that too I think. Anyway, it is pretty good. Thanks for the suggestion Danelle.
Tomorrow we might be going on a tour of Phi Phi island (pronounced peepee, I giggle everytime) where part of the movie "The Beach" was filmed. We will make sure to take lots of pictures for your viewing pleasure and we promise to have a good post up about it.
Thank you for all your comments! We miss you all!

Hello from Phuket

2006-02-18T13:43:00.000+09:00

We spent the day before yesterday in Bangkok, trying to work out some travel plans. As we have mentioned in previous posts, we have been exploring different places to replace Madagascar on our itinerary. Some kind and resourceful friends have been working on our going to South Africa and Lesotho. Things are looking promising there, so we set out to change our tickets before we left Bangkok. We took a taxi to the Delta Airlines ticket office in Bangkok, but found the building to be vacant. Luckily there was a nice travel agent nearby who gave us directions to office's new location. We expected that making any changes to the tickets would require a lot of time. Agents are not used to seeing itineraries this complex. The last time we changed our tickets, it took a team of agents about two days to get things worked out.
We were sad to find out that there were no flights leaving out of Bangkok on route to S. Africa. We tried all sorts of different airlines and routings, to no avail. Luckily, the agent was willing to explore options with us. She suggested that we could fly out of Singapore, through Paris on our way to Johannesburg. She mentioned that we should be able to fly from Bangkok to Singapore for $25 each or so. Just before we had to leave to catch our bus to Phuket, our new tickets were finished. We were very appreciative of the ticket agent's efforts, and were well aware of the rules she had to break to make things happen. Here I am with our new tickets, and new friend.

We will be leaving Singapore on the 15th of March, Arriving in Johannesburg on the 17th of March. We are looking at taking a train from Chiang Mai, Thailand to Singapore. This would give us the opportunity to stop in Malaysia for a day or two before spending a couple of days in Singapore.

We had paid "VIP Bus" tickets to take us from Bangkok to Phuket. After all of the scams we have had to endure around here, we were skeptical that a VIP bus would actually show up to pick us up. Fortunately, at around 7:15, we boarded a bus similar to the one in the brochures. It was a beautiful bus. Two floors, complete with a TV, bathroom, and huge windows. We were content, feeling as if our money had been well spent. It was about an eleven hour ride from Bangkok to Surat Thani, where we were to stop. The ride went by fairly quickly, even though the road was really bumpy. Larissa slept more than I did. In the wee hours of the morning, I was thinking back to the claims of the brochure and tour agent "80% reclining seats." I thought about how that would be calculated. I assumed that an 80% reclined seat must be one that is reclined 80% of the radial distance from a seat that is completely upright, to a seat that is completely horizontal. Thus, the seat wound have to be at an angle of 18 degrees from horizontal. While these seats did recline more than most, I was convinced that it was not to 80%. I new that I could figure out the exact percentage, but thought I'd better wait until morning. As it turns out, I never got the chance to gather this important information.
When we arrived in Surat Thani, we were told that it would be about an hour until another bus arrived to take us on to Phuket. An hour later, it was not a bus that came to pick us up, but a pickup truck. With 13 tourists in the back of the truck, we took about a 20 minute ride to our next stop, where a real bus was to meet us. About a thirty minutes later, a minibus far too small to accomodate all of us showed up. They put as much of the luggage as possible in the back of the van, and the rest was strapped on top. Even though we were frustrated, we were being calm and patient, keeping sight of the possibiblity of our arriving in Phuket soon.
About 2 hours later, the transmission went out on the van. The driver recruited a couple of mechanics, or at least people dressed like mechanics to come assess the situation. I guess the driver had friends in the area, as it wasn't long until a pickup truck showed up to take us to a restaurant. Here is Larissa, still smiling, and the only girl who sat in back. For some reason, they figured that a restaurant would be all that was needed to keep us content. What about getting to Phuket? I thought. I had gotten sick the day before, and by this point I didn't have a voice. I probably would have complained more, but I could only produce raspy whispers. The pickup truck ride was enjoyable, but terrifying. One guy almost fell of as the irresposible driver took a corner to fast.
We waited at the restaurant for about an hour, until an even smaller minivan showed up. This one had no roof rack, so we were required to hold our luggage on our laps. No one complained. After a few cramped, hot, and sweaty hours, we arrived on the island of Phuket. The driver told us that we would be stopping at the tour agency so that they could figure out which buses to put people on to get them to our final destination. After our patience had been tested all day, we were in no mood for what was to come. A friendly tour agent invited us to sit down, asking us where we would like to go. Larissa said that we were headed to Patong Beach. He proceeded to try to sell us a hotel, and a bus ticket to get there. I was furious. After all of this, there was no apology, but an attempt to get more money out of us. We had actually paid for a bus to take us all the way to Phuket, but we were instead taken to a travel agency, far enough from town so that we had to rely on their transporation. I have scarcely ever been more frustrated. All I could do was whisper in Larissa's ear what I wanted to be said. We were not the only ones that were angry, actually a mini riot broke out among our group of travellers. We convinced the agency to drop us off at the bus station, so that we could arrange transportation from there.

Eventually, we got to Patong beach. Some kind and generous friends had arranged for us to use their timeshare here. We were lucky that something became available, as this is Thailand's tourism high season. The hotel is the tallest building in Phuket. We are enjoying our corner room on the 7th floor. It has floor to ceiling windows, and two balconies. The view of the Andaman Sea is beautiful. This is a definite upgrade from what we have gotten used to the past few weeks. We have a mini kitchen, a separate living room, and Satellite TV complete with the FoxNews channel. Larissa was thrilled to be able to dry her hair for only the second time since leaving home. "Jason look, I am pretty," she said as she pranced into the living room.

There is a lot to do here, but things are expensive, so we will probably just do a lot of chillin' on the beach. We do plan to go scuba diving at least one day, but we are hoping to do some research into the best dive sites before we go out. We will be here until the 24th, at which point we plan to go to Ko Tao. Ko Tao is a small island in the gulf of Thailand. In order to get there, we will need to take a bus from here to Surat Thani, and then a boat ride to Ko Samui, and then another boat from Ko Samui to Ko Tao. Ko Tao is known for its' proximity to some great dive sites.

Fresh Start

2006-02-16T00:19:00.000+09:00

After failing as travellers yesterday, we had a couple of main goals for today. First, we wanted to see a few of Bangkoks main tourist attractions, rather than back alley wats, tailor shops, and gem stores. Second, we wanted to get a feel for a few more modes of public transportation. We would not take the easy route and just take a taxi to wherever we wanted to go.

After getting our $.50 breakfast, we headed to a convenience store. . . Okay, we headed to 7/11. . . to get a bus route map. With two thailand guidebooks, and a tourist map, we still felt that we needed another map. All of our maps were, and still are, insufficient in one way or another. Unfortunately, the bus route map would not break this trend. Even though it claimed to be "updated for 2006," it did not include bus stops for skytrain terminals that were built a few years ago. Larissa mentioned in an earlier post that we managed to trade a book on Madagascar for one on Thailand. I don't think she mentioned; however, that our new Lonely Planet Thailand is a photocopied version of the original. It is a beautiful book to look at, the cover is indistinguishable from the original, and photographs within are in high gloss color. After only a cursory perusal, we decided that it would be a good plan to get the book, despite our supporting an illegal practice. Well, don't you worry, we have paid the price. It turns out that while pictures and text come through brilliantly in the copy, the maps are basically useless. You know how you can usually read a description of a restaurant or hotel, and then reference it by number on the map? Well, we can see the numbers on the map, and some road names, but none of the roads are actually visible. Anyway, lets just say that our information gathering is not very efficient at the moment. We try the best we can to combine several sources in such a way so that we can figure out how to get from point A to point B, and whether point B is worth going to in the first place. We decided to make an attempt to take a bus to Wat Pho, which is famous for a gigantic "reclining buddha." As far as we could tell, there were several buses that could take us there. There are several classes of bus service around here. The main difference between the lines are the age of the fleet, and whether the buses had air-conditioning or not. We found that a nice airconditioned did the route that we would be interested in, so we sat down to wait for its arrival. It arrived quite quickly, but never stopped. After watching a few go by, it didn't look like any of them were going to stop. We weren't sure if maybe we were supposed to flag them down or something. After a few sheepish, noncommittal scratch-your-head type waives we decided to broaden our search to include any bus willing to stop, that may be on route to Wat Pho. Just then, an old rickety bus pulled up showing a number of interest. We jumped on in a hurry, the bus never actually stopping. We got about 50ft. before Larissa made a lunge toward the door to jump off the while it was moving. She had realized that she had left her backpack on the bench where we were waiting. Luckily, she thought better of jumping off the bus at speed. Even so, we couldn't get the driver to stop, so we were fortunate that traffic slowed the bus just enough for us to bail, and run back to get the bag. Again, feeling defeated, we sat down on the bench and waited for the next bus. It was not long until a similar bus came along, and slowed just enough for us to get on. $.20 later, and another moving bus exit later, we found ourselves at Wat Pho.

The Wat is beautiful. It is certainly a bigger, more ornate structure than those we were brought to yesterday. We have noticed that the Buddhists are good at making their places of worship very beautiful, without using expensive materials. A closer look at glistening pillars of gold and diamonds reveals broken glass and gold paint. After taking off our shoes, and entering, we were taken back at the size of the buddha. I forget the exact dimensions, but I would guess that sleeping buddha is around 200 feet long. He fills up the entire temple, as there is only a narrow walkway around the perimeter.

From there we walked to the Grand Palace. We had fun playing games with some Tuk-Tuk drivers on the way. Oh, the Grand Palace is closed today? Really, you can take us around the city for 10baht? What a deal. Say, do you suppose you could take us to a tailor shop, and maybe a gem store, and a few no-name wats? Just as the drivers got really excited, we relished in the moment where we dashed their con-artist hopes. Anyway, the Grand Palace shares a compound with the wat of the emerald buddha, and a museum of Thai royal regalia and coins. This is apparently one of the must-see attractions of Bangkok. Unfortunately, the admission fee cost more than our lodging. After some debate over whether we should fork out the cash, Larissa had some feelings regret surface over not taking advantage of similar situations in the past. She reminded me that the whole time she was in Florence, she did not go to the top of the tower next to the duomo (I forget its' name). Nor did she ascend the Eiffel Tower during her time in Paris. She had more examples, but I stopped her short in order to go get our admission tickets. The Palace was truly grand, and the grounds around it beautiful and well manicured. Unfortunately, I did not get a good grasp on the history of the place, so I'll have to leave in dark a bit. While in the coin museum, we were informed of some of the history of the emerald buddha. The things that stand out in my mind is that he is not actually emerald, and the fact that the king changes his clothes in a ceremony commencing the start of each new season. Right now the little green guy is wearing his rainy season outfit which is covered by his winter season cloak. The emerald buddha sits high in a nice Wat within the compound. Picture taking is not allowed in this particular wat. I set the camera on the ground and blindly snapped a few anyway. I'll have to check and see if any are worth posting. Anyway, sorry I am not being more descriptive of what we saw. I will say, in my defense, that it has been a really long day, and I am writing despite my bedtime passing hours ago.

From the palace, we walked to the Chao Phraya river where we planned to experience another mode of public transportation in Bangkok, the riverboat. After narrowly avoiding a couple more scams, we made it on a boat headed for the skytrain station. The boat was way overfilled. Larissa reminded me a couple of times that were it to capsize, we would all be dead for sure. Even so, it was a nice, cheap way to make it accross town. Larissa was excited to make it to the Skytrain station. As she probably mentioned in the previous post, we are staying in the cheapest part of Bangkok at the moment, where the predominating commerce involves bootlegged cd's, cheap trinkets, and yes, prostitution. Before I move on, I would like to mention that it is disturbing to see how prevalent sex tourism is around here. We have seen many an old-white man with a young scantily clad thai girl. Quite sad. Anyway, as much as Larissa excels at roughing it, she likes to make it to the ritzy part of town once in awhile. She requested that we make our first stop Siam square, apparently one of bankok's best shopping areas. After leaving the skytrain (a pleasant ride at a reasonable price), we first happened upon a beautiful bakery. We had many choices before us, but were able to settle on one peach mousse, and one chocolate-banana mousse, both of which we shared. From there we bumped into the nicest grocery store eithier of us had ever seen. While you can get anything there that you can get in America, the store also offered a vast selection of asian foods, and an incredible produce section. We saw apples that could serve a family of four, and starfruits that looked like NFL regulation footballs (slight exaggeration). Even though we looked like the grungy backpackers that we are, we were treated like valuable customers. Much of the fruit was available for sampling. There was also a booth where all sorts of fresh juices were being made. We tried passionfruit, tamarind (sp?), and flower. Yes, flower. Flower juice tastes like the smell of nice-smelling floweres. Then we bumped into a gelateria. I got the passionfruit of course, and Larissa got the cookies and cream. I was disappointed that she got such a common flavor, but I was glad to take a few bites of hers here and there as it reminded me of how good my gelato tasted. The prices around this part of Bangkok are quite high in comparison to other areas. The grocery store was more expensive by a good margin than stores in America. We spent the rest of the afternoon experiencing Bankok's upper-end shopping, without actually buying anything.

We then took the skytrain to a terminal close to a restaurant we wanted to try. We got off the train, and started looking for "The Atlanta" a small budget hotel famous for the wit and character of its' ownere. As usual, we walked around for a long time before finding the place. I still blame the bad maps for our navigation problems.

The Atlanta was to be our second dose of culture today. As we entered the unmarked door, we were impresed with the 50's era decor and nice layout. We were shown to a nice booth, and then were handed a very unique menu. The cover read "Please do not remove this menu, as it is only 1 of 3 in existence." It turns out that the Atlanta menus are famous due to the witty and comprehensive writing style of the owner. The menu is written in a form resembling an academic paper, complete with references and footnotes. The early editions of the menu were often stolen, and used in Thai restaurants around the world. Anyway, it took us about 20 minuttes to read through the menu before actually starting to decide we wanted to order. The menu boasts that the Atlanta has the largest Thai vegetarian selction in the world, over 100 items. These are not just thai dishes with the meat omitted, they are Thai dishes with meat substitutes. Primary among the substitutes used are tofu and quorm. I did not know what quorm was, but I have learned that it is a meat substitute mad from "mushrooms and other edible fungi." The chefs at the Atlanta can make quorm to match the texture of squid, beef, pork, chicken, fish, or just about any other kind of meat. My dish included fried duck. It was delicous. Apparently each night at the Atlanta, guests are invited to watch a movie in the lobby. Larissa was excited about this opportunity, but we decided to duck out early in order to make it home at a semi-reasonable hour.

After another skytrain trip and a short taxi ride, we arrived home with our two main objectives accomplished. Tommorrow morning we are headed to the airport to see if we can get our tickets changed. Then, in the evening we will start our bus jouney to Phuket. We are on a slow internet connection right now. Sorry no pictures.

We are Siamese if you please

2006-02-16T00:06:00.000+09:00

Don't worry, we got here safely. We have just been wearing ourselves out and it has been hard to get up the strength to get to the internet cafe. After you hear everything we have to write, you may understand us feeling overwhelmed.

First of all, we are staying in the backpacker district of Bangkok. We have a room at a very clean guesthouse. It costs us only $6 and it is quite fine with us as we don't go there much. The bathrooms are shared and we decided against airconditioning because we usually get too cold in the middle of the night if the AC is on. We have two fans that blow on us all night and they are quite sufficient. The backpacker road Th Khoa San. This road is pretty fun. You walk out into what seems like a carnival every morning. There is music in the streets and tons of street vendors selling vegetarian Phad Thai for about 30 cents a portion. They make it right in front of you and it is quite good. And it fills you up. Jason and I have made a habit of eating phad thai in the morning and phad thai at night. For the last two days we have skipped lunch because we have been too busy running around. So we have been eating quite cheaply. We hear that the traffic here is HORRENDOUS but we have found it quite civilized compared to Vietnam. It is even tame compared to come US cities I have been in. The taxis here are metered and quite cheap. It is nice to ride in them because they are airconditioned.

When we were in Vietnam, a nice Australian couple told us that when we went to Thailand, the people were a lot nicer and they wouldn't try to rip us off here. After yesterday and today, we realize that the Thai's will try to rip you off; just in a more sophisticated manner.

We woke up yesterday morning with the plan of walking around the district where our hotel is and seeing the sites. "The sites" were basically a whole bunch of wats (temples). At least we assume there are temples around, we never really made it to our walking sightseeing tour. We were about a block away when a man approached us to see if we wanted to take a tuk-tuk ride. Tuk-tuk are three-wheeled mini trucks as you can see in the picture below.

The man pulle dout a map and showed us the cool places we could go. A place where elephants play soccer, the grand palace, thai boxing place, a monkey farm, etc. Well sounded nice but we said no thanks. Then he told us it would only cost us 10 baht each. 40 baht equals a dollar so you can imagine our surprise when we heard this. He said we could ride around for as long as we wanted and it would only cost us 10 baht each. "You see, the government is doing a sepcial promotion where they pay for our gas if we take tourists out. That is why we can only charge 10 baht!" I (Larissa) had read in our guidebook to be wary of people who claim they can take you on a tuk-tuk ride for cheap. They warned that the drivers would take us to places where he might be able to get commisions off of us. Like if he took us to a certain tailor shop, he would get part of whatever we spent there. I mentioned this to Jason and he said he didn't care how many places the driver took us to, its not like we were going to buy anything. "He isn't going to get more than 20 baht from me." I thought that was a pretty good point. We are in charge of ourselves and we didn't have to buy anything if we didn't want to. We figured he could take us to some cool sights and then take us to his tailor shops in between and we could humor him by looking around but not buying anything. Our first stop was at a giant golden Buddha. So far so good!
The driver was very nice and urged us to spend as long as we wanted taking pictures and such. Our next stop was a very beautiful but small wat next to a school. Here is picture of the inside.

The kids were at recess and were running laps around the wat. They cried out to us "Hello!!" as they ran past. Jason and I couldn't imagine, we were sweating from just sitting there. We couldn't imagine running in that heat. We went inside the wat and met a very friendly man. He told us that he was a history teacher at the school. He asked if we took a bus to the wat and we told him that we took a tuk-tuk. "Oh, a tuk-tuk! you can get them cheaper today! The government is doing a promotion for three months where they get their gas paid for. This is the last day, so tomorrow you probably will have to pay more but today you can get them for real cheap." That put our mind at ease. He went on to tell us how the goverment is trying to lure tourists back to the area after the tsunami by giving free gasa to the tuk-tuk drivers. We asked what some good sights to see are and he told us about the grand palace. He said that it is better to go there in the afternoon since the monks take a break to pray and the place would be closed for a couple hours around noon. Another good place would be top 10 collection. He said they are the best tailors around and they will make you a real nice suit out of cashmere for only around $250. We thought that was a lot of money since we only paid 50 in Vietnam. He said they probably weren't real cashmere. We agreed. We asked him what a good bus service was since we had heard reports of some tourists being drugged and robbed on some bus lines. He told us to make sure to go to TAT. They are the government travel agency so they have buses that you can be sure are safe. You also get what you pay for which, as we learned in Vietnam, you have to worry about sometimes. We thanked him for his kindness and went off to find our tuk-tuk.
He told us he was taking us to top 10 collection. "Oh they must be good if everyone knows about them" we thought. We went in and broswed around and left. Ha, we thought. He thought he could get a commission. Off we went to TAT travel. We bought two bus tickets to phuket. We talked to a very nice but unhelpful person who sold us the tickets. They were a little more expensive than other places we saw but we had decided it would be worth the money to have peace of mind.
After that he took us to another nice wat. This was also next to a school. After we came out, our tuk-tuk driver looked somewhat ill and told us he was going to use the toilet. we sat in our tuk-tuk to wait. Two tourists were sitting near another tuk-tuk next to us and they struck up a conversation with us. One guy was from Malaysia but lived in Canada and the other guy was from England. They told us some of the cool places they saw and told us we should check them out. Then the guy from Canada told us about how he comes every time he visits here, he buys a couple blue saphire pieces of jewelry and takes them home and sells them to jewelry stores for 100% profit. 80% of all blue sapphires come from thailand so we could get a good price. He said he could give us the name of quality shop since a lot of them had worthless jewelry. We wrote down the name of the place he gave us and he gave us his email address just in case we weren't sure where the best places to sell the jewels were. He also said that they give you a %20 discount if you pay with cash. You know in cartoons where you can tell the character is motivated by the money because dollars signs go cha-ching in their eyes? Well, if you had looked closely enough, you would have seen the dollar signs in our eyes. Jason has always been interested in reselling objects for more money and he is very good at it. We asked the driver to take us there and we sat back thinking about the money we could make. We got to the store in to find a beautiful place with rows upon rows of jewelry. Everything was beautiful. The saleslady was really nice and showed us everything. The prices seemed steep but I have never shopped for real jewelry so I wasn't sure what a good price would be. Since Jason and I are cautious people, we asked for their business card and told them we would think about it. The saleslady said that they were only open to the public for another hour, usually they only sold their wholesale goods to exporters but today they had opened it up to the public. Plus today was the only day we would get a discount. Jason and I were sold enough on the idea that we had almost planned on going to find out a way to get that much cash and come back a day or two later after researching things more. At this point though, we figured we wouldn't have enough time to make an informed decision so we took her business card and left thinking we its too bad but I guess we wouldn't be buying any jewels.

The driver took us to another small but beautiful wat. We walked into the compound, not sure where exactly to go when a man sitting on a park bench told us that the wat was closed for about 10 minutes more so the monks could pray. We sat down on a bench near him and read our guidebook while we waited. He started talking to us and told us about some cool places to go. After a while, he asked us if we had been to buy any jewelry yet. We said we had gone but we hadn't ended up buying any. He asked us why not? We could sell it in America for a good profit. He showed us a reciept showing us that he had just bought some gems. He had bought them from them same store as we had just been to. He said we should go back to the store because it was going to close soon and this is the only day it is open for tourists. This sounded remarkably like what the saleslady had said and suddenly, like a bolt of lightening, we got suspicious. We opened the guidbook and read a section all about gem scams. It said there were tons of very skilled con artrists that will try to lure you into a nearby gem store to buy some gems to sell in your country. Things began to click into place. Those tourists were fake tourists and con artists. The history teacher, everyone had just been trying to set us up to buy the next thing. Everything we had been through and every person we had met had been gearing us up for the biggest con of all; buying fake gems. They almost got us...... More later.

Waiting...

2006-02-13T13:10:00.000+09:00

Well we just got done with our 11th flight of the trip and we are waiting in Seoul, South Korea to take our 12th flight. Our flights have taken us from Redmond-Seattle-Honolulu-Nagoya-Guam-Yap-Palau-Guam-Tokyo-Seoul-Ho Chi Minh City-Seoul. Tonight we are off to Bangkok!
This airport is great because the chairs have no armrests so you can find a back of three chairs and lay down for a nap. Which is just what Jason and I did for the first 3 hours here in Seoul. We are here for 13 hours so it isn't too long for a nap I suppose. Seoul is pretty expenisve so we are planning to spend our time in the airport.

Thank you for your comments on the last post. They were so nice to see that I almost don't want to take back my takers comment but Jason said that it sounded like one of those kids in second grade that try to make you feel sorry for them so you will be their friend. Ouch. So to our faithful readers, thank you for reading and comment when you feel like it. Talk to you soon!

Goodbye Vietnam!

2006-02-12T22:58:00.000+09:00

Tonight we are leaving Vietnam. Next stop: Thailand. We had a good stay here in Vietnam. We got ripped off countless times, and the people took our money with huge grins on their faces but we still had an excellent time. Jason and I want to come back here every so often. Sooooo, goodbye Vietnam!

Right before we came here to the internet cafe, Jason and I bought two hammocks for $2.50 each, exchanged one of our Madagascar books for a Thailand travel guide, and went and got some passionfruit sundaes. Here is a picture of Jason enjoying his.

Here is a close up of the sundae.

If you look right below the whipped cream, you will see little black ants in the passionfruit pulp. We took this picture and then Jason noticed sopping ants dragging their bodies out of the jelly like substance just to curl up and die on the glass rim. In some moods this would be entertaining, but tonight we decided it wasn't worth watching and exchanged our sundaes for good ol' soft serve with oreo crumbles. yum.

To our parents, thank you for commenting on our blog. To the rest of you, take take take that's all you know how to do!! Please comment and let us know that the hours we spend are not in vain. :]

We'll see you in Thailand (well, I guess you will see us actually.....)!

Mekong Delta

2006-02-11T22:16:00.000+09:00

We got up early today in order to prepare for our trip to the Mekong delta. The dirty clothes that we had paid to have cleaned were still not done. Larissa spent about half an hour trying to figure out where the clothes were. Finally, they were returned to us, half of them still wet. By that time, we were in a rush to catch the bus. Even still, Larissa found time to get some clean clothes on while I started taking our bags downstairs. I am wearing the same clothes as yesterday. I don't think that they were clean yesterday either. Easy to lose track of that sort of thing.

I guess we missed the bus, because we were lead away from the hotel in search of it. It is not a big deal to miss a bus around here, because they circle around the city until they are filled. We were lead to a different bus terminal, in fron of An Phu tours. This greatly concerned us. An Phu was resposible for our not-so-enjoyable trip from Hoi An to Saigon a couple of days ago. We were relieved when we were picked up by a TNK tours bus. Then, we were annoyed when we saw a bus that said "An Phu and TNK Tours." It is hard to figure out who is who. We used to think that there were a bunch of competing tour agencies around here, now it seems more like it is just one big company. Oh well, we got the big beautiful bus this time.

Off to the Mekong Delta we went. For a little background, the Mekong is Asia's third largest river. It originates on the Tibetan Plateau, and flows over 4000km, through China, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia before reaching southern Vietnam. Their are around eight main branches of the river covering a large area of fertile farmland. The Delta is resposible for a large percentage of Vietnam's food production.

About an hour's drive from Saigon brought us to the river town of My Tho. There we boarded a motor boat and took a short ride to a fruit market. Here is a big basket of dragonfruit, accompanied by a young saleswoman. Here is what dragonfruit look like inside. We bought a few oranges to hold us over until lunch. After the market we re-boarded the boat and headed for Turtle island. We hiked along a nice grove of fruit trees and pineapple plants to the other side of the island, where lunch was to be served. We were given some ramen noodles and vegetables with some sort of meat on top. The woman who served us said that Larissa's food was vegetarian, but mine was not, though we could not discern the difference between the two. I asked to have mine exchanged for something vegetarian. The fake meat around here sure looks real. Hmmm.... It was a good lunch nonetheless, and it was topped off by a nice fruit selection at the end: pineapple, dragonfruit, jackfruit, and a fruit that I call the armpit fruit (we dont know the name of it, but due to its' taste and smell, armpit fruit is as good of name as any) which we did not eat. We did not intend to eat much fruit while in Vietnam, especially fruit of questionable origin. The fact that we haven't had any bowel troubles as of yet has made us a little under cautious I think.

The boat picked us up on the other side of the island. We were then dropped off on Unicorn Island. There we got to taste coconut candy, and view the process of its' production. Larissa helped out by stirring the boiling coconut milk for awhile.

The locals seemed to enjoy this. I think they were laughing at how easy it was to get tourists to do their work for them. The coconut candy was very good, even though neither of us are big coconut fans.

Then Larissa held a big snake for awhile, after which we enjoyed a nice cup of tea with locally harvested honey and lemons. Then we were transferred to small row boats, four people per boat. Two women in the usual conical hats rowed us through a maze of small channels.
This was probably the highlight of the day. When we got out into the open again, the big boat was waiting to take us back to the bus. On the way back to the bus, we were shown some floating villages. On some of the houses, you can see a chicken-wire enclosure between the floor of the house and the water. It turns out that many of these houses have catfish pens underneath them. Our guide told us that when the catfish reach a kilogram or so, they are sold off.

From My Tho, it was a three-hour ride to the Delta's biggest city (pop. 60,000), Can Tho, where we are now. Along the way we got to see Vietnam's largest and apparently most beautiful bridge. It was paid for by the Australians. I'd be interested to find out more about that relationship. We took a ferry from the town of Ben Tre to Can Tho. We checked in to our hotel a couple of hours ago. We have a pretty nice room, especially considering that its' price is included in the $15 tour fee. We made our way down to the riverfront for some food. The tour claimed that meals are included, so apparently dinner is not a meal. We ordered a large pizza and two sides of rice. When the food came out, it looked like we had ordered a small pizza and two large orders of rice.

We are not exactly sure what is on tap for tomorrow. All that we know is that we have to be downstairs for breakfast at 6:30, and that we will be visiting a couple of floating markets before making the return trip to Saigon.

Fried Snail with Lemon Grass

2006-02-10T23:13:00.000+09:00

We wanted to add a few things, now that we have completed the activities of the evening. We found a restaurant, called the Bohdi tree, in the same alley as the California Burrito. The Bohdi tree, as we understood from our guidebook, is known for its' vegetarian selections. When we were seated, we were impressed with the prices, and the selection. We noticed some very interesting selections in the vegetarian menu, like braised ham, baked squid, and fried snails with Lemon Grass. Each of these entrees were less than a dollar. To be safe, I ordered a vegetarian burrito, and Larissa ordered macaroni and cheese, but we also got the fried snails. We had to see what a vegetarian snail looked like.
We chuckled as they brought out the macaroni and cheese.

It was your regular pasta with tomato sauce, but I guess the slice of cheese on top qualified it as macaroni and cheese. My burrito looked fine, but wasn't all that tasty. The snails looked disturbingly similar to snails, just without heads.

I asked the waitress if they were for sure vegetarian. She said yes, but I don't think she understood the question. Then Larissa tried asking what they were made out of, the waitress answered our repeated questioning with "made from vegetables."
Larissa tried one first. I think she ate its' tail. She said it was too spicy, and tasted too much of lemon grass. Then I took a shot at it.

I thought it had the right amount of spice, but the texture was a lot like you would expect a snail's to be like.
I finished about half the plate. The snails didn't taste good, but they didn't taste bad either. I have know idea how they made the little guys. I am not entirely convinced that they weren't actually snails.

On an unrelated note, some of you have been requesting pictures of us in our new clothes. We would be happy to post some, but it might be more of a hassle then it is worth. You see, part of the service of getting tailored clothes in Hoi An, is that they fold them incredibly neatly, and seal each item in its' own plastic wrapper. Neither of us are very good at folding, so we are afraid of doing anything with the clothes, the suits in particular. We do have a picture of Larissa in her suit, taken during the first fitting. We'll try and post it soon. Also, if you look to the picture (in the post previous to this one) of Larissa standing in the midst of traffic, you will see that she is in a new pair of pants. That's the best we can do for now.

Patience Marathon

2006-02-10T19:15:00.000+09:00

We are once again reporting to you from Saigon. We feel glad to be able to do so, as it was a real challenge to get back here. I (Jason) think we mentioned before that we were unable to get a train ticket from Da Nang (near Hoi An) to Saigon. Plane tickets did happen to become available, but we could not justify their cost. During the Tet holidays, everyone around here does a lot of travelling, and it shows. Anyway, we were able to get a bus ticket, though we were horrified at the schedule. It was to leave at 6:00pm, and arrive the next day at 3:00pm. We were assured; however, that this was one of the fastest buses, a direct trip to Saigon, that would forgo the usual layover in Nha Trang.

Before our bus was to leave, we wanted to do a few more things in Hoi An. First, we took a boat trip ($2, private boat, 1.5 hours) down a river, the name of which I cannot remember. The boat driver took this picture of us sitting in the front of the boat.

There were boats of all shapes and sizes carrying all sorts of exotic loads. We enjoyed watching some people fish for awhile.

After I snapped a few photos; however, they came over our boat for some money. So, I paid about $.50 for the photo shoot.

On our way back to our hotel we grabbed some baguettes and pastries in case times got rough on our bus ride. We also stopped by to pick up Larissa's custom made $12 shoes. She is happy with them. They are red and white of course.

We were worried all day that we were going to be on a cramped and stinky bus for 21 hrs. So, as we sat in the lobby of our hotel, each time a overfilled bus came by we crossed our fingers that it was not ours. Then, a big beautifl bus with hardly a soul on it showed up. We were told that this was the bus to Saigon, so we grabbed our stuff and tried to get on. Just then, the girl at the front desk, who sold us our ticket, came running up to us. She said that this was not our bus, and that our bus was "right over here." Behind the big beautiful empty bus, was a small ugly bus with all but one seat taken. I quickly started objecting. The girl was obviously concerned with our dissatisfaction, and started spouting off to the driver. She assured us that while this was a smaller bus, we wouldn't want to go on the large bus because it was to take a layover in Nha Trang, and thus it would take a lot longer to get to Saigon. Everyone seemed eager to accomodate us on this little bus, just as the big beautiful bus drove off. With shifting of luggage, a seat barely wide enough for two undernourished children was revealed in the back of the bus. At least we can sit together, we thought. As we were seated on the bus, the girl assured us that it would only be 12 hours to Nha Trang, where some of the passengers would be dropped off. With that, we drove off. "Whait a second," I thought, "Nha Trang?" I hoped that her mention of Nha Trang meant that we were just passing through, very quickly, as we had passed up the big beautiful bus to avoid a layover there.

I thought it a good idea to make friends with the people that were sitting inches in front of us. They were a young couple, students from Saigon. The girl translated the driver's updates for us. We would stop in Nha Trang for two hours, then switch to a big bus before heading to Saigon.

We listened to audiobooks for awhile, and then tried to fall asleep. We found out that when you are fearing for your life, it is really hard to sleep. Several times, during the night, as we had near misses with huge honking vehicles, I considered begging the driver to let us off the bus. It was truly a scary ride. I could not believe all of the traffic that were on the roads in the middle of the night. The especially terrifying part of the trip was a mountain pass. We were somewhat delerious at this point, due to lack of sleep, but it seemed like every couple of miles the paved road would give way to a narrow section of dirt and gravel road guarded only by the mountain on one side, and a deep dark abyss on the other.

We arrived in Nha Trang early, about 4:00am. We slept on the bus for ahwhile until we were told to get off and wait inside the tour agency's office. It was raining hard (as it had been most of the night) so we didn't walk around much. First we were told that we would be leaving at 6:00am. When it was about 6:30, they told us that we would be leaving by 7:00. We finally got on the bus around 8:15, and then proceeded to circle the city for an hour while they tried to fill up every last seat on the bus.

We were frustrated on this ride with the all to frequent and lengthy snack and bathroom breaks. Then, when we were just outside of Saigon, we got a flat tire. Luckily, we were in an area loaded with tire stores when it happened. Actually, we may have been driving with a flat tire for quite awhile. They didn't tend to keep us informed very well. In fact, we didn't even know we had stopped to fix a flat tire until the driver got out of the bus an ran accross the street to talk to a tire salesman. He ran back and forth across the street for about 15 minutes, between two tire vendors, probably until he got the best deal. Then, he got one of the passengers to front the cash to pay for the tire.

This ride was a lot less stressful than the first. We enjoyed a few episodes of Lost and got through the first thirty-some chapters of The Da Vinci Code audiobook. So, with that for entertainment, and a nap here and there, the trip from Nha Trang to Saigon went faster than it otherwise would have.

Arrival in Saigon, 6:30pm. There are tons of hotels and guesthouses in the backpacker's district of Saigon, where we were dropped. We toured 6 or 7 of them before settling on one for $9/night. We settled half because we thought it was a nice room, and half because we were hot, sweaty, tired, and sick of bargaining.

We got cleaned up and headed out on the town. For dinner, we stopped at a place called Margherita. Larissa got some pasta while I got some burritos. Very good. Then we went out for ice cream. Larissa got what they call a honeybee. It was a dish with coconut, avacado, and strawberry ice cream. Lariss says it looked more llike a caterpillar. I got the passionfruit sundae. It was basically a bowl full of fresh passionfruit pulp with a scoop of lemon ice cream in the middle. The passionfruit beat the socks off the honeybee.

Okay, I need to move on. Today we got up with the intention to go to the Ben Than market. We visited it once before, but activity was slow due to the holidays. After about a twenty minute walk, we arrived at the market to find it bustling. You can buy just about anything there, from clothes, to jewelry, to handicrafts, to fruit,

to pigs feet,
to live catfish (some baby ones pictured in the tray),to cow tongues,etc. etc. etc. It is a real eye-opening experience best undertaken with closed nostrils. The smell, especially in the meat market can dissolve even the most hearty appetite.

We came away from the market with a couple of avacados and some lychees, assuming that we would feel like eating later on.

On the way back to the hotel, we happened accross a back-alley with a nice looking restaurant by the name of California Burrito. The sign made claims to "true vegetarian food," with no MSG. We both got vegetarian burritos, which were quite good and interesting. They contained, along with the usual suspects (beans and rice) broccoli, cauliflower, and tofu. While in the restaurant, we noticed a sign advertising a sister restaurant called California Pizza. Marking its' location on our map, we decided to take a walking tour there in the afternoon. First, we had to return to the hotel to take care of some things.

With no clean clothes left, we arranged to have some laundry done, which cost around $.50 per kilogram. Then we arranged a tour of the Mekong Delta, which will take up our last two days in Vietnam. We don't know how good the tour will be, but it seems like a bargain at $15, supposedly including meals, hotel, boat and bus rides.

Now for the walking tour. Saigon is a bustling city, with more mopeds and motorcycles than I knew could exist in one place. There are few crosswalks, so to cross the street you just kind of start walking, and watch the motorcycles weave around you. Here is Larissa in the midst of them, while on her concrete island of safety.

In a way, we came to find out, Saigon has a defined commercial arrangement. It seemed that all of the stores selling electronics were on one street, while stores selling such things as antiques, motorcylcles, clothing, or souveniers were restricted to their own respective streets. We are not sure whether this is a result of zoning, or what. We noticed the same sort of thing in Hoi Ann. Store after store advertising custom tailored clothes. Surely someone would want to put a convenience store in the midst of them, but no. If someone is making money selling something, I guess his neighbor decides to do the same thing next door. It is good for the consumer though. Once you decide what you want, you can have an entire street of vendors competing for your business. Sometimes you can just sit back while they do the bargaining for you.

We ended up walking all over the city, but still full from our burritos, we never stopped at California pizza. We stopped by the river for awhile, and then dropped by a bakery where we purchased a nice long baguette.

Back at our hotel, we made a lunch of bread, avacados and lychees. Here is Larissa making lunch on the bed.

We had never tried lychees before. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they are round and colored like a strawberry, but covered in soft spines. Once peeled, a greyish ball is revealed, with the look and feel of an eyeball. I think they taste like a mix between a pear and a grape. Good.

This is the fastest internet connection that we have found yet. Also, it is the only one that has allowed us to view our blog. I think Larissa replied to some of your comments. Thanks for letting us know that you are reading! Perhaps we will be able to come here again and make a post after the trip to the Mekong, and before heading to Thailand. Our tour leaves at 8:00am tomorrow, and gets back the next afternoon. That night our flight leaves for Bangkok.

Tonight we are going to eat out, again. All of this eating out has not even come close to getting old yet. I think we might just stop by and get another passionfruit sundae.

Your dress madam?

2006-02-07T22:36:00.000+09:00

Well, we are going on our third day in Hoi An and our official clothing item count, is drum roll please........ 36! One of these items is a pair of shoes that I (Larissa) ordered today. They cost me $13 and they are leather and beautiful red and white. They will sew any shoes you want and even embroider any logo you want. Puma, Nike etc. I would also like to update you on Jason's shopping attitude. He is now the proud owner of MORE tailored clothes than me! That is right. Jason beat me by about 5 items. All it took was one tailor with a "can-do" attitude (Jason's words) and Jason went crazy.

His biggest purchases were two suits. They fit him PERFECTLY. Apparently you can also order clothes from this tailor from the states and have it shipped. So, we had her take our measurements and we may just do that in the future.

Today we saw some of the more famous sights of Hoi An. Yesterday we had planned on doing such and rented a motorbike to ride to a nearby ruins, but somehow ended up in Da Nang which is where we came in on the train the other day. So we just decided that we would call it a joy ride and stick to walking around the old town district. But TODAY..... Well, the famous Hoi An sights are on a ticket scheme. As in, you buy a ticket and it allows you to visit 5 of the famous sights that you want without paying another entrance fee. We only looked into two today. The Ceramic museum and the Quang Trang (?) Old House. The ceramic museum was just a bunch of broken pottery and the old house was exactly what it sounds like. The ceramic museum was in an old house too. It was very beautiful with wood carvings everywhere and a courtyard with a fountain in it. We enjoyed the house more than the ceramics. It had a nice wooden balcony that we could look down on the street from. Here is a view from the balcony:

We also stopped by the market today. We didn't pick anything out to eat but Jason took some pictures. Here is a particular fetching one, I thought:

We also happened to wander into a beautiful handicraft gallery. There is a beautiful art style that they make here. It is embroidery. They take pictures of daily life in Vietnam and then they take silk threads and embroider them onto fabric. The whole fabric square is taken up the thread. It looks very realistic. There were a bunch of girls sitting there carefully creating masterpieces. We found out that we could email them a picture and they could make it for us and then ship it to us. It takes about 1 month for one girl to make one project. Dependent on the size of course. Then the host took us into a back room and we got to see a woman weaving silk. She was using an old fashioned loom and making beautiful natural silk. She took us to a room farther back and we saw two woman making a floor mat. They weave the reeds into a multicolored sleeping mat. It didn't look too comfortable. Then the host took us upstairs where the silk worms are kept. WOW! They have silk worms of all different ages and there were big mats with tons of silk worms eating mulberry leaves. Then they took us to a screen with tons of silk worm cocoons entwined in it. After the moth comes out, they take the cocoon and put it in boiling water. From this, they spin the silk. You may be able to understand better by seeing this picture.

Right next to where I am sitting are the cocoons in the boiling water. There is a contraption that that woman in the background is spinning. When it spins, it unwinds the silk from the cocoons and puts it on a big spool. It was quite interesting to see this all in person!

It is fun to be able to eat out 3 meals a day! Jason and I even get to order drinks every time! Today Jason got a pineapple shake and I often get mango juice or soda from a bottle. We were worried that, as vegetarians, we wouldn't have enough food choices here but we have been pleased to find that every restaurant we have been to has had a big vegetarian menu. Tonight we ate at a new place and had great pasta. It was different tasting but after noodles and vegetables all the time, it was just what we needed!

We wondered down a new street tonight and were amazed to find a beautiful upscale district. We looked wonderingly around and low and behold, there was a wonderful little pastry and dessert shop inside a huge restaurant. It was the kind of dessert shop that I ate at with Andrea in Walla Walla recently. The desserts were mini sized but decorated to a tee. Jason got a passionfruit/chocolate mousse cake and I got a chocolate mousse cup. They were a wonderful change of pace and Jason and I noted to each other that it felt really great being able to eat thins kind of thing without thinking you were hugely splurging. Together, our desserts cost under three dollars. With Andrea, each dessert cost over five dollars.

On this same street, we came across another handicraft shop where all the crafts in the store are made by people with disabilites. We didn't buy anything tonight but tomorrow morning we will go buy some silk sleeping bags. They are only about 8 dollars. I think REI charges like.... $50? Correct me if I am wrong Adam. Apparently the person who weaves the bags is mute and deaf. It is great to see a place like that so that the people with disabilities don't end up on the street like so many do.

We aren't able to view our blog so we aren't able to respond to your comments. We are able to read them now though because we changed the settings so they are sent to us via email. So keep commenting. It happened once we got to Vietnam basically so we are assuming the government doesn't allow blogs? I can't view anyone elses blog either.

Today at around 6pm, we are going back to Saigon. By bus. This hellish experience will last approximately 21 hours. Since it is holiday time, everything on the train is full and the plane is too expensive. We are going to buy some books for the long ride to tide us over. At least the bus has air conditioning. I hope it has leg room. Well, pray for us and we will talk to you all again when we get to Saigon.

Ancient City

2006-02-05T22:33:00.000+09:00

We managed to get several hours of sleep on the train last night. Besides having an inconsiderate roomate, we the ride was enjoyable. The train went north from Nha Trang to Da Nang. Our goal for today was to make it from Da Nang to Hoi An (about 30km away) and to find a good cheap hotel. Our Rough Guide Vietnam book suggested that we should avoid the local bus from Da Nang to Hoi An at all costs. It instead recommended that we find a taxi or honda-om. The best price we could find for a taxi was $8, but it required that we wait around for 15min. or so while the friend of the salesman, who owned the car showed up. While we were waiting, we met a guy named Quang, who as it turns out takes people on motorcycle tours of Vietnam. We got to know him a bit, and he showed us some pictures of his clients, and gave us a book of references to read. When our taxi didn't show up, we decided to hire Quang, and his friend Nom for a few hours to see the sights between Da Nang and Nha Trang. Here are our new friends, trying to attach our backpack to one of the motorcycles.

Don't worry moms, I (Jason) requested that we be provided with helmets. We drove a mile or so to Quang's house, where we met his wife (who served us some tea) and family. We also picked up a couple of helmets. After stopping at a bakery to get some bread, we headed off for China Beach, which is apparently where American G.I.s would go to relax during the war. Quang said it was a famous place, but we are not familiar with why that is.

Then we were off to the marble mountains, which according to our guidebook, are Vietnam's most southerly limestone outcrops. The largest of the mountains has steps leading to the top, and paths leading to several temples. Here is the view:

There is a large cavern near the top of the mountain. We entered it to find it very smokey and crowded with people holding incense. We weren't sure what the significance of the place was, but we were able to find out that people were trying to catch the water dripping from above. Success in this endeavor brings good luck for the new year. I wonder what they had to do to get good luck in catching the water droplets? This is the tallest of the temples on the mountain:

Unfortunately the town at the base of the mountain was littered with shops selling various marble pieces, from furniture to sculptures to fountains to trinkets. We thought some of the stuff was nice, but not really worth carrying around. I left the shops to find Quang and Nom. Apparently when I left, Larissa was bombarded with buying pressure. She walked up to me, surrounded by several other women, asking for $12. She was half proud, because she had bargained them down from $25, but half embarassed because she committed to buy something. Anyway, it is a pretty little marble box. It is red of course, and has a sketch of Hoi An carved into the lid. I really have no idea what it could be used for, besides maybe a candy dish. Larissa seems to think that what it is used for is irrelevant, as long as it looks pretty.

We then headed off to complete the final leg of our journey to Hoi An. When we arrived, Quang showed us to a nice hotel. I tried to act unimpressed as we were shown a couple of sample rooms. Larissa smiled, and let out a bit of a giggle. I knew she liked the place. We booked a room, $10/night. It is a clean room, complete with a private bath, satellite tv, a shared balcony, and airconditioning.

Quang then showed us to his sister-in-law's tailoring shop. Hoi An is well known for it's abundance of silk tailoring shops. Around here, you can pretty much pick whatever you want out of a fashion magazine or what have you, and they will take your measurements, help you pick out fabric, and have your custome made items ready the next day. A full cashmere suit goes for around$50, while a dress shirt about $7, and a winter coat about $30. Larissa is in love with this "opportunity." Thus, she will tell you a bit more about it, and the other things that make her love this place.

Okay, so this is me (Larissa). WOW. This place is amazing! Every other store is a tailor or laquerware store. I thought THAT was cool but then I walked into a shoe store. I noticed all the shoes looked pretty grimy, dusty and worn. I thought, oh thats too bad, I want shoes but I guess they suck here. Then one of the store people said "you like? I will make it in your size!" So, these grimy shoes are just sample shoes and you pick out what you want and they make it for you! You can even change the color of the shoe if you want. Wow. I love shoes. So I will have to have of those made while we are here too.

The architechture here is pretty cool too. Hoi An is called an ancient city because most of the buildings are ancient, not like in ruins but made of nice wood with carvings and the like. There is a really cool covered bridge too that is very stylized.

There are so many colors here. Everything is so bright and beautiful. Case in point, here is a picture of a woman making chinese lanterns.

Jason didn't want me to put it in because it is blurry but I don't care, I really like it. I think I took a really good picture. Anyway, there are lots of laquerware stores around here and Jason and I have been window shopping trying to decide what we want. Jason is getting sick of shopping to my dismay (even though we haven't really bought anything yet) but I think he will get excited about the backpacks. There are Northface backpacks here for 10-15 dollars depending on the size. That is even before we started bargaining. We thought they might be fakes but upon further perusal, we think they are real. So, I think Jason might be spending time in backpack stores while I am being fitted for beautiful clothes.

There is a lot more to see here than just clothes and such. We are planning to get around to that tomorrow. We will let you know about that kind of stuff as soon as we can.

Nha Trang

2006-02-04T20:17:00.000+09:00

Last night we boarded our train to go from Saigon to Nha Trang at about 10:30. When we located our sleeping compartment, we found that we were sharing it with a large Vietnamese family. There were at least four people on each of the lower bunks. We said hello, and crawled up onto our upper bunks. We whispered to one another asking how it was possible that they were able to put more than one person per bunk, that could be a real money saver we thought. They seemed friendly, though we didn't talk much with them because they didn't seem to speak much English. Just before the train departed, all but two members of the family left to other compartments on the train. Many local people are traveling right now, returning home from their holiday travels. People around here save their money all year for the Lunar new year travels. The average local wage for a worker in Ho Chi Minh City is around $50 per month.
The beds on the train were comfortable and clean, and we thought we were in for a good nights sleep. Unfortunately, as the train got up to speed, it sounded like we were stuck in a tornado.

We arrived in Nha Trang about 6:00am this morning. We were to find a certain cafe where the diving company was to pick us up at 7:00am. When leaving the train station we had no idea where we were going. The funny thing is, you cannot let on that you don't know where you are going around here. So, we confidently walked through the lineup of taxis, cyclos, and honda-oms down a street that we had never walked before, as if we new exacltly where we were going, so that we could avoid some of the haggling. When safely around the corner, we quickly pulled out our guidebook to figure out where we were, and where we were going.
You can get just about anywhere within an hours drive for a dollar or two around here, but for some reason we keep on walking. After being lost for quite awhile, we found the cafe, probably 4km from the train station. Unfortunately, there was no diving bus to pick us up. I went out in search for food while Larissa tried to get information about the dive trip from a travel agent in the cafe. Neither of us were very successful in our tasks. I walked up and down the street, and returned sheepishly with only a bottle of water. "It'll only be a few hours until we can get back for some food" I assured her, feeling down on my abilibty to provide for the family. As she tried to approach the travel agent, a near riot broke out in the cafe due to the fact that a bus leaving from that location had filled up far before it could accomodate everyone who intended to board it. With bigger problems on her hands, the agent was far from helpful.

Finally, around 7:30, someone showed up from a dive operation. We piled into a van and headed out. We drove up and down the streets of Nha Trang until all the seats were filled, and then headed for the port. It was a dreary day today, and the ocean looked cold and uninviting as it came into sight. We were quickly escorted to the diving boat. It was not your typical dive boat. It was a large wooden boat, crowded with people, looking like one of those refugee boats you see on TV. We were glad to find out that the majority of the people on the boat were snorkelers. We don't like to share the water.

We started our 45 minute trip out to the dive sight. I spoke with the divemaster, trying to get an idea of what to expect. He told me that the visibility would be very poor due to the windy conditions. He said, "If you look closely, you might be able to see some coral." That was really encouraging. Smelly and tired, we were hardly in the mood for any but the best news.
I then went about the task of trying to get someone to connect my dive computer to a regulator. All this requires is a few turns with a wrench, but before I knew it, the majority of the crew was standing around arguing about how it should be done. I made a couple of feable attempts to grab the wrench that one of them was holding, so I could do it myself, but they weren't having it.
About ten minutes later, the computer was attached. I was disturbed at the fact that the computer seemed to be the envy of all of the divers on board. To help cure my anxiety, I checked it periodically to make sure that it hadn't been snatched up.

We donned our gear, and jumped into the water. I let out a bit of a girly squeal, as the water was shockingly cold compared to what we were used to. The visibility wasn't good, but it sure beats the Oregon coast.

As we began following our guide around the reef, we noticed that he wasn't much for stopping and looking. It seemed like he was just trying to see how fast he could swim. We tried to keep up at first, but after awhile we just stopped to look for however long we wanted. He would disappear off into the distance, and then awhile later would return at full speed to see if everything was alright. I thought it was good for him to burn as much of that extra energy as possible.

Besides our being quite cold, the diving was very enjoyable, even despite the poor visibility. We saw several lion fish out in the open, an octopus, a big cuttlefish, and some unfamiliar species of anenomefish. There was an amazing population an variety of anenomefish. They were bigger and more aggressive than those that we found in Palau. They repeatedly bit my dive computer, I guess they wanted it too. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, we saw lots of coral, beautiful coral.

So, remember in the last post, I mentioned that we were to go out with a company called Rainbow Divers? Well, after our first dive, we noticed a big boat (nicer than the one we were riding on) that had "Rainbow Divers." Confused, we looked at the side of our own boat, and at the shirts of the crew, and they said "Explore Vietnam." "Uh oh," we thought, "we have been hijacked by another dive company." We thought back to when we were picked up. A lady approached us and said, "are you diving today?" I told her that we were, and we followed her to a bus. Since we had already paid for the tour (diving here is about half the rate, of the half-rate we were getting in Palau), we were concerned that Explore Vietnam might not have been the ones that we paid, and we wondered whether they would be expecting some payment at the end of things. No wonder they did not have us on their list of divers, we thought back to when we got on the boat, our names were the only ones missing from a dry erase board.
We decided to remain as inconspicuous as possible, while planning our escape.

The second dive was better than the first. The day of diving was good, but I think that the diving here could be really good. There are some islands around with reefs that are almost left alone. This time of year is said to be the best time to dive Vietnam, we just got unlucky with conditions.

After making the return trip to the port, we were shuttled past the Rainbow Divers dive shop, to the Explore Vietnam dive shop. There they fed us a nice meal. Midway through, I made put all of our bags in a position for a quick escape. We finished our meal early on purpose, and said small innocent good-byes as we hiked away.
We still don't know what happened, perhaps Rainbow divers subcontracts with other operators. We were in no mood for the hassle of finding out.

We don't like Nha Trang all that much, so we have decided to leave tonight. We will board another overnight train to Hoi An. After diving, we rented a motorcycle. Not a smart thing to do. Two liters of gas and a 6 hour motorcycle rental costs around 4 usd, unless you want to hang around and bargain a bit. In some parts of vietnam, like Phu Quoc, it is only $1 per day. As we drove away from the rental shop, weaving back and forth, I realized that we should have rented a bigger bike, or an automatic moped. My feet are too big to shift very effectively. We planned to tour some side roads, but before we knew it we were on a 4 lane highway, with traffic weaving around us. Larissa mentioned that we should have looked into getting helmets, though no one on the roads has them. Luckily, we came across a side road, and made our way to the beach, where we sent up a prayer of thanks that our lives were spared. Then we went for pizza, and then to an internet cafe, where I am writing this from. Internet rates are very reasonable here, less than a cent a minute. We did not do a good job of documenting the day photographically. That is why this entry is pictureless. It is pouring rain right now. The ride to the train station might not be the most enjoyable.

We were hoping to read your comments today, but we cannot seem to view the blog.
In regard to the videos, I think I did something wrong with creating the hyperlinks, so I am assuming they didn't work. The problem may be fixed now, but I can't tell you for sure because, again, we can't view the blog.

Thanks to those of you who are helping us with Madagascar-replacement options.

Cu Chi and Cao Dai Holy See

2006-02-03T22:09:00.000+09:00

Yesterday afternoon, after we got the ATM card thing worked out, Larissa and I managed to get some things arranged for the next few days of sightseeing. For today, we arranged a tour to the Cao Dai temple in Long Hoa, and the Cu Chi tunnels in Ben Dinh.

It is really easy to get tours to just about anywhere in Vietnam or Cambodia at various tour agencies in this area of Ho Chi Minh. We are staying in the backpacker's district around Pham Ngu Lao road. The tours are very reasonably priced. The full day tour we took today usually runs about 4-5 usd, but because of the Tet holiday, we had to pay 7 usd per person. Still not a bad deal.

So, as our tour was to leave at 8:00 am, we got up early enough to go get some breakfast. I had a breakfast burrito, and Larissa had french toast and a grilled cheese sandwich. We came out with a bill of about 3.50 usd. Sorry I keep using usd instead of a dollar sign. Unfortunately on this combined language keyboard, I cannot figure out how to insert certain symbols.

I nice big airconditioned bus picked us up just a few minutes late. We took the front seat and thus had a prime viewing station for the ride ahead. Our first destination, over 100km from Ho Chi Minh City, was Long Hoa, the site of the Cao Dai Holy See and Temple. As we drove along, we saw all sorts of interesting sights. We saw water buffalo pulling loads of sugar cane down a 4-lane highway, mopeds with families of four riding along, and cylcos piled with watermelons, among many other things. Larissa was frantically trying to shoot pictures from the bus window, but grew frustrated. We have decided to stake out a position on a busy street to photograph the interesting sights as they go past.

We didn't know much about the Cao Daism before today, but as our tour got started, our guide named Slim Jim, started giving us the run-down. Apparently in the 1920s, a French guy living in Vietnam was cantacted by a superior being called Cao Dai, or "high place." This spirit, or whatever, was kind enough to communicate to this Frenchman thate basics of the Cao Daist creed. In this communication, the Divine Eye was told to be the tangible representation of the existence of the spirit, or the religion, or what have you. Since that time, revelations from the Cao Dai have added to the religion. Currently, it uses vehicles such as Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Confucius, etc. to tailor belief systems to various individual cultures. Thus, Cao Daism is viewed as the manifestation of the combination of many other religions. This religion is indigenous to Vietnam, and it enjoys around 2 million members here. We are not sure how many people are part of the church in other parts of the world.

About an hour into the trip we stopped for a bathroom break. This particular rest area had many varieties of snake and scorpion wine available. My favorite bottles had cobras posed in the position of biting scorpions. A good sized bottle of snake wine can be purchased for under 2 usd. We'll try and post a good picture of some snake wine when we get a chance.

We then continued on national highway 22 toward Trang Bang. This is the town of the famous photograph by Nick Ut of the naked girl with her back in flames running from a napalm attack. The girl's name is Phan Thi Kim Phuc, she is still alive and living in Canada. You could probably look up the photo using google if interested. In route to the temple, we came within just 10 km of Cambodia. We are already wishing we had more time to spend around here because of all of the exploration opportunities.

Then we arrived at the Cao Dai Holy See. The area has twelve gates, the main one of which is never used. Apparently it is for the Pope of Cao Dai. This was confusing to us because the Pope is dead, and the agreement is that there will never be another pope because people today are not suited for the role. We entered one of the side gates and came within site of the temple.

It is a very colorful, unique, and impressive structure. It has very asian styling, and it is colorful. We toured the area a bit, and then made our way inside the temple to observe one of the 4 daily services. Each day at 6 am, 12pm, 6 pm, and 12 am, there is a forty minute worship service in Cao Dai temples. It is not obligatory for members to attend these services. According to Slim Jim, it is mainly older people who attend the services because the younger people are working or sleeping.

I am going to have to make things quick here. Front and center in the temple is a giant eye ball, the divine eye. It is on the ninth step, the most holy step. There are seven seats on this step as well, but no one ever sits in them. They are for saints or something. The service was interesting. Worshipers in white robes, and church officials in colored robes, ascend the steps of the temple while bowing and praying. Each of the colored robes represent a different aspect of the religion, like the Christian aspect for instance.

We then stopped for lunch. We were accompanied by a nice Australian couple at our table. We ordered vegetarian rice with vegetables, under 2 usd for both of us.

We then headed for the Cu Chi tunnels in Ben Dinh. For a little background, the Cu Chi tunnels were first constructed for a hiding place for resistance soldiers during the French occupation of Vietnam. They were then expanded greatly during the American involvment in Vietnam. Only 30 km from Saigon, the tunnels were very close to the main American bases during the war. In fact, some of the tunnels, which were occupied by Viet Cong Guerilla fighters, actually went right under an American military base. The fighters used the tunnels to hide from American bombing by day, and as a base of offensive attack by night. There were entire networks of tunnels. Today, many of the tunnels have collapsed, but tourists can still crawl through a few hundred meters of them; however there size has been doubled to accomodate western girth. This is an original entry hole:

This is the entry point for tourists:

Before we went into the tunnels we were exposed to an entirely one sided video about the Cu Chi fighters. It was interesting to see some propaganda at work. Slim Jim, a South Vietnamese, seemed to be fully aware of the bias, and made corrections often. We were also shown some booby traps devised by the Guerillas. Any one of these traps would be truly horrible to encounter for sure. Just knowing that such things were in the woods must have had a real negative effect on the psyche of the Americans. We were then shown some of the ways that that Cu Chi fighters crafted weapons from harvested U.S. bombs. Also, we were led to a shooting range, where, for a 1 dollar per bullet, one can shoot his/her choice of an AK47 or an M16. Unfortunately, the minimum purchase was 10 bullets. That is equal to a nights accomodation and a nice meal around here, so we passed up the opportunity.

Before the tour was over, we were lead to a picnic area to have some steamed tapioca. Larissa thought I should try the peanut and sugar crumb dipping sauce, but I was concerned with the shared dipping vats, so I passed.

We are about to leave to the train station to catch an over night train to the beach town of Nha Trang. We sprung for the air-conditioned soft sleeper compartment. We will arrive in the morning, to be picked up by Rainbow Divers for a day of diving in the South China sea. Depending on how we like it there, we may stay another day or two before heading further North to the town of Hoi An.

Thanks for all of your suggestions regarding our potential itinerary change. We are frantically trying to evaluate all options while planning our things in our current location. We will keep you posted on what develops. Thanks for reading!

Oh, here are a few video clips to correspond with the "Dive of a lifetime post." Matt, my brother, has been nice enough to host them for us. I will not be able to check whether I have entered the links correctly, so let me know if they don't work. If you have been emailed videos from us, you may have already seen these.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Hello from Ho Chi Minh!

2006-02-02T23:39:00.000+09:00

We arrived here in Saigon really late last night! When we stepped out of the airport, we were quite taken aback. We walked out into a roped off area and on all sides was a HUGE mass of people. The weird thing was that they were all standing/sitting quite quietly. We walked to the other side of the courtyard/roped off area and all they all silently watched us. It was a little disconcerting. We tried to ask the taxi driver if some royalty was coming on the plane or something but either he didn't speak English or he was otherwise occupied trying to dodge the hoards of Motorbikes that take over the roads. We asked the guy at our hotel and he said it was just everyone waiting for their families because it is the biggest holiday of the year, Tet. Unfortunately we got here to late to see all the cool dancing in the streets and such but there are still lots of decorations up!

Anyway, we got in the taxi and immediately Jason and I gave each other a "look" because our seatbelts were missing. Great. Off we went. Here in Vietnam, the drivers use their horns as warnings. Warnings that they are about to run a red light, warnings that they are about to hit you so move, or warnings that they are about to cut you off. You know, normal stuff like that. There was only one stop light that our taxi driver actually stopped at and then it was only a bit of a pause before he was off again, swerving between mopeds, honking as he swerved into the other lane around a bus. I grabbed my arm rest more than once. We finally made it to our hotel.
Here is the view from our window:

The tall orange building is a hotel. Our hotel looks the same way, as many hotels around here do. I guess it is because they have to pay taxes according to how much street front they take up. Our hotel is the An An Hotel and we are quite pleased with it! We got a luxury room since we figured $32 ain't too much to ask for such a nice a clean establishment. We think we might be changing to a different hotel soon. Not because we don't like ours but because we can get a better room than the one we had in Gaum for $10. Yes, that's right.
There are plenty of places to eat here. Even for us vegetarians! Down the alley next to our hotel is a nice restaurant called the Asian Kitchen. We ate there for breakfast. I got the vegetarian mixed noodles. When they brought it out, I was dissapointed because it had tons of meat in it! I told them I asked for vegetarian and they said it was. I looked closer and sure enough, the meat had the decided look of gluten. It was an excellent meal. Here I am holding up some real looking gluten:

Jason got the vegetable curry. We ate all of that for less than $4. And man, was I full afterward. In fact, we were so full that we didn't eat lunch.
After that, we took a cyclo ride. Cyclos are backwards tricycles where you sit in the front and the driver pedals from the back. Here is me with my driver, Phom:

When we started, we had agreed on 15,000 dong per hour for Jason and I each. That is about $1/hour. Not bad eh? So, first they took us to the War Museum. Wow. What a depressing place. It was horrible seeing the pictures of what agent orange did to people. There was much to see there but most of it was depressing, as war is, so I won't go into detail.
We rode around the city for awhile and let me tell you, we are definitely traveling. Everything is so different. But we really love it here! There are children walking around laughing and babies are riding on mopeds with their parents and cyclos are haggling you and the conical hats are everywhere and people are playing cards in alleyways and people are vending books and mopeds swerving around you and it is all glorious choas that neither Jason or I mind at all.
Our next stop on the cyclos was the zoo. It was less than a dollar for an entrance fee. When was the last time you can remember it being that cheap? In this zoo, there were no signs saying "don't feed the animals". Apparently these are a very important signs as the bottom of the monkey cage was littered with snackfood wrappers that people had thrown in for the monkeys to dine on. In fact, they even sell sugar cane for you to feed to the elephants. One elephant was so tired of eating sugar cane all the time that when the people reached out to feed him the sugar cane he just grabbed it with his trunk and then dropped it into the moat.

Next we visited a pagoda. There were tons of worshippers inside waving insence about and bowing in front of idols. We felt a little like we were intruding. The pagoda was very beautiful. It had bright reds and yellows and deep blacks. The idols that the worshippers were bowing down to were different "heros"(as our driver told us). You offer insence to one if you want to have kids. You offer insence to another if you want to have a successful business.

We decided three hours was long enough to pay the guys so we had them drop us off at a large market. That is when they told us that they charge 50,000 dong per hour per person not 15,000. We said "but I thought you said 15,000!" He said "yes right, 50,000!" Oh boy. Well, we paid up but learned our lesson that we should follow our guidebooks adivce and have the price written down as we prearranged it.

After coming home from grocery shopping, Jason realized he didn't have his ATM card anymore. He hadn't used it since early this morning. It was then about 6:30 at night. We rushed back to the ATM we used because we thought that maybe it got sucked back into the machine like it does sometimes. Then we realized that we didn't know where the ATM was that we had used. It was the first thing we did this morning when we still had no idea what roads we were wondering down and we couldn't find the darn thing even though we tried to retrace our steps. We found the reciept and had people call the bank to ask it's location. Everyone kept trying to send us to the wrong bank. Finally, someone got it right and we found our ATM on a road that we had canvassed many times but hadn't walked quite far enough on. We asked a guard that was standing there what we should do since we left our ATM card in the machine. He said, "oh yes" and reaches into this wallet to pull out our ATM card!!!! Oh thank you Jesus! Of course, we still don't know if he used its credit card abilities during the day or not. We are optimistic that he didn't.

We had a wonderful dinner at a vegetarian restaurant called Zen. We ate smoothies, apitizers, entree's and a big bottle of water and it still only cost us just about $4. We like this place.

Here is another picture of me in a cute store with lots of tempting things to buy.

I will try to convince Jason to let me put more pictures of him in here. Of course it would help if I took some good ones. Every one should come to Vietnam.

Off to Vietnam!

2006-01-31T15:39:00.000+09:00

Well, Jason and I are leaving to fly to Vietnam tomorrow morning around 2 am. Ugh. We won't get into Vietnam until about midnight tomorrow. Just so you all know, we are about a day ahead of you here in Palau. I guess we should have told you that when we first got here.

On our current itinerary, we have about a month in Madagascar. We were trying to get some medical missionary work there but have been having a horrible time getting in contact with anyone who can help us. Plus the island is really huge and the internal transportation is really causing issues. So now, we are considering finding another place. We have tossed around ideas of South Africa or Kenya. Does anybody have any suggestions? It has to be on the globe in between Thailand and about Italy. If anybody knows a good place or has suggestions for South Africa or Kenya, or other places, comment and let us know. We are trying to be open to anything. Except Iraq or something. :]

Hopefully we will talk to you again from Vietnam!

Out on the Senator's boat

2006-01-30T19:36:00.000+09:00

About a week ago, the same guy who took us out on the boat to go to Jellyfish (who we found out is actually and senator of Koror) lake told us he would take us out again today. He was too busy to go with us so he just arranged to have boat and driver ready for us. We tried inviting some of our new found friends but only Jason and I were able to go. So, at 8:30am we pulled up to the Senator's house and met our driver Gerwin. We thought we were just going to go see some cool islands and go snorkeling so we were excited and floored when the driver said "So, you guys want to go diving right?" Just so you know, the senator used to run a diving outfit so we felt pretty comfortable going out even though he wasn't there. The driver and the senator's househelper took us to a garage/shed type place where they kept a large amount of scuba gear. Jason and I were both able to find gear to fit us so off we went. We decided to go back to German Channel where we saw all the mantas and fish. I was a little hesitant because I wanted to end our experience at German channel with the dive we had last time. I figured we wouldn't be able to replicate it so we shouldn't try. But we decided to go because that is the only one we felt comfortable diving without a guide.

We jump in the water, descend and promptly see 3 sharks. It was a good start to a dive but we decided to dive it how we did last time and hover around 35 ft to look for mantas and schools of fish. Gerwin said that we should just head toward the other bouy that we could see in the distance. Since I was the only one with a compass, Jason gave me a briefing on how to navigate and off we went. The visibility wasn't great and it wasn't soon before I looked down and I saw dusky blue and I looked up and I saw dusky blue. I was leading the way with the compass so I couldn't see Jason either unless I twisted myself around to make sure he was still behind me. I did this quite often which is why I think we we ended up in a totally different spot than we meant to. Actually, I think we were going the right way, the current just carried us a little. Somewhere in the mass of blue, Jason ran into a jellyfish tenacle. This is what it did to his arm.

I first saw his welts underwater and I was terrified at first because I thought he had some scuba disease where the air goes to his skin and makes little bubbles under it. So I was relieved to find out it was just a jellyfish sting. :] Poor Jason, it must have really hurt to make all those welts.
Pretty soon after that, we decided to stop. It was an ok dive none the less.

Next we headed to the Rosegarden where we saw really cool anenome fish and fed the rest of the millions of fish. The coral there is mostly dead though.

Next we headed to an arch that everyone seems to want to take us to. It is a pretty cool arch, granted. When we were done taking our picture in front of it, Jason asked, "Were you ever used to be able to go under the arch in a boat?" He asked because there was a huge boulder sitting under the arch. Gerwin is like "You want to try?" and off we went. Jason was giggling the whole time, in a very manly way. I was looking over the side of the boat, watching the hermit crabs go back into their shells because yes, it was that shallow. Here is a picture of us ON THE OTHER SIDE wow.

Then Gerwin took us to cemetary. We thought that we had been there already. We thought that was the place where I got my clam wound. But it was this little place hidden amoungst the Rock islands. There was tons of beautiful coral and a huge diversity of fish. Here is a picture of me with some fish.

I think that names of the two snorkel spots should be switched. The Rosegarden would be more appropriate a name for the cemetary because at the cemetary, the noral is alive and beautiful and some of it looks like roses. The Rosegarden should be named cemetary because all the coral is dead. Anyway...

Then we went to another snorkel spot called "soft coral garden". It has a lot of beautiful soft coral there. It is in colors like yellow, pink and red. There is also an arch there. This is a picture Jason took after he said "See how far you can make it out of the water Larissa!"

All in all a great day except that I had 5 bouts of the hiccups.

Dive Of A Lifetime

2006-01-28T19:16:00.000+09:00

Yesterday we had the opportunity to go out diving again. We headed out to the Peleliu island to check out some of its' dive sites. Apparently, Peleliu is known to be a moody area to dive. Upon questioning our divemaster (Marcel) about it, he told us that any given Peleliu dive can be the best dive of your life, the worst dive of your life, or the last dive of you life. This seemed like awfully good odds to me (Jason), a 1/3 chance to have the dive of a lifetime.
The first dive site was called Yellow Wall, named because of the predominance of yellow coral in the area. It was neither the best, worst, or last dive of my life, but it was a really great experience. We were able to see a few Clown Triggerfish (picture below doesn't do it justice), turtles, and a two new kinds of anenome fish.

Above is a Regal Angelfish. It is common at all of the dive and snorkel sites around Palau.
While we came up completely satisfied with the dive, Marcel didn't think it was all that great. He said that because there was no current, there were not nearly as many fish as there can be.
Then we headed to Peleliu for the other members of the group to take a tour of the island. Since we had already seen the same sights, Marcel offered to take us out on another dive. For this we went out to Peleliu coral garden. This was the most colorful and active coral garden either of us had ever seen. Larissa got to see an octopus, which changed colors several times before it hid in a hole, just after which I arrived to see what all of the excitement was about.
When we returned back to pick up the other divers, Marcel proposed that we leave Peleliu, and dive German Channel for the third dive. He claimed that he had just experimented with a new way to dive the channel that resulted in really close encounters with Giant Mantas. The four of us doing a third dive were all game, so off we went. Marcel's plan was to find a school of fish and stay inside of the school and wait for the Mantas. Sounded fun to us, but not all that realistic.
When we arrived at the channel the waters were calm, and there was a huge school of fish near the surface that we could see from the boat. When we got in the water, we knew we were a part of something very special. Within the first 5 minutes, after seeing a porcupine fish (pictured below) we were surrounded by a school of thousands of Blue-lined Fusiliers.

Soon a few hundred Black Snappers and Humpback Unicorn Fish joined the school. After a couple more minutes, Black Jacks and Giant Trevally started darting through the schools trying to catch the fusiliers. The following picture shows primarily Black Snapper in the foreground (the larger fish), and (look closely) the dark ring that makes up the bottom half of the picture is one big mass of fish, mostly the Fusiliers.

The water was not completely clear, and as we looked closer we could see millions of krill suspended in the water. The fusiliers and snappers were feeding on the krill, and the bigger fish on the smaller fish. The bottom half of this picture shows mostly Black Snapper, and the top shows Fusiliers.Just as we thought the dive could not get any better, four Giant Mantas (various sizes, probably 12-18ft.) came swimming right toward us, they too were there for the krill. They flew within feet of us, then disappeared into the distance. We went back to enjoying the thousands of fish surrounding us. Every couple of minutes for the remaining 45 or so minutes of the dive (we were only at a depth of about 20feet.) the Mantas would come back to see what we were up to. Several times they did flips within arms reach of us. They were truly huge and magnificient. After I took a couple of videos early in the dive the camera heated up and caused condensation to form in the underwater housing, so it got all fogged up. so the pictures weren't all that clear, but hopefully you will get the idea.

This and That

2006-01-26T19:18:00.000+09:00

First of all, please note that Larissa has added to the post covering day 4 of our trip to "Cabin Island and Beyond."
Things have slowed down here just a bit over the last couple of days, but we do have a few things to share that may be of interest.
Yesterday, as I made an attempt to enter the bathroom, I noticed something large scurry in front of me and around the corner. I called over to Larissa, not yet knowing what the creature was, "You are going to want to see this." She must have known by the tone of my voice that it probably wasn't actually something that she cared to see. This was demonstrated to me by her reluctance to come near me, and by her repeating the question "What is it?" over and over again while remaining at a distance. It turned out to be a big black spider. When it quit jumping around we took a photograph of it (the pen is for scale), then I captured it. Larissa, the good wife that she is, made me feel like a real man for my efforts.

We have noticed more cockroaches as of late. Two of them we found dying by the front door. We are hoping that this isn't an indicator of some kind of poisonous gas leaking into the apartment. Larissa thought they might just need a drink. So, the first one I put out in the rain, and the second in the sink, but to no avail.
We tried new snorkeling spots both yesterday and today. Today's was disappointing, but yesterdays is worth mentioning. The water was murky yesterday, so when we drifted more than 20 feet apart or so we were out of sight of one another. Early on in our exploration, I noticed numerous large figures moving in front of me. As I frantically considered the types of creatures that may kill or dismember me, I was able to distinguish the forms as eagle rays. As I was completely interested in what I was seeing, I had to find Larissa so that we could enjoy the sight together. So, I took a three second look, then popped my head up. She was fairly near me, but could'nt hear me as a yelled and yelled. By the time I could grab her and return to where I spotted the rays, they were gone. We were both frustrated. Near the end of our snorkel, I spotted something rare, a sea snake. It was about five or six feet long, and looked like a big fat snake you would see on land, but it was snaking through the water. So, I took my three second look, and went up to yell at Larissa. She was closer this time, but by the time I looked back down, the snake was gone. With all of the yelling I was doing, locals on shore were becoming concerned. I looked up, saw a bunch of people investigating our stuff on shore, and became convinced that they were considering stealing it. Turns out they thought someone was drowning or something. Also, as a matter of coincidence, two of the guys on shore turned out to be the same guys that accompanied us out to Cabin Island.
Not all of our entertainment is coming from the great outdoors. We have a little media player that we use to store and view our pictures. Before we left I loaded some movies and TV shows on it. Upon leaving, we had about enough shows/movies to watch about two per week. Well, we watched 2 1/2 just last night. Mostly we have been watching the TV show Lost, the first season. Larissa is particularly addicted, and tries to make plans to watch episodes well in advance. This way she can say "But Jaaaaasssooooon, you promised." I pretend not to want to watch anything in the interest of having some entertaiment left for the last couple of months of the trip. Fortunately we have audiobooks too, but I tend to fall asleep after a couple of chapters, nomatter the book. This frustrates Larissa to no end, as she has a much longer attention span when it comes to books.
We tried a new grocery store for the first time the other day. . . We tried a new grocery store for the LAST time yesterday. We thought we would get some taco shells. They were in the clearance isle since they were near their expiration date. When we were checking out, they came up at the nonsale price. After a short debate in my head over whether to make a stink over 70 cents, I decided "what the heck, I am on vacation, I've got plenty of time." So, I let the cashier know. Fifteen minutes later the supervisor was trying to figure out what to do. Finally, they refunded my credit card. Then I asked whether I could buy the tacos at the sale price. The Supervisor said that I could, but they had to do some paperwork, so I would have to come and pick them up later. WHAT??? Can't you just envision it? "Hello, my name is Jason Hamel, I have some tacos on hold here, may I pick them up?"
Being out in the sun so much, Larissa is getting really tan. I am getting tanner, but the process by which I tan is slower, and more complicated. First, I get red, when you touch me I turn white for a few seconds. Then, the pain sets in, just before some light peeling of skin occurs. After this, I come out with a tan, and a few new freckles. The other day Larissa was asked if she was from India. Worried that people may not readily identify us as a couple anymore, I joked with her saying that while she looks really pretty, she should put on some SPF 100 on or something. "What?" She said, "Just so that I can be ugly?" My interpretation of that comment was "Just so that I can be a cringeworthy pasty white just like you usually are?"
Tomorrow we are diving a couple of the spots around Peleliu. We will let you know how it goes.

The Icebox

2006-01-24T19:47:00.000+09:00

Today we rode our bikes to Malakal island, for our third trip to the park known as The Icebox. During the Japanese occupation of Palau, which began in the early 1900s and continued almost through WWII, there was an icemaking plant at the current location of the park. The park provides some convenient access to a nice snorkeling spot. We have had the whole place to ourselves in all of our trips there so far.
There are alot of the colossal clams called Tridacnidae there, which we mentioned in an earlier post, though I (Jason) don't think we knew there exact name yet. Turns out these guys are the largest of all bivalve molluscs. Here is a picture of Larissa saying hello to one of them.

This (above) is about the size of the clam that the boat anchor got caught in (see Jellyfish Lake post).
It seems that the smaller Tridacnidae are, the more colorful they are. Some are very bright blue. When you come near, they close up in a hurry.
Larissa is a gifted snorkeler. I love having her around because she finds so many things that I would have otherwise passed right by. She is particularly good at finding anenome fish, which we both very much enjoy watching. This is a picture of a Red and Black Anenome Fish

We may be going diving tomorrow. We still need to see a hammerhead shark, a whaleshark (unlikely), and a clown triggerfish, which I have designated as my new favorite reef fish, even though I have never seen one.
Just so you can plan ahead, early next Wednesday morning we will start our trip to Vietnam. We predict that blog posts will become shorter and less frequent at that point. We'll see. Take care for now, and thanks for the comments and feedback.

Cabin Island and beyond

2006-01-23T15:45:00.000+09:00

The following two posts cover our weekend trip to an outer rock island. We have covered the events by day, two days covered in each post. I (Jason) wrote about the first two days, and Larissa wrote about the last two days. Thanks to those of you who have been posting comments, it is nice to see that people ar reading. We are hoping to reply once in awhile. Please feel free to give us suggestions like "keep it shorter," "need pictures of . . .," "Need more humor," etc.

Day 1 (Thursday)
We met Sherwin (the pastor who took us to see his relatives a week or so ago) this morning and went off to meet the people that were allowing us to use their boat, and stay in their cabin. We met them at their home, which had no walls and a tin roof. This is a typical home in Palau. Tarps are draped from the roof during heavy rains to keep the home dry. Inside and around the home there were 5 or 6 people were sitting around chewing beetlenut. For those of you who are not familiar with beetlenut chewing (as I was not), it goes somewhat like this: Take a beetlenut, split it open with your teeth, put some lime powder on it, wrap it in a leaf, and then chew away. The leaves that are used taste like a spicy mint leaf. This combination, when chewed, turns red. Thus, a naive person assumes that chewers have nasty mouth injuries. The locals have a good time with this, and have made many a visitor very concerned. Unfortunately, chewing beetlenut is not good for one's health, nor one's teeth. Many people around here are without most of their teeth because of continuous chewing. Anyway, we hung around for awhile listening to Sherwin and his friends talk in Palauan. We knew we were part of the conversation, as once in awhile we were pointed at, and other times Sherwin translated for us.
The fact that this family is big on beetlenut chewing is relavent to why they have a cabin on a remote rock island. The lime powder that is used in chewing comes from "cooking coral." On their island, called cabin island, they have a worker that spends his time processing coral to yield a fine lime powder, which is sold around palau for use in chewing beetlenut.
We mentioned earlier that we may be going to the bungalo of a chief. It turns out, that the chief's bungalo is on this same island. When Sherwin contacted the other family to see if we could borrow their boat, they offered for us to stay in their cabin.
So, we loaded up their boat and headed out to the rock islands with a planned spearfishing/snorkeling stop along the way.
Neither of us had ever spearfished before, and didn't really like the idea of killing such beautiful fish. At first, we just got in with the others and watched them spearfish (we were accompanied by 3 others whose names I cannot spell, and whose connection to Sherwin or anyone else would demand a wordy explanation). It didn't take long before both of us were itching to try our hand at shooting fish. We were told that there was to be a fish barbeque that night, and that one way or another some fish would lose there lives for it. That was all the excuse we needed. I tried first. I didn't know if there were any specific species that we were going for, but I chose to go for the drab colored, uninteresting looking fish, thinking that it would be easier on my conscience. When I was handed the gun, I proceded to load the spear as if I knew what I was doing. Sherwin left me alone to my own devices. I was surprised to find out how much strength it took to pull back the bungee, to load the spear. I had a moment of anxiety as I considered that I may need to ask for help. This provided me with an extra burst of strength, and I loaded the gun. I found this easier over time, probably because of improved technique. Anyway, my first few shots were close, but yielded nothing. Then, I speared my first fish. I proudly took my squirming little surgeon fish back to the boat and presented it to the others. They acted excited and made me feel like I had really achieved something. Then Larissa took the gun. Unfortunately, there were no fins around that fit her, so she was not a big threat to the fish. She made 5 or 6 shots, and almost killed a couple of fish before she decided to give up. I could tell that she was disappointed. After I speared for awhile longer, we headed off to Cabin island, in pouring rain.
By the time we got near the island, sky cleared, and we caught our first glimpse of the place that we would be calling home for a few days. It is a beautiful island that is quite flat, and quite small. As we moored the boat, we were impressed with the beauty of the island, and somewhat taken back at the sight of the cabin in which we would be staying. The first picture, showing the beachside part, shows the sleeping quaters on the left, and the kitchen and storage area on the right. In this photo, you can see the rainwater collecting system and the backdoor. To the right there is a solar panel, which is used to charge 12v car batteries used for a cabin light, and a car tape player rigged up with some home speakers. We were shown our bedrood. This is a convenient room as the floor and the bed are one in the same, a plywood platform a few feet off the ground.
While it turned out to be a functional building, it is not much to look at, and did not fit the idealized pictures we had dreamed up. It actually looks a lot like many of the homes in Palau, so I don't really know why we expected any different. Anyway, we were pleased to be in such a pretty place, and happy to get the experience of living in a Palauan cabin.
We were introduced to Leo, a Filipino who is responsible for cooking the coral, and watching over the place. We found him to be friendly and helpful. He showed us the work he had been doing, explained the process of making the lime powder, and introduced us to his pet fruit bats. We had envisioned that the coral was harvested from the reefs around the island. Fortunately, there is no need to even go near the water to get plenty of coral. The island is covered in it, which, as a side note, took a toll on my sandals, which are still functional (barely) but not even close to pretty. Larissa was hinting at my getting a new pair. I will resist as long as possible.
Sherwin took us on a short tour of the island. We walked down a very nice trail, by two other cabins, on our way by the Chief's cabin (which was quite nice and well kept), on our way to the beach. For much of the walk, we could see ocean on either side of us. The beach was pristine, and our spirits were lifted. On our way back we met the curator of the chief's property, we think his name is Aldren, but every time we asked him, or Leo, they said it so fast that we still don't know for sure. He lived in a nice, well-kept area of the island, and had a few roosters on a leash. Both Leo and Aldren, as we came to find out, raise these birds for cock-fighting. When they return to Koror every couple of months or so, they bet a portion of their paychecks on the fights. Leo admitted that when it comes down to a fight between his and Aldren's birds, Adlren's birds come out on top.
Upon our return to our cabin, Sherwin and the others decided to take off so that they could get a little more spearfishing in before going back to Koror.
Larissa, being a very loving wife, immediately started making some food on the kerosine stove. She made Ramen, which we ate, in true island fashion, using leaves as plates. Because of the natural feel of this practice, and the fact that there were few dishes to do afterword, we continued using leaves as our dinnerware for the rest of our stay.
That afternoon we were itching to get out and see more of the island. It was hard not knowing it's shape, or how long it might take to walk around it. So, at as the tide was near it's low, we started a trek around the island. For this first half of the hike, we were mostly on beautiful white sandy beaches. I had a hard time keeping a good pace up, as Larissa was distracted with collecting shells. She had noticed on our ealier walk, that there were many hermit crabs around that, in her estimation, had insufficient homes. She made her mission to find beautiful protective shells to bring to them. Before I knew it I was supporting her endeavor, both hands and pockets filled with shells. Sooner or later, the beach ended, and we were walking on rocks and coral. This was tricky. It was made even trickier by the fact that we were carrying so many shells. Larissa would hear nothing of the suggestion that maybe we should leave some behind. "What about the crabs?" She said.
Larissa found part of a Chambered Nautilus, which aparently is a rare find as they live in deep water. We also came accross many brittle stars, sea stars, and eels. The following picture shows Larissa 's reaction to the first brittle star we found. It took us around 2 hours to get around the island, which was larger than we thought. We barely made it back before dark. It turns out that the part of the island where we could see ocean on both sides was just one small penninsula. Nevertheless, it was a very small island. We settled in that night on our plywood beds, content with our new home.

Day 2 (Friday)
Thursday night was tough on us. It rained all night, and it seemed like we were going to be taken by a Tsunami or a hurricane at any moment. There were a lot of unfamiliar noises, and a lot of bugs that seemed interested in making a home in our sheets. Unfotunately, the weather was not to clear up anytime soon. During the morning hours we sat around reading. Larissa mostly read a magazine called "True Stories" that Leo had sitting around while I read our Vietnam travel book and tried to learn some fish names from our tropical fish book. In the early afternoon we came to the conclusion that we'd better not let the weather decide when to get out and do something. We made an attempt at snorkeling off our home beach. There wasn't a reef there, so we didn't see much besides sea cucumbers. Cold and wet, we returned to the cabin. Feeling a bit defeated, we remained in the cabin for the rest of the day. Leo came over and chatted with us a bit (he graciously yielded his place of residence for us, and moved to a smaller cabin nextdoor). We found out that he had been on the island for over 2 years, and signed a contract for another 2. We were surprised to find out that he is married. His wife has not visited him, or seen a picture of where he is or the work that he does. I offered to email her some pictures, but he was not interested. Unfortunately, I never got a picture of Leo. We are planning to start putting pictures of more of the main people we meet so that it is easier to follow along.
Filipino workers are common around here (Aldren too is Filipino). They come here for a few years and make what is a fortune in the Philipines.
That afternnon we bid farwell to Leo as he went to pay Aldren a visit. This was just before the brunt of the storm hit. We wished he was around as we tried to figure out how to tack down the place. As we tried to go to sleep, rain was blowing in from all directions. I went out in my poncho (which, as it turns out, and I think Larissa will mention later is not actually a rain poncho, but a wind breaker) to let down the tarp walls. This went smoothly, but unfortunately the window nearest the sleeping area was without a tarp. We managed to move our bedding far enough away from the spray to keep from getting soaked. The wind was blowing everything that was not securly fastened, inside and outside the cabin, all around. During the night I heard some rustling over the wind noise, and found that one of the dogs, Mikey, who Larissa had befriended, was eating our bread and had stolen our Ramen. The other dog, Rex, had taken our pasta to Leo's house as we would come to find out. I was angry at the dogs. While making threats that I didn't really mean, but helped compensate for my sense of loss, Larissa assured me that it was okay, the poor things were hungry. Many of you know that Larissa holds dogs in extremely high regard. I understand that dogs always come first.
It is these kind of nights that get me thinking that I, we, could use more gear. I am glad that there is not an REI nearby, I hear they have waterproof sleeping bags. Heck, they might even have waterproof ponchos and portable dog screens.

Cont'd...

2006-01-23T00:01:00.000+09:00

Day 3 (Saturday)

That morning on Cabin Island, we woke up with hopeful spirits that this day would not be like the last. After all, it was only sprinkling outside and it had been pouring! We decided to wait for a little bit until it cleared up which it obviously was going to do. We had breakfast, waited, read, waited, trimmed our fingernails and waited some more. Finally, we couldn't take it anymore so we donned our ponchos and headed out. As soon as we walked out the door, that sprinkling that I described before turned into a downpour. "No matter", we thought. "We have these ponchos and pent up energy from our day "inside". Let's keep going anyway."
So off we went. We followed the only road on the island. There is only one car on the island, which belongs to Leo. Incidently, this tiny jeep-like vehicle happens to be broken. So the road isn't really used except as a foot path. And a path for the larger hermit crabs to roam. On the road we came across a handpainted sign that said : "SLOW DOWN Under construction". This was obviously a product of one of Leo's more bored moments :]
Near the sign was a huge fig tree. These aren't your regular fig trees that bear those sweet, tear drop resembling fruits. This tree resembles a banyon tree. I think. Anyway, roots grow off its branches down to the ground and start new trunks. Soon the off-shoots strangle the orginal tree and kills it. I am not sure what happens then. :]
We continued walking down this road, dodging hermit crabs and stepping over sprouting coconuts until we came to the chief's end of the island. The chief of Ngaptang, or something like that owns half of the island and that is where we ended up. WOW! How different it is than our side of the island. All the brambles are taken away and it resembles woods more than anything. Except when you see the white sandy beach surrounding three sides of his land.

He has a very nice enclosed, thatch roofed house in the center of his land and picnic tables galore. Seeing it made us regret the moment when Sherwin said "unless you want me to call that other guy" to see if we could stay there and we turned him down to be polite.
After we toured around that side of the island for a bit, we realized that our ponchos weren't really ponchos but merely windbreakers. We pondered this horror on our long and wet back to our wet and open quarters for lunch. Just as we returned to the shelter, the sun broke through the clouds and everything was beautiful. But since we hardly got any sleep the night before, due to our worry over whether we were going to be blown away in a typhoon our not, we promptly fell asleep. When I was falling asleep, Jason took this beautiful picture from our little hut. Great view eh?
When we awoke 15 minutes later, it was pouring but we decided to eat and go snorkeling down at the other end of the island anyway.
Snorkeling was the best that I have ever experienced!!! WOW. Jason saw a black tip shark. I have never seen him start like that. I just saw it's tail but apparently it was huge and much more firghtening looking than a black tip reef shark that we had been used to seeing. There was a big drop off and then HUGE heads of coral. The fish life was amazing and we saw a lot of fish we hadn't seen before. Unfortuntely, the underwater camera ran out of batteries before I took any good pictures, or before I could hand it to Jason and he could take some good pictures. Sorry. I guess we took too many videos of ourselves spear fishing. If we had known that such good snorkeling existed, right around the corner for our humble abode, we would have risked wind and rain and cold to go at least 5 more times. Alas, our ride was coming in the morning so we couldn't as it was getting lower and lower tide and we still to pass over a whole field of dead incredibly sharp branched coral to get to the beach. We couldn't kick it was so shallow so we very slowly worked our way back to the beach.
That night, there wasn't any rain but I guess all the rain had deprived all the rats of the island, their regular food stuffs because that night, they tried to eat ours. I slept very well that night but I did wake up a couple times and saw Jason with his headlamp on watching the rats scamper over our stuff and occasionally getting up and moving our things to safer places. At one point, I woke up to Jason's movement and then him chuckling and saying "Oh that's great." I innocently asked what was and he answered that he woke up to the sickening realization that a rat was perched on his chest. I was so delirous. I said " No way!" and went back to sleep. I have a very fierce husband who battled the rats all night while his sleepy damsel in distress dozed. Note: I am horribly afraid of rats and I hate them. They illicited more that one screech out of me on the survivor island when I went to find a bathroom. Somehow, I was tired enough to where they didn't particularly bother me. I think they were less scary because their noses weren't as pointy and their ears were more rounded. Funny what makes a difference in perceptions like that. We tried to get a picture but it was dawn and they had just finished scampering about for the night.

Day 4

The next morning we woke up bright and early to go snorkeling in our new favorite spot. We had longer to visit there and we made themost of it. We saw a couple moray eels. We saw several anenome fish but no more sharks! We bought a reef book and were able to identify a lot of them that we didn't know the names of before. Jason really loves our new reef book and likes to get it out and quiz me over fish names. :] I thought I was done with school for awhile! Anyway, we started swimming back when we heard a loud "oioioioi" noise coming from shore. We looked up and saw that our ride had come and was trying to get our attention. Pastor Sherwin had brought the boat and several other people and they were going to take us to Peleliu.
Peleliu is the Southernmost island in Palau and is said to be the most famous. It is famous around the world for a big reason. In world war II, the Americans fought the Japanese in one of the bloodiest battles ever! I vaguely remember watching a history channel documentary about the battles that went on around the island and how it was so horrible because of all the caves from which the Japanese shot at the Allied forces. The Allied forces also couldn't just drive their boats up onto the island becuase the whole island chain is prtocted by a huge reef. So the boats landed on the far end of the reef and the solidiers had to wade onto shore while the Japanese were shooting them from hidden caves.

Well, I was going to tell you all about our day in Peleliu but since the computer just froze and I lost everything that I wrote for the last HOUR, I will leave you with some pictures that mean nothing to you. Ta ta!

OK, I am going to tell you some short summaries so you can understand the pictures. Below is the woman who borrowed a truck from her brother so we could tour around Peleliu in the back. If you don't have x-ray vision you won't be able to see that her hat says Camp Au Sable. This is the camp where Jason spent many happy summers. And yes, she has actually been there! We met this woman's mom as well. She is old enough to remember what the Japanese occupation was like. The Japanese occupied Palau starting in 1914 until the Allied forces freed them in the early 1940's. I guess they were still occupied by the American's but her mom said that the Japanese treated them like slaves and made them march around and work in work camps. She said when the Americans came along they were free and peaceful. Side note: Japan is giving tons of money to Palau nowadays. They are paying for many new roads and other community projects. America has funded some as well but not as much as the Japanese.

The picture below is of a big hole that everyone jumped into. Except me because I didn't have my swimsuit. Apparently, an American solidier saw some water coming out of the ground and put a bomb down there and then there was a big swimming hole! ha. But the water is salty. It seeps in through a nearby reef and rises and falls with the tides. I would post a picture of Jason jumping in but they all turned out blurry.

The picture below is the view from a place called bloody nose ridge. The legend goes that the Americans were wading up the reef in the distance when they started getting mowed down by bullets. They thought that the whole mountainside must be comvered with solidiers because so many people were getting hit. When they finally mad e it up to the top of the mountain, they saw a lone machine gunman and shot him. When he fell, his helmet came off too, to expose long, beautiful black hair. It was a woman! She had stolen a machine gun from the Americans and had hiked up the mountain (quite a hike too, and we had stairs) and shot tons of solidiers coming up the beach. Some say she had a baby strapped to her back and a samurai sword at ther side. Other say they hadn't heard about the baby or sword so who knows what is true. :]

This is the view from where we were sitting in the back of the truck. The lady up above bought us some tama at a local market. Tama are deliscious. These were banana tama and taste like balls of banana bread. Jason ate a million of them. That is what you can see people holding in their hands and eating in this next picture. We asked the pastor (making the L with his fingers) if he had the recipe and he said sure, that his wife made them all the time. We asked her later and she said she had never made them in her life. She always buys them from the store. Ha.
Well, I hope that makes these pictures more enjoyable. Thank you for commenting! It helps us see who is reading our posts!

We're Off

2006-01-18T15:43:00.000+09:00

Today we are getting ready for tomorrow's trip back out to the rock islands. We are going to be dropped off on a private island near Peleliu, an island of historical significance due to the bloody battles that took place there between the Japanese and Americans during WWII. Tomorrow we plan on snorkeling and spearfishing at a couple of spots on our way out to the island, where we will spend 3 nights before we take a tour of Peleliu on Sunday.
Before we leave; however, I'd like to mention a few things in regard to previous posts. Fist off, I tossed an turned last night because of my neglect to mention one of the most significant sights of yesterday. On our second dive, we were fortunate enough to see, according to National Geographic, the largest coral on earth. They call it the apartment. It is truly magnificent, and is the size of an average American home. We were all the more impressed when we found out that this particular coral species is one of the slowest growing on earth. It grows at a rate of only one millimeter per year. I don't have a good picture of it, so I put in a picture of a shark that was roaming nearby.
Secondly, I wanted to pass on a note in regard to the generosity of the Survivor producers. Due to their donation of various tables and pieces of furniture no longer needed following filming, there is now a furnished and functional youth room in the basement of the church.
Thirdly, I wanted to be sure that our readers are familiar with with what we mean by "rock islands." Palau is composed of over 200 islands, most of them referred to as rock islands. The rock islands are composed primarily of limestone, and have a profile that often resembles the island pictured below.

The mushroom shape is the result of erosion and the activity of limestone-digesting marine organisms. The most famous of the rock islands are known as the seventy islands, which is a group of protected islands whose beauty is best captured by aerial photographs. Good thing, because without a special permit, it is illegal to be within 2 miles of them. This is all the closer we have been.
Note, the reason that this photo is so much prettier than all of the others found on this blog is because we did not take it.
Lastly, we would like to give an update in regard to our resident cockroach here at the guesthouse. After complaining about cockroaches in Guam, we were advised to take a more lighthearted approach to these cute little guys. Actually, until yesterday we had not seen our cockroach since our arrival in Palau. Yesterday we caught him returning to what we assume is now his cush residence, our toiletry bag. There, with only slight hesitation, we left him. I will see if we can get a photograph of him for everyone to enjoy.

Surviving on Ulong

2006-01-17T20:12:00.000+09:00

The last few days we have been living on the cheap. Today we rewarded ourselves by going diving for the day. We rode our bikes a few miles early this morning to the dive shop, where we were told that we would be going to Ulong. "Oh, sounds great," we said, neither of us having any idea what this ooolong place was. On our boat ride out, we learned that Ulong is one of the eastern rock islands, which has four very good dive sites surrounding it. Also, interestingly enough, Ulong is the Survivor island. You know, the place where one of the Survivor TV shows was filmed. More about Ulong, which is now often just referred to as the "Survivor Island" later.
The first dive site we were taken to is called Siaes Tunnel. The main feature of this site is a giant cavern that starts at about 70 feet. When we entered the cavern, it looked almost black. Just about the time this dive site started to feel like a rather bad idea, our eyes adjusted, and began to behold some true beauty. There was light at the end of the tunnel, and several "windows" along the way. By the time we were most of the way through the tunnel, we were at around 115 ft. and were met at the end by a good sized shark. The rest of the dive was particularly enjoyable because of the colorful and unique coral.
After a long surface interval, it was off to Ulong island for a lunch break. This is an incredible place. As we walked along the beach, chilled in the shade, scouted out coconuts and bananas, we agreed that this would not be a bad place to survive for awhile. Ulong is actually a state park, complete with a few picnic tables and an out-house, which were removed during the filming of the show.Above is a picuture of us standing on part of the Ulong beach. Just behind us is where one of the survivor camps were.
Our lunch consisted of pringles, donuts, vienna fingers, and a can of pears. We were rather disappointed in ourselves for this. It was also sort of embarassing, given the fact that we were given a discount for being SDA, but our actions were not exactly preaching the health message.
I (Jason) was given advice before we left that it was good to be frugal, but that it is my honeymoon, and I need to splurge once in awhile. Larissa has noticed that I have been taking this advice, but honestly I think it has gotten out of hand. We are like kids with an unlimited candy budget. For the past four days, we have visited the donut shop at least once per day. Larissa says she likes me this way, says I seem more human. I am not quite sure how to take that.
Anyway, back to the events of today. Our second dive site is called Ulong channel. We waited until afternoon to dive there, because we wanted to dive during incoming tide. This dive site consists of a long channel, about 40 feet wide in most places. It is particularly entertaining during incoming tide because of the fact that the current will glide you through the tunnel, while you just have to focus on steering, and swimming upstream once in awhile when something particularly interesting wizzes by. We found this to be a really fun way to dive, but also found it frustrating in that things did, in fact, wiz by quite quickly. Wow, Shark, turtle, oh eel, no over there, school of. . .
I am experimenting with underwater photography. As long as I claim to be experimenting, I cannot be expected to produce quality results. This is good, fish never seem to smile and look at the camera at the right moment, and they, and everyghing else, looks blue in the photos. I did try one minivideo today, which I thought turned out well. It is of a couple of anenome fish in there anenome. Maybe we can figure out a way to post it here.
Remember the avacados that we got a few days ago? Seemed like they were never going to ripen. Fortunately they have ripened, unfortunately, they have riped all at the same time. Luckily we are good at integrating avacados into just about anything. Larissa made dinner tonight, rice with avacado chunks on top, and steamed carrots on the side. We did not clean up after dinner, had to get over to the computer lab to make a blog entry.

Changes Around Here

2006-01-16T19:38:00.000+09:00

As we have been writing this blog, we have found it cumbersome to write in the third person. Our intent was to disguise the author of each section, or to make it read as if both of us had equal input into the writing of each section. This has turned out not to be worth it. So, from now on, we are going to write in first person. No more Jason and Larissa, but Larissa and I, etc. You get the idea.
The other thing that we'd like to mention is that sometimes we get to writing about events out of order, so posts may appear that are previous to those that are most current by date. We don't want you to miss any, so look back once in awhile to see if there is something new.
Thanks for looking, and let us know that you are visiting by posting a comment or two.

Jellyfish Lake

2006-01-15T19:30:00.000+09:00

We were fortunate enough to be invited out to the rock islands by a local business family which is involved in the church. This is the family that owns the major grocery store on the island, which offers vegetarian selections from Loma Linda, Morningstar, and others. They also own the major road construction company if we understand it right. Therefore, there is no road construction happening on Saturdays.
The man is a native Palauan, and he is married to an American. He started his business success on Palau with a dive operation. Therefore, he knows the waters of Palau.
The pastor of the Koror church, who arranged this outing, and his family also joined us.
On the way out to our first main stop, we stopped by a natural arch in one of the rock islands. This is one of the postcard landmarks of Palau.
First we went to a private beach where we had lunch, took some photos, and played with what most of us guessed was a monitor lizard.
Then we went off to Jellyfish lake, which was predicted to be the highlight of the trip. Jellyfish lake is one of many marine lakes within the rock islands of Palau. It is unique because it has a very high population of Jellyfish that have lost there need and ability to sting. This makes them nice swimming companions. Snorkel gear is all that is needed. Fins are not allowed. The jellyfish migrate to the most sunny part of the lake, as they depend on a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic organism. The swim to the main jellyfish concentration took 5-10 minutes. Along the way we encountered some stragglers. These guys are very fragile. Both of us killed a few with misplaced swimming strokes. That is why fins are not allowed. Eventually we got to the jellyfish population center. Amazing and eerie! The lake is very deep, and not very clear, so all you can see is jellyfish fading into a dark abyss. Jason took this photo of Larissa by sinking down a ways and then shooting up. You cannot help but rub up against these guys as you swim along. As we got into the midst of a lot of them, we just used our arms to swim. This is a truly unique and sureal experience that is highly reccomended. Jellyfish lake was indeed the highlight of the trip.
We also got to visit a place called the rose garden, a snorkeling spot with clouds of fish. Some of us just stayed on the boat and watched the fish rather than get wet. Then we went to a spot called the cemetary. We assume it is given this name due to the large population (dead and alive) of giant clams that reside here. These clams, the largest in the world, get over 500 lbs. By chance, our anchor landed slightly on one of these clams, in about 20 feet of water. The clam then closed around part of the anchor. We spent most of our time at this spot trying to dislodge the anchor (which was not heavy enough to kill the the clam) from the clam. The plan that worked was to have two people try to open the clam while the other took out the anchor. We are not sure why this worked, because the clam is stronger than we are, but it did, and for that we are glad. These clams are incredible, and not actually all that boring. They have bright and variable colored soft parts, and open and close enough to be fairly entertaining. After we dislodged the anchor from the clam, Larissa was concerned that it had been moved on top of two other clams. So, she set out to move it back to its original location. This clam was probably around 150 lbs. but light enough to budge underwater. As she went down to move it, it closed, which startled her. The shell of the clam was apparently sharp, as she sustained a wound to her finger. Luckily, our host was quick to fix the situation by cutting a piece of his T-shirt and wrapping it around the bleeding (but small) wound. Larissa did move the clam, but it rolled back to its position atop the others.
Our last stop was eventful in that we saw about ten black tip sharks and a sea turtle.
We Are excited about the coming week, and hope to keep you posted on its events. We plan to go diving on Tuesday. Also, the chief of one of the states of Babeldaob, the largest island of Palau has invited us to stay at his personal bungalo on a private island. We plan to take a boat there with another pastor from the church next Thursday. Cross your fingers that this will work out, as it has a whole lot of fun potential.
On a different note, some of you have been wondering what we have been eating. Our staples are rice, pasta, potatoes, and pizza. It is odd to have a kitchen supplied with only the foods that we like. Larissa asked this evening, Jason, what should we eat tonight? He replied, It doesn't really matter, we like everything that is in the kitchen. Larissa made pasta, peas, and steamed carrots. We have eaten out twice, once at a very good indian place called the Taj, and another time at the Rock Island Cafe, where we ate pizza. We are well fed here, but we need to watch our food budget a little more.

A Relative Experience

2006-01-13T16:19:00.000+09:00

Today we got off to a late start. We left the house on three separate occasions always unsuccessful in actually walking more than 50 feet away. The last time we went back to the house, we had forgotten sunscreen. We were both a little annoyed since the third time was not the charm but by the end of the day, we were very glad for our scatterbrainedness! As we were walking up to the house, the neighbor, who is also an Adventist pastor here, pulled into the driveway and asked if we wanted to go to the capital with him. It was his day off and he wanted to drop something off at his mother's house. Up for adventure and realizing that if it was up to us it seems that we would never get out of the house, we agreed. Off we went to the big island. Here is a map of the Palau islands. It is pretty obvious which is the big island, no?

So we headed up the east side of the island. We visited the Adventist academy and and then headed up to the new capital building. And wow. The pastor was telling us how it looked just like the white house, but he wasn't kidding! Actually, it looks a lot like our capital building but I can understand the confusion. It was weird because you are driving past all these rainforests and no civilization and then standing there in the middle of it all is a big white building on a hill. We drove around and took some pictures of the building (we have never been to our capital building so we figured why not?) Then we headed off to the new capital city. It has been a city for a long time, just not the capital. It really isn't a city. It is more like a stretch of beach with a few houses on it. But there was construction going on everywhere and the pastor said that it is changing every week. He said that he was going to visit some re-lay-tives (that is how he pronounced it). The first relative was an uncle of his. The uncle and his wife loaded us down with freshly picked papayas and bananas. Neither of like papaya (we tried, promise), but the bananas are all gone now. And they gave like 3 bunches. Anyway, next, we stopped at his mother's. His mother has a nice new house. It was just finished this summer and it very modern and pretty looking. I went around the back and was surprised to see the kitchen outside. The shower and bathroom were also separate little houses outside. The bathroom was the cleanest, prettiest little booth! It is interesting how islanders build houses differently.
The pastor then took us up a stone pathway that led up the hill to the back of the house. It took us up through taro fields and between mango trees. Under such a tree, we found a couple very pretty red dragonflies. The pastor then showed us an amazing trick! He taught us how to catch the dragonflies. You sneak up behind them and twirl your index finger in a circular motion. Their eyes follow you and soon they get so dizzy that they are incapable of moving. You then grab them by the tail! Pretty ingenious eh?

Up the pathway, was where the native Palauians used to live. They used to live up on the hills but then they moved down to the beach to be closer to supply ships and fishing. We began to pass foundations of ancient houses! They were tucked in amongst the "spirit tress" (they call them) and palms. The pastor explained that the Palauians who are still under customs, bury their dead at their family ruins. He showed us the ruins of his ancestor's house and his grandfather's grave.We walked back down to his mother's house and found that they had harvested a plethora of avocados from their tree for us! Oh my. Jason and Larissa both love avocados. Unfortunately none of them were ripe. But they ripened fast and we had one for breakfast this morning! They also harvested a couple coconuts for us as well as a bunch of star fruit. We were loaded down with succulant goodness! Then to top it all off they hit some mangoes off of a tree for us. Those aren't ripe either but we are waiting excitedly. About the time that the pastor opened a coconut for us to drink, a friend of his came walking up. His name is Clayton and he is quite the character. He sat down on the stone path next to us and began to talk. Here is a picture of him telling us all about his ancestors:We had a hard time understanding him since his four front teeth were missing (from chewing beetlenut?) and he had an accent. He told us to tell all our friends back in the states to come here to Palau. "We have enough food for them all!" He then said, "I am a free man! I go out, fish, take only what I need, eat from my trees and I am free!" He promised to take us fishing before we leave. Fishing on his raft and everything!
Before we left Larissa mentioned liking sugar cane. The pastor said he thinks that his auntie had some. So off we went to the other side of the island. It was a long drive but he gave us like 5 canes. We have been chewing sugar ever since. Jason had never had sugar cane before but quickly got used to the texture and flavor.
Jason and Larissa agree that today was pretty much the best day they have had since coming to this island. Combine the local fruit and people with sightseeing and riding in a car and we had ourselves a winner. We wish we could tell you more eloquently how cool this day was unfortunately, we aren't that good with words.

Exploration

2006-01-11T15:18:00.000+09:00

We have been given a simplified map of the islands of Palau. Upon studying this map, Jason noticed that there were still some main roads on our island, the island of Koror, that we still have not explored. This was of immediate concern to both Jason and Larissa, but for different reasons. Jason felt the immediate urge to go explore the unseen, while Larissa thought of ways to make the day more like a vacation. Jason assured Larissa that the exploration of the unseen areas would involve only a short leisurly bikeride. So, off we went, with a can of pringles and one bottle of water. Shortly into our ride we found ourselves a bit overheated and hungry, so we stopped by a local airconditioned bakery. There we bought some fresh Abrabangs (which resemble filled donuts), which were completely unfamiliar to us. They tasted fine, but we both agreed that we could not enjoy them completely until we knew what the brown filling with the unusual texture was. We found out later that the filling was composed mostly of sweet beans. Odd for a donut.
We continued riding. We found a road that led to the Northwest corner of the island. Out in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, we found the U.S. Embassy situated on a nice cove. There we watched people fish (pictured below), drank all of our water and ate all of our food.
Feeling thirst on our way back up the hill, we stopped at the embassy to have them fill our water bottle. It was a bit of an ordeal to go through security complete with a metal detector and ID check so that the guard could take our bottle in to get it filled, but afterwards we were glad we went through the hassle.
So we again continued riding. While Larissa likes exlploring, she thought back to the promises of a leisurly day, and compared them with the present activity of climbing a long hill in the hot sun. As we struggled up the hill, Jason thought he would offer some encouragment: "Come on Larissa, let's go. . . Go! Go! Go!" Slightly annoyed by this, Larissa reminded him that "this is a honeymoon, not boot camp."
A short while later we found an old stone walkway with a sign that indicated that it led to a canoe pier. It turned out to be an interesting hike through a village, and then through mangroves, and finally on to the ocean. This picture shows part of this trail.

Today

2006-01-10T19:45:00.000+09:00

We were lucky enough to go diving in Palau. For those of you who don't know, Palau is considered to be basically the best place to go diving in the world. That is why we were lucky. We went on 3, 50 minutes dives. The first one was a huge reef wall called Blue Corner. The wall went so far down into the blue, we couldn't see where it ended. That was a little disconcerting. We also saw so many sharks, we lost count! It actually isn't that scary to see them. They were all pretty little. At least littler than I (larissa) imagined them to be. It seemed like if they did bite you, they couldn't fit their teeth around more than my foot. At the top of the wall there was an incredibly strong current. So since we wanted to watch the sharks and other big schools of fish without holding onto coral the whole time, we used current hooks. These little devices were invented here on Palau probably because three major ocean currents converge onto Palau. Anyway, the hook is basically a hook (imagine that) that is attached by a couple feet of cord to your vest. You then take the hook and anchor it to some dead coral. Then you just sit back and watch all the action without worrying about wether or not you are gong to be swept away. While we were hooked down, we saw about 7 sharks, a school of jack, a turtle, and countless other fish. We even saw some clown fish hanging out with their anenome.

The second dive, we went into a hole. It is called the Virgin Blue Hole. It goes straight down so if you look up, you can see the divers above you sillohetted against the backdrop of the sun shining through the water. At first it felt like you were descending into a big black hole. We found that if you just stared at the wall as you were going down it wasn't so bad. At the bottom of the hole, we were about 106 feet under the surface. When we came out of the hole, there was about 4 sharks just sitting there in the sand. We watched them for awhile until they got spooked and went away. Then we followed the reef until we ran out of air.

The third dive was called the german channel. There we got to see a Manta Ray! It was big and beautiful and it flew over us so gracefully! We also saw a lot of clown fish and they were so cool! They are Jason's favorite fish now. They really like to rub the sides of their bodies on their anenomes. :] Here we saw a lot of sea cucumbers. They were HUGE! One we saw looked like an underwater catepillar. It was kind of lumbering along in the same manner. We also saw some Lion fish. You know the ones that have all those big beautiful spines everywhere?

Pictures are up and working now so be sure to go back and check old posts to see the pics.

Fishing and snorkeling under a bridge!

2006-01-08T19:27:00.000+09:00

Today was our first day on Palau! Everything is great! We decided to walk to a bridge that we drove over on the way from the airport. We got a little more than we bargained for! It was a few miles on a winding road in the hot sun. As we walked, several cars slowed down and honked at us, motioning us to get in the car. We were a little hesitant as you can imagine. We thought perhaps there is an unofficial taxi service here and we would have ot pay once we got in. Anyway, we finally got to the bridge and just about then realized that we had forgotten to put sunscreen on. Jason decided to find a shady spot to take pictures and observe the happenings while I snorkeled. Here is me coming back from snorkeling:

It is spawning season around here and all the fish are a little territorial. I didn't know this when I got in the water. There was a cute little pink fish that got really close to me and was just staring. I was happy to observe him so close and I thought him curious. Then he charged me! I screamed through my snorkel and stood up in the water. I felt a little silly so I got back in. :] There he was again and this time when he charged, he actually bit me! His mouth was so tiny that it didn't do any damage but it was startling none the less. Everytime we go snorkeling now we steer clear of those little guys!
It started to rain so we huddled under the bridge to keep dry. It was a pretty cool tropical storm and only lasted a little while. We remarked how we never thought that we would be huddling under a bridge during our honeymoon!

After it stopped raining, we went and sat next to a little girl who was fishing. You could look down into the water and see all the fish fighting over the bait until the hook was stripped. There was a couple bigger fish that kept coming around and the little girl was shooting for a bite from them. Finally she got a big one on the hook and promptly shouted for her dad to reel it in:
On the walk back from the bridge, another person stopped and asked us if we wanted a ride. He had a pick up truck and we were tired so we decided to go for it. It turns out he recognized us from the plane the night before. The ride back was great! Really breezy and nice. The pastor and his wife here are letting us use their bikes so we don't have to worry about walking everywhere now. Those bikes are now indespensible!

Aloha Oi

2006-01-07T20:29:00.000+09:00

First layover: Honolulu, Hawaii. We had just one night here but we spent it wonderfully! Jason has a cousin who lives here and is a pharmacist in the army. He and his family let us crash at their cozy bungalo for the night. They have 3 children. They were all adorably outgoing when they discovered us there in the morning. The eldest immediately recruited Jason to play. We had a wonderful breakfast and then it was off to the airport!

Next was a 9 hour long ride to Japan. It wasn't that bad of a flight though. We were in a comfortable plane and Continental Airlines is still very service oriented. We didn't order vegetarian meals so we were worried about eating. The flight attendant told us that they had all made it their personal mission to find things for us to eat. They kept bringing us random food items. We even got a delicious fruit plate that they stole from first class. Neither of us had ever been to Japan so even though our layover was only 1 hour, we made the most of it by people watching and buying a kind of candy we had never eaten before. The candy turned out to be great! We would tell you the name but it was written in Japanese characters.

We had a night in Guam that was quite intersting. We were really tired when we got in at 1 am so Jason called the cheapest hotel and they picked us up at the airport. We were ready to plop right into bed, until we saw the bed that is. Not only did it have dirty, hairy sheets, but there was a cockroach living on the dust ruffle. Luckily Jason's best man, Adam, works at REI and got us some sweet deals on travel sheets. So we slept in our own clean sheets on top of the dirty ones.

The rest of the day we hauled around our baggage to a mall, a scenic overlook (called two lovers point), and a movie until we were finally able to leave on the plane to Palau about 8:00pm. Here is a picture of Larissa at Two Lover's Point:

We stopped over in Yap, a tiny little island, but only for a few minutes for the security to search the plane while we grabbed our stuff and waited outside. The landing strip at the airport had just fractured so the pilot had to turn off the enginges right as we landed so gravel wouldn't get sucked up into our engines. We were towed to the teeniest airport we have ever seen. It was about 2 rooms big and open air except bars like in a prison cell.

We were then off to Palau and a very nice Pastor and student missionary met us with shell lei's and smiles. Our apartment here is awesome. It is the guest house for the Seventh Day adventist church. He get to stay here for about 3 weeks and during that time, we have a two story, three bedroom, one and half bath house all to ourselves. It is a little old and musty (Larissa spent a couple hours scrubbing things when we first got there) but perfectly perfect! We have our own kitchen and have enjoyed running down to the store a couple blocks away to get little food items that we need. Surprisingly, this store has almost anything you could ever need! We even found Big Franks and Postum!! Today we bought some artichokes. We also have our own washer and dryer. Which has been using a lot since it is so humid here that all we do is sweat all day.

Hopefully soon we will be able to post pictures on here so you guys can have eye witness of everything we are talking about.

Stuff to remember...

2006-01-04T12:25:00.000+09:00

First of all, you should know what you are reading! Jason and Larissa got married on January 1st, 2006. Jason's father and step-mother were generous enough to donate a large part of their frequent flyer mile fund to get us both around the world tickets for our honeymoon! We have about 4 months to go around the world. Hence the name of this blog.

Well, you are reading this blog either because 1) you recieved an email from Jason and Larissa telling you to check out their new blog, 2) you recieved an email from someone who thought you would be interested in our blog, 3) you followed this link from Larissa's blog Looking Glass Self or 4) you found this blog on blogspot.com. At any rate, we are glad you came!

Jason and I created this blog for several reasons: 1) to keep in touch with friends and family and to share our experiences with them, 2) to show off our savvy camera skills with great pictures from around the world, and 3) to document our journey for future remembrances!

We would love to hear from you! It is really easy to comment on anything you see here on the blog. At the bottom of each post, is a link that says # comment. Click on this link, enter what you want to say in the big blank space. At the bottom, you have several options as who you can sign the blog as. You can either sign in with your blog account, with your name, or as anonymous. Then click publish! We have nowgiven you the tools to comment so no excuses!

Hope you enjoy our blog! Visit often!