Islands part III - In which I go night diving

Ok. So guess where I am as I am writing this….

I’m at a second story spa, looking out over a busy Chiang Mai street…. and my feet are being nibbled by hundreds of tiny fish!!! Erin and I just found this crazy place. You sit with your feet hanging in cool tanks of water and the tiny cleaning fish suck, and nibble and TICKLE you toes. At first I just died laughing, it was way too tickly but now I’m doing pretty good… except when they go in between my toes… The info sheet says it is called: “Fish Spa Skin Pampering and Nibbling Treatment” ! who knew!?

The whole thing was only for 6 dollars (we got a special discount for being adorable and speaking thai) we get to stay as long as we want (provided too many other customers don’t come, and then need to switch us out.) Apparently this is the popular thing for Thai and Chiang Mai people. Its great.

Also it has free wifi.

Overfishing, global warming, tourist and anchor damage, and even more over fishing have left the reefs missing most of their best sea creatures. Although each of us 30 students snorkled for maybe 10-20+ hours on the program (hundreds of total observation hours) all over the archipelago no a single one of us ever saw a shark. But I was very lucky.

One morning on the Lipe part of the islands course Marica and I got up early to do a dawn snorkel by ourselves. We went down to the beach right off the resort, and swam out. The reef as patchy and more sandy than other reefs, but still in surprisingly OK condition considering its proximity to all the development. We had just reached the big reef shelf (pretty far out into the channel) and I was looking around, and suddenly I see a very familiar shape right there below me. A sea turtle!

I couldn’t believe it, their basically ecologically extinct from the area. Island fisherman have gone years without seeing them, and there he way! The siz of a trash can lid. I was so startled I shouted into my snorkel, and threw my head out of the water to call marica over. As I did so he started booking it over the reef, and the moment I put my face back in the water he was gone.

My best guess was he was the sponge-eating hawkbill sea turtle, wandering around looking for a new home. It was such a special moment, I felt so lucky to have seen him. It also made me feel conflicted and sad. There used to be many tutles breading in the archipelago but people at all the eggs, and trawlers and fisher nets caught but the adults. I’d make me so sad to think this was a tutle “sink” a place roving turtles went to and didn’t come back from, drawing down the total world population. On the other hand maybe it’s a good sign he was there at all.


The night dive:


It was late on the last night on Lipe, when Marica and I went out for our night dive. We were armed with two half broken underwater flashlights. The night was perfectly clear, zillions of tiny stars in the sky. There were the lights from Mountain Resort on the hill overlooking the water. Across the channel Adang island was tall and dark. To make it all the more mysterious and amazing heat lightning cracked in the clouds over the ocean. The dark water sloshed up on the beach, and hiss back across the sand. It was so scary, and so amazing. Marica and I put on our gear and turned on the lights; from the surface they illuminated bright teal patches in the dark water, underwater they opened up halos in the darkness. We kicked out towards the reef. Dark patches of coral glowered under us. It was truly just like flying in a lucid dream. When the heat lightning flashed we could see it from under the water. Horror movie flashes of errie grey light. We got way out, the dark surface rolling beneath us. We flicked off the lights. I stuck my head under the water, and shouted with shock and with glee! The water was filled with bioluminescence – tiny marine organisms that glow when you bump into them. Tiny sparks of light glittered in oras around bodies and kicking fins. For all the stars above there were dancing stars under the water. We splashed and summer salted and shook around under water. If Marcia was a little ways off and I couldn’t see her in the dark, I could just see the glow of her phantom ghost. Trembling and tumbling through the water. When she dived to check out the coral with the light her front half of her body swam ahead and shadow legs trailing stars followed.

The reef was a sleep. It was dark grey, not the rich brown of day time. There were a few ragged and sleepy fish hiding inbetween the corals, urchins empty annenomies. A few red red fish scurried over the reef with buggy black eyes. It was like going forward in time 10 or 20 years, to see what the reefs will be like when they are empty and degraded.

But we did see one creature of interest: one of the floating nearly clear rocketship of a things that I don’t remember what their called. You could just make out the neon lines of is cone shapped body and trailing fins. I cupped it in an underwater hand, it felt like jelly.

Our lights started running out of juice so we made our way back. When we got in they were basically dead.

I notice that most of the memories I want to lock into writing are diving ones. I’ll try to record some others, too.

The wait staff at the Mounton resort (where we were staying) were all super friendly. They came from the mailland to work there half the year. Several of them were lady-boys “Pu Ching” (men become women), which was cool to have to opportunity to meet them. Every evening if I walked through the restaurant to get to the beach we would stop and all chat together, or when I walked down for breakfast there would be a chorous of hellos. It was such a small island that it was cool to make relationships over the week we were there. Restaurant owners waved and smiled asking “by nai crahp?” where are you going? All the time.

The area where the trash was sorted was in the center of the island, hidden by a patch of forest. We walked passed it so many times before we were shown the secret path in. Once we started paying attention, when we walked the road to town during the day we could see smoke wafting out of the trees from the burning. So there is at least one patch of woods that will remain s tanding on Koh Lipe (Lipe Island)… the one that hids the trash pit.

On our first visit to the trash area they were burning what looked like a refrigerator sized plastic crate, it smoldered toxicly. Five urak lawoi women sorted heaps and heaps of rubagge into packs of cardboard, cans, glass, burnables ect. One interesting thing we learned was that the tourists (mostly western European) are conditioned to sort their rubbage, but that the Khon Thai (Thai people) don’t do this. Pi Pooh wanted to hire Urak Lawoi for his projects to give them an opportunity at employment, and so maybe if they sorted at work they would bring that home to their resident families, too.

The same applies for littering… in Thailand throwing you trash on the side of the road is super common if there isn’t a trash can right there… or even if there is. This comes back to the circle of concern: things are much more relationship based, things outside the circle are disregarded however huge amounts of consideration and respect and generosity for those in the circle is accorded. Every thai house I’ve been inside is spotless. It makes me have appreciation for our common courtesy, but the importance put on relationships and greng jai (respect and consideration for others and social harmony) is something I’d like to take back to the states.

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I'd like to thank you all for reading, and for you e-mails ect. Sorry if this is way too much information, and that is rather choppy. (Its easiest for me to just post my journal up in big chunks.) I hope you are all having wonderful holidays, and Merry Christmas to my family back home! The holidays seem very bizarre here; the only hit to the season is the coffee shops, and airports are all hosting fake Christmas trees. You are in my thoughts.

Love, Gigi