Tropical Paradise...and class

I know this is ridiculously late, but here is a bit about my last course of first semester:

It all started with a 23 hour bus ride. Seriously. We drove down Thailand's western coastline basically as far as you can go before reaching Malaysia. Thankfully, it was a pretty nice, double-decker bus with room enough for me to have two seats to myself. And thankfully, I packed some Tylenol PM. We made a few stops for meals and potty breaks, but we also made a stop at the site of Thailand's old capital. Rising out of the perfectly manicured lawn were incredible towers and walls of sagging red brick. The capital was built sometime in the 14th century and it was fascinating to see the toll that time had taken on these man made structures. The incredible detail and complexity of the buildings' ornamentation were evident. Yet at the same time, corners were rounded by erosion, cracks were widened by the roots of plants, and Buddha images were decapitated long ago by looters. And the charismatic red bricks set against the vibrant green grass and the striking blue sky was particularly beautiful. So it was really fun to explore the place, and a welcome opportunity to stretch our legs.

Sprawled across my seats, I awoke in the morning to the bus stopping at the pier. Finally, the ocean! But our journey was not over, we had a four hour boat ride ahead of us. Eventually, we came upon a couple of islands, ringed with immaculate white sand beaches and then surrounded by turquoise waters. This is where we would spend the next two and a half weeks. For my group, the first half of the course was spent on Lipe Island. It's pretty small, you can walk all over it in less than a day. But it is the only island in the Adang Archipelago that has been developed. The first resort opened nearly 30 years ago, but the past 5 or 10 years have seen a huge boom in construction. Today there are some 50 places offering accommodation and even more offering food. So we actually stayed in small bungalows at one of those 50 resorts. Our place essentially had its own private beach which we thoroughly enjoyed either laying out on, snorkeling off of, or looking out at from the deck of the restaurant. So while we on this island, we spent 4 days doing projects in small groups but we could spend the days as we wished. Usually this meant some morning beach time, a couple of hours of work, a yummy lunch, some more beach time, and maybe a little more work-- if we could squeeze it in. In the evenings, we often had meetings with significant people on the island such as business owners, restaurant owners, and locals. Speaking of, the locals are actually a minority people-- the Urak Lawoi. Years ago, they were semi-nomadic sea gypsies, spending most of their time on boats; fishing, living subsistencely, and moving from island to island. The Thai government, however, wanted to be sure that Malaysia did not claim these Southern islands, so they set up a National Park and gave land titles to the Urak Lawoi. This forced them settle in one place. Then, over the years, voluntarily and not, the Urak Lawoi sold off their land to developers. Now, the remaining Urak Lawoi often do not own the land they live on. In fact, an entire village was forced to relocate just months before we arrived. Furthermore, their primary livelihood (fishing) is at high risk due to the severely depleted fish stocks in the archipelago. Many now work in tourism industry but very few have high level jobs. So are projects on the island were meant to try to figure out what is going on on Lipe in terms of development, the local culture, and the state of the island's environment. Then, our last two days on that island were spent snorkeling the reefs in the area and writing midcourse essays. Aside from some rain on our second day-- which was a good excuse to get some schoolwork done-- our weather was fantastic.

At the halfway point of the course, it was time for us to leave Lipe. So we got into our kayaks. We paddled around the entire island of Lipe and then crossed the straight to its neighbor, Adang. It took us just over 2 hours. Once we arrived, we set up camp! The rest of the course we would be spending in tents. Tents on the beach, that is. This campsite was actually at the site of the National park, so we had dinners at their restaurant each of the two nights spent there. Breakfast was always a granola type mixture made with your own personal recipe of boiling and powdered milk, hot chocolate mix, instant coffee, and/or sugar. Lunches were always an endless supply of bread, peanut butter, nutella, honey, banana chips, and beef jerky, plus some watermelon or pineapple. The second campsite that we stayed at was a 17 km paddle away from the first which took about 5 hours, not including lunch. This site was much quieter and more secluded, with no restaurant or tourists to speak of. We had the same breakfasts and lunches but then cooked our dinners, some of which consisted of fish caught that day by our boat drivers. There were some bathrooms but they were straight out of a horror film-- filthy, broken, rundown, and accessible by a long overgrown path. I went there once and decided never to go back, a decision which was re-enforced when someone ran into a viper on that path. I also had a close call with a venomous creepy crawly at that site. While completing an assignment at a picnic table, I just happened to look down and see this ridiculous THING on the leg of the table, a mere inch from my leg. It was hideous. It's body was about 3 inches long, but then its LEGS. It had about 30, each around 2 inches long. It was bright orange. It was one inch from me. It was gross. And disgusting. I carefully but urgently removed myself from the table. According to our local boat driver, the venom from that bug hurts more than that of Thai centipedes. One of the teachers at school was bitten by a centipede and was sent to the hospital for a morphine drip. So yea... that was scary. But actually, I loved camping on the beach. I loved falling asleep to the sound of the waves. I loved waking up to the view of the ocean. I loved showering under a 4 ft tall hose attached to a beached boat. I loved spending a week entirely on either sand or water.

This half of the course was focused more on ecology and less on people. So our days were spent doing activities such as a forest plot survey, a mangrove study, a sea anemone survey, and a giant clam project. We did a few more short paddles in our kayaks. I always looked forward to them, it was pretty cool to slide right along the top of the ocean like that. And we did alot more snorkeling. Throughout the trip, I saw alot of barracuda, anemones and clownfish, starfish, crown of thorns, sea urchins, giant clams, moray eels, small rays, and all your colorful reef fish. Little surprise, I couldn't get enough of it. To get to and from different beaches or reefs when we didn't kayak, we took traditional long-tail boats (these boats also carried all of our gear when we did kayak). They are skinny but long wooden boats with a motor attached to the end of a swiveling 15 ft long pole. Our drivers were a couple of Urak Lawoi from Lipe. One day, on our way back from snorkeling somewhere, our boat suddenly started veering to the left. All of us students were facing forwards but one of our field instructors, Pi Aaron, sat facing backwards on the bow of the boat. We watched as he jumped up and headed for the back of the boat, stopping just before climbing over all of us, as the boat began to straighten out. So I look back to see what was going on back there. Turns out our driver was fishing. While driving. In fact, he had the steering stick in one hand, a fishing pole in the other, and a cigarette in his mouth. He hadn't actually caught anything, but had just become a bit preoccupied with the line for a moment. i kept watching him as he soon propped up the fishing pole, took a seat on the cooler, draped his elbow over the steering stick, took a drag from his cigarette, removed it from his lips, then smiled and mouthed the word "sabai" across the boat to our Thai field instructor, Pi Pui. "Sabai" is loosely translated as chill, relaxed, enjoyable. So that sums up the course pretty well I'd say.

The last part of the expedition, our travel back to Chiang Mai, was like a variation on Planes Trains and Automobiles. It began by loading up longtail boats at 4 in the morning. Those boats took us out into deeper waters where we transferred everything onto a ferry. After a 4 hour ferry ride we had a 2 hour bus ride to the airport. From there, we had an hour and a half flight to Bangkok followed by another hour and a half flight to Chiang Mai. It was a long day. But then a final seminar in Chiang Mai and a Thai language assessment interview meant ISDSI was over. Islands was a great way to end it, it would have been hard to top class on the beach. The scenery was spectacular and the activities were fun. The teacher was horrendous but thankfully, he doesn't even teach while we are on the expedition. So overall, it's hard to complain.

Alot has happened since then, such as a three week long vacation with my parents. Hopefully a report on that will come very soon, now that my new room in Bangkok is equipped with wireless. Until then!