Scituate, Massachusetts...
If you read John's journal you will know that I received an email from my cousin that my mother was in the hospital with a tumor on her spine and they suspected cancer. I made arrangements to fly back to Boston the following day. The flight segements I was able to book were generally good, but they couldn't find a connecting flight to Boston the same evening, so they had me scheduled for laying overnight and taking a flight the next morning. Thank God for friends! My friend Tony was able to get me a buddy pass on a Delta flight the same evening that I arrived in LAX for a direct flight to Boston! I was able to make it back to Scituate in 24-hours, 20-hours in the air and 4-hours for layovers. That as good as it gets. Thanks Tony!

I arrived 6:00 am, took the MBTA train to Braintree and was picked up by my cousin Ric. He filled me in on what details he knew and recommended I bring a notebook to record the names of all the hospital people involved (very good idea!). My mother was on strong pain killers and a bit confused but very glad to see me. The doctors and staff were all very nice, but always very busy and, because they worked in shifts, the doctors and nurses attending my Mom changed constantly.

After visiting my Mom and finding as much as I could from her, the doctors and nurses I returned to the family home to set up communcations. I changed my Mom's "emergency only" cell phone plan to a normal plan that I could use to get calls from the doctors and talk to my Mom, bought a cable modem and changed my Mom's Internet service from dial-up to hi-speed cable and bought an inexpensive microwave oven to be able to prepare food more quickly for myself and my Mom when she returned.

I brought my Mom home from the hospital today. She's a bit fragile at the moment, which is understandable. She's on strong painkillers and has been through a battery of tests, including MRIs, CAT scans and a biopsy. They're recommending radiation therapy which will begin on July 6th for 10-13 sessions.

My cousin, Tilla, has graciously volunteered to stay with my Mom after I leave to continue the round the world trip. I have reservations to return to Bangkok starting on July 18th and arriving on July 19th.

I'm a bit exhausted after the 20-hour plane flight, 11-hour time change and being affected by all the issues surrounding a loved one with a major illness, so please excuse me if I'm a bit sketchy on details.

Please keep my Mom and myself in your prayers and thanks to all those who have helped me and my Mom, including Tony, Ric, Tilla, Bob, Madeleine, Connie, and Sally.

2006-06-24
Bangkok, Thailand - Monsoon season - Trip Planning

I'm sitting in my guest house room listening to the rain and thunder that is typical in the afternoons during monsoon season. This one seems to be a particularly violent storm. Just before it arrived I was eating lunch in an outside cafe and watched the street vendors preparing for the onslaught by rolling out rain tarps and bringing fragile items under cover.

I finally have some time to catch up on my journal. It may sound strange to say that "I didn't have time" because many people consider a year around the world trip as a really long vacation. Maybe it is that way for some, but traveling to 23-countries backpacker style, planning every part of the journey and trying to keep a web site to share it is enormously time consuming.

One of the realities that came to light was that there isn't enough money to complete the trip as planned. We still want to travel for a full year, so our solution is to move some of the travel time in expensive countries to cheaper ones. We're in the process of doing that now. We're moving the additional days, other than those for an overland safari and an Egypt tour, from Africa to SE Asia.

Yesterday I spent another 8-hours on the Internet communicating with travel agencies in Egypt and Africa working to define and price out our travel there. I have spent almost a week in total on this part of the trip alone.

Part of the purpose of this trip is to share, through photos and journal entries, some of the experiences. So far we taken over 7,000 photos, selected the best ones for the web site, added captions and sent them to my kind cousin Ric who posts them on the web site. John has spent countless hours on journal entries and web links to share the journey. I'm really glad we're doing this, but there's not a lot of breathing room between planning, doing, recording and sharing the journey.

Back to what's going on...
John's out exploring Bangkok on his own. We each need some time apart on occassion, as can be imagined. We're traveling together 24/7 most of the time.

Meeting other people is also a way to ease the strain of traveling together for such a long time, but that hasn't been easy on Khao San Road. When you leave the guest house onto the main street it's a circus - lots of street vendors trying to peddle you stuff, people just arriving or getting ready to depart and taxi and tuk-tuk drivers badgering you to go somewhere. Everyone ends up having a kind of dazed look on their face. Not the best environment for meeting people!

The rain has stopped, for the moment, and shortly I'll be heading back to the Internet cafe to do some more travel planning and to post some blog entries.

Perhentian Islands to Bangkok...
A lot of the details of this trip have been developed on the fly. From talking to people on the Perhentians and before, it appeared that the weather and diving on the Perhentians was better than any in southern Thailand during this weather season. The west coast of Thailand would be in the rainy season. We had already missed the Full Moon Party at Koh Phanghan, so we decided to head straight to Bangkok and avoid a lot of bus / train travel and potential border visa scams.

Not having planned any of this, we had very limited cash, on the order of $10 in Malay currency, and had made no reservations of any sort. It's amazing how things can work out. We met a British couple, Emilie and Tom, on the boat. They knew where the cheap local bus station was and led us to it. It was $1 to go to Jerteh where we could either go to an ATM and get Malay cash or take another bus to the major city/airport, Kota Bharu. When we got Jerteh we found we had enough cash, $4, for the bus fare to Kota Bharu. It was leaving immediately.

At Kota Bharu I got some cash from the ATM, but knew if we had to use bigger bills to pay the driver, he wouldn't have change and would want to keep the extra,so we negotiated with a taxi driver to get us to the airport on the $3.50 we had left.

We arrived at the Air Asia office at noon and were able to book a flight leaving at 3:00 pm for Bangkok via Kuala Lumpur. We were in Bangkok by 8 pm. Tom and Emilie (thanks!) had told us about a cheap and clean guest house in the backpacker section of Khao San Road. We found it and settled in quite easily. From an island of a few hundred people to a city of eight million in a day! Quite a change!

Perhentian Islands - Snorkeling at D'Lagoon...
We talked to Gemma and Kimbell about taking a short boat ride to D'Lagoon to do some snorkeling and we all decided to do it. We negotiated a group rate with a small boat captain, about $3.50 each, to take us top D'Lagoon and pick us up later in the day.

D'Lagoon has one resort and a small beach tucked in between the rocks, reefs and jungle. It's quite a nice area. We started snorkeling and found some deep water and great clarity! There was a very large titan trigger fish moving the coral around with it's mouth in order to get at crabs and other things to eat. I enlisted John to attempt to take a picture of it, as I had two previous encounters with titan triggers who had tried to attack me. At that particular time I wasn't wearing any swim fins to fend it off with. I also saw a black tipped reef shark. They're quite striking, but difficult to take a picture of because they move so fast.

Later we took a 10-minute hike through the jungle to Turtle beach. This is supposed to be where a lot of the turtles lay their eggs. We couldn't figure how the turtles managed to get onto beach because the shallows were strewn with boulders that we had trouble getting around. The water clarity wasn't very good, the seas were a bit rough and we didn't see any turtles. Other than that, it was great.

We hiked back to D'Lagoon and our trusty boat captain showed up exactly at the time we had agreed on.

Dinner was a humorous event in that all of us (Kimbell, Gemma, John and I) had run short of Malay currency. We ordered a bizarre assortment of inexpensive dishes and shared them, then recalculated and figured out what other cheap dishes we could get. It was actually quite a lot of fun and on our last day we discovered some things we really liked but hadn't tried yet.


Sea Creature Sightings:
Titan Trigger fish
Black Tipped Reef Sharks

Perhentian Islands - Snorkeling Day Trip...
Gemma, Kimbell, John and I took an all day snorkeling trip. We visited five different sites, starting at 10 am and getting back about 5 pm. It was a neat experience to visit so many different sites in one day. Each one was a different environment. At the last site I was snorkeling alone and was able to follow a squid for about 5-minutes, observing it changing color to match each of it's new backgrounds, sand, rocks or coral. Quite awesome creatures! Unfortunately, I also like them for dinner (calamari). For a few days there were 4-5 squid boats in the bay at Long Beach. They fish at night attracting the squid with lights and then netting them.

Sea Creature Sightings:
Black Tipped Reef Sharks, large and small
Sea/Green Turtles
Squid!!!

Perhentian Islands - A Cash Advance and Internet Hell...
I knew there was some reason I was delaying dealing with an island cash flow crisis until after my birthday. I soon learned why. There is no ATM on the Perhentian Islands. If you run out of Malay currency you can convert US dollars, losing about 6%. I had already done that and had no US cash left.

My only option was a very expensive cash advance. The person converting it charges you 15% of the amount and then my bank charges me another $10 (or 3%, whichever is larger) as a cash advance fee. For changing the equivalent of $100 US dollars it cost me $25 not including interest! The interest on a cash advance acrues as soon as it is taken out, there is no grace period. Knowing this, I planned to pay enough money into my credit card account to cover the balance via PC banking.

I tried doing this in the afternoon, but found that the internet building had lost it's air conditioning and was now the equivalent of a sweat box used as a torture device in prisons. I lasted two minutes in the place and wasn't even able to bring up a web page. I aborted but still had to pay 60-cents for that pleasure! The next morning I went in early and found that, not only was it cooler in the morning, but also that the air conditioning had been repaired. I spent 1-expensive hour taking care of the cash advance and other crucial internet things. Internet is $10/hour on the island.

After that, the rest of the day went much better!

My Birthday on Perhentian Kecil - Temple of the Sea...
I wanted to do a dive to the "Temple of the Sea" dive site on my birthday. John graciously agreed to join me, as the trip would not go unless there was another person to make a group of four.

On the way to the dive, the boat engine seized and could not be re-started. Luckily most boat owners carry cell phones and we had three boats on their way to us. We transferred our dive gear to one of the boats and the other boat towed the crippled craft to shore. I don't know what the third boat was for.

The dive was quite beautiful. One of the species we saw at this particular area was bamboo sharks. These are a very small size sharks. They often hang out in groups underneath rocks. I photographed a few individual sharks with their heads poking out and I also saw five of their tails sticking out from underneath another rock. The sea anemones were quite beautiful as well.

That evening we went out with Kimbell and Gemma for dinner and John paid for mine as well as giving a birthday card and a book, "Land Below the Wind" about Borneo. It was nice way to spend my birthday!

Dive Site:
Tokong Laut - Temple of the Sea

Sea Creature Sightings:
Bamboo Sharks
Indian Ocean Walkman
Blue Spotted Sting Rays
Razor fish
Barricuda
Box Fish
Scorpion fish
Moray Eel
White Eyes Eel
Titan Trigger fish
Scribble Filefish

Perhentian Islands - Coral Bay
John and I took a ten-minute walk over to Coral Bay to try out the snorkeling. The clarity wasn't as good as on Long Beach, where we were staying, but we did see some interesting creatures. It looked as if dynamite fishing might have been done in this area, as well as a lot of boat traffic in the coral areas. We met up with Gemma and Kimbell for dinner.

Sea Creature Sightings:
Turtle
Bump Headed Parrotfish
Blue Spotted Sting Rays
Giant Grouper
Titan Trigger fish

Perhentian Islands, Redang Island dives
We joined a three dive trip to Redang Island which is about a two hour boat trip away. It was a beautiful day and you could climb on the top of the roof (via the toilet room) and enjoy the sun and the view.

Underwater the clarity was quite good. We saw a variety of marine life, including turtles and reef sharks as well as some of the most colorful sea anemones of all our dives.

On the third dive we started a short distance from the shore of a small island. After we descended, we found the current to be very strong. It was a challenge to stay with the group and one person reported seeing his exhaust bubbles going downwards rather than upwards! I was above the group for a short while and saw bubbles spiraling up towards me in a mini tornado. The divemaster decided to abort the dive, we grouped together to do a safety stop and surfaced about 1/2 mile from the island. We were so far away that we flagged another boat to go to ours to tell them where we were so they could pick us up! After being picked up we had a 4th dive in a much shallower, calm water area around the island.

During the trip we met a really nice, young couple, Kimball and Gemma. Kimball was from Holland originally, most recently living in the UK with his girlfriend Gemma. Gemma was originally from the UK. We ending up hanging out with them quite a lot.

Dives:
Batu Totong
Pulau Lima
Terumba Kili #1
Terumba Kili #2

Sea Creature Sightings:
Giant Puffer
Scribble Filefish

Perhentian Islands - Batu Nissan
I had planned to join a morning dive to Temple of the sea, but there weren't enough people, it required 4 but we only had 3, so I decided to join the other two people on a dive to a spot in the local bay called Batu Nissan. The other two divers were very new to diving and one of them expressed she had difficultly in clearing her ears. For some reason the dive master said he and I would be a "buddy team" and then the two of them. That didn't seem to make much sense, as both of them were inexperienced while both of us were significantly more experienced. I ended up staying with the girl, who was at 3-meters while she adjusting her ears, while the divemaster was already at 18-meters. Later on the newbee guy, Josh, was freaking out about a remora fish that was trying to attach itself to him. They're a type of cleaner fish and quite harmless. I reassured him by hand signals not to worry. He also hadn't learned how to clear all the air out of his bouyancy vest, which I demonstrated to him underwater. I think a few of the divemasters here have a bit of a casual attitude towards the divers in their group. That was generally was good for John and I. We didn't need the constant, "Are you OK???" sign, which can become annoying, but for new divers I think it's a bit worrisome.

Sea Creature Sightings:
Jenkins Whip Ray
Blue Spotted Sting Ray
Yellow Box Fish
Trevali
Remora
Cushion Starfish
Anemones

Perhentian Islands - Moonlight Resort - Three Reefs Dive
We awoke fairly early to join a morning dive to Three Reefs. It was located next to the bigger of the Perhentian islands. The dive included some "swim throughs" of underwater passages formed by a jumble of boulders. I joined the group for the first one, but was a bit low on air after encountering an agressive Titan Trigger fish and opted for the over the top route on the later ones. I was attempting to photograph a large (ergo the name "Titan") trigger fish when it came straight for me. I had to actually hit it with one of my fins to fend it off. This is the first time I've been "attacked" underwater and it isn't a fun experience. I was thankful I was wearing fins. The Titan Trigger fish eats coral and can give quite a nasty bite.

Kuala Lumpur to Perhentian Islands - Panarama Bungalows
We took an Air Asia flight at 7:40 am to Kota Bharu. We were fortunate to meet up with a nice French couple who had already booked a taxi to Kuala Besut, the ferry terminal. We shared the cost and found that we could take the same ferry boat as them to the island. We boarded immediately and were on the island by 11:00 am. The French couple, Matthew and his girlfriend, were living in Kuala Lumpur. Matthew had been offered a job in Kuala Lumpur from the company he worked for in France and accepted a two-year assignment. They had been there for three months and already had taken short trips to Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. They were going to the Perhentians for a long weekend.

On the smaller of the Perhentian islands, Perhentian Kecil, we ended up staying at Panarama Bungalows the first night. The room included a fan and dinner for both of us, but not breakfast. Electricity was on from 7 pm until 7 am and there were no electrical outlets. This is problem for charging camera batteries and for using the computer, so we moved the next day to a place that had 24-hr. electricity and an electrical outlet. It also had air conditioning, which was very nice, especially when working on the PC. The bungalow, Moonlight, was cheaper, but didn't include dinner.

We checked out Spice Divers. They had been recommended to us by Matt from Trawangan Divers in Indonesia. The girl he mentioned, Cindy, was there and very spunku and helpful. She's originally from Calgary in Canada. We decided to do a dive the next morning with Spice.

That eveing for the "included" dinner at Panarama you could choose almost anything on the menu, which was kind of cool! I had the "barbeque" which is popular option at most of the restaurants, choice of chicken, squid, prawns, King Fish, Barracuda, or Blue Marlin, choice of rice, baked potato, mashed potato or roti canai, and it included a simple salad, fruit. You had you're choice of sauces for the main entree, including garlic butter, curry, coconut, pricek (Mayay spicy sauce), peanut sauce and black pepper. I tried most of them at one time or another and they were all good. Roti canai is a fried doughy pancake-like thing, usually two of them, served with a side bowl of curry sauce for dipping. It was very good and quite cheap. We often ordered it and shared it with others as an appetizer.

Seaventures Oil Rig, off of the island of Mabul near the city of Semporna

John and I stayed at an oil rig run by Seaventures and did 8-dives in three days. We were the only guests for at this 60-person dive resort for that time. It was very nice for diving. I had bought a small digital camera (Konica Minolta X60) in Singapore and an underwater housing (good to 40-m) and loved using it. Some of the underwater photos came out very well!

Sipadan, where we did four dives, is ranked as one of the best dive sites in the world. It has been accepted as a world heritage site and the government and dive operation owners have been at odds from time to time, as they were before we arrived. The government established a quota of 120-divers that can visit Sipadan per day in April of this year.

For the dives not off of the rig, we had our own boat and divemaster. Our divemaster, Mando, (from the Philipines) was excellent. He had been diving in Sipadan for 9-years and knew not only the big things, but the small unusual things as well. We did two dives under the rig, four on Sipadan, one off of Mabul and one off of Kapalai.

We just finished diving today and return to Kinabalu this evening.

Sorry I haven't been blogging in a while. Someone described traveling around the world as "being on slack time". I would beg to differ! We're always finding places to stay, planning and booking things to do, finding transport to get to them, doing them, photographing them, blogging about them, keeping in touch with friends and family, meeting new people, and in the process getting and giving travel advice, budgeting, and trying to figure out what items of the local cuisine are edible and finding places to spend the night. Not that it isn't interesting, it's just that it's not like we're kicking about with nothing to do.

Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp

I had a great time at Uncle Tan's camp. We saw a lot of wildlife, but most notible were: an orang utan in the wild, a red leaf monkey, the tiniest leaf frog in Malaysia and a herd of Asian pigmy elephants.

The elephants were a special treat, as they aren't usually around this time of year. Lan, the manager of the camp, got permission to go 1 1/2-hours down river to try to find them. We saw them foraging by the river banks and pulled over to a place where we could go onshore. He told us to hide in the grass as the elephants tromped past about 15-feet away on the trail above us. When an elephant came into view, we jumped up, took a photo and then dropped for cover again. It was quite cool and exhilarating.

Later on we boated further down to where they were lounging by the river. This is where we counted 35 of them. A few of them went into the water, ass end first. Our boat almost touched shore and we were less than 15 feet from them at times.

On the way back, in the dark, the engine quit. Lan got out the light and began doing engine repair. It took about 15-minutes but he got the engine running again. Whew, we didn't have to spent a night on the jungle floor with bananas for dinner...

Uncle Tan's was very cool but we exhausted after three days. We had survived about 8 one-to-two hour boat trips and several jungle treks.

After we left Uncle Tan's, we caught a bus to Semporna and stayed overnight at the floating Dragon Inn. Aptly named, as it is built on stilts over Semporna harbor. While Semporna is a dingy, dirty town, the Dragon Inn is quite nice. It has long boardwalks, a good restaurant and probably 50-100 rooms, all built on stilts over the water. The rooms have heated showers, air conditioning and a TV! They keep groupers, crabs and other sealife in a netted area next to the restaurant, so in terms of seafood, you can't get it much fresher!

The next morning we headed to the Seaventures oil rig (converted to a dive resort) where we would be staying for the next three days. There were two of us and the captain in a boat with two 200-HP outboards. That thing flew!