Back home

We've been home for about 3 weeks now. The paper I mentioned in my last post got resubmitted and was published last week. One of the master's theses is now complete and the other is out of my hands for a little while. So I've had some time to sort through all 7794 photos that we took on the trip and I selected a mere 287 that are worth sharing. So far, Leah and I have gone through all the Australia pictures and added captions. They're posted online now so you can check them out. New Zealand and Thailand pictures will follow but life is likely going to get in the way so they may take some time. I also started drafting more blog posts but those will take even longer to appear.

In the meantime, a few post-trip thoughts seem appropriate. Before we left, we had dinner with our friends Anne and Todd. They are avid travellers and gave us some useful advice. One of the "rules of travel" that they try to stick to is the "camera rule". Occasionally, you leave the hotel for dinner or to pick something up at the pharmacy across the street and, on your way, you see something that simply demands being photographed. And you camera is in the hotel room. So the rule is "don't go anywhere without a camera". We didn't stick to this rule in a totally strict sense (e.g. the camera didn't come SCUBA diving with us) but whenever the question arose and the answer wasn't obvious, we took it. This definitely worked out for us on many occasions, even though it meant lugging around a DLSR with two lenses (the rule has a simple extension that covers lenses - you can see this degenrating, can't you?).

Upon our return to Vancovuer, we took the skytrain from the airport to our house and sat at the very front of the train (Leah's favourite seat). For those unfamiliar, the Canada Line has no driver so the front seat has a huge window looking forward. I'd never had a camera with me on the skytrain before so I started taking pictures. This is the best one I took. Perhaps a familiar Vancouver scene but certainly not one that does full justice to the city. Unfortunately, I'm rarely carrying my camera with me when the best Vancouver moments arise. That's when it occurred to me that the rationale behind the camera rule extends beyond travel. So I've been carrying my camera around with me, not all the time but certainly more than usual. These are some of the things I've seen and photographed around Vancouver, courtesy of the camera rule.

Kelly, my graduate student, had to abandon her cat, Rafi, for a couple weeks so I did feeding duty one day. Still suffering from jetlag, I was awake before dawn (not hard this time of year) and got a few pictures on the cat-feeding expedition. The picture to the right is the morning frost on the grass in front of our house.

Rafi

The view down Cambie toward downtown Vancouver and the Lions in the distance.

I took this next photo at Queen Elizabeth Park. The lighting and weather weren't great that day but I got photos of a heron, buffleheads, mallards, wigeons and robins. I'm only including the squirrel here because while traveling around Australia, we kept marvelling at all the exotic animals but we never saw black squirrels. So here's a black squirrel. How exotic, eh? You really have to leave home and come back to see it the way everyone else sees it (especially the Japanese tourists who seem to be mesmerized by black squirrels).

After 6 years of living in Vancouver, my good friends and climbing buddies Annemarie and Ryan decided to move to California. While walking over to their place to hang out with them before they took off, I crossed paths with a flock of pigeons in the middle of a crazy figure-eight loop-to-loop around a couple big buildings. I must have watched them do 5 or 6 laps and got a few dozens shots of them in action. I didn't realize what was going on in this particular photo (and I'm still not really sure) until I looked them over on my computer. A little mid-flight snuggling? Or just a momentary collision?  

A former student of mine has been getting into backcountry skiing recently and I hadn't skied in the backcountry yet this year so we headed up to the Coquihalla to ski Needle Peak. This is Caroline skinning up toward the summit ridge.

Messing around with prolonged exposures in the Broadway and Cambie skytrain station on the way to pick Leah up at the airport on her way home from Christmas in Vernon.

Leah, goofing around at a park near the Reifel Bird Sanctuary.

 An old man showing off his duck-catching skills for his granddaughter at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary.

A Sandhill crane at Reifel.

A cormorant near the Cambie Bridge.

Great blue heron at the Lost Lagoon.

Science World across False Creek.

Totem pole in Stanley Park

River otter on the Seawall

Lions Gate Bridge

Where are we?

My sister emailed to tell me that I'm definitely the first person to have ever spotted a wombat in Thailand.  Apparently, the order of recent posts has been a bit confusing. I've tried to back-edit posts adding warning of temporal disorder.

For those who want to sort out where we are and where we've been, you can look back at my third post which lists all the places we visited in Australia and New Zealand. For the Thailand portion of the blog, here's a brief summary.

Nov 22
Bangkok. Just passing through this time.

Nov 23-27
Railay Beach, Krabi Province. Railay is a peninsula on the west coast that everyone refers to as an island because the only way to get there is by longtail boat. It's a bit touristy and a bit overpriced by Thailand standards but the crazy limestone formations (karsts) are popular with the climbing crowd.

Nov 28
Krabi Town. After Railay, this nearby town on the "mainland" felt a bit more authentic even though it was also largely focussed on tourism. I rented a moped for the afternoon and headed to a nearby National Park. The park was nice but I enjoyed the ride out there even more - it felt great to see the country side and see what Thailand looks like without all the tourists around. We also got Thai massages there. I told the woman about my separated shoulder (it took some creative gesturing to communicate that one) and tendonitis. By the time she was done with me, I don't think I had any ligaments or tendons left so problems solved.

Nov 29
Travel to Ko Lipe. A full day affair. 4 hours on a "bus" (minivan) followed by 2 hours on a speedboat to get to a tiny island in the Andaman Sea.

Nov 30 - Dec 3
Ko Lipe. Ko Lipe is hard to get to but worth the effort. Thanks to Mike B for the suggestion. It is a bit touristy and a bit pricey but really mellow with gorgeous beaches and great snorkelling. We also spent two days finishing our Open Water SCUBA certification. In case I forget to blog about the minnow schools and trumpet fish, can someone remind me? Very cool experience.

Dec 4
Getting to Hat Yai (a city in the south of Thailand). Getting from Ko Lipe to Chang Mai (from far south to far north) can be done in many ways. We decided that time constraints were a good excuse to avoid the 20 hour bus ride so we went the "easy" way. All we had to do was get to Hat Yai for one of the daily 1:30 pm flights straight to Chang Mai. See this post for the full story. Memorable day.

Dec 5
Chang Mai. Chang Mai is a major city in the north of the country. Lots of tourists, temples, students and tailors. Our guidebook told us that we should come to Chang Mai to learn. I don't think we consciously tried to do that but you can't really avoid it here. We spent 24 hours at a meditation retreat which was mostly focussed on learning how to meditate but we also picked up a lot about Buddhism and the local culture. The next day, we did a temple walking tour (9 temples in a day - apparently very lucky) and finished that off with a trip to a local tailor where we learned how to tell the difference between various cotton, polyester, wool and silk blends (and did a little shopping too). And today, we just got back from a full day Thai cooking class where we got a tour of a local market, did the shopping and then learned how to prepare five different dishes each (Pranang curry, green curry, hot and sour soup, spring rolls, papaya salad, deep fried bananas, sticky rice with mango...). Tomorrow we're off to the Elephant Nature Park and then a couple days of hiking in the mountains near town. Finally, back to Bangkok for a couple days before heading home on the 16th.

So now that you know the where, what and when, I can focus on telling stories for a while. But for now, I have a paper to resubmit and two MSc theses to proofread so I may not post anything for a little while.

Wombat chasing

(This post is out of sequence - we left NZ a few weeks ago but I'm doing this blog thing Memento-style, remember?)

I'm not sure I'd ever seen a picture of a wombat before this trip. I might not have even heard of a wombat. If I did, I definitely knew nothing more about them than their name. At first I thought this was just because we didn't have wombats where I grew up. But then we didn't have sharks in Montreal either. Or road runners. Or elephants. Or kangaroos. Clearly, wombats ended up with a lousy marketing team. Wombats are extremely cute. Small, furry, short-legged, buck-toothed. They are also avid grazers. In fact, I've now seen about a dozen of them for a grand total of 2 or 3 wombat-hours and at no point in all that time did a wombat look up from his or her busy munching for more than a second or two. Example. I was trying to get a good close-up photo of one. I quietly and carefully edged my way closer and closer until my target wombat's head filled the viewfinder. I took a few shots then lowered the camera and watched. I was pretty close at this point so it was easy to make out details. Head hanging down to grass level, buck teeth plucking away at the blades, nom, nom, nom, away it would chew. Small quiet steps, it meandered across the field, leaving golf-course-like stubble behind it. It just so happened that as I was lowering my camera to admire this adorable creature, its meanderings brought it closer and closer to my feet. Surprised at how comfortable it (he? she? how do you tell?) felt around a human, I stood as still as I could, trying not to spook it away. Suddenly I realized that it had grazed its way right up to my shoe and was now testing out the leather on the side of my big toe. Unable to maintain my composure, I pulled my foot away before my toes were mistaken for blades of grass. Despite jerking its head about when I pulled my foot away, the wombat didn't miss a beat. There was an imperceptible delay in the chewing rhythm before it got back to the grass near my other foot.

Later that day, while visiting the Tasmanian Devil Sanctuary, our host explained how, despite their cute and cuddly appearance, wombats can be quite dangerous. I tried hard to imagine this but could only conjure up an image of a small hole the size of a wombat tooth in the side of my shoe. Apparently, like their cousins the koala, wombats have a hard bony plate on their backside. When threatened by a predator, wombats head straight for their nearest burrow (apparently they take long enough breaks from eating to get in a little digging). The attacker can slash and bite at the wombat's butt with very little effect. Here's where things get ugly. If the attacker is sloppy enough to get its head too close, the wombat can trap and crush it between its bony plate and the ceiling of the burrow. A somewhat tenuous defence mechanism but we all do what we can.

Leah and I spent a bit of time discussing the implications of all this. We decided that wombats definitely wouldn't stray far from their system of burrows. Furthermore, they must have a strong instinct to dash for the nearest one if any sign of danger were to appear (I've since learned that wombats have clocked in at a whopping 40 km/hr so proximity to the burrow may not be that important). The next day while hiking the Cradle Mountain trail, we had an excellent opportunity to test out our hypotheses. Along the side of the track, we spotted several wombats innocently munching away. One in particular was standing about halfway between the track and an obvious burrow about 3 meters away. "I'll walk over to him and try to scare him into his burrow" Leah suggested, "while you get ready with the camera so we can catch him in mid-dash". She stepped off the path and approached the wombat with none of the caution or subtlety we had exercised earlier, perhaps even trying to look threatening. Three feet away. She looked over at me, "camera ready?". Two feet away. She looked at the wombat. Then at me. Then back at the wombat. One foot away. Nom, nom, nom. Our dash-for-the-burrow hypothesis was showing signs of cracks along the foundation. Six inches away. Nom, nom, nom. She leaned over and reached down to the wombat's back. She started to pet it. Nom, nom, nom. Clearly, the instinct is fairly specific to more obvious threats so next time Leah will have to impersonate a dingo or quoll.

Getting to Hat Yai

We arrive at Pattaya Beach (on Ko Lipe) an hour before our scheduled departure. This is actually quite early because "departure" means the time they start loading bags onto the boat. The process involves passengers lugging their bags out into meter-deep water and waiting for one of the boat staff to notice them. The bags are then stashed in bins under the benches. Bags too big to fit underneath and those that show up late get piled in one of two heaps at the front and back of the boat. Then passengers load. There are seats for most but the last few aboard end up sitting on improvised seats (thin mattress pads) placed atop the wall just in front of the 4 outboard motors. As the boat pulls out of the bay, I try to count how many health and safety violations the operators would get nailed with at home. I lose track as the boat hits open water and starts what will be about 90 minutes of water-park worthy entertainment.

The wind has been blowing and the seas are a bit rough. The boat is open on top with only a canvas pulled across a metal frame to protect the passengers from rain and spray and there's a gap between boat and canvas on all sides. Within ten minutes, the young Thai girl sitting next to me is holding a plastic bag to her face. I glance at her mother who explains to me in Thai-lish that she's feeling sick from the petrol smell. In my head, I weigh suffocation against nausea and decide that my Thai and the mother's English are not good enough to get into such a philosophical debate.

As the boat continues to rock sideways through 2 meter waves, water comes splashing through the gap, thoroughly soaking everyone in the back third of the boat. The German woman at the back left corner seems to getting the worst of it - not only is she soaked through but so is the suitcase she's trying to protect. The Ukrainian couple in front of us is holding up lifejackets to deflect the cascade and the three Thai men sitting on the wall at the back start using their mattress pads as improvised shields. I look back periodically to make sure all three of them, perched precariously on the wall above the motors, are still holding on. The young Malaysian couple across from us are both looking pale. Drenched and apparently sea-sick, she heads to the front of the boat and takes a seat on the floor out of the splash zone. All blood seems to have left her face and she spends the last half hour of the trip, eyes closed, head lolling back and forth with the heaving of the boat, desperately trying to keep her lunch moving in the correct direction. Beside me, Leah's eyes are closed and she has a look of pained concentration on her face - she later tells me she spent most of the trip visualizing a big dry white towel folded neatly on the bed at our hotel in Hat Yai.

When we arrive in Pak Bara, we discover that the minivan-bus, for which we already have a ticket, has no seats left and we'll have to wait 10 minutes for the next one. At least this gives us a bit of time to change into dry clothes before the two hour bus ride. The next minivan-bus shows up 15 minutes later and leaves 2 minutes after that, empty. A third one appears a while after that (I stopped paying attention to time - why bother?) and we get on, thinking we're lucky because the driver has to move a couple bags around to make room for us. "Thinking we're lucky" because he repeats this process twice more as others appear. Leah and I both have seat belt issues and give up trying to put them on. When I try to figure out why mine wasn't working, I realize that our seats started life in another van and were bolted in at the back of this van when someone realized that there was no point having trunk space when luggage could just as easily be piled up on one seat with any overflow stashed between the seats and the door. At least the roof of the van doesn't leak as it's now raining quite hard. We remain dry for the next two hours.

When we arrive in Hat Yai, those who speak Thai are dropped off at their chosen destinations. When only the Ukrainian couple (the ones with the life-jacket deflectors) and us are left, the driver hangs up his cell phone for long enough to yell something at us in Thai, at which point we are unceremoniously dumped at a street corner somewhere in the middle of town. When the dust settles, we look around for some sign of where we've ended up. A friendly local woman who speaks English (remarkably, one of these always appears in a moment of need) asks us where we're going. Our hearts sink when she says "is that in Hat Yai?". Eventually, she points us to a Songthaew that the Ukrainians are already getting into, "he'll know". We tell the driver the name of the street our hotel is on, showing him the piece of paper where we've written it down, and he nods confidently, pointing us into the back of the Songthaew (a pick-up truck with a canvas cover over the flatbed and a bench down each side). The Ukrainian man helps haul our luggage on board and we squeeze in at the back. After the Ukrainians get dropped off at the correct hotel, our confidence is bolstered. About ten minutes later, the driver stops in front of what looks like a hospital, gets out of the cab, comes around to the flat bed of the truck and asks us if this is where we want to go (in Thai, of course). At this point, the difference between the street called Rajyindee and the one called Rajyindee Soi 7 is starting to become apparent. I show him the piece of paper with address on it again, pointing out the entire name. He looks at it again, makes a face, pulls out a pair of reading glasses and checks it again. This time, he nods more vigorously. We later discover that street names in Thailand are a bit more structured than at home - Rajyindee is a main street and Soi 7 refers to a lane (the 7th one) branching off it. After a few U turns to circumnavigate the canal that runs through town, we finally pull up in front of the hotel. Next challenge, dinner...

Spider

We saw a ridiculously huge spider yesterday. I asked a local if it was dangerous and his response made it clear that he thought I wanted to know if it was dangerous to eat, which apparently it was not. In case you hadn't guessed, eating it had not really crossed my mind. While I wasn't exactly concerned about the reverse scenario, it seemed reasonable to think that it might make an attempt and, in the process, leave a bit of poison behind or a take a small chunk of flesh. Somehow, the rest of the conversation involved recommendations on other edible invertebrates I should sample. The question really arose because I wanted Leah to hold up a familiar object close to the spider so I could give you a sense of scale when you look at the picture. Somehow I ended up holding the lens cap and she took the picture. The spider did not get eaten. Nobody got poisoned. You are getting your sense of scale.

Post-posting edit - my brother-in-law informs me that this spider is a Giant Golden Orb Weaver aka Nephila Spider. Thanks, Josh.

Learning to read Thai.

Ok, the title is totally misleading. I just managed to navigate my way through the "upload image" process entirely by iconography. Took a few tries but here they are. This is very much an abridge collection. I took more than 2000 photos in NZ and later went through and selected 234 as worthy of showing to others, should they have too much spare time on their hands. Here are six of them. Yeah, it was hard for me to cut it down but you (statistically speaking across the entire population) have an attention span of less than 3 minutes. Hrmph.

A Maori wood carving at the Auckland Museum.

A beach in Abel Tasman National Park.

A Takahe. Once thought to be extinct, these burly cousins to the coot (I think) are alive and working on a comeback. The only natural populations are in the Fiordlands of the South Island but this guy lives on Tiritiri Matangi which is a protected island near Auckland that is now home to a number of indigenous and endangered species.

Two things NZ has in abundance. Green. Sheep. I took this picture on our way to see glow worms in the caves of Waitomo.

Milford Sound. The single most spectacular spot in NZ that we visited.

The view from above Routeburn Falls on the tramp of the same name. (Tramp = NZ for hike)

A few NZ pictures

I was going to post some pictures from NZ but the entire blogger interface is coming up in Thai and my Chrome browser doesn't seem to be translating completely. Sigh. Maybe Firefox will be more clever? . . .