Thai Island

Photo Link

2010-07-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

Photos are Posted: http://picasaweb.google.com/Gigileet/BestOfKoLipeThailand# (the best 400, of over 2,000!)

Monkey Island - The Laws Have Holes in Them

2010-07-22T02:53:00.000-07:00

Today Pauli, Onna and I took a boat to Adang Island (the mountian island next to lipe). Here is the headquarters of the national park. The island is much bigger than lipe, and all protected land except for a small Urak Lawoi village on one side.

There was no one on the island except for a few families/workers employed by the national park. The finnish couple took a bit to go swimming and relax on the beach, and i went in search of someone to interview. The ranger stations were closed, empty, but not locked. There was a saveworldsavelife / playboy calander hanging in one. I found out later, the national park (all of it including everwhere i've been snorkling ect.) is stricktly technically closed this season. Eventually, i was directed to the head of the area's national park, who was working at a compter on his porch. I forgot his name so i'm going to call him Mr. B for now. Mr. B and i talked for an hour and a half. It was wired to talk to him, after hearing s much on the island about the national park and its lack of enforcement. Its always hard to tell where things are getting stopped in the chain of comand, of course.

He spoke some english which was really helpful. He said the national park couldn't be strick about enforecement - and when i asked why, he said because it was way too big. too big for them to patrol for one. but also that the fishing boats were peoples jobs and they needed to work. If the fishing boats didn't come in the national park, they wouldn't get anyfish.... I kept asking around to try to see what he would say and eventually he said "the laws in Thailand are not like the laws in Malasia or the USA. The laws in thailand have holes in them" . When i asked if the budget they got from the goverment was enough he said "not enough. not enough. not enough. not enough. not enough". Apparently they only have enough money for oil for the boat to patrol about two days a week... when they had a boat. Apparently the boat is in for repairs for the month, was last month, and will be next month. I have a foggy recelection it was also in for repairs six months ago... So now they can only patrol in a small longtail boat: meaning its too dangerous to go out at night.

Mr B. appeared quite concerned about the bleaching, as well as any illigal logging on Adang (by locals to build boats, or use in thier houses). I wondered, personally, that taking one tree was kind of like taking one big fish, but clearly there was a difference here.

The tax that is paid by the tourist who come, 47.5% goes to other parks,5% the local gov, and 47.5% to lipe: but it can only be spent to service tourists NOTon patrolling orprotecting the park. I.e. for repairin the national park's bungalows. The money is sent into the national park center and redsitributed.

I thanked Mr B. for his really good (long!) 1.5 hour interview and Onna and Pauli and I climbed the mountain behind the station. It was hard and hot! uh oh landsea! (but at least canada wont' be hot). We found out there wasn't a waterfall at the top, butwe were traveling waterfalls by the first five minutes. From the top Lipe looked like a postcard. The terquoise water and the little boats like cows comiing into feed from a blue field...

Then Onna relaxed while Pauli and I went on a huge adventure to try to findthe waterfall. The path was obscured by huge vines and wove right into the jungle (sort of parallel the beach but far away). We saw everything on our walk! a forest rodent, squirrels, a small monitor lizard, a huge basketball sized flying squirrel glinding between the trees, a black and white hornbill, bats under a big bolder, and monkeys high in the tree tops!! horay!!! i've wantted to see wild monkeys so badly! We probably saw so much becausei don't think anyone has walked that path for many months. We didn't find the waterfall though. It dead ended in a huge bolder strewn riverbed. We hiked along the little trickel for 20 minutes, took a picture standing proudly at a knee high trickel, and hiked back.

That evening i had dinner with Dariusand Bee, and went for a long swim out into the bay. It was beautiful, the feel of the water on my shoulders without the rashgard, and the coral omminous beneath the surface.

Local Fishing Trip

2010-07-20T07:40:00.001-07:00

Today I went out fishing with the blond sweedish couple Onna and Pauli. It was the best day I have had so far!

I interviewed Solep in the morning – to try to get an illegal immigrant islander perspective as another steakholder group. Unfortunatly, his thai is very much comprised of practical words no academic ones. When he didn’t know what environment, problems, or nature, meant I knew it was going to be one of my shorter interviews. I did ask him what were the good things and bad things about living on Lipe and she said for good that there were no police so he didn’t have to be afraid because he has no passport.

Jaeng arrived after breakfast and Solep told him that his (soleps) mother had broken a vein in her head and was very sick. It was so sad, because there is no way Solep can go back to burma to see her. Shirtless, with a chest cut from hard construction work, in a towel smoking a cigarette, he started to cry. Jaeng made sure Solep had a way to call home, and wasn’t going to go to work today.

Jaeng gave me a ride over in the morning on his red motorcycle. Onna and Pauli and I sat in the shade of the beautiful Castaway resort where the tourists are staying, while Jaeng rounded up our boat. There were three men onboard, a famously good fisherman named Pi Mon, another younger fisherman named Joy, and a thirteen year old boy named Jehw.

On the way out Pi Mon showed me the lines we would be using. The put a weight at the end of a plastic ring wrapped with a lot of fishing wire, then above the weight five hooks baited with duck feathers or frayed bits a shiny plastic rope. We drop the end into the sea, very deep, until it hits bottom and then bounce the line up and down, as the boat drifts along in the currents. After a minute or so we pull up the line, to check. Sometimes it comes up laden with many fishes!

We spent the day cruzing around all over the archipelago. Sometimes we would go far out into the ocean, to where the big fishing boats had dropped foam floats with food for the little fishes. At the first one of these we arrived at the same time as one other boat. Pi Mon pulled up his line with our first fish, three or four small yellow Sargent angels. He tossed them back into the sea one at a time, brining each fish to his face for a second as if sniffing or kissing it. By the last fish, our boat and the other had drifted close to eacother. Mon shouted something at the other solo fishinerman and threw the last fish at the other boat. It barely didn’t make it into the boat and bounced into the sea. The fisherman shouted something at eacother and laughed.

I asked to learn to tie the hooks and the oldermen had the younger boy teach me – which was extremely fun. Once I got a hang of it, they took out a pile of a dozen hooks and said “pratice till they are gone” and everyone laughed, but I was realty happy to tie the hooks. I made my own line and fished with it, and caught over the day…. About five tiny tiny tiny reef fish about the size of my palm! Haha. Pauli got pretty good though and pulled in quite a few good ones.

The sky was big, and the day sunny, and the company lovely. Onna and Pauli learned the words for “fish’ and “big”. Sometimes the ocean would erupt around us as big fish tried to catch little ones and the fish would splash out of the water in a smacking splashing wave. “blah blah blah blah blah’ Pauli and Onna would chant “fish fish fish fish fish fish” the Fishermen laughed and everyone joined in shouting “blah blah blah blah blah yai blah yai “Fish and big fish”.

We snorkled a bit over lunch, with several dog jawed barracuda.

By the end of the day the bottom of the boat was full of fish. We pulled in mackerel and grouper, and several others. Now and again one of the fish would go into a fit of flapping as it dried out. By the end we had a garbage bad a quarter full (40 fish?).

I asked if we could all eat together at Pi Mons house, and the answer was yes. Onna and Pauli were up for the adventure, and went home to shower. I rode into the village wit the men and the fish on a motorcycle side car. As we rode into the village, people, mostly kids, shouted hellos and the fishers and at “gigi” which was nice. We met with Jaeng who was hanging out at Mons house. Suddenly a boy appeared with three half meter baby black tip sharks in his hand! I was surprised and half depressed half delighted. “the little sharks have soft sweet meat!” someone said.

Jaeng invited me to take a shower in a bath-shack in the village, meaning I wrapped in my sarong towel and poured rainwater over myself as I stood on a cement block surrounded by piles of burning trash and meandering dogs and ducks.

Wandering around I saw Mon cleaning the fish behind the house, fluffy kittens interacting with the gangly chickens, and kids flocking around a young woman who was cracking Chiton into a bowl. To imagine a Chiton think of those plated armored things you always see as early under the sea creatures in natural history museaums. These ones live stuck like barnacles onto rocks. The woman expertly stripped them down the grate like bodies of tough hard pale meat. I learned about Chiton in my Organism Diversity class right before coming to Thailand the first time and had been so excited to try them when I heard they were eaten in the islands. But this was my first sighting! I tired a piece of the meat, it was… extremely hard and I chewed very cautiously. It was not bad, I decided, although not exactly good tasting either. But I was so happy to eat it!

The kids flocked to look at pictures, and suddenly one said next to my ear “excuse me, she wants to look” and I almost jumped out of my skin. It was a young boy, about 6, who was talking. I remembered suddenly hearing gossip this kid who spoke english and Thai and had a chow lay father and farang mother. He was great!

My camera ran out of batteries so Onna Pauli and I went into town to buy fruit for dinner, and I ran home to get the charger. I met Jaeng there, which was hilarious, since we had just been talking in the village about how far it was back to Sanom beach when neither of us had been planning to come home before dinner. Solep was using Jaengs motorcycle to buy a huge bag of something, (cement? Rice?) and Jaeng and I sat together on a log as sunset came and talked until Solep returned.

Onna, Pauli and I arrived before dinner was done. The village was ripe with barking dogs, and the houses on slits, and trash fires, and as I led them to the house I saw struck by the place in their eyes – the way someone might see it if they hand’t spent 7 months of the last year living in cities and villages all over Thailand. He houses were big in a way – big for shacks? Big for things on stilts with corrugate roofs? They were sort of tossed together beyond the sandy road and into the patches of swamp and jungle. Inbetween were bird cages, and birds loose, bath cement slabs, and parked motorcycles, and bits or garden, and outdoor sitting platforms, and dogs, and kids, and bicycles, and trees stacked with barrels and fishing poles… all sorts of things! Large TVs were playing cartoons or the news from inside many of the houses.

We arrived and they met Jaeng and several others and we were ushered into one of the houses to watch T.V. and wait for dinner to be ready. We gave the host our bags of fruit which I was told to put in the corner of the kitchen. Four kids were running like crazy all over the house, one was doing her homework aloud. One older girl laid out a blue mat in front of us, and when she walked about a chubby little boy started doing running slides onto the mat, crashing and laughing and rolling around where he landed. At one point the first girl came back in and saw him, shouted at him, hit him, shouted somemore and left him face first and silent in the center of the floor. I was worried this would overwhelm my Finnish friends, but no worry. “I guess that was going to be our kitchen table” said onna. “no running on the kitchen table” said Pauli “I guess that’s what just happened”. The english speaking kid started chasing the table running kid with a toothpick and chaos resumed.

Omg. Too much to write. Diner!!! Jaeng, Mon, and the three of us ate together and what a meal!!! First there was sweet and sour fish in a thick red sauce, then salty fried fish, (all we had caught today), the stirfried vegtables.. but that’s just starters. After that there was cold lime salad of chopped Chiton. Thai people have never eaten this. Siad Jaeng introducing the Chiton dish. It is a Chow Lay specialty. And last but not least was a big spicy bowl of sauce and shark meat!!!

This was a source of internal conflict for me. I’ve been not eating fish this trip, to not put one more pressure on the fish population here. I’m torn because its so local, and the chow lay seem to harvest in a somewhat sustainable way (line fishing or trap fishing) but only becuase its part of the island culture and certainly supporting the local people! So I decide I would eat a little fish, when it was offered to me by an islander and it would be rude or inconsiderate to refuse. Anyway, there was no putting the sharks back in the water. I wish i could have seen them there, not on my plate, but I also didn't want to pass up such a once in a life time opportunity.

The shark was, unfortunately, really good.

So that’s how I came to be in a fishermans house, eating my catch of the day, and rock chiton salad, and baby shark, on a tiny remote tropical island, in the middle of the ocean, off the coast of Thailand, on the otherside of the world. [Later Pouli and I joked about making sure to say it was baby shark, because how much more demasculating it was to say "i at baby shark" b "i ate shark meat"]

The baby shark meat sort of fell apart in your mouth it was so soft. Jaeng mentioned shark fin soup and shook his head disapprovingly. I thought of all the shark fin soup in the world, and didn’t understand why the rest of the shark wasn’t around either – unless the meat gets very tough as the shark gets older???

After dinner, we and several village men, and Darius and Bee (from Café Lipe), sat together and some people smoked cigarettes and others drunk coffee and we told stories. Jaeng told a story (which I actually understood 80% of without the translation by Bee) that went like this:

A long time ago Python was very venomous. He wasn’t like today, but had strong strong venom and everyone was afraid of him. One day a farmer was working in a field and he found four or five big crabs in his field. He wanted to take them home for dinner but he didn’t have any bag, or anyplace to put them, so he put them in his shirt. Soon after he surprised Python and Python bit him in the leg, and since python was very poisonous back then the farmer fell over dead. The cows flying over saw the farmer and came down to see him and peck him, but then they saw his chest was still moving and alive! (he wasn’t actually alive, see, he was dead as dead but the crabs in his shirt were all moving so the crows thought he was alive.) Python doesn’t have any vemon anymore! They said. His venom is no good anymore, it has no value! And they went around telling all the other people and animals. Now, python was really upset/angry that his vemon was no good anymore and he spit up all of his venom. Then many other animals found the venom and took it forthemselves: the kind cobra, the spiders, the bees, and all the other animals that now are poisenous, the last to get there were the ants. Since they were last only some got venom and some didn’t. The red ant was so angry that he didn’t get the poison like the other ants that he sucked in his stomach, and that is why the red ants have such skinny smalls waists.

The conversation also turned serious: like to a 12 year old boy who died while hooka diving about three years ago. To the dangers of this kind of diving, and how many many people used to die from it, because the chow lay didn’t know, Jaeng said. Why do they still do it, if they know its dangerous? I asked. I dunno said Bee, Jaeng said its not as dangerous now because they know not to stay down for many hours and to come up slowly… still sounds very dangerous, I said. Everybody seemed to agree with this. The number 100 came up as the number of people who have died from this type of diving since it first came to the village… I don’t think that it has an particular accuracy, but its scary.

When I couldn’t keep my eyelids open anymore I walked home with Bee and Darius. I felt I had crossed some sort of “coolness of my life” bench mark – like this is the SIP I always wanted to do, or learning how to tie a hook and line and fishing in a tiny wooden boat with locals was something I had always had on the list of amazing things to do before I die, I’d just never known that specific item was on there until today. On my bungalow hammock and wrote a “life list” before falling into bed.

Raw Urchin Meat

2010-07-20T06:21:00.000-07:00

This morning found a group of women sitting in a circle on the beach. Around them orbited a gang of little kids, some on bicycles, some with orange bottles of soda. They sat around two plastic tarps -- one blue, one green. In the center of the group was a mountain of black sea urchins. The cinadrians? Plucked fresh from the sea waggled and twitched their long black spines in protest to the salty air. The pile seemed to shiver and jive and even the broken husks that sat in smaller radiating piles were twitching their spines feebly. The women used an array of tools, one a long piece of wood, one what looked like a pick-ax, one a crow bar like wrench, and pulled the urchins one at a time from the pile. Then the pounded the urchin with the tool to break the brittle, but very sharp, spines. The detached pieces of spine littered the sand like drifts of needles. The pounded a circle around the center photosensitive “eye” of the urchin. An eye which looked like a white star flecked with bright blue spots like glinted here and there on the black body as well. Once they had pounded a nubby ring of spikes around this eye, they could pull out the center. Along with the eye the hard heart of the urchin slipped out from the rest of the hollow body. Inside was a yellow and brown mass of insides, which the women expertly carved out with a twist of their thumb. Working in pairs, the pounder and scooper & and cutter and cleaner, who could be distinguished by their hands: The pounder by her black stained hands glittering with the pieces of black spine clinging to the backs of her fingers, the cutter and cleaner but her wet clean hands, clutching a pen knife to seperate the brown guts from the spongy yellow meat. They collected the meat in big plastic tubs of sea water, tossing the empty husks into piles behind them. The radial children retruned now and again without streached palms. They squatted next to their mothers, who would reply with either a stern scolding or a piece of raw yellow meat.

I came across the women on Pattaya beach, just in front of one of Lipe’s bigger and fancier resorts “Bundaya Resort”. Several smiled when I came over, and answered that the sea urchins were called Hoi, and yes I could take pictures. One small girl, who I guess has come to recognize me, greeted my thigh with a head-butt and refused to release it from a fierce hug even at the embarrassed urging of her mother. I took a hundred or so photos in the next hour.

When the pile began to dwindle, men came trudging up out of the sea. They pulled behind them blue oil barrels filled with the twitching urchins. The men, several of whom I could see now were large boys, were shirtless and wore masks and snorkels. They dragged the blue barrels up the sandy beach and replenished the mountain with its twitching rocks. A young boy – maybe three or four years old – helped gather the broken husks and pile them back into the empty barrels. He carefully approached the piles, plucked a piece at a time between his chubby fingers, and chucked the spiky shells into openings in the drums.

There was the sound of crunching shells, and occasional bursts of gossip as the women worked. After a while, a LadyBoy came over and joined. She squatted next to the tarp, balancing her beautiful handbag on her leg, and hacked at the urchin with her crowbar-wrench, all the while tossing snips of gossip among the other women or chattering at the children. Once she had broken into the Hoi she would pass it to her neighbor and so her hands were not blacken from the Hoi juices, and in fact, her fingernails were long and pink. I liked her immediately.

Once I got the courage up to ask questions, I was met with a slightly warmer brew of being completely ignored than I experienced with the noodle makers. I sat between a woman in a blue skirt named Julie and woman in a green skirt with a yellow shirt. I found out the Hoi were delicious raw and with lime and very spicy chilies. They were even better cooked, or in Tom Yum soup. I asked if I could taste and the group rumbled with laughter. “The farang wants to taste’ said someone. And Julie dipped her hands into the babypool like tub of brown water and pulled out a piece of meat about the size of an almond. I held the meat with my fingertips: it was wet and very spongy or porous. It was a dark yellow, and had a smell like piers or fresh seafood that made me think instantly of my summers growing up in Maine. “What flavor does it have?” I asked. “I don’t know” laughed Julie, and “sweet, sweet” said someone else. Everybody glanced up at me and I grinned and put it in my mouth. It was delicious, strong and sweet like an oyster.

I asked if they sold the meat, and they said sometimes at Pak Bara pier. One kilo sold for one hundred bhat: about three dollars. I looked at the circle of women carefully navigating the spiky, poky, dangerous creatures with expert black stained hands and I figured each hoi produced about five of those almond sized slivers of meat in maybe two of three minutes of cracking. I asked how many Hoi today? “many Hoi” someone finally answered. I asked if it was dried first. No one understood, or no one answered. I asked in one month, how often they collected Hoi. No one answered. I asked if they collected Hoi often. No one answered. I asked in Lipe had environmental problems. “Yes”, said the woman in the yellow shirt “Trash and the coral”. “The coral is degrading?” I asked. “yes,” she said. “Why is it declining?” I asked. “It is white” she said. “Do you know why it is white?” I asked. “It’s the same as everywhere, in Phuket, and Krabi and Taroutao” she said.

When I had filled an entire SD card, I just sat for a while with the women. Watching the kids run into eachother on their bicycles down the beach. One girl came over crying, and the mom in the yellow shirt scolded her. The Lady Boy mimicked her. She said to me, “she likes to sing songs”. A few men helped cleaning the urchins, though most went back to the sea or retired in the shade of an empty resort restaurant behind us. Now and again curious Thai workers from Bundaya or curious tourists peered over. One Bhundaya worker had curry hair and I knew him from the first day when he rescued me and my bags from an embarrassing walk across the island from the ferry. “one month has gone quickly” he said, when I told him I was on the island for only three more days. “Yeah,” I said, “that is really true. I’m sad.”

I ate and ventured into the Urak Lawoi village as rain clouds started to sweep in ove the island. I found Pi Maew and her husband Bom in one of their bungalows, making a map of how to get to their resort from the mainland. Being one month familiar with the place, I could make out how to follow it, but I wasn’t so sure a new tourist would be able to do the same. I asked her for suggestions on who to interview. She suggested I go over to the church, which was open minded of her since in her interview she talked about how she has issues with the islands Christians, mostly over how they intentionally went on singing late into the night after she asked them to stop since her guests at her bungalows were complaining about the loud music coming from the nearby church.

I went over and the people I met (a family, pastor, wife kids, and two LadyBodys -- I’m not sure how they were related, or where the Ladyboys are coming from all of a sudden) were very friendly, nice, folks who spoke slowly for my understanding benefit. The fisherman talked about an idea to make artificial reefs, so that the big boats couldn’t take the fish from these reefs, but the Chow lay could go fish there. Apparently, they’ve made this type of reef in Krabi and it works well. Little fish come live in concete coral, than bigger and bigger fish come along too.

Next, I interviewed Pi Boonchu, my boat driver of yesterday’s snorkeling trip and my diving trips. Now, I must go to bed because it is midnight and I don’t have time to write so much more. I hung out with Maew and Bom and took photos around LIpe and the trash cleaning up group made a bar-b-que all day and we met for another wonderful dinner, this time at Darius and Bees house. I interviewed Darius more, lovely, and will go fishing tomorrow on a Chow Lay boat. Either, it will be a chance for participant observation for Chow Lay fishing, or for Chow Lay taking Farang fishing and Farang fishing (Onna and Pauli) or for both!

Volunteer Trash Pick-Up Day

2010-07-20T06:17:00.000-07:00

This morning as I trekked out of Sanom Beach, the cycle of the tides brought big waves sloshing underneath the bamboo path. Pi Jaeng warned Ra Wang Tanon Mai Pai be careful of the bamboo path (he actually used the word path in Thai which I’ve forgotten and replaced with road) and then Mai Keng Rang Lao Its not strong anymore. Its so nice to be learning more and more Thai. Progress is slower than it could be since so many of the key players here speak English, but I’m still learning and loving the opportunity to speak Thai.

I met a slim blond boy at Pee Pee Bakery, where I got a chocolate croissant for breakfast. I told him about the snorkeling trip and he was really keen to go. At Pooh’s place I met back up with Neils and Jessica, a honeymooning couple, who are also interested so the trip was a full booked go ahead!

At 11:00 Neils Jessica, and I went to meet Pi Tasha start a volunteering day to pick up trash on the road and beech. We got big black garbage bags, and walked down to the beech together and no sooner had we reached the beach and started putting things into bags, when a wonderful Thai couple (friends of Tasha and I) come along and start helping us out too: It was Pi Som (who in an earlier chapter sold the hotdogs on a stick) and her husband with a motorbike and sidecar. John came and joined, and then two more Dutch tourists came and joined in. Soon we had gotten more bags and rakes and were raking debris, and sorting recycling. Some construction workers on their break from the resort we were cleaning in front of came out to pitch in too. It was delightful to see the tourists, and the islanders cleaning and working together. I can’t say we weren’t having a really good time, actually.

We cleaned all the way around a Thai man lounging in a hammock by the sea, who watched us revealing little in his impassive face: perhaps he was equally balanced by no wanting us to disturb his relaxation or ask him to join, and not minding us cleaning his front yard. I thought it was a little funny, Neils was frustrated at first saying “look how they just watch us and do nothing!” I said, “maybe he’s working hard on a construction job and this is his one break in the day so he wants to relax not have some foreigners telling him what to do”. Beyond him, there were two guys who were sitting together, one got up to help and the other got up and left so as not to have to. The one who helped held the bag while I picked up bits of rubbage to toss in – bottle caps, crushed cups, the occasional diaper, bits of string and foam pieces (which crumble in your fingers frustratingly) and shards of broken glass and so many disposable lighters and water logged flip flops! We said we could start a shoe store, if you can find two of the same you don’t have to pay. Also, I don’t see how there could possibly be enough smokers to account for all of the disposable lighters I have found on beaches over my life. Beaches must be where disposable lighters go to die.

When we had done about maybe 5% of the kilometer beach a nice streach on either side of the Walking Street road, we went up onto the raod. Here we loaded up the side care on the motorcycle with the bags, and we’d got quite a system going for rubbage, and plastic, and glass and aluminum. At the first store, the woman store owner donated more plastic bags and offered us all a free drink from the cooler. We took a break, sitting on the front step and hanging around the motorcycle, chatted, joked, and felt very wonderful. It was so nice to be able to do something to help, and to pitch in alongside new friends. The new Holland couple introduced themselves as Onna and Grald. Neither looked like the kind of person I would have pegged to pick up trash for a whole day in the hot sun during their vacation: and that exactly why judging someone by looking at them is nuts. She had platinum blond hair, medium short length, and he was a big guy wearing a red t shirt. I can’t say, now, why I was so surprised and delighted when they joined in. Maybe it was how they picked up the trash at first; they looked like they were picking up trash. Holding it in small handfuls away from their bodies like it might smell on them or cut them or ooze on them at any moment. This, of course, was the rational way to handle it, but by the end we were all grubbing big handfuls of litter, picking little bits from the dirt, tossing and sorting into the motorcycle car like pros. We had quite an armada as we went down the street, receiving more donations of bags, and new helping hands as we went. We built a sort of crazy efficient machine, with Pi Som and Pi Newt, a Thai woman who works near the pharmacy, sweeping into pans, and Tasha wraking up piles that Jessica and I would pluck through, and Grald, Neils and John grabbing the bigger pieces, and Pi Newi driving the motorcycle slowly along to our new spot… and so on. Between the hilarious John and Neils we were laughing and joking all day long. At one point, by the hot and long end (three and a half hours later), Neils and John were skipping and singing an Australian version of 99 bottles of beer on the wall. We made it all the way down the walking street. We had some water and guava – the fruit that gives foreigners or Farang their name. this led enevitably to more echos of the joke “a foreigner eats a guava” “or Farang eats a Farang”

About half way, a little tiny girl with a giant rainbow umbrella came out and followed us. When we were busy trying to decide what to do with a huge pile of junk a family had just let accumulate in front of some currently out of commission bins by their home, the little girl came over and took a rake quietly from near the cart. She proceeded to start raking the leaves in the street behind us. Pi Tasha ran to get the rake back before I could snap a photo, but it almost broke my heart with happiness to see her copying our cleaning brigade.

By three o’clock we were exhausted, and Lipe’s main street was shinning. We took a break, but all agreed to meet back up at 7 pm at Tasha’s for a big bar-b-que dinner together. We showered, snacked, and recovered. I met with Tasha and helped make salad in the tiny kitchen behind her place. He place is actually… this a storage garage. Many of the stores along walkingstreet are like storage garages, and Tasha bought one and sells tickets, and snorkeling equipment and stuff in the front, has a table and chairs on the side, and built a little tiny room for a bed room and bathroom int eh back. Then there is a mini add on kitchen behind the unit in another little room, and her chili pepper and lemon grass garden that fills her “sideyard,” –a garden that would also fit in a bathtub.

Tasha is an unbelievable cook. Neils and Jessica came by early too, and we made a beautiful long table outside under the afternoon sky, with table clothes and huge platter of fruits (lychee, Long Kong (brown balls like hard grapes, but with grapefruit flavored jellies on the inside) and some spiky brown tear shapped fruits, with stiff brown inside sections that were sour and sweet). We made a heaping salad a cubbed fruist and veg and cheese, and had many drinks Tasha marinaded the chicken. The guests came along and night fell and we lit the table with candles and cheer, and ate and ate and laughed and laughed and made very very good friends. Tasha brought out the pinapple chicken, and it was actually probably the best chicken I have ever eaten. And Neils said so and Tasha got so embarrassed and angry (from too may compliments) that John and Neils had a ball continuing to get her goat about how good it was, and it was every bit as good as they said, which made it even funnier. I was almost crying with laughter.

I met up with the skinny blond boy and his girl friend who were having a fabulous time at Time to Chill bar. You couldn’t meet nicer people than I’ve met today. They were extremely excited to go. We sat under the rasta lights laughing and talking for a bit. When I got back, it turns out our snorkel group grew to nine persons, as everyone except the Thai’s who had to work, wanted to come along. I had asked Pi Boonchu, our boatman, is 8 was ok earlier, or if 6 was better for one boat (thinking this might happen) and he said two boats was better for 8, but Tasha said “no!” we all go together so everybody pays less! But refused to call him and tell him that. I got kind of annoyed that she was acting like this. It was already only 7 dollars or so per person for the whole day, and if she was going to challenge him on how he ran his boat she better actually tell him not expect me to! But John said he saw how for my money, I was happy to support another of Boonchu’s friends for another boat he but he agreed with Tasha saying in Thailand he’d learned to sticking out for your own interests first. I said we could talk to him about it tomorrow, all of us, and eitherway we would all go so that was that I guess. Neils very helpfully kept running out to Pooh’s place to increase the number of lunches we would be ordering to bring along.

((turned out Tasha didn't show up at all, and the eight of us went and just payed a few extra bhat for the extra people. The day was great fun, although the conditions wern't great in the morning:the tide was high and the water foggy so it was kinda hard to see. .. we ate on a beach looking out over the mountians, and snorkeled over giant clams that sloshed their jaws shut when our shadows crossed their colorful lips.)

I was proud of our volunteer group. It definatly made an impression on people on the island because people kept bringing it up when i went by. Some people teased saying things like "oh when there is more trash can i call you to come pick it up?" or asked why we were doing it or said "more will come anyway". It was a little sad to see how even the next day waves had brought more trash back to the beach, and the street (which we now watched with eagel eyes as we walked around) had new empty cups and cigarette butts and wrappers even the next morning -- an there are no excuses for the street: thats people here not waves.

Pi Jaeng

2010-07-20T06:12:00.000-07:00

Last night Neil and Amanda had a going away party. The employees of Pooh’s Bar, Mr. Barry and his family (a Dive shop owner), two honeymooners who were also having a nice diner, and Neil, Amanda, and I, all ate together at a line of tables with red checkered tablecloths and candles. For my vegetarian dive leader friends there was an array of Tofu: Tofu friend with dipping sauce, Tofu appetizers with mushrooms, Tofu Tom Yum…

I had breakfast with Pi Solep and Dehwehwim again. The flavor was rich and delightful, and although the meal was tough, meaty, and salty, none of that made my stomach hurt which was a joy.

The honeymooners might be interested in sharing a day of snorkeling in the national park so that will be very nice.

I interviewed Pi Jaeng this afternoon. I found him surveying the terraces he had just carved into the hillside behind one of the bungalows – the new home for a terraced garden. He finished planting a batch of flowers around the resort and we sat together on a little gazebo platform near the sea. Thanks to Jaengs slow speaking, clear Thai, and generally amiablity it was by far the most long and successful interview I’ve done it Thai – although that wasn’t surprising. The talked about the positives and negatives of a fishing life – a life he used to live before starting the Sanom Beach resort. A fisherman has freedom, he said. The income isn’t steady, sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you are not lucky, and sometimes you friend is lucky all month and you are not lucky, but you know there is always anotherday when you will be lucky again, and you can eat what you catch so you don’t need to buy anything. He disagreed with what Pi Maew said that people share the fish they catch, saying in the old days the Chow Lay used to do this, but now they expect money in exchange for giving another Chow Lay fish. He said long ago the Chow Lay didn’t know about protecting the ocean. Then, when the national park was made it was a good thing. But the Chow Lay just kept on fishing destructively when and where the national park wasn’t looking. Then people were arrested. He also did this when he was young, but was lucky he was never arrested. It was a good thing tourists, and development, and the national park came because, he said, in his opinion, if they hadn’t the nature on the island would be better, but the sea would be worse. Somebody with a boat can make more steady income, and make more money by taking the tourists to see the coral, he explained....

Sickness

2010-07-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

Sorry i haven't posted in a while. I've been sick for the last 5 days. :( Luckily nothing so bad as Dengue. The health clinic here gave me some meds for my symptoms. I think (hope to heck) i'm almost better now. Its been extremely frustrating to be so close to so many fun amazing things, in such a beautiful place, with such a big project, and to be inoperable, miserable, and confined to my bungalow. The first day I thought i had just got heat exhaustion, but when after a day of hydration and rest the 15 minute walk into town took an hour, and a spoonful of broth made me super nauseous I realized it must be something more. I just at my first real meal in 5 days tonight! YIPPEE!!

Up until the sickness I had been working ahead of schedule on my project to hopefully get all the necessary interviews in for sure and then have a with time for a little adventuring at the end... so i think, luckily, i'll still have enough time to finish up the interviews i need before my flight up to Chaing Mai in 8 days. Its frustrating, but I keep reminding myself that in the scheme of life its a small thing. I'm looking forward to getting back out into the action with a new appreciation for the simple things ...like the feel of the waves on my feet again, and walking and sitting without back pain!

Love,
Gigi

Clean Out The Sea / Reefs some of the Best

2010-07-08T21:51:00.000-07:00

8th – Two Weeks Left

I awoke for sunrise and climbed out on the rocky point with the necessary sunrise watching supplies: a pillow, bug spray, and a camera. I watched it come up over the main Pattaya beach, and actually found the subtle morphing of blue and cream color out over the opposite ocean even more fantastic that the blazen red layers over the beach.

I watched a documentary on coral reefs, as well as the video Neil made of our diving trip, and looked through the underwater photographs he took of me diving around in the area of severe coral bleaching. Some look very good for my project. I brought a waterproof camera case and camera, but the camera was either a) left somewhere(at a restaurant) and taken or b) left on my bungalow porch to dry from a bit of sea water that got in the case and taken. I have a memory that it was b), but I hope it was a). Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some good reference underwater shots anyway, if not, I can always patch stuff together for my paintings : )

((Another fantastic lunch of fried chicken, spicy bamboo salad, sticky rice with dried garlic flakes, and raw vegetables: Three girls sat next to me, and I’m pretty sure I at as much as the three of them combined! ))

At one point today, I watched a sea eagle hunting out behind the longtails off the beach.

I met and interviewed a sailor named Brian who is here with his boat. He actually got caught in the storm on the way over. Several new things I learned from him were that one of the impacts of island development is that the developers bring in their machinery and supplies on these huge, heavy, metal barges. The barges come right up to shore and smash everything underwater in their way. I saw one on the beach yesterday, I told him. He told me, the he saw the boat, too. At one point, they had to move down the beach, so they just moved down, smashing everything along the way. There is a way to get in and out without damaging the coral, if your careful, he said. “Yeah but they don’t care” said a friend who was sitting with us “its not their island, what do they care?”

Here is an early 6 minutes in our half hour interview:
( Longtails, by the way, are the big wooden boats with a motor on a pivot at the back that everyone drives here. )

How has Lipe changed since you first visited in 2004?
… It used to be you know, the chow lay used to live on the beach, you know. But now all the resorts have bought all the beach land. So they’re kind of been pushed into the jungle, they cut, pushed into the middle of the island, and their cuttin’ the jungle, you know, and makin’ houses in there, now. So its going pretty fast now. Big changes….

What draws you to Ko Lipe?
I’ve got lots of friends here, you know. I made friends here over the years. I really like the people here, the chow lay. They’re cool.

I saw you had a big fish yesterday, do you go fishing with the Chow Lay sometimes?
Yeah yeah. I well… yesterday I was just fishin’ on y way down here. I was uh trawlin.. uh pullin the line behind my boat you know. And uh, I got out in the deeper water, the deep sea you know. An the chow lay, they don’t go out that far you know. When the weather is rough, as well, they don’t go out at all, you know. Actually three boats yesterday they went fishin in Eight Mile Rock. It’s a reef pinnacle, you know, eight miles from here. They call it Eight Mile Rock. It’s a really nice place, you can go diving there. Sometimes you see manta rays and all sorts of stuff. But uh, yeah, well yeah, some three longtail boats went fishing there yesterday before that, and then the storm came along and they tried -- they headed back to Lipe when they saw the storm comin’, but it came so quick they got caught in it. They don’t have compasses or nothing. So they ended up -- they went the wrong way. They ended up on that island points that island over there Ko Klang. They got lost in the storm and they couldn’t see, you couldn’t’ see like 200 meters. And they went over to that island. It’s dangerous, you know. They went over there and then oh fuck its Ko Klang, but they were able to hide behind the island and get some shelter. They were lucky…

…

How do the reefs here compare to other places in Thailand?
The reefs here are some of the best. Ah, around these butains these islands are good, the coral, you know. The fish no so much, but their famous for the coral. A lot of the fish have been eaten and stuff, you know, but a lot of small stuff but not a lot of big stuff anymore. You know a few years ago when I came in first and was sailing around, you’d see a lot of sail fish jumping and stuff. But I just don’t see the anymore. It seems like just in the last few years.

What do you think are the biggest contributors to the decline of the big fish?
For sure the trawlers. The trawlers you know and the pursaners you know.

The what sorry?
The pursaner, its another type of fishin boat where they, they get ah, they go along in their boat and they track the shoals, with their sonar, you know? If they uh, see the fish feeding or whatever, and then they put out a big net, when they have -- they see the fish, kind of target it, when they know where they are, they’ll drop a big net. And, keep going with the net and drop the net behind them, you know, and put a big net behind the shoal you know? And pull up the bottom like a purse. Its called a pursal net. Then they, ah, so they just take everything, you know, and that really can clean out the sea. There’s big -- there’s fleets of them. Usually you’ll not see just one of them, your see 20 or 30 of them all working in one area, and their nets are really small (he made a grid between his fingers), small size you know, so they catch everything.

The other type of the boats, the other type of the fishin they do is they pair trawling: where two trawlers drag a net behind them. It can be a big long net, you know . with weights on the bottom to hold it down you know. Between, an open net, and they’ll just steam along together. And they’re draggin’ weights on the bottom, these kind of steal rollers that just hold the net down on the bottom, on the bottom, they roll along the bottom. And they just steamroll over everything on the sea floor you know. So everything on the sea floor is destroyed you know. Whatever is down there is destroyed. And they catch everything too, you know. That too, they just clean out the sea.

How much longer do you think they’ll be able to find fish around Ko Lipe?
Ah… I dunno… its hard to say. I mean, no I mean, cause the reefs around here are still pretty healthy so they are like a nursery so there’s a lot of small fish growin’, but then they get caught younger and younger every year, you know. So the fish size is getting smaller every year. But yeah, [the Chow Lay] used to be able to catch just from the rocks here. They’d just go catch as many fish as they wanted just from the rocks there. Now they have to go to like Eight Mile Rock and places like that. Which already there’s a lot less fish there as well…

While we were talking, I couldn’t help but think about what Brian had said. As the fish declined, the Urak Lawoi started going further and further away, more often, looking for the big fish. It struck me that now, both through the Hooka Diving like Neil had talk about, and going out to far off vulnerable spots like the three longtails caught in a storm at Eight Mile Rock, overall the decrease in fish was luring (or dragging) fisherman into increasing dangerous situations.

I interviewed Marcus and Marsha, the Russian couple, over dinner.

I’m beginning to really enjoy the walk home along the beach each night: The stars, and the waves, and the tide out on my left, the dark bungalows and the jungle on my right. I’m more confident to return home a little later in the evening (8-9 pm) since the guys at Time to Chill bar can watch my light to make sure it makes it around the corner to Sanom Beech. I carry a handful of rocks to chase off dogs or other unwanted attention, but haven’t had any trouble so far.

2010-07-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

Last night there was lightning like you wouldn’t believe. The horizon, the beach, the trees out front my bungalow, were flashing in and out of darkness. Strangely, the thunder is was so quiet. The lighting kept going and going, red and white flashes of light.I remember waking up in a daze and peaking out at the ocean and the ships under all that lightning. It came so often and from everywhere at once, like a strobe light at a disco. It was around 4 am i think. The breeze was coming in the window and through the mosquito net to lick my face with a little of the rain. I tried to find a way to lay down and still see the water, but didn’t have enough pillow, and fell back asleep. I had a frightening dream of someone trying to force their way into my bungalow, when i woke up it was just the sound of sticks and things falling on the porch and roof.

The morning I caught up on recording, and had a skype chat with Alex and Xavier! Hooray! I tired to upload some pictures, but it simply not possible with the internet, so I back them up onto another computer here in case anything happens to my EPC. Sorry no pictures! There was a ferocious wind and rain, that trapped me at Pi Pooh’s Bar. The palm trees were going crazy. Apparently last night a tree fell right onto the room of one of the pooh bar employees while he was sleeping, and the roof fell on top of him, and the branches were dangling over his bed. He was fine, but the room is a wreck! All the surfaces outside are covered will fallen branches and leaves. Trees came down all over the island.

Lunch was incredible. Spicy Som Tom payapya salad, a plate of leafy vegetables to eat it with, sticky rice, and Lahb Guy or chicken pounded up with lime and chili and garlic and onion and something pure delicious. The woman who works at the Som Tom place is great because she explains to anyone who is near, when I come by, that I am a student from America studying the environment on Lipe Island and that they should speak Thai to me.

I went for a photoshoot in the Urak Lawoi village after, and got some INCREDIBLE pictures. I came across everyone hanging out, the kids playing with bikes, and jump rope and stuff and the men playing volleyball (the kind where you can only use feet and head) they would leap into the air and highkick this tiny wicker ball across the net. The kids were all keen to get photos taken this time, and I was swarmed for a while. I invited them take photos too, but told them to ask politely. It was really fun, and their pictures were more interesting then mine! I ran into Pi Boonchu and we talked and joked, and he invited me into his home for coffee, and we arranged a plan for a two day snorkeling trip to hit all the sights that Ajaan Mark (my program director) wanted me to check out in terms of bleaching ext. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get several other tourists to come along to share the trip and price.

Some Urak Lawoi girls I’ve been smiling at and saying hello to for a few weeks, asked where I was going as it was headed to dinner (yes! This is the most common way of saying “hey, how are you? / I’m interested in you” In Thai) I told them I was going around to take pictures, and if they wanted a picture. One said no, and two said yes, and they were laughing, so I took some pictures of the group and they were all keen to see them. We talked for a few minutes until they got a cell call home for dinner.

I interviewed some folks from Holand over dinner. On the way back a patch of swamp/field was roaring with frogs, crickets, and birds. It was quite the orchestra with fighting dogs coming in for a solo, too.

Bringing Home the Catch

2010-07-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

I snorkled in the morning off of Sanom Beach. The most interesting thing I saw was this disgusting red-brown slime stuff in the water. At first I thought it was poo, then fish guts, the algae. It broke apart into threads, and was everywhere in some places, unavoidable, coating the surface of the sea. I’d dive under and swim with my hands out to try to block it and get away.

I interviewed John over lunch. In the afternoon I headed back over the Pi Meaw’s place. Everyone was hanging out around the house when i arrived, and i took a seat on the porch platform in front of Mi Meaw’s house. Like many of the hosues in the village, her home is made of bamboo woven into mats for some of the walls, and wood walls on others. It has a corrugate metal roof. The main hang out area is a raised platform (hers covered) in the front of the house. Outside are piled many many colorful baskets, and buckets, ext. Evidence of her love for animals are the many dogs and cats lounging in the yard, the wooden stand with a dead fish on it, for her eagle to come by and eat, and a fishbowl on the front table with a black goldfish in it.

Her husband lounged in a green mesh hammock, and Meaw sat next to him. All around were the dogs and the boys: her son and little brother. The little brother rapidly alternated between playing with a toy AK47 and a toy truck. The otherboy took a shower in a plastic tub, his father taking a break to go scrub him down. I had a wonderful time hanging out with them today. I got the cutest pictures, too. The little boy (I think her brother), picked up some tools like a hex wrench and walked (waddled) over the family motocyle and started play repairing it. Then a slightly older little boy saw and joined in. He would pose as if straining really hard to undo the screw and wait for the sound of my camera to run over and see the picture.

After a while, Meaw’s father came home carrying a meter long fish in his left hand and holding over his right shoulder an old tennis racket with the normal net replaced by a baggy net to make it into a bucket with a handle, which was full of smaller colorful fish. Meaw’s dad sat down (from a long day at sea) to have a smoke on some handrolled cigarettes, and the son in law and daughter washed and sorted the fish. The older boy came over curious, and watched as Meaw’s husband cut the mackerel in half. He picked up on of the halves and examined the bloody section, before he was shooed away. The fish, and the activities around them, were one of the most memorable things I’ve seen. It was visceral, but also beautiful. The mackerel glistened sliver, and was lighted with glittering green flies. The colorful reef fish, some still twitching and alive, came in many colors like yellow, and dull red, and brown with hexagonal spots. When the mackerel was sliced in half it revealed rings of white flesh (like lines on a topographic map) where the corded fleshy muscles ran through the fish’s body, and the bright red blood streaked down it onto the wooden platform. I’d chosen not to eat fish on the island (baring social situations where it would be rude/disruptive not to eat it) so as not to put one more consumptive pressure on the reef. However, this sight made me feel really good. It seemed a very natural and fitting part of the family routine. Everybody was happy for dad to bring home the fish, and prepared for a bar-b-que dinner. Of the catch, some Maew was taking into a friend in the mainland, i believe some was sold, some was eaten for dinner. Meaw’s husband joked about us talking too much and burning the rice…

Scuba

2010-07-07T22:50:00.001-07:00

SCUBA today! The first dive was at a rocky outcropping on the east side of Adang island. The rocks came jutting out of the water like in a pirate movie. I was really excited to SCUBA again after four months since I was certified. There were two divers, me and a new arrival on the island, a Canadian man named Darel, who is a helicopter mechanic by trade. (which means he gets to travel all over the planet, working 6 weeks on in a country and then with 6 weeks off and his job will fly him home for those weeks if he likes – very nice set up!). Besides Darel, there was Neil (our excellent leader) and the boatman Pi Bunchu.

For the dive, we dropped down on one side of the rock outcropping and swam around it with the current. Under, the surface were stair like levels of coral, and we descended to one of the lower levels and explored around. Since the water was deeper here, less was bleached than around lipe. There were some soft corals, and boulders rising off the bottom covered with interesting growths and shapes. The landscape underwater is really intriguing – in this site corals were thickly scattered among the sandy bottom. On the side of a huge purple sponge I found a lionfish tucked against the current, when we got close he flared his fins like white fans of streamers or whiskers. A moray eel opened and shut their jaws as it bobbed it’s head out from a crevice between corals. It’s tiny white triangular teeth, glinting menacingly. There were long schools of yellow fish, flowing inbetween the coral heads and the divers. Neil took a picture an anemone that was split in half – half brown-purple and half bleached white. The coral fish inside it, rubbing and swimming between the two halves… it struck me as a great symbol of all of the archipelago. A family trying to make due in a home that was half healthy and half ruined.

We ate lunch a beach near the Urak Lawoi village. “a new boat, a new toy” said Darel as a group of local kids came over and started playing on our boat. I splashed around with one girl, we talked a little but she seemed young and I’m not sure how much Thai she knew yet.

The second dive was at a place called Stonehenge. It was full of huge bolders, strewn among the coral hill and the coral around them and each rock covered with a fascinating array of underwater life. It was like a garden of purple soft corals, that looked like braching fractals swaying in the current. The chubby branches, blistering with smaller whirls of purple lace, some were a dark purple and some where bleached and many were a creamy combination. While swimming I accidently brushed one with my hand and it felt like prickly rubber. I realized the best part of scuba may be how you can fly around, upside down, head first, all around the coral rocks and praticied gliding around looking very closely at all the details of the life around. The coral animals (like flower heads) coming out of each pore on the coral bodies. Their tiny heads like soft stars under the water, rust, or moss green, or white. My favorite kind of soft coral is the bubble coral. It looks like a sheet of inflated sacks/bubbles of varying sizes – mostly a little bigger than almonds. It’s a sort of transparent light brown and if you get very close you can see each inflated bubble is ridged like a fingerprint.

At each site we saw many algae covered nets and ropes where they had been cut or broken once tangled among the branches of the corals. We found a coconut milk bottle, and here and there the corals would be smashed, or white branches lay on the sand, or they would be dead and algae covered a kind of brownish green film overtop the decaying structure. Each coral probably showed some signs of damage. I usually wouldn’t notice the damage unless I thought about the really good looking corals and imagined what the reef must have looked like if all were untouched. It showed a pretty convincing shifted baseline for me: I could look at the reef and say “wow its perfect!”, unless I tired to actively imagine it without the damage as part of the landscape and try to visualize what it might once have looked like.

After the dives, we had some delicious thai snacks of gelatine balls with sugar and coconut on the outside, and a sweet liquid filling. In the late afternoon I interviewed the dive leaders from another resort, Castaway. They told some great stories, like seeing a moray eel as thick as a dinner plate and 2 meters long swimming over the reef during a night dive, and letting a shark out of one of the fisherman’s traps. They said the reef was some of the healthiest in Thailand, at least before the bleaching. And they hoped the cooler water temperatures (not 3 degrees less than when I came, from the rain) would help the coral recover, although no one knows one way or another what will happen. The reefs were great for their soft corals, and in comparatively good health aside from some physical damage (from anchors for instance). There were many little fish, and other interesting creatures to see. The biggest thing (before bleaching) was that they were missing was large fauna, fish, sharks, and turtles. These are things that other places have, like nearby more regulated national park Phi Phi. "How often do you see sharks?’ I asked. And one diver, Simon, said he had seen two or three in the last year, and knew them each and where they lived. “How many times do you think you’ve dived in the last year?” I asked. He thought about it and did some quick math on this fingers. “Probably more then three hundred times,” he said. “I see more big stuff, sharks and big fish coming off the fishing boats, or bar-b-qued on the beach, than I see in the water.”

Boy with Fish

2010-07-05T03:19:00.000-07:00

2010-07-03T20:25:00.000-07:00

2ed July 1, 2010

I had a long and delightful dinner with the Norwegin family I have befriended here. I arrived at “time to chill bar” before they had ordered, and we enjoyed a long memorable evening together. There are the three (adult) sisters, their mother, and the oldest sister has a daughter Susana, who is just about the most beautiful child I have ever seen. I guess her father is African and her mother Norwegian, and she has big hair and big eyes and a big laugh. She is four years old. We chatted and I felt helpful to be able to share some of my knowledge about Thai culture, and stories from my time here. All the time, we were sitting in a lounge are behind back while a rain storm pelted down off the sea. It whipped and billowed the big green sheets at the front of the bar, even blowing over furniture. Once and a while we would get a tiny mist, but mostly our corner was cozy and dry. Over the night, and me and Susana were playing with a hammock. Its incredible how easily kids are amused! We must have made up two dozen little games over the evening. She was shy at first, but I had her devotion by the end of the evening.

At the end Pi Mut offered to take me home, because it was still raining and dark (our food for the six took much longer than I had planned for thinking it would be just me). We drove down the dark beach on his motorcycle, the rain and the waves rolling in off the sea and splattering our faces. I put out my umbrella, whippling and protesting in the wind, and held it forward up above us like a shield. I was laughing so hard. We must have looked so hilarious, and me with by big orange rain cover on my big backpack, too. Haha!

The days are starting to run and blear together – also to speed by. Whereas the first day I think lasted about a week, and I accomplished so much, I feel like now I barely wake up and its nightfall again. (and that’s saying something because I get up at 6:00!) I lay on a mat on the beach, and got started by big sand crabs out of the corner of my eye while I studied Thai this morning, read more on the Urak Lawoi, transcribed. I met Pi Mayoh this afternoon at one. She was hanging out on the porch / sitting area in front of her house with her husband, mother, and a friend named Ek. They were talking about topics that could have been from my project interview questions: gambling, fish from the reef, fish getting taken and sold by the aquarium trade, alcoholism, cultural changes… Possibly inspired by my presents/questions yesterday, but at least defiantly to each other and not for my benefit. I was mostly just getting a few abbreviated stories from Pi Mayoh now and again. For instance:

Urak Lawoi employees are hard to have because they don’t work as hard as the Burmese. They are used to being their own boss, and on their own time, and not used to having to work hard. Pi Mayoh would give one of her Urak Lawoi employees a three hour break to go home and rest, cook her husband something for dinner, and her employee would come back and say she didn’t have time to cook dinner she needed a longer break. However, Pi Mayoh’s friend had seen her playing cards the whole time. Once, and employee went for a three hour break and lost 10,000 Bhat. (three hundred dollars). Wow, I said that’s a lot! What was her salary per day? 8,000 Bhat a month! Said Pi Mayoh’s husband.

Apparently there used to be Dragon fish here. (which are like a sea horse with wavy crazy fins), but people from Ko Lanta took them and other fish for a aquarium Trade. Pi Mayoh said “I saw the shop and I saw the Dragon fish and I was think “there are no dragon fish in Ko Lanta!” I know the man who they pay to do this, too.” When was this? I ask. “maybe six years ago” she says.

Pi Mayoh took me for a walk to see the more old fashioned style Urak Lawoi village on the other side of the island. She took an umbrella for shade (and eventually for rain). We walked together and she pointed out places here and there where I could find people to interview. There was no one really around in the village since it was the middle of the day. The houses were much much smaller, made from more natural matericals like woven bamboo. They were closer together with just a scattering of trees and bushes inbetween.

we stopped by at a construction site where her friend is building a bar. He talked to us for hours about all of his experiences living in many countires like Saudi Arabia, sigapore, Philipeans, Candana...

in ten years, still have fish for you?

2010-07-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

Quotes about the Urak Lawoi village:

"Before, everyone was close together in the community, but then they started to sell their land. They said, “oh money, money,” and then they went to the Mafia and they said ‘I want to sell’ and then fighting family and family break."

"Twenty years ago, they make people like this [fighting and divided]. They tricked the land the people. The Pu Yai Ban of before, (Pu Yai Ban is a important/powerful person on the isalnd, its a position) he said to the chaow lay “give me your land I’ll go to the mainland and make a chanood (title for each person) for you”. And he took them away and sold them, and then he also gone! 5 years later, and 10 years later, people come and say ‘oh this my land’ the people here said ‘huh? Khay doni? When did I sell it? ...
Like this [Castaway resort and the nearby the village] they built houses here, and then one woman from the mainland came and said “oh you have problem. This is my land” and they said “huh? This my land! When did I sell to you?” nobody knew. They were tricked: because the young brother of my father, he doesn’t know to read Thai he wasn’t educated. They tricked him to sign, and then when he signed arrested him. They are fighting and fighting, how many year? 10 years in court. Now, they win, people chow lay win. Now the [Castaway] resort rents from him. But in court we lose money, because the lawyer got money from [the urak lawoi] and from the woman in the mainland. Not only here many people fighting with lawyer and the mafia man come and says if you sell to me, you don’t have to fight anymore, and you get some money. Then when they sell to him, they still have problem in court. "

"When I went to school here, there never had drugs in school. Now student sell in school. Start maybe 12, 13 years old. One pill - 500 Bhat. Teacher know, but teacher cannot do anything… When the student are drug, when they don’t have money, they steal. Maybe steal money from their parents. The mama here, the parent here, they never say "no no stop!" But they give money, really. Not everybody, but maybe 30% are addicted to drugs, I’m afraid my brother, my son. And my cousin! he is addited, he start when he was 14.

They sell to kid or tourists. Someone who wants to sell here they buy for 150 on mainland, but when they sell here sell for 500, they get 350 more. So they don’t care, here "ok children buy from me, I sell." Its sad. "

"My grandma is a teacher of dance tradition at the school, but the children lazy now. Lazy to learn because tey have game, computer game, and the bar… at the beach is open for children… Normally you have to tell kids "you cannot go out"...Today they go [out]. Maybe tomorrow have to go to school, but today they party. Then tomorrow they not go to school. School is very open, they go to class, no teacher, they come out, they go all over lipe. I start my son my brother going to school in the mainland (my mom go two weeks, then I go two weeks, to take care).

I tell them all the time, if you don’t study now, every resort evey restaurant want have a [diploma]. If you don’t have, you have to work very hard, no? and if you thinking, I will just fishing fishing, in ten years, still have fish for you? Maybe it will be hard… like some place in Africa thye protect fish (I saw in TV) before they make net and turtle, whale, dolphin die in net. And now they let fish only with the line, and it is very hard. What if in 5 years around the world protect fish? Now your free you can go anytime you want to go, maybe in 5 years there will be only one week or one time you can go. Or what if another Tsunami come?"

"When I’m like 5 years, my father he work on a big boat, a fisherman boat… My father, he work very dangerous place: between Thailand and Burma… If you have a passport you can go Burma, but the government is very bad… He have passport. When Burma saw fisherman from Thailand, they don’t care people in the boat have passport. They say ‘if you don’t go away, you die’. He had to swim to a island. Half month, two week, no water. Water like this [in puddles on the ground] he had to drink. No food. He had to find crab, no rice, he have to eat from tree like this with the fruit inside like an almond [cashew tree]. Three of them on the island, and some of his friends in the boat, Burma killed. … Many times [my father] swim to a island. "

I knew my father worked hard, dangerous, I knew I had to help him. When I was 11 years I start work myself. I worked in the restaurant of daya resort. I serving. I am very small, 11 year. I learned english by handfuls. I dunno! The menu have thai word and english word. When people order [they point at what they want] there is thai word and english word so I see the Thai word… I like work. When I work I’m tired, I get money per month.

Did you go to school and work?
Yes… I go like this. Before go to school I clean, wash plates and glasses, water before not have [spigot], have to carry to home. Then I go to school, come back, cooking very quickly, then I go work to 10 pm. But my aunti in there very nice they say OK you have to do homework first, you have to do homework and if busy you can help. If people see too much for small girl.

What did you do with the money you made?
Half I give mom, half for me. For me, like for school or for buy shampoo, buy lotion.

But after me, my sister in school go down, down, down and after sister very bad. Many children lazy. 15 year and lazy to work. Just say ‘Mama money. Mama money. Mama money to buy drug. Mama money to play game. Mama money.”

"But still have nice[things in the community]. like fish: this hosue have fish, this house have no fish. One house say "OK I have a lot of fish I’ll give some to you." Here its still like, "OK I give you, and next time I don’t have maybe you give to me." Still like this. "

Sucess Interviewing in the Village

2010-07-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

1st July

Oh My Jao. Today was the day of ultimate success! I interviewed an Urak Lawoi person – for three hours! Granted she spoke english; which was extremely conducive to the length. I kept thinking it was going to wind down, and the she would ask: So what else do you want to know about? Or say.. you know the thing is… And off we would go again. Eventually, I had to give my thanks because if I stayed any longer I might have passed out from fatigue and I knew I still had to walk an hour home and eat dinner and type it all up tonight.

Lets see. From the beginning…

Either attack spiders or bed bugs CHOWED me last night. It was the worst night I’ve had so far. I went to be paranoid about the Dengue mosquitoes and woke up itching like mad. I thought I was just imagining it until I felt these big swollen lumps on my elbow and shoulder. Then, I couldn’t find my light so I was digging around in my bag in the dark trying to get out my spare. My first guess was mosquitoes biting me through the mesh, but they were big swollen bites with a deeper more burning itch, not like a mosquitoes frantic but sizzling itch. I saw that they seemed to be places that might be touching the surface of the bed while I slept. I can’t really remember what I did at what point, but I went back to bed and work up two hours later with more. Seven on my back, on my stomach one, arms. Then I thought, SPIDERS ARE ATTACKING ME! Then I went into hyper mode and pulled all the pillows off the bed, swept it with a broom, changed all my clothes and put on long pants and a shirt, tucked and tied down the net, sprayed everything with bug spray, got my sleeping pad, inflated it and put it onto of my mattress, got a fresh sweatshirt for a pillow…. with a while of thinking about it I realized it was probably bed bugs not spiders. Even so, I couldn’t fall asleep for another hour and a half because I was thinking of them. In the morning I was fine. The itch stuff brought down the swelling a lot. I talked to Pi Solep about it and he seemed to think about the same thing and said change and wash your sheet, so I hope that will help.

I ate breakfast with my Burmese friends again. This time Solep kept saying Mai arroy “not delicious”, but it was pretty good. I had coffee, read some poetry, wrote “Marine Preservatives”, and typed it. In the late morning, I passed John and SomSak who were talking about me and were like “hey there she is, come over’ and it turns out SomSak had asked John what “before” and “after” meant and wanted to know the difference between “after” and “later”. This turned out to be pretty hilariously hard to explain. I left them learning vegetable names together, and went out to the bay for a swim. There were huge waves and I only went out a few minutes before I realized the tide was going to be very strong and swam back. That is when I discovered it was excellent body surfing!!! The Thai guys on the beach were laughing at this loco chica (who was trying very attentively to make sure her shorts stayed up) and was getting pounded into the sand now and again and dumped up onto the beach laughing more often. A mask and snorkel make body surfing about ten times as enjoyable as without, I learned.

I decided after several days of emotional recovery from the noodle makers incident, it was time for me to overcome the awkward and venture back into the village. I found the same women playing cards, and sat with them for a while. When I asked if I could take a picture of them playing, they all immediately and fervently said “no!”. So that was that. While I was sitting with them I saw some kids playing. The biggest boy (12-14) was swinging this tiny boy around. Then the girl grabbed a big piece of Styrofoam and started sort of beating/fighting the large boy, only where the girl was using foam for her sword, the big boy was using the small boy. At one point he just threw him towards her and the boy front planted in the dirt. He didn’t look mad, although it looked painful, and he ran and tried to jump back on the big guy again. When I said bye—deciding to give up on the card players for photos or information, all four women said bye back and they might even have smiled. This confused me, but was also pleasing to an extent.

Three kids ran up to me and started introducing me to the dogs that were with them. When I asked them questions about themselves, they ran away. Then I just walked along smiling and saying hello to everyone I saw. One woman who was washing clothes gave me a warm hello back, and my “interest in me sensor” went off. Yippee! We started talking a bit, and then her daughter arrived. I wasn’t expecting an interview or anything, but when I was just tangentally explaining why I was there, to get permission to take her photo she said “ oh yeah, what do you want to know about?” and off we went. About 10 or so minutes in, I found out she spoke extremely good english and well. That was that.

Gosh, what to say though… I don’t want to paraphrase her interview because so many of the topics are sensitive, and I don’t want to misrepresent anything. Topics included: corruption, kids at the school selling and doing drugs; the fragmenting of the community over time, parental abuse and neglect, health problems from the trash problem, drama about land, history of land ownership in the island, “new growing and healthy coral” (in quotes because I’m not sure she wasn’t calling the white coral, new growth of the coral instead of very sick coral), all of the animals she’s taken care or nursed back to health in the last year (cats, puppies, sugar glider, bald eagal, sea turtles…), her dad working for a fishing ship in Burma and having to jump overboard to escape the Burmese military and live stranded on a island for weeks….

Quotes coming.
Love,
Gigi

Marine Preservatives (poem)

2010-06-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

Marine Preservatives

What your hearing, says John
is the sound of petrol exploding.
The long tracks in the sand
look like belly prints of refugee snakes
What refugees? Find some wet sand.
A dog is eating a diaper on the beach.
The jellyfish are taking over the ocean;
Someone said they love climate change.

They don’t catch much fishing that way.
Moonlight in an old water bottle, want it?
Its not as valuable as turtle bone earrings,
but its worth more than a can of jellyfish.
Jellies have no hearts and no blood, he said.

The first time I got bent
I couldn’t walk anymore.
But I was one of the best
at placing the dynamite,
so they let me keep my job.
Everyday my friends
carried me out to the boat.

The fish and blood in the water from the dynamite
attracted sharks. Want shark fins? Buy a can of explosives.
A dolphin head is drying on the roof. This rain will be good
for the papaya trees. Who flooded the hospital garden?
The patients aren’t wearing any shoes. They are dancing
on the mosquito larvae. The monk said they’re inbred
and that’s why they are stupid. What if they just like to dance?

What would you like to drink?
Do you have pineapple juice?
We have it in a can.
Yes, but do you have it in a can screaming?
Do you have it in a can screaming and with blood? Do you have
three more generations? what about in a jar? What about Hopefish? Can you find me a steak of Hopefish with trumpet flower and onion? Do you have that?
with a glass bottle of jellyfish moonshine?

He Inflated his Overalls like the Michelin Man and ZIP

2010-06-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

30

My run this morning was beautiful. It started raining (I really only have the heart to run when its raining) and the clouds were just a little sunrise and a little storm, out over the bay. I ran up and down the beach twice, (4 kilometers) and the sand was packed and then pockmarcked by the rain, and the guy at the gate to the military base at one end waved at me, and while I was running I could feel the rain on my arms… The tide was really really far out, and the bits of broken coral and everything was basking, exposed, on the edge of the beach. I passed the Monks (two of the four) who were going down the beach collecting merit and food in the morning. I thought about smiling at the one who I talked to the otherday, but I wasn’t sure if I shouldn’t make engagement with him since it was only in a tank top and shorts, but I kinda smiled on the way back and he looked right passed me, so hummm.

After showering, and laundry, I went and tried to make a cup of coffee to have on the beach. I managed to light the stove on my own (Dehwehwim and Solep were nowhere to be seen), and I put water on, and then I realized I couldn’t find the coffee. I looked everywhere, because I found it yesterday; I opened the bag! there were 30 packs – and I knew there was no way Dehwehwim and Solep had managed to drink 29 cups of coffee in one day. It started to make me a little bonkers, not even that I am that insane for coffee but that I knew it was somewhere obvious and I couldn’t find it. Had they begrudged me taking some yesterday and hid it?! I looked in all the counters, in the pots, behind the house, in the cubbord, on the porch. I found cleaning products, and oil packets, and a container of lolly pops, and the empty package from the 30 coffee pack and then I gave up and got a bag of tea and opened it, got the hot water, and saw the lolly pops again… Who… I thought… keeps about three food items in the house, with one of them being a giant container of lolly pops and I opened it up and there was the coffee!!!

I sat on the beach with my coffee and thought about how thankful I am for how much Dale and Cindy have supported me (both in a hands-off I trust you, and in a being able to count on you for getting me whatever I need way).

I skyped with Tor and we dreamed about opening an ecotourism resort one day. I called mom and colin who are doing great up in Maine with the relatives. I did some transcriptions and translations (haha. Biology). After two of them I was ready to go crazy. It was pouring today. Really pouring and that delighted me, because another dive master stopped by Pooh’s Bar today and said while talking with Neal (Pooh’s Dive Instructer) “the coral will come back.” And I said ‘how do you know?” and he said “I mean, no body knows, but with this rain that’s good to cool the water down. And its happened [bleaching] before and it came back. And not all of its bleached, some of its still O.K so that will help the bleached coral reestablish.” I looked out at the rain, pouring off the metal roof onto the patio and felt really good (I’ve been enjoying the cool down too!).

I had lunch with John, and Lee Pae Backery (the one just on walking street with a little view of the sea at the end of the street. Its so well kept and a nice atmosphere with little black and white table cloths, and its very very clean. No T.V. playing or anything, too. John and I joked about how terrible most Thai dictionaries are. I said yeah I bought one once, for tourists, it had the word for “poached eggs! And not the word for rice. I’m not even kidding, in the food section there was poached eggs (I’m not sure I know what poached eggs are in english!) and not rice. In THAILAND.”

After lunch I went back to interview Neal if he had time. Amanda, his girlfriend and another employee at Poohs place has come down with Dengue fever (mom don’t tell grandma). Actually, something with a Thai name that’s worse then Dengue fever. It’s from mosquitoes they think. One other person got it last year, and no one else since then, but it’s really aweful. She had a 39.5 fever last night. The islands clinic nurse is on standby to come give her an injection to cool her body down if she needs it, and they’ve given her drugs to control it and so shes doing better. I guess, mom, dad, you have a right to know and try to convience me to come home, but I’m wearing two kinds of bug spray, and sleeping in a mosquito net. Tomorrow I’m wearing long pants and brining long sleaves too. They fogged Pooh’s place this afternoon. A guy went around with a backpack like a jet pack full of white foamy chemical death and blasted everything in sight. Pooh passed out little.. those nurses mouth cover things. I decided id be a good idea to take off for a bit (while my computer downloaded a new antivirus) and when I got back it was coated in little brown droplets!!!! Eeepsss!!!

I also interviewed a guy who lived on a sailboat off the atlantic coast for a year, and he said when he was around Kayaking the other day he saw what he said was “a lot of trash in the water” unlike what he had seen around many many other seas.

(the following quotes aren’t actually real quotes, their just from my memory. I’ll do the transcription sometime and put up the real ones)

I interviewed Neal. He was particularly articulate, knowledgeable, and interesting. He told the story (he written it actually, and is looking to get it published) about going down diving with the locals when they were setting their fish traps. It’s horribly dangerous! It’s called “hooka diving” and they just hook a really long tube up to a aircompressor. (and a jankkety old one that’s prone to spew unclean air, or give out at any second). And then then dive down to (when he went) 28 meters deep!!! and then they ran around on the bottom, setting up the trap, and dancing over a lion fish (extremely poisonous), and when they were done, they just pulled out the tubes for air from their homemade masks. One guy filled a bucket with air. The other guy was wearing overalls and he “filled them up with air like the Michelin man” and ZIP right up to the top. If you don’t know to blow out the entire time, your lungs can explode. To go up safely and allow enough time for the Nitrogen bubbles to come back out of your muscles and blood you should take a minute and a half to go up, with a three minute safety stop part way. “how long did they take to get up?” I asked. And Neal said “about three seconds.” By the time he got up to the top, they were getting ready to go back down again, over and over. When you go down diving that deep, your under about 4 times as much pressure, so air gets denser, and when you breath in one “lungful” of air your really getting 4 times as much oxygen and Nitrogen as normal. The oxygen is O.K but the nitrogen gets absorbed into your body tissues. When you come up again, its like opening a coke bottle, all the bubbles suddenly don’t have that pressure keeping them in and they all fizz up. Its called getting Bent. He says “that’s why so many of them are bent. If you come up so quickly, the Nitorgen can’t get out of your lungs so if forms bubbles inside you. It can kill you, and if it doesn’t kill, it’s extremely painful to get bubbles in your joins, a few hours later your just be bent over in pain (that’s whey they call it bent). It can be debilitating/handicapping. That’s why you see so many people in the village slouched with limps and on crutches, they’ve been bent and got bubbles in their joints.”

It’s a fantastic interview. I’ll pull a bunch of quotes from it if I have energy tonight. He also linked it to overfishing/the coral reef decline. “If the area is getting low of fish it means they might be down there longer, or going out more often, or setting more traps, to make income for their families, which is just increasing the danger.”

While hiding from the mosquito mister, I discovered a new favorite kind of Rotee (fried dough pancake) today which is egg and milk with sugar!! I asked Pi Awm, who makes them, what her favorite was and she said egg and tuna.

I had dinner with Pi Mut again today. The best Tom Yum soup I’ve had other than my Mae’s in Chaing Mai. The perfect priao sour and pet hot with bright green chfir lime leaves, and colorful chilis, and thin slices of chicken, garlic, cilantro, and lemongrass. He said “you want to play four?” and I was like “what?” and he pointed and I said “what?” and he brought over a connect four game! We played, the lights from the bar making the pieces glow a little (they reminded me of disco lights) as the sun set and night fell. The local mainland fishermen were putting out nets at the low tide, so maybe by next low tide fish will have swum in and got trapped. Fitting to the name “time to chill bar” the music was calm and beautiful, and I had this wonderful moment of almost … surprise or puzzlement for how fortunate I have been in my life. Some things we control, some things are chance, and somehow we end up where we are.

Put More Jungle in the Jungle

2010-06-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

29 th

Today I had breakfast and coffee wit Solep and Dehwehwim, the Burmese workers who are also living at Sanom Beach. It was really nice, and delicious. The sauce was tomato, onion, oil… over rice. Then there were these big hunks of beef (think beef jerky) that were soaked in oil and spices to sort of rehydrate, and you pulled strips of the meat off the block with your teeth. I taught Solep some phrases in English. I spontaneously wrote a good poem. In town, I wrote some stuff for Udall, worked more on poems and went around with photos for a while. I met up with John and talked over lunch about what it is like to retire in Thailand. I snorkled off Sanom beach again (hoping to see the small shark) but it was very murky conditions because of the quite drastic tides from the nearly full moon so I didn’t see much of anything. I lay down on the beach to write, my first intentional exposure to the sun on the trip and suddenly I feel rain falling on me. I look up and there are no rain clouds, just whispy white smudges, but it keeps raining. Fine! I shout to the sky. I see, no sunbathing! And just then I look out at the water and a strange fruit is floating towards me in the surf. It’s a kind of lumpy rainbow pineapple. When I pick it up it looks very much like a pineapple, with brown wilting leaves at the top, but big fat sections that stick out like molars. The ends of the sections are yellow with brown dots, the middle parts are green and inside the crevices is bright red. The meat, where the skin was torn seemed papery and white like a… honey comb or sugar cane. The elements apparently say no sunbathing, but pineapple is O.K.

I went out for dinner and found a new place that is quite lovely. It just re-opened a few days ago. It is a bar/restaurant on the beach, made and decorated with driftwood and other beach found items. There are Pringal cans with lights in them along the celing, tree roots made to lanterns, walls made of glass bottles and cement (the nozzles sticking out). Everything it seems is made out of stumps, or drift wood, decoared, and covered with pillows. There are bottle caps mosaics on the pillars. The food is really really delicious (the best I’ve had on lipe) and cheap (before I got a discount), the guys who work there are friendly and kind. I interviewed one with long decorated dreadlocks, named Mut (moot), about the bar. It was a nice interview because it was (a. in english) and b. I got a few different answers that normal. For instance, he said

“I think that if everyone took… if you have your home and you take care in front your home, beside your home, that is enough. If you are thinking you want to help everything in the island, too much, because you cannot do by yourself alone. But if you have one home, your home, make nicer, make something clean, make a small tree, coconut tree, or something, you can do… I have some land too in the jungle and it grow up everytime when I go to the jungle. I put more tree like the lemon, the coconut, I grow chilis, pumpkin…put more jungle in the jungle…if everybody do, Lipe will be beautiful.”

"don't worry about the future"

2010-06-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

28

Long day lots of rain. Took Photos. Met a Monk who was really keen on converting me which wasn’t so useful to my project, but he also had a really fitting sign hanging on the way to them temple that said “don’t worry about the future”. Spent half a day writing two awful poems before I could get out a good one. Read up on the history of the Urak Lawoi. Chatted with Pi Jaeng, who smiles so convincingly in his eyes and so often I can’t help but to really enjoy his company. Met some more tourists, a Russian and American couple (Marcus and Marsha), who may be snorkeling/diving companions in the future. Heard, from a Thai woman named Soy, about her trip to Belgium and culture shock that hilariously resonated (sometimes as opposites) to my experiences. “I couldn’t figure out how to get off the plane. its your first time flying and everything is so different, and scary. I looked out the window once we landed and it was very tall to go down. There were so many different ways to go, for bag, for pet, for getting plants, the airport was huge. I saw someone else with black hair (an asian person) and followed them… and in Belgium I couldn’t sleep it was very cold! I wore double everything, double pants, double socks”. I feel some of the novelty shock is giving way to let in a little more of the lonely, but I’m still doing really well overall.

schools of thumbnail sized yellow fish

2010-06-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

27th
Today I did two more snorkeling trips. First was out at the other point of the big bay that my beach is right next to. I was surprised, there was actually a lot of good coral there. There were big rocks cascading down into the water too, which I always enjoy. I saw the biggest fish so far – I’m guessing about a meter long! (maybe three quarters) and it looked like a puffer fish! (I’d love to see him expand). I don’t know if it was actually a box fish (same body shape). It was spotted kind of like a green leopard. I took a picture with my underwater camera. I kept getting “sea turtled” on the dive, aka, startling myself my mistaking floating pastic wrappers for jelly fish. This was probably made worse by the fact that the water was littered like a mine field with tiny invisible shreds of dead jellyfish. When you swam into one, ZAP! If it got you on the ankle, or ear, or lip, it hurt! (but only for a minute or so). The other really note worthy thing, was I saw an Urak Lawoi fishing trap. It was about the size of… a bathtub? It was like a cylinder with one flat side: the arches made of bent “rattan” vine and with rope netting. It was quite far down, just off a point of rocks, sitting on a sandy patch on the bottom amid boulders and coral heads. Inside were half a dozen large brown and white reef fish, and one giant black parrot fish. They turned this way and that, nudging at the netting. I remembered my professor for ISDSI when I came here last time said the biggest fish are the best breeders, so the most important for the population so it’s hard on the ecology because we tend to go for the biggest. On the other hand, it was really cool to see this traditional form of fishing and trap (hand made) from mostly local materials. I dived down several times, until my ears wouldn’t clear properly anymore. I found I get about a dozen or so free dives per snorkeling event before my right ear starts hurting and refusing to clear. I liked the idea of showing this integration of the reef, the fishing pressure, the local culture, and tried to take some photos (no clue if any will turn out). Then I realized the camera I was using had taken in a little salt water, maybe it wasn’t built to work at depth….

I took a nap in a hammock, in the shade, on the beach. I ate two of the best mangos of my life. I felt a little lonely. I went snorkeling on the other side of the island in the afternoon. Apparently, the Urak Lawoi little kids just had an english lesson because on my way to the reef I passed a bunch -- waving from a beached boat, and the boughs of a fallen tree-- they shouted, giggling, “hello, goodbye, hello hello, hello goodbye, goodbye, hello”.

I decide to check out shark rock. There was some staghorn coral that wasn’t bleached there, which was nice to see. It was windy, so the current was pretty fast, and the water pretty shallow, so I didn’t go around shark rock (but soon!). I floated through clouds of fingernail sized yellow fish (Sergeant angels). I watched crabs scuttle over barnacles on above water in the rocky coves of a small island, while sea cucumbers munched on the sand below. On the way back I chased a massive herd of grey parrot fish, devouring the coral with their chom chom chom / Squeek Squekk like ice snapping, or puppies in tennis shoes on a gym floor.

Moonlight Marching

2010-06-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

26

Man so exhausted. So I did more interviews today. Met and talked with Bee and Darius some more, (they gave me some good leads about who to go for interviewing / friending in the Urak Lawoi village). Then I went into town with the intention of interviewing the smoothie couple and Pi Pooh, but met this woman named Pi Tasha. We made friends and started talking about ways to improve the island, and the issues I’m studying, and ended up planning a volunteer day to lead by example of –doing something- about the env. on the island and not just talking and talking about it, which she says is all that ever happens. Then she invited me to make dinner with her and made Farang food (which apparently other Thai’s don’t appreciate) absolutely phenomenal salad, chicken and pesto olive pasta. We spoke pretty late into the evening. Then a line of soldiers. Yup soldiers. Walked by (one corner of Lipe is a military base) and they were all wearing leather boots, camo, carrying big guns, and had the most ridiculous hard hats covered with plastic branches and leaves like crazy bobbing green feathers. They were friendly enough from a march and smiled and waved a little when we waved. And Pi Tasha pushed me out into the line so they would walk me part of the way home, so I walked along with them, people saluting and laughing from the side of the road. They walked out of Walking Street and onto the beach in a line and the tide was way out so the beach was wide, and it was a full moon, and the resorts lights were dancing in a haze far away, and it was quite a sight – the soldiers (with guns and cammo and their hats) marching along onto the beach and into the moonlight.

Good quote from the day: the reef is everything for this island. People just coming for the beach? No. there are many many beaches in Thailand and we are pretty remote to come just for the beach…. And if the reefs die, the kind of people will change. The kind who come for the nature and the reef, they are more polite, more respectful, they will care about protecting Lipe’s nature. They aren’t the kind who get drunk in the street. If the people change, Lipe will be more dangerous, especially at night, like Phi Phi or Phuket.

Rough Day

2010-06-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

June 24 (day of darisu and bee dinner, forgot to copy)

During the day I did more interviews of shop owners along Lipe’s walking street. I attempted my first interviews int eh Urak Lawoi village, but unlike the shop owners who seemed fascinated and eager to be interviewed, the four villagers I asked declined or drifted shyly away. The forth, was unemployed and in quite a rough time and talked to me for a while. It turns out she wasn’t originally Chow Lay and came from Phuket some years ago. Although I’m not sure I caught everything she was saying, it was a very interesting (and different) interview from so far. I read up on coral bleaching, as well.

June 25th

Uhhh. I just saw some men talking on the porch or Sanom café and I thought Pi Jaeng might be there so I wandered down, but it was Solep, Ewwehwim, and a bunch of their (I’m assuming) Burmese worker friends. I chatted for a second, but I wasn’t up to getting started at more today, and I went back to collapse in my Bungalow.

Today has been rough. The electic cut out last night, so I couldn’t finish my Participant Observation/recording/journaling for the night, and when I checked the time it was almost one anyway. When my alarm work me at 5:30 for my run, it was pouring. I slept till 8. I ran at 8:30-9. It was really difficult because of the heat, (even though it was still raining) and I felt I couldn’t get enough air. I went to town and had, a remarkably great breakfast of Tom Kra Kai. But as I was waiting for breakfast to arrive, I realized my stomach didn’t feel so great. Once I finished breakfast and journaling and uploading it was already 11:00. I went out to take photos – something I havn’t done much so far so I decided to take time for it. I encountered the lovely “smoothie shop couple” who we interviewed last year and who were excited to be interviewed this evening. Pi Pooh agreed to be interviewed in the afternoon. The people with the store with fruits and veg by the Urak Lawoi village were also welcoming and happy to be photographed. They also came to the island about a year ago. I ventured into the Urak lawoi village.

A bunch of women and girls were gathered around the first house. They were seated on a big wooden porch/area. The were pouring and packing fish sauce, “orange water”, red pepper, and sugar, (the toppings for noodles here) into little plastic bags, cutting soaked chicken feet with a meat cleaver, and boiling broth and water. I introduced myself. Only a few would look my way. No one acknowledged me, exactly. I explained, in two sentences, my research. I asked if I could take pictures of them making the soup. One woman said “yes”. I asked the girl nearest me, if I could take her picture and the woman who said yes said “ty lurry!” which means like …” Go ahead and take them!” maybe with the subscript (don’t keep asking us!). I took a bunch of pictures. A bunch of men were sitting playing cards and drinking whisky across the street. One man with half a bottle of Red Label came over and started talking to me. He was slurring; he wanted me to take his picture with one of the girls in the picture, too. She was clearly not amused and would get up and move away. He’d follow, sloshing behind her. I tired to engage the women and ignore the drunk man. They asked if I wanted a bowl of the soup. I didn’t really, but I said yes. It was noodle with “chicken insides”. Normally, I’ll all for food adventures and i've eaten intestines before, but the intestines looked like (please excused the description) fatty wrinkled butt holes. I ate the pieces of liver. The broth was really good. The man said, “if you don’t eat everything its not delicious.” I looked at the soup. I thought if I ate the butt holes I might hurl onto the woman next to me, and I decided that would be markedly more insulting that not finishing.

Yesterday, I tried the tactic of walking up and asking to interview right away/looking for somebody who wanted to be interviewed. That didn’t work so well. Today I tried the tactic to hang out with a group for a long time, chat, try to integrate, try to give a causual context, wait for an opportunity for someone to open up a little, or an opportunity to talk to someone. Giving it only one afternoon, this didn’t work either. (I heard that the researcher who originally came here (6 years ago?) stood around in the village not being accepted for like, a year, (maybe half?) before people started talking to her. Ahhhhhhh! After my expeience of today, I am…. In awe… I felt quite awkward. I’d ask the women questions every so often. If the questions were simple, once in a while they would answer. Slowly as the women finished whatever they were doing, then left.

Eventually, it was just me and the main noodle soup maker. She was chopping pieces of chicken into smaller pieces. When I write “pieces of chicken” I think of the sytrofoam platters of breasts they have in Meijer. This chicken came in a big yellow bowl, rimmed in flies. It was still covered in the pimply skin. It had little toe nail claws. This didn’t surprise me in anyway, but it struck me vividly. The man came back over. At two plus hours in, I was eager for anyone to talk to me. He flipped through my notebook, trying to read where I had words written in Thai to aid my correct pronunciation of the vowels. I started talking to him. (He seemed much more coherent now). He began giving the same set of answers I have been getting from each shop owner. It turns out he is also not Chow Lay. He arrived three months ago. He is working on the trash problem, from what I could gather as the collector and the person who sells the trash – so he’s the one who has taken over the position Pi Pooh used to have?

== long tangent about waste management, only read if you’re interested ===

Background: Pi Pooh got together a group of buiseness owners and created this system of dealing with the waste where every business pays in based on their size. Then the trash is collected, sorted, and boats come to carry it off the island. There were lots of cool side projects like ducks to eat the food waste (although most of them died, choked on little pieces of plastic), and the recycling would be sold as a bonus for the sorters who had to pick through it all, or used to offset the costs of hiring boats to take the trash away. It was called Rahk Lipe. Which was cleaver because it Rahk can be read as both “love” and “protect”. It had some harships, like many resorts were not paying their dues, but it was also working pretty dang well (especially compared to burying the trash!). As every person I’ve interviewed, then and now, has listed trash as the number one envionrmental problem on the island, there was clearly a public motion to support it. ‘Some people thought I was making a lot of money with the program,’ Pooh said, ‘but I was loosing money.’ It was also a stressful job, because people were always complaining, about dues, or rubbish.

When I arrived with ISDSI last year, my sub-group studied waste management on the island. As I seem to have a knack for doing, we arrived at a pivotal point for that issue too. While we were there, Pi Pooh was handing the whole operation over the district government. I believe I thought this was a success. I might have written something in my final paper like “this shows how and bottom up approach to solving environment problems, and bringing people together around a common cause, can be institutionalized into an established system”. I can’t remember, or it was unclear why, but the program was sort of shrinking in size the week we arrived. Where there had been about 15 employees, then there was 11. Today, (as far as I could understand) Mah Goh, the man I interviewed said he worked alone, and then said there were 3 others who helped separate the garbage. I haven’t seen the name Rahk Lipe, anywhere. Maybe because it is low season, and people aren’t bothering to clean, but the island is much much dirtier. Trash is all along the street and the beach. Why would the government say it wanted to take over the operation, and then drop it?

(I’ve since been told, this never happened, rahk lipe is still going, still doing the trash collection, and just ran out of money during the low season when everybody left / pi pooh resigned from being the person who goes around getting yelled at and trying to collect money so he could focus on his own business. And by a different source, a different story. (what I keep thinking should be a simple matter is turning out quite controversial… government, money, garbage, drama!)

== tangent ends==

When I thought i might pass out from the exhaustion of being ignored, I thanked Mah Goh, for his interview and left. I bought a smoothie and tired to recuperate. That’s when I realized my stomach had really gone sour. It felt like someone was twisting around in there with a stick. I thought of the twenty minute walk home and was … overwhelmed. I had an interview in a few hours, here. I walked home. I lay down on the beach in the shade. I went to my bungalow and slept through both the interviews I was suppose to have, and to 7, when I had said I’d meet John and the girls to watch soccer. I got up and ate a granola bar for dinner. When I went to go talk to Solep and his friends all stared at me, I decided that was enough of that and called it a night.

P.S. The sea is beautiful. I’m really glad I’m staying here a little more than a month. It might take a while to get interviews in the village!

You could swim to it

2010-06-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a long dinner with new friends: John the recently retired engineer from Australia, who has been living on Lipe for the last four months. Two charming sweedish sisters (names coming when I remember them) one 29 a nurse, one 17. And Darius a European Farang married to Bee, and mainlander from near Lipe. Darius and Bee own a beech side coffee shop/bungalow/restaurant place where we all just met to have pizza and salad dinner. It was a phenomenal evening. Darius and Bee are –full- of stoires of Lipe over the last seven years.

One story was about when the Tsunami came in 2004. Lipe (named after the local word Nipe, which means flat) is an extremely flat island, especially when compared to its neighbors Adang and Rawi. Luckily, the Tsunami didn’t hit hard here. Darius and Bee’s neighbors saw it happen. They ocean, the neighbors said, came in and out, in and out, very very fast. They were (smoking hooka) watching the Farang one second swimming in the bay, the next second flopping on the sand. The fish too, and all the coral were exposed, and the fish, suddenly out of water were flopping and flopping, dancing and dancing, until the water came back in. On the other side of the island, both from Adang and from Lipe, they watched the water pull out from the channel between the islands, and all the fish were flopping and shimmering, and the coral heads revealed, and then the wave passed between the islands and from the perspective of each shore, the people on Adang thought ‘lipe must be gone” and the people on lipe thought “adang is gone higher than the coconut trees on the shore” and the wave just went straight through and both sides were just fine. On one island, not far from here, some fishermen and an old man were on the beach. The old man saw that suddenly the longtail boat was sitting on the sand, and he knew the tide does not go out in five minutes (he didn’t know anything about Tsunamis, but knew something was wrong) and he told the otherman, and they went the only way they could, which was up the mountain side. Then the wave came and carried the longtail boat all the way into the forest and left it there, where it still is today. You can go an see it resting in the jungle.

A sadder topic was the history of the Chow Lay ocean people on the island (the Urak Lawoi). How they used to own the land, and could make a fortune off of it, but they sold and sold it, and now their own village is sitting on rented land. Darius and Bee talked about how they used to rent their land from a Chow Lay. It was a great deal for him, every year they paid rent and when the contract expired he would get everything, all the infrastructure, the customers, the business. For seven years they explained this to him, and did this contract, but then at the beginning of this season he decided he wanted to sell. He wanted to buy a motorcycle. They said they tried to convince him that this was not a good idea, but that he only wanted to sell. It’s like many of the chow lay have never learned to think in the long term, they cannot see the consequences of their actions over time. It complicated by the fact that the land (once owned by grandparents) now has ownership split between many grandchildren, so if more than half want to sell, it usually gets sold even if a few have tired to build something or go somewhere with the land. John talked about seeing on the island, tin roofed wobbly shacks -- with amazing sound systems in them. The music coming out of the little hut would be fabulous, and he could see the colorful lights flashing between the cracks in the walls. Darius talked about how seven years ago “the chow lay village used to be well kept, clean, and beautiful, when it was their own land. But now they just throw things on the ground, since it is not their land,” he said, “what do they care.’ I asked if the new influx of packaged goods was part of it too. “yeah,’ he said “for sure”. He said, “they know their done for, they just drink themselves away from it all. They’ve got no land. Their running out of the money they made from selling the land. The water is running out of fish. A man, 23 years old, died last year on the walking street road. He drank himself to death on white whiskey (whiskey cheaper than beer).” I mentioned how we heard last time I was here that some chow lay, having sold their land on Lipe, want more land and bigger villages inside the national park. The national park doesn’t want to give it. The chow lay have no where to go. Many are just squatting on the land they already sold, until the developers move in and want to build another bungalow there.

We talked about what people want, and what they think they want, and how everyone has a right to choose. I said how some of my experiences in Thailand make me question if people (the world over) actually know what will make them happy. “When it comes down to it, though. We choose what we want. If these people want a motorcycle, if that is what is important to them, they have the right to that” said Darius. To me it looked like the Urak Lawoi, coming from a life style of being able to take what ever they needed from the sea whenever they needed it, hadn’t learned long term judgment.(I think Jaeng might have said something like this 6 months ago). I kept thinking of kids, getting a huge sum of inheritance and not knowing what to buy with it. This isn’t to say every Urak Lawoi person sold their land for a motorcycle – several have made successful business, or rent their land. “Pi Jaeng,” (who owns the bungalows I’m staying at) I said, “seems to be doing really well with his land. He is always working on the bungalows when I’m around. He seems to have a lot of perspective on the situation of the Urak Lawoi on the island.”
“Yes” agreed Darius. “He is a smart, a hard worker, and doing well. But he was very lucky. Everything he built he could build because the money to start was a gift.”
“Really?” I say.
“Have you seen the big house on the hill behind the resort?” asked Bee. “That guy gave Coon Jaeng the money to build what he built. Well, it was a trade more than a gift. Jaeng gave him the land to build his house on. The “contract” was done in this house. Since Darius could speak Swedish with the house builder, and Thai with Jaeng.” Darius added, “Once he got the money, Jaeng had to work hard too. He only had money, but no one to help him put in the nails.”

Yet another facet of the issue is the availability of extremely cheep Burmese labor. “there are a thousand Burmese on the island right now’ said Bee. ‘That’s an exaggeration. But they are easily the biggest group here. They have no papers, no passport. They work for nothing, 200 Bhat, 300 Bhat a day. They eat one meal and work all day. They’re good workers, and they’re strong too. They don’t get drunk at work.” She listed basically every big resort on the island, “They all have many Burmese workers.”

We talked about the trawlers, the lines of bright lights on the horizon. They shine extremely bright floodlights into the sea to attract the schools of fish. When they see on the radar there are enough fish (say 10,000 kilo) a huge fishing boat comes in and puts a net around them all and takes them all away. Tah Lay Mohd. (the sea is empty). The national park says nothing. “they have money in their mouths. They require a 200 Bhat fee for the national park, but they don’t do their job. The money just goes into their pockets. They don’t get paid very much, and if its not enough to feed your family what are you going to do?” (Who wants to be posted way out here in the middle of nowhere?) The rule is not fishing within 10 kilomoters of the park. When we interviewed them last season, the park claimed the enforced the law and that it was 3 kilometers away. I say, I once saw floating lights set up for this kind of fishing in the narrow channel between Ko Lipe and Adang. “oh!” says Daruis “That’s nothing. They were off that point right there two nights ago. Right off your Sanom bungalows (the bungalows I’m staying at). The huge fishing boat came right in to the point. You could have swum to it.”

Besides the trawlers, I was very happy to hear what Darius said about sea life. “There’s all kinds of sea life here. Black tip sharks, nurse sharks, manta rays, eagle rays, rock fish, (and many more I can remember). There is less now, but you can still find them.” He told us where we could find sharks off Lipe, behind a certain rock, if you came at it from behind in a certain way (so as not to scare them off). They are about 10 kilos, he measured about a meter with his hands. Black tips. They’re not dangerous. They just swim away. Once a man said he had them swim two times around him, then they swam off.” Apparently my face was revealing my excitement. John laughed and noted I was “itching to go”. He said he’d go with me to see them sometime, he knew the place Darious was talking about. I can’t wait!

My friends walked me home along the beach, since it was late. They laughed as I showed them the way to Sanom beach – you get to the end of Pattaya beach and then clamber onto these big rocks. You can’t see the path at first, it just looks like climbing onto rocks. Then there is a walkway made of bamboo poles nailed together that leads over the rocks and around the corner to Sanom Resorts, with it’s small private beach. Since it’s high tide with a full moon, the waves sometimes come sloshing right over the rocks and under the path. It seemed completely normal to me, until I saw how surprised everyone way. Wow, they said, this is really adventurous! I guess it does feel a little like being a lost boy, coming home to my treefort-bungalow every night.

Writing Day

2010-06-23T21:41:00.001-07:00

In the morning, is saw the travelers off. I skyped Tor, I heard about catching giant swamp spiders by wading through the muck and catching the frog-eating-arachnids with ziplock bags and gloves. I read up on coral bleaching in Thailand, rested, (it’s become extremely hot again), was assaulted by the black and white stripped dengue mosquitoes, cleaned up the beach in front of my bungalow, went into town for dinner, wrote, hydrated, watched a gecko catch a moth, journaled.

Environment Girl

2010-06-23T21:38:00.000-07:00

Today I meet up with a few tourists I encountered in town yesterday and we all split the price of a long tail boat to go snorkeling for the day. It was a delightful group. First there were three Muslim Swedish girls traveling together, who were originally from Malasia. One, Pi Yang, spoke fluent Thai, one Amanai spoke fluent English, and one Amoneh, seemed pretty shy and didn’t speak much while I was there. They had made friends with two Thai guys who came in on the boat with them. Both of them were apparently named Bond. One Bond was from Bankok and spoke english well, and the other was a friend who Bankok bond met online as a travel buddy for sourthern Thailand. Overall, our gang was hilarious company since we were such a hog-pog of languages. Sometimes Bankok Bond would try to ask me something in english, but I woudn’t understand so he would tell Pi Yang in Thai and she would Tell Amanai in Sweedish and Amanai would tell me in english.

I bought some fried chicken and sticky rice on my walk to met them at their resort where they were having breakfast. I’m not sure whether Thai friend chicken is the best in the world, or if I just don’t eat fried chicken enough in the US, because it was great. At the resort, which was the same one my study abroad program stayed at six months ago, the wait staff recognized and remembered my name which was really touching! It was so fun to see them again!

Our boat driver was named Coon Lehk. He had smile lines on the corners of his eyes that looked like the v of a fish tail. He had rich tan skin, and short dark hair that was just starting to go grey on the tips. He wore a silver ring and bracelets, and a black and silver chain and shell necklace. His character might best be described by his wiry black gotee.

As we were leaving Lipe, a stormy rain shower came sweeping in between the two islands Ko lipe and Koa dang. Our boat motored off into the gale, which rapidly got more adventersome. The troughs of the waves rocked us, cold rain pelted into the wooden boat the islands almost disappeared into the clouds. We hung tight to our lifejackets, and I carefully watched Coon Lehk as he handled the boat. Long tails are steered with outboard motors, attached to a long handle and a pivot. Coon Lehk branced against the rain and the waves using all his strength to guide the boat in a zig zag across the channel. He looked like the was concentrating very hard, and I could see every muscle in his strong calves and arms as he steered the boat.

In maybe 15 minutes we reached the lee of Ko Adang. Here, it was just raining lightly, s the mountain blocked the cloud. We got out and took a peak around in the warm water, with a thin layer of cold where the rain had fallen on top. Almost immediately, I saw two long thin predatory fish gliding along the surface and then a beautiful blue and purple and black hexagonally patterned eel coiled under a coral. We snorkled three places alongside of the lee of Ko Adang. Each place was thick with coral heads, about a third of them bleached. There was still a lot of sea life around. Schools of parrot fish chewing on the coral. Large true clown fish (black and white not orange and white), and the normal colorful array of reef fish. It was clear that the staghorn coral and other thin branching kinds were hit hardest by the bleaching. They were like white chandeliers sitting on the reef. Some of the Massive coral boulders were bleached, others were still vivid green. Coon Lehk explained that the coral turns very bright blue just before it bleaches.. which may explain the “easter eggs” I saw off Mountain resort the other day… I’m not sure.

There is a smaller Urak Lawoi fishing village on the lee side of Adang, which we saw from the boat. The island is thick with jungle, and emergent trees, waterfalls. Two Urak Lawoi boys were playing of a moored row boat, they looked just like my friends playing on a raft at Friends Lake back home.

We ate lunch on a white beech, and waited for the water to calm down for a while. Bankok Bond made a woman out of sand, and named her Lisa. Coon Lenk talked to Sounthern Bond quite a lot about the coral, and Bond was full of questions. Some I understood, a lot about the currents ext. I couln’t. It turns out Coon Lehk is not a Urak Lawoi, he is from another part of Thailand, but he came to Lipe because he likes the fishing lifestyle. Although, as I understand it, only Urak Lawoi are supposed to be allowed to fish (as part of their traditional life style, early claims to the island resources), so it was interesting to see that Coon Lehk has been able to live as a fisherman on lipe as well. There are a lot of mackerel and barracuda, he said. He also explained climate change as the cause of the reef’s bleaching. So far, most of the people I’ve met have been aware of climate change’s role in the bleaching of the reef. Only one Farang, and one Thai person of maybe a dozen or two I’ve asked, couldn’t tell me when I asked why the reef was bleaching.

While we talked Pi Yang and Amanai were walking down the beach collecting shell and hermit crabs and putting them in plastic bags. They showed up and dumped their load onto the sand, and the treasure immediately began scuttling away full speed, so they were gathered back up and redeposited in the bags. Amanai showed me her bag, to which she had added seawater for them to live in. The crabs had abandoned their shells, and were clawing and wiggling wildly at the plastic. I suggested that maybe they were drowning as opposed to swimming. She seemed hesitant, but poured out the water. When we were getting ready to leave, they wanted to bring the shells and crabs with them, but I asked them not to. They agreed not to bring the crabs, but still wanted the empty shells. I explained, feeling cheesy, that the crabs needed bigger homes when they grew up and would need the other shells. They weren’t happy about it, but they left them behind and I felt better. This started my reputation as Nak Anorak or Environment Girl. This became the joke of the next twenty four hours.

We snorkled one last place by the Urak Lawoi village. Here I saw a crab sneak up a giant colorful ocean clam before it could snap shut. The crab grabbed the fleshy meat of the clam and then slowly pulled and yanked and tore the clam out of its shell. Meanwhile, the reef fish swarmed the pair, trying to steal the clam meat. The pink red crab moved like a slow and jerky puppet. His buggy white eyes with red dots for pupils twitching this way and that. He had just broken away with a long stretching piece of clam (it just kept coming out and out of the giant clam shell, which would twitch futilely now and again), and suddenly a huge green-brown moral eel lunges out of the coral and the crab retreats and the fish flee and the eel grabs a big chunk of clam and disappears again. It was classic “always a bigger fish”. It looked just like something you’d see on Discovery. The eel came back and snapped at the fish that were still trying to get pieces of the clam. I was only floating a few feet above all this and wondered if the eel electicuted a fish if I would feel it in the water.

The last place we snorkled, was just off the place where boats are moored on Lipe. While I saw swimming around the people on the boat caught a bunch of reef fish, (with a dumping food in the water and net I think) and were holding them in their hands. I swam up to the boat and they handed me one, which I didn’t know what it was until it was flopping in my palms. Surprised, I dropped it into the sea. It looked frazzled, but swam away. I followed it for a bit, interested to see if it recovered, which it seemed to. The bottom of the boat was swarmed with tons of fish (looking for more handouts?) it was very fun to swim though the cloud of them.

We ate together at a little restaurant next to the school. I was starving and it was delicious chicken soup with wide noodles. I can’t even explain how good it was. We told stories and tried to translate jokes through many langagues. I ordered a drink for a card table nearby, successfully without knowing what it was and as they man handed it over, I asked what it was called (looking for the word smoothie) and he said ‘cow-poat” which is “corn”. (it turned out to be a corn flavored smoothie. It was pretty good.)

I went home, showered, cleaned my gear, ext. and we were going to meet again for dinner, with Coon Lehk to grill fish and make som tom but I got there ten minutes late, and no one was there. I watched kids play soccer at the school for twenty minutes, it started to get dark. I feel sad, thinking of everyone bar-b-queing and having a great time without me. I decided to go see if I could find them, at the resort maybe, and walked along the beach to mountain resort. Three thai guys asked me where I was going, and then three dogs ran up and jumped on me, and I hit them on the nose with a waterbottle and shouted at them (the dogs), and felt harassed and awkward. When I arrived at the resort, my friends the employees in the restaurant showed me which bungalow my diving friends were in, and the girls where in there watching a movie. Apparently there were no fish to grill, so the night was cancelled. Bond and Bond came over and we watched the American movie and then I ahd a sleep over with the girls, since it was late and dark. It was fun to have AC and hot water for the night.

Oh yeah, and after the movie we all went on a spontaneous trip to visit Coon Lehk at his house. Bangkok bond’s idea. And he was eating dinner, so we went out to another restaurant and ate some more. I was so tierd I could barely think (it was like 11 – way past my island bed time  ) but I intervewed Amanai a bit more.

On the walk to go to see Coon Lehk we ran into two people fishing in the dark on the beech. One was an Urak Lawoi man, and the other a Russian tourist. They had caught two reef fish and a small blue spotted ray. They had cut the stinging tail off the ray, but neither the ray nor the fish had died yet. They flopped half in a plastic bag, half in the sand. You could see the flat nub where they sliced off the ray’s tail. Its back was coated in sand. Its eyes flashed wildly about. The spots on its wings, which are normally glowingly bright blue in the water, were pale and drab in the moonlight. I had been hoping to see a ray, on the reef. I don’t know if the Russian man was paying the Urak Lawoi man to take him fishing, or if they were friends, or what. Bankok Bond teased me about being environment girl. He asked me if they ray was beautiful. “more beautiful in the water” I said. All the sadness I felt for Lipe and the reef, and this amazing natural place that is so rare and so special, suddenly welled up in me and I felt angry and hopeless. There is so much stacked against this place: climate change, tourist development, the trawling big fishers off shore, the corrupt national park, the local fishing people, tourists who take shells and put crabs in plastic bags because they don’t know better, this Russian man fishing in the dark. I wanted to pick the ray up and fling it back into the sea. Bankok bond asked me if I ate fish. “I eat fish” I said. And we walked on.

Earlier in the day, Bankok Bond, Southern Bond, and I had been walking along the beach. Southern Bond was taking picture of the ocean. Bankok bond said he had come to this part of Thailand because his mom had been all over southern Thailand years ago. She had talked about how beautiful it was, the perfect beaches. But so far, he said, the beaches, the islands, everywhere his mom had went has disappointed. There were many more bunglows, more people. The beach we were walking on, (the beach I walk everyday) is very heavily littered with debris, trash, glass, lighters, syrofoam, diapers, you name it, its probably somewhere on this beach. I explained how we had learned on my study abroad that “in the past” people just brought their trash down to the ocean at low tied and let high tied take it away. ((Yesterday, I saw someone carry a bag to the sea.)) “The island’s aren’t the same as when she came here” he said. “it makes me want to start a volunteer organization for opeople to come here and pick of the trash. I’ll take a picture of what they used to look like and tell my volunteers, O.K. make the beach like this.” I told him how Pi Pung has also had the idea to make a organization to take Thai kids camping here, and then show they how to protect the nature. The idea to teach kids to have a “consciences mind” was finally the word we came to, as the best English translation. “You know today, you talking about not taking the shells because they are the homes for the crabs.” He said. “I make joke you are Environment Girl, but that is a good thing. Maybe if enough people say like this it will change how everybody acts.”

The thing is, it will be so easy and quick to destroy places like Lipe, but to get them back? If we ever wanted to it would be so hard, expensive, and they wouldn’t be nearly as strong or as beautiful… I don’t know how much of the bleached coral is dead, and how much could still recover. (bleaching doesn’t necessarily kill it right away, it can come back sometimes.) But, if Lipe doesn’t get monsoon rains to cool down the waters soon, the coral will probably not recover.

Bathroom Friend

2010-06-23T21:37:00.000-07:00

Today was absolutely perfect. Up to 20 minutes ago… when… I FOUND A GIGANTIC HAIRY BEADY EYED SPIDER IN MY BATHROOM! It was about the size of my hand. And right next to my mirror. We surprised eachother I tied the door shut and turned the light back off. After a lot of consideration I have come to the conclusion it was a tarantula. Grandma J, I brought along a tiny dream catcher you gave me once for a little bit of home and to keep my dreams good in this strange place (also I thought it might be a nice American gift for someone at the end of my trip). Its going to have to work pretty hard tonight!

Other than that today it rained!!! Hallelujah!!! Its so comfortable now!!! I got up at 5:30 and went for a morning run on the beach in the light rain. Next, I went home and clean up and got ready for the day, and then went out and tried to make a skype date with Tor. Unfortunatly, the internet place was not open and poking around in back I couldn’t find anyone to open it for me  I had a Phad Thai breakfast at a little restaurant called Thai Pancake and chatted for a while with the people there, watched some Thai T.V. that I didn’t understand at all. I ended up getting some orange juice down the street and drafting a set of interview questions for the businesses I’m going to interview. While in the café, me and a wonderful Thai woman named Pung (which means bee) and two Farang who are volunteering here for another Farang friend who is building a resort, struck up a conversation and I did an informal / quite long and through and interesting interview for my project. It was outrageously rewarding, and my head was throbbing at the end because Pi Pung is a very good Thai teacher and was constantly helping me correct my sentences and teaching me new words. Then Pi Pung helped me interview the restaurant owner/worker SomSak and that was a really great interview too! (he spoke way too fast and emphatically and big-word-ie for me to understand on my own).

I was walking home in a moment of joy, and noticing the beautiful yellow flowers in the trees, and the teal water, and being proud of my SIP and speaking with such interesting people and all of a sudden this Thai word just pops into my head. I think “did I just learn this from Pi Pung? ( no… ). Is this a word I just heard and recognized, but didn’t know?” and I was still holding the dictionary from the interview so I looked it up and I found it. (which is really unusual because usually I remember/hear a consonant wrong or something and can’t find it) but I found it and guess what it was…. Experience (noun)! I even had the tones right! I had been thinking about what a great experience this was! Brains are such astonishing and complicated things. Somehow my brain found this word, that I didn’t know I even consciously knew, and drew it up when I hadn’t even come to the word in english yet! Wow!

I took a recovery break and looked up and wrote down correct tones and stuff for most of the words I’d just learned from Pi Pung. I read some of Di’s poetry, was enamored yet again, and ate some fruit on my porch. I sort of wanted to sleep, but was tired not sleepy, so I just relaxed for while and when I started to feel anxious about productivity again, I packed up and headed back into town. I did two more interviews in town (a very curious and kind shop owner) and a Urak Lawoi fisherman/restaurant/bungalow worker. The Urak Lawoi fisherman was around and was super easy to understand because he really dumbed down his langage for me, and motioned a lot, and made sure I followed - which was really nice. He gave me some interesting points of view, and insightful quotes like he “likes his restaurant jobs more than fishing by a lot because its not so much work” and “having tourists come allows the islanders to earn much more money to support a different way of life (they are able to buy things besides food, like electricity and tv ect)”, but they have to save money when it comes because the flow of tourists is unsteady and they may need to eat later. As the island becomes very developed the kind of people have changed from coral/diving loving, to just beach going people. He also talked about rotationally closing islands to allow the coral time to rest and recover from diving impacts.

After that it was starting to rain a bit so I started to go home, but felt the inkling for more adventure and came back into town, taking refuge under the awning of a shop. The people said “come inside and sit with us for a bit until the rain stops” and we sat together and chatted. (they ahd just got their dog fixed and the daughter drew on it with red marker to look like a tiger, and wrote on it). Then the daughter got two umbrellas and walked me to Pooh Bar (where I was going) so I wouldn’t get wet!

At Pooh Bar I met back up with Pi Pung and some of her friends to watch the soccer game. I ordered some delicious noodle soup with chicken meatballs. We hung out and her friends seem sooo nice. I walked home along the sea shore. And then I met the spider and my day took a rapid turn towards horrifying.

Two liter sized Pufferfish (blah bakapow!)

2010-06-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

June 20th

Each day of the two I’ve accomplished less than I expected, and ended the day exhausted. I guess I should expect it to be exhausting to spend the whole day speaking in a language you hardly know! The heat is something I’ll have to give my body time and lots of caring to adjust to, too. At noon I came home and lay in my hammock and felt sick for a while, before going back out. There is a growing line of empty water bottles on my front porch. I started to write about how often i put on sunscreen, when i realized, that was a pretty logistical thing to write about. I find myself wanting to write down the wierdest things. I think this is since there is no one around to just tell them to, like i normally would. Lets see, what did i do today... Maybe I should write about climbing along the rocky bolders of the shore. Scrambling over the surf kissed rocks in the sun, with the teal water rolling and tumbling out as far as the eye can see into the horizon. Maybe I should write about a puffer fish bigger than a two liter bottle huffing his spiny stomach at me as I floated over him. His black spots cruzing over the sandy bottom. Maybe I should write about kicking into the waves above the “coral reef” where 30 percent is dead and algae covered, 5 percent is sea anenomies, and 50 percent is bleached – par three weeks ago. Three weeks ago, it would have been easy to come to lipe and talk about the fishermen, the trawling boats off shore, the corrupt park office, the waste water problem and eutrafocation, to talk about the dangers to the reef. It would have been easy to write an essay on how irresponsible or uncaring, or optionless local management was putting in danger this paradise oyster, this ecological and beautiful treasure. Well, I see tying the global community to this issue won’t be hard now.

The reef was depressing. Today I snorkled off mountain resort and it was even worse that my Sanom beach. I’d say 40 to 50 percent was bleached, in someplaces more. I remembered while I was out there, to mildly nauseating surprise that reefs are usually described as colorful. This reef was like going on an Easter egg hunt in a newspaper factory… that just got hit by a tornado. I’d see one head, bright blue or green and the little coral symbionts just blooming. It was almost erie actually the way they would just GLOW these bright colors. But from that coral all I would see was the rust red of the massive heads (their good color) burned with the white frostbite bleaching marks, and then stone colliflowers, and dusty sandy broken pieces on the bottom, and algae consuming the dead parts of the older corals. I saw the normal fish. Normal being about a dozen species, which I expect is not so many as I should be seeing. The most interesting ones were the big parrot fish, green and purple, with their little flocks of grey younger parrot fish. The sound of the parrot fish chewing on the corals is like ice cubes cracking in a glass on a hot day. Its one of the only sounds you can hear on the reef besides your own breath through the snorkel and the rush of waves lifting your body overhead. The other most interesting fish were “Nemo Fish” as my new friend Som calls them. They seem to be doing O.K. in their screaming lemon drop annenomies. The best thing about clown, (or false clown) fish is that when you swim up to them, they see their reflection in your mask and their very territorial so they charge your face, waving their little white fins ferociously. The saddest thing was swimming right up to the bleached corals and seeing the little coral filterfeeding flowers in every pore, but pale white. I’ll need to read up a bit more, but I’m pretty sure that’s the coral, but minus its colorful symbiotic bacteria: the partner it needs to feed.

After diving, I explored the adventurer more today. Scrambling, and climbing over the rocky pier at the end of sunrise beach, to castaway construction sight, and crashing through the woods up to the road, and seeing another symptom of Thai island death: a poster for a full moon party on this “hidden beach”. Walking back and tracking into grey sticky mud which coated my flip flops, and trying to hurry inconspicuously through town (to the nearest foot washing station) without any one noticing this crazy farang girl, sweaty, with crazyperson feet.

I stopped at a road side kanom (snack) stand for dinner and got to know the people working there better. I orderd two of everything. Two grilled hot dogs on a stick, two sets of three pork meat balls on a stick, and two big meaty mystery patties on a stick, and ate them with sweet and spicy sauce and loads of raw cabbage. It was so delicious. There is Som (which means orange) the woman who grills the meat, she is a great person to learn Thai from because she speaks slowly and clearly and repeats everything I say, only with correct grammer or pronunciation so I can see what I’m doing wrong. Then there is Jai (which means heart, mind or spirit) who is classic –very- friendly thai man, who pops in and out and sort of hangs out while the women run the stand. Then there is a older girl who knows a little english I think, because she proudly clears up my and som’s un-understandings will key english words. Her name is Phone (rain) and she is smack dab in the center between cute and beautiful, also quiet with a great smile. She sells drinks while Som sells the food. I checked: They live on the island year round, but are from the mainland. New friends?

Love, Gigi

Day 1: Dying Reef

2010-06-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Post # 1.

Journal excerpt:

I’m talking with Coon Jaeng and he says “are you going diving?”
“yeah” I answer.
“there is coral out there” he says, and gestures out from the beach. A few rocks peak above the sea, and dark blue blotches like camo-shapes are visible beneath the surface. “There is coral out there, but it’s dead.” He says. His voice, like the sea, is calm covering something much more complicated. I imagine I can hear sadness and picture other currents underneath. “Three weeks ago” he said “it was green and alive. Then it turned the color white, then it turned the color black and then it died. It happened all around…” he gestures as if circumnavigating Lipe island. “I went to look in my boat. It died on Ko Adang island and Ko Rawi island and Egg Rock too…. It’s the same as 12, 13 years ago, when Thailand had Elnindo.” ‘sorry, what?” I ask. We are speaking thai and I didn’t catch the last word. I leaned in closer “el nino” he says again, slower, and I understand that I do understand the Spanish word. “ka, ka, Cow Jai” I say ‘oh, yes, I understand.” From the veranda where we are sitting, Coon Jaeng squints out over the beach. “That year, the water was cold, and the coral died the same. This time it is not cold. It is very hot. It’s about temperature. Now, the water is hot. It’s too hot for the coral to live.” I look out over the bright water with pinched eyebrows and a falling heart. Today is my first day of the month I’ll spend on Lipe Island, a four hour boat ride off the southern tip of Thailand. I’ve come to study the coral reef and its relationship with the island’s inhabitants; what factors go into its degradation and what impacts the decline will have on tourist development and the local people. “I came to learn about the reef” I say. “and now its dead. It is hurting heart,” which is the Thai word for sad. “In the US the coral is in danger too, the oil in the sea comes out and comes out and we can’t stop it”. Coon Jaeng nods. We sit in silence for a while. The waves lap up on the paradise white sand beach. A black fishing bird is cawing form the tropical trees in front of Pi Jaengs bungalows. “Today, you dive out there” Pi Jaung says getting up “tomorrow I’ll take you out to Egg Island. Egg Island coral is more beautiful… but its dying too.”

Post # 2.

Hello!

I arrived safely this afternoon on Ko Lipe island. It is unbelievably beautiful. Very humid. And there are hardly any tourists here. The waters are a crisp light blue. The sands are warm and white. Most resorts and restaurants are closed. People (the whole journey long) have been kind and helpful. I’m looking forward to the rest of my stay here. Pi Jaeng, the owner of the bungalows I’m staying at is wonderful. My bungalow has a big hammock overlooking, past shading tropical trees, peaks of the open sea. After starting at 7:00 am W (on four hours sleep) and arriving her at 3 pm F (minus a 13? hour time difference) and sleeping only a bit on the plane I fell directly into bed until now (6:30 – nightfall) so I’ll go into town tomorrow morning to email this and check out the internet situation. At worst I know there is internet for 10 cents a minute (yikes) at one resort. I’m doing extremely well and having a very good time. I was able to get an extra supply of money out of the ATM in the pier town, so although there is no way to get money on the island, I should have enough for the trip with me (hidden around and mostly in my neck pouch for now).

One funny story so far is compared to the people who are just coming out for a few days, my 20.7 K bag and carry on and back pack were humungous!! The speed boat dropped us off on the opposite side of the island from my resort, and for a moment I contemplated carrying all my stuff (possible, but extremely hot and potentially embarrassing) all the way across the island (a 30 munite walk without bags). However, two really helpful employees of another resort gave me a ride in their motorcycle with side luggage car, (for like 3 dollars) and from their resort and I called up Khun Jaeng who cheerfully came to pick me and my stuff up from their resort (and we could meet in person for the first time). I liked him immediately.

Two stories of success were changing my money in BKK (31 B / dollar) not in New York (where the rate was 27 B / dollar) and saving a hundred dollars that way. Then I got to Hat Yai, took a group taxi into town $2 and got a ride from a wonderful woman, Anowan, the two hour van ride to Pak Bara (the pier where I’m going) for only $5. It was a private ac van with lovely company since she goes everyday as part of running her company in the low season, even if only one person like me comes. Although she runs at a loss for the day, she says over time it all works out. (she lives in Pak Bara so she was heading from her Hat Yai office home, a trip she makes each day). It turns out there isn’t a local bus that goes to Pak Bara this time of year, so it was doubly fortunate I could go with Anowan. Because to go by bus would have meant traveling three separate busses and def. missing the 11:30 ferry until the next day. On the ride we joked about how the 6 boats and many agencies running during high season all compete and “fight” to get customers, but in low season everybody works together and are friends because there are so few tourists that they can’t all operate. The same service from the airport would have cost $70 dollars or more. I made the ferry, and had a wonderful time cruising at a whopping, bouncing, flying, 90 kilometers and hour with a really fun family from south Africa out to the island.

To a slight prick in my stomach I realized the only thing I’ve eaten today is a airplane sandwich at 6:30 AM. Hehehe. Time to pull out some of the snacks, dad packed me for the plane, and while I barely touched since meals were served so often. I think I got (in this order) dinner, lunch, breakfast, lunch, dinner, lunch, no wonder my stomach is confused. This time, unlike in last September, we chased the sun around the globe so the whole trip was brightly lit. Mom, the water was a light blue, but mostly looking out the window was too bright to do. We flew over Alaska and n. Canada and could see the tiny nubs of melting glaciers up the big trenches where the used to lay nestled in the mountains.

If your interested google Ko lipe, and click ‘welcome to ko lipe” and check out the map. I’m staying at Sanom bungalos, which are on their own tiny private beach below the biggest “sunset beach”. The owner is the only indigenous islander to have a tourist resort. I’m pretty sure I’m the only guest around right now, but many local people were hanging out in and around the resort today when I came in. Khun Jaeng (the owner) says I’m welcome to use the resort kitchen to cook for myself, or I can get food from the restaurants in the other parts of the island. I have electricity from 6 pm to 1 am to charge things and write. My Thai is slow and I’ve forgotten some words, but it’s returning at a reassuring rate. The flights and connections were no problem at all. I’m almost done reading Blink which is fantastically interesting.

Hope this isn’t too much detail! I want everyone to know I’m safe and sound. I’ll email this tomorrow morning and possibly even skype if the much more affordable internet café is open this time of year. Forward freely.

Love,
Gigi

Post # 3

June 19th

Wow. Today was awesome and I am exhausted!!! The day started with me getting up at early morning, about six. I made my room riep roy, meaning tidied up, and put away the rest of my things, organized my backpack to be a day pack for each day. I was feeling a tiny bit apprehensive about going out to talk to people, but if I didn’t feel that would they really be worth talking to? What I mean is, I guess, the best things are always a bit scary and risky, but that’s where you have the most to gain.

I walked out my door to go into town and talk to someone/have some breakfast but before I even leave sanom bungalos I run into a couple of guy and one girl hanging out in the Sanom greeting/café area. I start talking to them a bit, and they invite me for coffee. Somehow, I understood them very well, especially one really friendly guy name Rit. They were impressed by my Thai and we got on really well. It was defiantly a confidence booster. It was so much fun talking to them! They invited me to eat breakfast with them. We walked out to the beach and over to the rocky point, where their lodge was perched above. Smoke was rising from a cooking fire nestled between three triangular rocks. We made breakfast on the beach! I learned everyone (all 8 peoples) names by writing them down and practicing, there was Rit, Ne-ew, Non, Oh-rah., Guang, Ek or “x”, Atit, and Ray. –interjection, omg, my eye lids are sunburned!!! – it was so perfectly amazing. We took photos and chatted and joked. They were all guys, a big extended family. I wondered at the time where all the girls were. The boys splashed, snorkeling, in the water. We ate together on the beach. It was… watery cooked cabbage with garlic and egg! With (tor you’ll love this) something called “salty fish”. Aka fish cooked, soaked, roasted, grilled, injected, made of, and sprinkled with salt. About one rice sized flake of fish is like… my max per bite. normally people just sort of squish a ball of rice on the fish and the juices that come out make the rice flavored salty. Classic real Thai food.
Everyone was just perched on these big bolders on the beach, joking and chatting, or shuffling about up and down the rocky sairs/latter to get up to the huge bungalow veranda above. Smoke rising from the fire and wafting over into the sunlight…

It felt great to make friends and hang out on the beach with them. They invited me to go snorkeling with them, but I decided I had a responsibility to email that I had arrived safe so I went on. At one point, Ray asked me what I thought of Thai people, and i said “They are very generous” and that is the truth. I think if I had to describe all of my experiences in Thailand with two words they would be adventure and generosity.

After that I went into town and used Pi Pooh’s internet and reconnected with him. He remembered my face which was fun. (we interview Pi Pooh in my project group studying waste management last time I was here. He basically single handedly started up a waste management system on the island.)

Next I came home chatting to people on the way. Lipe is composed of the biggest most developed “sunset beach” lined with bars, resorts, massage parlors, resturants, ect. Then a main foreigner drag/walking street, lined with the same plus stores, internet cafes, ext. Almost all of these are closed. The beach and the streets have accumulated debris, natural coconut shells, bits of dead coral, leaves, and driftwood, as well as construction debris and lots of trash. A few of the every kind of venue is open though, and almost everyone I’ve seen has been Thai, and a lot of them local or at least full time residents, which makes a whole different feel because the migrant seasonal workers are not as invested in the island, its social atmosphere, or it’s future, as those who call it home. When I spot them on the beach or in a shop, Farang (foreigners) are a unexpected and a sort of awkward sight.

The other half of lipe is remnants of forest and the Chow Lay (ocean people) villages. These are corrugate roved houses, bustling with playing kids, and working/socializing adults. The village is crowded with bedraggled chickens, and skinny dogs, and cats. I saw a chicken wire cage with doves, women washing clothes, carrying coconuts, making dinner, a guy and his toddler son burning an empty blue oil drum, a scrawny puppy yowling as it ferociously chased its tail, a man selling popcorn from a cart… Imagine trees enough for shade, dirt roads, houses haphazardly arranged over the packed ground, a spattering of brush and gardens, many neighbors hanging out together and working, lots of animals.

I’m trying to basically only speak Thai unless the other person speaks really good english (like pi pooh) and I’m really enjoying immersing myself in the language again.

After coming home, I went for a snorkel off Sanom beach. When I got out there I’d say about 30% of the coral was bone white. Some was dead, some was still alive. There were a decent amount of fish, some pretty big parrot fish, a few morish idols. It was a mix of a really euphoric to be there, but sad about what was happening dive. My new fins were heavenly and all my equipment, mask, snorkel worked flawlessly, which was awesome. I am fascinated by reefs. The second I get in, I just want to learn more about them. Get really close up and look at the little symbionts in the coral. Follow the schools of fish. Know what species I’m seeing. Know what species I’m not seeing, but should be. They are just so exciting and high energy, even when they are half dead.

After the swim I showered, the water very warm from the tubes in the sun all day, and washed my equipment. I decided to escape the heat of mid day and did a lot of organizing ideas on my porch. I brainstormed and wrote up schedules, safety protocols, decided on how I would record my experiences and did some journaling.

I took a two hour walk around the island. Bought some long kong, and knawhk fruits to share. Came back, showered again, and met with my new neighbor friends for dinner. This is when I found out they are just visiting and are leaving tomorrow! Oh no! all that time I spent memorizing names, socializing and networking is leaving tomorrow morning. Boo. It was really fun and rewarding and worth it, though it would have been superb if my friends were staying longer.

I am so exhausted I can hardly type. Good night!

ONG I almost forgot!! On my walk I saw a older fisherman carrying a GIGANTIC SWORD FISH over his shoulder into town. It was at least 7 feet long, without its giant sword nose. It was insane! He let me take a picture. Coming soon. I bumped into him a bit later, too. He sold it for 500 B -- about 16 dollars.