Making fun of my friend Owen about his ladyboy stalker
I'm still a bit stunned that my first school year here in Bangkok has come to an end. Tonight, I attend the end of year staff party, then leave for the airport to get my overnight flight to London. Of course, I'm not really on holidays at that point, as I'm attending a week-long course, which hopefully will be very useful. After that I'm looking forward to getting back to Prague (my favourite city in Europe) and doing some travelling around Eastern Europe. And for those of you who have endured my raving in the past about Velvet beer, I will particularly enjoy being able to imbibe some of that again. Ahhh, sweet Velvet...
Anyway, the last few weeks have been very busy with work, farewell parties, sorting out apartments and packing. I will be moving into a new apartment the day I get back from Europe - sadly I'm having to downsize a bit due to financial constraints, but the positive aspect is that I'll be living in a much more interesting part of Bangkok. Not that the suburban idyll of Bangna hasn't been fun, but let's face it - if you had the choice between living in the Bangkok equivalent of, say Glebe or Liverpool, where would you choose?
And so, that's about it for my first year in Bangkok. I'm pleased to say I haven't regretted my decision to come here at all and I expect I'll be happy here for a bit longer yet. So, don't hesitate to make plans to come and visit. Cheers!
It amazes me to think that in only 4 weeks I will have completed my first school year here in Bangkok. It has gone by scarily quickly, yet looking back it feels like so long ago that I first arrived, as so much has happened in the meantime. This school term in particular has flown by, mainly because I've been so busy. Work continues to go well and I still enjoy working at the school.
Outside of school, I have still enjoyed living in Bangkok and there have been a lot of social events to attend. As a result I have had some great nights out and met some really great people in the process. These will continue apace as the school year winds down and there are farewells for staff who are leaving, and end-of-year bashes. I have also done a few cultural things - I went to visit the local snake farm, where the red cross milks venemous snakes for anti-venom, but they also have a snake show each day. I also visited the National Museum twice (there was too much to see in one visit), which was quite interesting. Here are a few photos, plus for all of you who are craving some genuine Thai culture, a short video of a Thai pop concert that I stumbled upon in one of the shopping centres in town - pure class!
Two cobras face off against each other.
Funky bird-head statues at the museum.
Like most things in Bangkok, the museum is free for monks.
The other thing that has kept me busy of late is looking for a new place to live. The school have provided me (along with all the new staff) with accommodation near the school for the first year of my contract. However, from August I need to arrange my own accommodation. This involves a fairly tedious process of trying to find an apartment that is not only in a useful location (ie: reasonably easy access to school) but also within my budget. I have decided that one year in the suburban utopia of Bangna is enough and I will therefore move closer into the "centre" of Bangkok and commute. As long as I am not too far from an expressway entrance, it should only be a 20-30 minute commute each way. So many of my weekend days have been spent looking at a range of places from very nice and overly-expensive (it is clearly a global phenomenon that real estate agents show you really nice places above the budget you have specified in the hope that you will get suckered in by their transparent ploy), to very unpleasant hovels in a horrible location. However, during this process I did manage to find a few places that I would be quite happy with, so now I need to try to negotiate prices and arrange a lease in the next few weeks. Great fun!
Of course, with the end of the school year comes another well-earned holiday. I hope you're not getting too sick of hearing about all the holidays I get here, so sorry if you are, but in my mind they are the most interesting aspects of my life here. The school have seen fit to send me on a 5-day course in London at the start of the summer holidays at the end of June. The downside is that I have to do some work during my holidays. The upside is that the school is paying for my flight, so I get a free trip to Europe for the summer. So, my plan is to fly to Prague after the course has finished, then spend a few weeks travelling round Czech Republic and Poland. After that I will visit some friends in Spain and Ireland, then back to London for a couple of days before flying back to Bangkok in early August. I feel quite fortunate do be able to do this, as there's no way I could afford to visit Europe otherwise.
So, in the belief that a short update is better than no update at all, I will finish here. I hope all is well with everyone. Cheers.
When I was a kid, I used to really hate it when I was watching a TV show and it ended with “To be continued...” (Get Smart and Happy Days were two shows that I recall did this occasionally, much to my annoyance). So, to those of you who have been desperately waiting for the second part of my Borneo story, fret no longer. I only hope that contrary to so many sequels, this will be as almost as good as the original.
So, when we left our story last time, Jayne and I had just left Gomantong Cave. From there we were subject to a very uncomfortable ride in a mini bus to Lahan Datu, where we had a quick bit of lunch (sadly at the Sabah equivalent of KFC – if you were to ask why we ate there, I’m think we would have mumbled something about it being the only place we could find close to the bus station that had air-conditioning). We then had to wait for an hour for a second (even less comfortable) mini-bus further south to Semporna. All up, it was about a 6 hour trip. Fortunately, we were rewarded by staying in a very nice (and very cheap) hotel in Semporna that was built over the water. We met up with Marianne again that night for dinner. The next day Jayne and I took things fairly easy (Marianne was diving) after what had actually been a fairly hectic week or so that had involved a lot of activity and moving around.
The next day was our first day diving around the island of Mabul - about a 45 minute boat ride from Semporna. It was interesting diving, part of which was on man-made reefs, which were partly made out of rubbish (like old scaffolding, car parts and glass bottles). While it wasn’t nearly as attractive as the natural reef we also dived on, there was some great marine life, particularly things like frogfish and nudibranchs. I took all the photos here with my new camera and underwater casing. I was very pleased with the results.
A frogfish - they are freaky looking creatures.
Another frogfish - I call this one Sexy.
A nudibranch, kind of like a colourful sea slug.
Another nudibranch - they are only a few centimetres long.
And yet another nudibranch - they are quite beautiful.
That night we stayed in a long-house on Mabul Island. It was basic accommodation, but very relaxed and chilled, over the water with the back deck looking out over the ocean. Very pleasant.
Part of the view from our accommodation on Mabul.
The next day we dived at Sipidan Island, which is the main reason people come to Borneo to dive. Sipidan Island is consistently rated as one of the best dive sites in the world, and it was indeed very impressive. The island itself is the tip of a very high underwater mountain that drops straight down for up to 2000 metres to the ocean floor. Due to some unusually environmentally-friendly restrictions on the number of divers allowed to dive at the island each day, the coral is in remarkably good condition, meaning the marine life is amazingly abundant, especially big stuff like turtles, sharks and rays. We saw so many turtles and reef sharks, but only saw one big eagle ray and we missed out on seeing hammerhead sharks. It was rather special diving.
Sipidan Island.
One of the many turtles we saw.
And another turtle.
I also took a couple of video clips, one of a white-tipped reef shark and the other of a turtle swimming. The turtle video should give some idea of the abundance of fish life around.
Our final day diving was on at Kapalai (very close to Mabul) and again we saw some great stuff on these dives.
A very large potato cod.
A white-eyed moray eel.
A large cuttlefish.
A nudibranch.
A yellow-edged moray eel.
A crocodile fish.
A spot-fin lionfish.
A spotted ray.
An anenome fish hiding in its anenome.
A ribbon eel.
A frogfish on its side - its mouth is on the right side.
Another nudibranch.
We had to have a day of rest after our diving, which we spent exploring the tiny island of Mabul – it is a curious mix of a couple of very simple villages and a few very expensive resorts, all squeezed onto an island about 1 km long and maybe 500 metres wide.
The village we stayed in on Mabul Island.
A local villager posing for the camera.
Not sure what they were looking at, but it must have been interesting.
That afternoon we got a boat back to Semporna and arrived in the middle of the town’s biggest annual festival. So the town was buzzing with excitement (a far cry from its normal state) and the harbour was packed with very brightly-coloured boats in preparation for the boat races which were due to start the next day. Of course, finding accommodation there that night was impossible, so we jumped in a mini-bus to Tawau, about one and a half hours away. We spent a fairly unremarkable evening in Tawau then the next day Jayne and I flew back to KK, where we spent our final night in Borneo. The next day we were back at the airport and flying to Kuala Lumpur, where Jayne and I parted ways – I got my flight back to Bangkok while Jayne had to wait another 7 hours for her flight back to Sydney (not the best way to finish a holiday, but sometimes unavoidable).
And so ended my adventures in Borneo. One thing I found interesting was how nice it was for me to get back to Bangkok. While I enjoyed my time in Borneo, it certainly didn’t have the easy-going feel and friendly atmosphere that Thailand has. I realised just how accustomed I have become to having people smile and greet you everywhere, and therefore how much I notice it when it’s not there, as was largely the case in Borneo. It’s not that people were unfriendly there, but they didn’t come across as warmly as the Thais do, generally speaking.
And so I'm now back at work and back to my relatively normal life here in Bangkok. Well, that's about it for the Wilds of Borneo. I hope you enjoyed it. Cheers.
I have returned from the deep, dark jungles of Borneo in one piece and now feel the need to let you all know about my experiences there. My friend Jayne came over to Bangkok for a few days before the two of us departed for Malaysian Borneo together.
Now, I like to think that part of my role is to educate as well as rant, so in the interest of knowledge expansion, here is some information on Borneo for those who may be (until now at least) a little ignorant about it. Borneo is the third largest island on the planet (fourth largest if you count Australia, which doesn’t seem to make it on the official lists for islands, presumably because it’s also a continent) and is partly owned by the Indonesia (the larger southern part) and Malaysia (the smaller northern part). The Malaysian part is further split into two semi-autonomous regions: Sarawak (the western part) and Sabah (the eastern part). We only visited Sabah during this holiday.
We flew into Kota Kinabalu (KK), the capital of Sabah, on our very cheap Air Asia flights (about A$200 return) and were struck by how modern the city looked. We were expecting something a bit more basic.
The sunset on our first night in Kota Kinabalu
We only spent a day in KK (where we met up with Amy, one of the other teachers from school) before we headed up to Mt Kinabalu, which is the highest mountain in South-East Asia at over 4000 metres. Jayne and I had toyed with the idea of climbing it (it’s a very popular climb), but decided we couldn’t be bothered. It was nice to see it and do a bit of walking around the area. Unfortunately, I was feeling rather unwell on this day so I didn’t get to do much walking. We spent the next day at a place called Poring, where there are some hot springs in the National Park. Why so many people felt that the 35 degree air temperature was too mild and what they really wanted was to soak in some 50 degree water was a bit lost on me, I confess. Instead, I enjoyed a refreshing dip in a nearby waterfall and also had a swim in the cold pool, rather than sit in one of the hot spring baths.
Mt Kinabalu at sunrise
From Poring, we got a bus to Sandakan, luckily managing to avoid getting rorted by a very sneaky local woman who tried to tell the bus driver she was our tour guide and then overcharge us for our bus tickets. There we met up with Marianne, another teacher from school (we bumped into several teachers from school during the 2 weeks, but Amy and Marianne we actually planned to meet up with). It’s fair to say that Sandakan (and indeed every town we subsequently visited in Sabah) was rather uninspiring: small, dull, basic places that transformed into deserted streets lined with closed metal shutters at night.
Not far from Sandakan is a place called Sepilok, which has an orang-utan sanctuary. One of the big issues in Borneo at the moment is that a lot of the natural rainforests are being decimated in order to make space for palm plantations. Palm oil is one of the most profitable industries in that part of the world, so in true human style, companies are tearing down the rainforests and planting thousands of palm trees instead. Of course, this means that a lot of the local wildlife is losing its natural habitat, including the orang-utan. Hence, this sanctuary was set up to care for and rehabilitate orphaned or sick orang-utans. I quite enjoyed seeing the orang-utans. By the way, orang-utan is a Malay word which means “jungle person”, which is kind of appropriate because they are almost human-like (I think our second-closest relatives species-wise after the chimpanzee) and they do live in the jungle. They are very cute and quite fun. Here are a few photos out of the many that I took.
There is a special feeding platform where they come for a mid-morning snack
And there are special ropes to provide easy access to the feeding platform
Apparently this is quite comfortable if you're an orang-utan
After the orang-utans had finished feeding, as soon as the last one had left the platform, about a dozen macaque monkeys immediately raced onto the platform to scavenge the left-overs. They were also very playful and rather amusing. The baby one was particularly cute.
From Sepilok, we headed into the jungle proper and stayed at a jungle camp for a couple of nights. We did several excursions out and about to look for wildlife, mostly by boat along the river. We saw quite a lot of stuff, mainly monkeys and birds. We did see a mother and baby orang-utan in the wild, which was very nice. We also saw many proboscis monkeys, named because of their big and rather hideous noses (by the way, the Malay name for proboscis monkey actually translates as “dutch man”). Here are some more photos.
A white heron
A kingfisher
A hornbill
A proboscis monkey with baby
A typical house in the jungle
Marianne, Amy, myself and Jayne
After leaving the jungle camp we went to Gomantong Cave, which was very interesting. It’s a place where they collect the bird nests used in bird-nest soup. While the bird nest harvesting season had just finished, it was amazing to see the rudimentary equipment and extreme conditions that the people work in to collect these little nests – dangerous in the extreme. The cave itself was massive and therefore very impressive, but also incredibly smelly, as the entire ground was covered in inches of bat and bird droppings, which of course attracted thousands of cockroaches. It was far more pleasant looking up rather than down (so long as you remember to keep your mouth shut when doing so). We then headed further down the coast to a place called Semporna, but I think this would be a good place to end part one. To be continued...
I know it has been a while since I last updated my blog. This has essentially been due to a lack of time, a lack of exciting thingsto write about, and a little bit of laziness. I have been quite busy lately, both in and out of work and unfortunately, I don’t have much time today either, so this will have to be a fairly brief update of the last few weeks.
So, what have I been so busy doing? Basically, working and socialising. There have been a lot of birthdays among the school staff lately, so that means a lot of going out for dinners and the occasional party.
Work has been very busy lately. As the year goes on, students seem to get a bit more stressed and issues that may have been fairly minor in the past can become more difficult to cope with as the stress of schoolwork builds up. I am also running two counselling skills courses – one with students and one with staff, both of which are going pretty well. We had a big International Day at school a couple of weeks ago, which was a lot of fun. There are over 50 nationalities represented by the students in the school, so having everyone dress up in something to represent their home country was quite spectacular. The students' parents put together an absolutely amazing food expo, with huge amounts of food from dozens of different countries. That was a definite highlight of the day.
A few weekends ago a group of us from school went back to Ko Samet (a small island not too far from here), which was a fun weekend away from Bangkok - relaxing on the beach and eating great food. Unfortunately, it rained a bit (even though we are now in the hot, dry season), but not enough to spoil things too much. In an effort to save some money, I decided stayed in a very cheap (and a little bit nasty) hut that was very basic. I only mention this in an effort to stem the rumours that I'm becoming soft in my old age.
Earlier this week I also went to a soccer match. It was actually a World Cup qualifying match between Thailand and Oman. The atmosphere was great, despite Thailand losing 1-0. Here are a few photos and a video clip.
Here is a video clip which shows a near goal for Thailand and the rather amusing reaction of a couple of fans – my mate Mark is the guy in the orange shirt but I think the reaction of the Thai guy he's talking to is great. (Hopefully this will work.)
I only have one week left of school in this term before having two weeks off. I know I’ve said this before, but I do love the holidays that come with working in a school. So, I’m heading off to Malaysian Borneo for 2 weeks with my friend Jayne, who is coming out from Australia to visit me. I’m looking forward to this trip. I’ve only heard good things about Borneo – some good trekking, interesting wildlife and amazing diving.
So, apologies for the lack of interesting news, but I expect my next update will be a bit more exciting. Cheers.
Like most things in Bangkok, the museum is free for monks.
A white heron 
A proboscis monkey with baby 
