I'm becoming a mermaid.

I fixed my camera!  I think it just got wet.  I took it apart and put it back together again, and now it sort of works again!  Woohoo!

So, this picture is back on Ton Sai beach.  This is my good friend, Neao.  I met him while I was waiting for the taxi-boat to Ton Sai.  I spent a lot of time with him while he taught me some of the Thai language.

This is another friend of mine named Chi.  He makes really good coffee.  All of these guys work at the Chill Out Bar, which is the best place to hang out on Ton Sai.

This is Fidi, one of the German guys who I climbed with at Ton Sai.  I really love the climbing community at Ton Sai.  Everyone is super welcoming even if you're not such a good climber (like me).  I literally only took two steps onto the beach before a bunch of climbers approached me and asked me if I like climbing.  It sort of went like this:

Jason: "Do you climb?"
me: "Yea."
Jason: "Cool.  That's a good hotel.  Put down your bags over there, and then let's go climb the Groove Tube."
me: "Ok."

You might also wonder why Fidi is wearing a Native American headdress in this picture.  Ton Sai is a really silly place with lots of toys laying around.  I think that's why I like Ton Sai so much: People are just there to have fun, and everyone is super accepting of you no matter how silly you are.  This attitude encourages you to do whatever you want to do and not to worry about people thinking negative thoughts about you.  When I wasn't climbing, I spent my time on Ton Sai doing a lot of hula-hooping and swinging around balls of fire. 

This is me climbing at Ton Sai!  This climb is right on the beach next to the Freedom Bar.  While I was belaying (which means holding the rope while someone else climbs), I sat at a table at the Freedom Bar eating banana pancakes.  Could life get any better?  I don't think so.

This is how I finally left Ton Sai.  I took a few buses and ended up at Surat Thani.  From there, I took this boat overnight to an island called Koh Tao.  It was a really cool boat ride.  I spent half the night sitting on the upper deck looking at the stars.  A cool fact:  The moon is upside-down on this side of the world.

This is me doing a scuba diving course with Milley and Lucas on Koh Tao.  Today, I became a certified open water diver! 

This is me in my scuba gear right before my fifth dive.  At first, I found the diving kind of scary.  Have you ever had that dream where you're under water and then you realize that you can breathe?  That's what diving is like.  For me, there was a moment of panic when I jumped into big waves with a heavy metal tank strapped to my back... but then I started sinking (and breathing!) and it was the coolest thing I've ever done.  I find it to be a cool mental game, too, because you have to remember to be calm and keep breathing even though you're really far under water.

This is me about to roll off the boat into the sea.  For this dive, we found a really calm little harbor called the Japanese Garden.  It's amazing down there!  All the fish are bright colors, and the corals are definitely some special kind of garden.  My favorite fish was the parrot fish, which is fluorescent pink/green/purple/blue.  Hopefully, I'll be showing you pictures of it soon!  Tomorrow, I'm going to start the advanced diver course, which includes underwater navigation, a night dive, and some lessons on underwater photography.  Woohoo!

This is the last of me as I roll off the boat.  The best part of diving here is that the water is something like 80 degrees.  It's super warm, and you see some really exotic fish right up close.  I was really surprised that the fish don't swim away from you.  They're not afraid of you even though you're making lots of bubbles and you sort of sound like Darth Vader every time you breathe.  Some of the fish even like the bubbles and they're really curious about you, so they follow you around during the whole dive.

This is our whole group: Emily (our instructor), me, Lucas, and Milley. 

This is our lovely island, Koh Tao.  It's a nice place to be.  However, Ton Sai is still my favorite place on this trip.  Koh Tao is really developed for tourism, so you don't really get any sense of Thai culture.  The diving is amazing, but I wouldn't come here just to hang out.

Anyway, I'm spending the next few days doing this advanced diving course, and I hope I'll be posting some pretty fishy pictures soon!  Diving is such an amazing thing to do, and the underwater world is such a perfect place to be, so I hope I can share some of that with you.  Tomorrow, I'll be spending the entire day on the boat - We're starting in the morning, and then we're ending at night after taking flashlights into the water and checking out the night fish.  I can't wait!

I'm leaving Ton Sai tomorrow!

Maybe...

I'm accidentally still in Ton Sai.  It's easy to make excuses to stay.  I was going to leave Ton Sai after a few days, but the tide was high and I didn't want to get my pants wet when I walked out to the boat.  I was going to leave that evening when the tide went down, but the sunset was too beautiful so I had to stay to watch it.  I was going to leave after the sunset, but then there was a pretty cool lightening storm out on the water, and it was nice to have a beer and watch the storm.  I was going to leave the next morning, but the sky was clear and it was a perfect day for swimming.  I was going to leave after swimming, but then I met some guys who wanted to go climbing the next day.  I was going to leave after climbing, but my muscles were too sore and I needed a rest day on the beach.  I was going to leave the next day, but the Peace and Love Bar was closing, and they were having a great going away party.  I was going to leave the next day, but I was too tired from staying up so late the night before.  I was going to leave the next day, but then my friend started teaching me Thai and I had to learn some more before I left.  I was going to leave after my lessons, but then the guys started playing some good music, so I lied back down on the beach and forgot about trying to leave Ton Sai.  It's a losing battle.

This is Ton Sai.  It's paradise whether you're climbing the rocks or just swimming next to them.  I like to lay flat in the water and look up at the limestone cliffs shooting up over my head.  The water is a nice bath-tub temperature, and it's usually sunny but not too hot.  This picture was taken at Ton Sai beach, and between the two biggest rocks in the picture is Railay beach.  Railay is famous and full of resorts and the like, but Ton Sai was somehow left behind during all this development.  Ton Sai is only a 20-minute swim away, but the town is just a dirt road, a few bungalows, and a lot of bartenders who really like reggae.

This is my first view of the beach.  The guy walking there is Tom from the Netherlands.  We met in Penang and took the boat to Langkawi together.

 In Langkawi, I met a really nice German girl named Jana and we rented a car to drive around the island.  The driving was kind of scary because people drive on the wrong side of the road here.  I guess it makes sense that they drive on the left hand side of the road, though, because this used to be an English colony.

The first place we went in Langkawi was the Seven Wells waterfall.  This is a bunch of little pools where you can side from one to the other (like I'm doing in the picture).  It's like a natural water slide.

This is where the pools become a waterfall.  In the picture of me above, you can see that there's a little wire fence that keeps you from sliding all the way down the waterfall.  From the top, it looks like a really good idea to slide down.  From this view, it looks like a pretty stupid thing to do.  Thank god for the little wire fence.

After leaving the waterfall, we stopped at a little place on the side of the road for lunch.  Lunch was not so special, but THIS is delicious.  It's a dragon fruit.  It's sort of like a hot pink kiwi.  Life can't get any better than that.

At the end of the day, we went to the far north part of the island to walk across a sandbar that extends between some islands.  The water is only up to your knees, but you walk for a long way to get to the other island.  It's a pretty awesome thing to do, and a pretty awesome place to watch the sun set.

At night, we went to a reggae bar.  Since getting here, I've learned that reggae and beaches tend to go together. 

This is me and Jana going out at night.

This is me after leaving Langkawi and taking a ridiculous number of boats, buses, and other vehicles to get to Ton Sai.  This last boat ride totally restored my spirits after all the exhausting bus trips. Passing by all the huge limestone towers made me really excited to meet the bunches of climbers at Ton Sai.  When you get to Ton Sai, you feel like you've just joined a super-awesome club of climbers who have found paradise.  It's sort of like magic.

This is Ton Sai at low tide.  The tides here are crazy - In the morning, the water comes right up to the restaurant, so you basically have to swim if you want to get out of Ton Sai.  In the afternoon, the tide goes out so far that you can walk a few kilometers out onto the rocks and even walk over to Railay beach.

One day, I got really close to leaving Ton Sai.  I even went and spent the whole day in Krabi (which is the big town near by).  This is a pretty temple in Krabi.

This is another little temple in Krabi.  I really don't know anything about these temples, because there are no signs or any people around to explain what they're for.  Either way, they look really nice.

In this temple, they had lots of donkeys and elephants.  Is it a political statement?  I have no idea.

These are a few of my friends at Ton Sai.  They have a really nice cafe on the beach where I like to sit and make my next big plan for leaving Ton Sai.  Great guys.

This is also the last picture that my camera was able to load onto the computer before it died.  I'm watching it right now as it gives me helpless error messages, beeps a few times in apology, and turns itself off.  Poor little thing.  Next time I'm in a big town, I'll purchase my third camera of this trip.  This time, I'll try to find one that's not so fragile.

I'll hopefully be able to upload some of the rock climbing pictures from Ton Sai in the next few days.  I really am planning to leave Ton Sai soon, and once I leave I'll hopefully acquire some kind of technology (jump drive, new camera, etc) that will let me show you more pictures.  Until then, it's a nice day for swimming.  I'll go to the beach today, and I'll leave Ton Sai tomorrow.

The Last of Malaysia

I meant to post this right as I was leaving Penang, but I ended up on a beautiful Thai beach where I completely lost track of time.  I think it's been something like 5 days since I got here.  Oops.

Anyway, last time I posted I was in Penang (Malaysia) and had just spent a day walking in the wrong direction. The next day, I walked in the right direction.  This is what I found:

This is the Hainan Temple, which was really beautifully Chinese-like.  The special things about this temple were the ridiculous number of red lanterns, dragon statues, and beautiful stone carvings.  Inside, there was a hole in the roof and a pretty garden in the center.  This is my favorite temple so far.

Who's this guy?  I think he's Confucius.  That makes sense for a Chinese temple, I think.

These are some of the stone carvings.  Apparently, the temple was built in 1895, but they had Chinese workers come over and fix up the stone carvings in 1995.

These are all the red lanterns.  Really, there were a lot, and it definitely made the temple more fun-looking.

So, after seeing this temple, I ran into Ahmed again.  Ahmed was the Canadian/Iraqi guy who I met in Kuala Lumpur and who came with me to the Cameroon Highlands.  What are the chances of that happening?  Apparently, he decided last minute that he wanted to sit on the beach in Penang one last time before flying back to Canada.  So, naturally, I went with him to the beach.  We took a bus for about an hour north to the Penang National Park.  Here I am on a swing by the beach after we took a long and sweaty walk through the jungle.

We decided to reward ourselves for doing such an intense jungle trek by going out for dinner in Batu Ferringhi, which is the beach resort area where all the rich people stay.  It sort of looks like Vegas, right?

 Since we're by the sea, people here like seafood.  This is the Golden Thai restaurant, where you can walk along a path of fish and choose one for dinner.  Half the fish were already dead in their tanks, so we decided to go elsewhere.

This is a sea creature who is in a tank much too small for him.  His antenna things were touching the corners of the tank, and he had to just sit there like this... poor guy.

This is a restaurant shaped like a boat.  How cool.

The restaurants compete with eachother by putting up lots of lights.  Though this place had a camel, I don't think they actually serve camel.

This is where we went out for dinner.  It was a halal barbeque.

Here's Ahmed enjoying the barbeque on the beach.

...and me doing similarly.

The next day, I went on a walk to see more of Georgetown.  This is the WWII memorial.

This handsome young man is Captain Light at Fort Cornwallis.  Captain light was known for coming into Penang before it was yet discovered by other Europeans and establishing a port there.  As I understand it, he founded Georgetown.  A funny thing - there's a sign at one of the churches that says something like "British settlers and locals both loved him for his work."  Somehow, I don't believe that the locals would really have loved him that much for taking over their land...

This Georgetown's coast.  Only 300,000 people live there, but they have a lot of industry and hence a lot of skyscrapers.

This is the clock tower.  I guess it's kind of exciting.  I found it most useful to orient myself during the many times that I got lost.

This is just another example of the kind of colonial architecture that Georgetown is famous for.

This is St. George's church.  It's the oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia.  It's kind of funny how I got here:  While walking down the street, I met a Dutch guy named Tom.  The day before, Tom had met a crazy old Malay guy who showed him a free bus that you can take around the city to all of the main historical sites.  Tom and I went to take this bus around, because it was way too hot for walking.  While we were on the bus, the crazy old Malay guy got on.  We all got off at the same stop (at this church) and sat around under a tree for a few hours while the old guy told us all about the history of everything.  Even though the old guy seemed crazy at first, he actually had all of his facts straight and knew a ridiculous amount of history about everywhere in the world.  He said he knew these things because he's psychic.

After sitting around at the church for half the day, Tom and I went to get some tea in little India.  This is a Hindu temple in little India.

















Since leaving Penang, I've started the "breathtaking-tropical-islands" part of the trip.  After leaving Penang, I took a boat to Langkawi, which is a beautiful island at the northernmost part of Malaysia.  After Langkawi, it was time to go to Thailand.  I took a boat to the Thai mainland (to a town called Satun) where I took a local bus to Trang (a town farther north on the Thai mainland), took a minivan to Krabi (a town still farther north), took a sorngtaaou (which is like a pickup truck) to Ao Nang (a town on the beach), and finally took a longtail boat to Ton Sai.  I'm actually really proud of myself for having figured all of this transportation out on my own.  When I was leaving Langkawi, a guy wanted to charge me something like $50 to get me to Ton Sai.  Instead, I just set off on  my own, and I made it there for under $10.  Go me!

So, now I'm living on Ton Sai beach.  It's the closest thing I've ever seen to heaven.  There are huge limestone cliffs with stalactites hanging off them and the sea coming right up to the base.  The town is tucked between the cliffs.  There are no cars and barely any people here, but there are watermelon shakes and palm trees.  I might call it paradise.

I've just taken a day to come into Krabi (which is the big town near Ton Sai), but I unfortunately forgot my camera at home, so no pictures for now.  Next post will be all pictures of paradise, I promise.