Quick! Back to the Island of Dr. Cherot before its too late!

Well I am REALLY behind on my blogging.  Oops.  Not only did I leave London over three weeks ago, I have left Mozambique and South Africa already as well.  Oops.  To be fair to my AMAZING time in London, though, I must post a few pics from there.  It was a truly awesome time!  I still want to move back there.  I fit in there really well for some reason.  Actually I think that the reason is definitely the fact that I used to leave there and quite simply I am a bit of an Anglophile.  The beer is also just so much better than American beer.  Sorry America, but your beer is shite!….well compared to English cask conditioned ales anyway.  The thing is…now I wan tto move to Mozambique or South Africa as well.  D’oh!

London just seems to get better and better.  There are so many more funky buildings now that were not there 10 years ago when I left.  The London Eye is also quite cool but I never managed to make the time to go on it! D’oh!  There were numerous things I did not do this tme around despite having an entire month.  Oh well.  I guess I will have to go back!  Its strange how I seem to have more friends from London now than when I did when I lived there.  Every time I go I also end up with a bunch more friends too!  You’d think it might be easier for me to meet people in San Francisco but for some strange reason I meet people more easily in London.  I simply dunno.

I think I could easily be a BBC weatherman.  What do you think?

Here's one I made earlier!

I mean…how hard can that be?

One of the reasons I like London so much is that puns are more acceptable as legitamate forms of humor.  Americans seem to wince at puns a bit more.  Or maybe they just wince at my puns.  I saw this wine store and just thought it was awesome.

Those were OUR grapes!

After visiting the BBC I have concluded that I could in fact be a weatherman.  It was at the BBC that I saw the Tardis pictured atop this post.  Thats the original Tardis mind you, not some cheesy imitation Sears Tardis.  In the lobby of the BBC Television studio they also had a Dalek:

Procrastinate! Procrastinate!

It was quite cool I have to say.  Ok the real reason I want to work for BBC Television is that they have a full-on PUB in their building.  This is not a little Holly Hobby Tiny Tiki bar kind of thing that comes out on Friday afternoons and I am not talking about a mere beer fridge.  This is the real deal.  You can get cask conditioned ales from the pub in your work place if your work for BBC Television.  Umm….DUH!  Clearly the BBC TV owes the success of its high quality programming to this most splendid of British institutions.  Yes, ladies and gentlmen, the pub.  Speaking of which, its a little scary the rate at which good old fashioned pubs in England seem to be disappearing.  I walked through a neighborhood near Brixton with my friend David and we by three post-pub buildings.  They had gone from pub to some kind of wannabe upscale refuge for Trendar The Bohemian and then failed miserably.   Apparently pre-credit crunch Londoners were finding they wanted to spend their increasing pay on upscale bars and restaurants as opposed to going ’round the good pub for a pint.  What now that we are mid-credit crunch then?  Perhaps the caramel nougat center of this credit crunch candy bar is that people will be drawn back into the good old pubs!  People do tend to drink more when times are tough…they just can’t drink top shelf vodka served in silly glassware.  Hmmm….time will tell.

So one of the things I wanted to do that I did not get to do enough of when I lived in London was visit the British Museum.  Wow has that place changed.  Apparently it was one of their big millenium projects.  Look at the lid they put on this thing!

Serious ceiling

It was really freaky just looking at this thing!  I was astounded.  My friend Derek and I ended up going to see the Babylon exhibit that was on.  It was pretty groovey.  The only problem is that I forgot to go back and check out the rest of the museum.  How did I manage to go to London and get so few of the things done that I wanted to do there?!  Well the answer is….I was making all those friends I told you about earlier.  So then next time when I go back to London to see all those things I missed again, I will make even more friends and not go to museums and it will be this never ending friend cycle that will continue until I move to London at which time my London friends will become sick of me because I am not leaving all of a sudden, and then I will have time to go to all the museums and mope about bemoaning my lonliness.  The grass is always greener you see…  What about a job that just has me traveling to London a lot? Hmmm….

On our way back from the museum I saw this in the window of the comic museum:

This is just plain weird.

I am not sure I could actually get myself to sit in this chair.  I mean…I certainly wouldn’t go looking for change beneath the cushion.  Who knows what you might find.  By the way, this piece was entitled “Chairman Mao”, 1971 by David Scarfe.

So most of the pictures I have from London that I dare to share with you are from an exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art called….umm….ummm…..oops I can’t remember.  All I remember was that it was a Glaxo Smith-Kline thing…GSK Contemporary or something like that.  There were multiple stages to the exhibit and this was towards the end of it.  I had to be kind of sly with the iPhone taking these pics as I am not sure photography was permitted or not.  I did not see any signage to the contrary, however, so I reckon it was alright.

This was the first notable piece I saw.  The stuff preceding this was some video work which, frankly, I thought was really underwhelming.  Anyway, this piece was entitled “Countdown” by T.V Santhosh.  It was rahter strange indeed.  Sorry for the crappy iPhone photo…but by now you are used to all my crappy photos here anyway:

Counting Down

The next room after this one had some really col stuff.  First was this bone car:

This thing belongs at Burning Man!

Here is a detail of the bone car:

The detail on this thing was insane!

The same artist also did these really funny sculptures depicting the skeletons of The Road Runner and Wiley Coyote.

And the coyote:I wonder if Acme Glue was used to put these guys together

Outside the Royal Academy of Art were three nickel plated sculptures by Antony Micallef.  These might actually even be my favorite pieces from the show.  They are hilarious!:

Mmmmm...Happy Meal...

If you play console games too much this is what happens to you.

So yeah…it was a cool exhibit.  The coolest part was that I went with Jeremy, my art teacher from High School! It was great to catch up with him in London as I had not seen him in 15 years or so.  There were some other great visitations that occurred there as well and like I mentioned, I met some really awesome new people!  I really might have to figure out this new job that has me spending a lot of time in London thing.

Finally a word about food in London.  It was actually pretty darn good 10 years ago when compared to the early 80′s when apparently the food in London was shite.  Now its even better.  I thought the average cheap meal you could find in London was better than that of SF…not including pizza and Mexican food though.  Of course, London has KILLER KEBABS.  Man do I love me a good kebab.  My favorite place by far is Maroush on Beauchamp Place:

The best Kebab in London in my not so humble opinion.

The last meal I had in London though was the best meal I have had in a long time.  It had been a while since I had been to a restaurant that had a Michelin star as well so this was a real treat.  Apparently its one of, if not the only, Indian restaurant in London that has a Michelin star.

YUM!

This was far and away the best Indian food I have ever had.  The naan alone was just amazing.  The chutneys were SO amazing too.  One of them was just crushed peanuts and rose pedals.  All the meat was cooked to perfection it absolutely the most amazing taste sensation.  I could not recommend it any more.  Get the sample platter thingy!

So that was but a few highlights of my trip to London.  There was so much more.  I had to refrain from putting up pics of my friends in compromising positions involving Irn Bru Martinis and Kilts on Burns night and I shall save those fro Facebook.   I was sad to leave London.  One of the most difficult parts of this adventure has been all the goodbyes.  Leaving SF was REALLY hard because I was leaving my job (er…actually it was leaving me!), and I was moving out of my house, and there was so much of a sense of dying and everything ending…it was also Autumn which is already the archetypal motherload source of dying feeling…the election was coming up too and I was shitting myself in fear over who might win.  I had to get the fork out of there before the election hit or else I would have freaked out I think.  Suffice it to say, it was sad and strerssful leaving SF.  The exception to the goodbye thing though was Yap.  Damn I was glad to get the fork out of there after three weeks.  Don’t get me wrong…I had a great time and there are things I like about Yap to be sure but I needed to get to Palau!  I had a blast in Palau and was sad to leave there and I had to take 4 red eye flights in a row and at the end of it was the frozen shit hole of New Jersey.  Then I proceeded to have a great time in NJ and NYC and caught up with old friends and made some new ones too and so then I had to say goodbye again!  Yuck!  Then of course came London which I just talked about…and then leaving Mozambique was difficult too!  Shit! I REALLY liked Mozambique and the time I spent there.  Never have a received so much hospitality from folks and I met some amazing people.  I will have a lot to write about Mozambique and that comes next but I am not sure I will be able to post anything about that until I get back to SF.  I know…it will not be quite as fresh but what can ya do?

The Safari I went on in South Africa was also OFF THE HOOK and I have some amazing video from there…it was truly another Planet Earth moment.  I love this planet!  <GUSH!!!>

So yeah…I died this last Autumn and this Spring I am coming back to life.  Don’t worry..I’m not gettin’ all Jesus on all y’all er nuthin’.  Jus archetypally rejehovatated. know what I mean?

So GOODBYE for now…sniff sniff… I am glad to be headed to another air conditioned boat though I have to say.  North Sulawesi is cool but not “cool”.  Its like being in an armpit here.

Oh not to leave you with bad news but my underwater camera housing broke! So unless I can rent another camera I will not have any more underwater shots from the rest of the divey bits.   BUT I am going to the West Papuan Highland which should do more than make up for that! All of my video from the past few months is yet to come too…

BYE!

Souther coastal Mozambique can expect svere storms.

I made it!  I am actually in Mozambique as I write this.  Actually I have been here for almost a week.  I have been working on a website every day and I have not even been diving yet!  Its not for lack of time though. Its a matter of the weather.  Its been windy and rainy and its just not fun to go out and do research in that.  You have to do beach launches here and when the surf is up that is just too tall an order. I had thought that the dive operators here would go out come rain or shine but apparently that is not actually the case.  So nobody has been diving these days here.  Despite not diving I have been having a surprisingly good time.  I think its a good idea that I get accustomed to working again so that it is not such a complete shock when I return to work in the spring.  Working with Simon Pierce and Andrea Marshall has also been a complete joy!  Its been SO fun!  Here I am hanging out with the world’s leading experts on Manta Rays and Whale Sharks.  How freaking cool is that?  Very…to be exact.  I came here to see if this is something I really want to get more involved with in some capacity and so far I really like the idea even though I have not actually been tagging any animals yet.  Life devoted to the study of and preservation of the natural world may simply be something I have to do.

So…as much as I want to post some of my recent photos of London and Mozambique, i still have a backlog of images to post from Palau.  I had a blast on my last boat trip aboard the Palau Aggressor II with my friend Tim and Captain Mike and his wife Amanda.  They run a really top class operation and the boat was excellent.  Very roomy and all the Red Rooster beer I could drink!  Of course when you do 4 or 5 dives a day there is only so much beer you have time to drink so I actually did not end up drinking much which is a shame because the dark lager (or was it a stout?) was really really good.  So without further ado…its on to my last pictures from Palau.

This is a typical view from my cabin window.  There were Black Tip Reef Sharks that constantly circled our boat when it was moored.  I liked the idea of snapping a pic that was perfectly “framed”:

Mmmm....sharks....

An interesting feature of this boat was that it had a hydraulic lift on the back of it such that the diving skiff could be picked up and hauled around on the back of the main boat.  Very high tech if you ask me.  One day we were coming back from diving and there was a sea snake (sea crate as its called) climbing onto the boat and it was wrapping itself around all the machinery.  It was a baby but it was very cool.  Its apparently the most venemous snake in the world.  I am pretty sure its related to cobras as are coral snakes but I am not totally sure.

Mmmmm...sea snake....

Here is a shot of a sleeping Parrot Fish.  I have a cool video of one as well.  The cool thing about how they sleep is that they secrete a kind of membranous balloon from their mouth which envelopes their whole body.  They do this to mask their scent while they are sleeping.  If you look closely, you can actually see this membrane in this photo.  You see what looks like specs of dust just above the fish and this actually little bits of sand and silt that have gotten stuck in the membrane.  Its very weird looking when you see it.

Mmmm....sleeping Parrot Fish membrane sack thing.....

On one dive we saw Octopus which was very very cool.  It was trying to make itself look like coral and then it would pose a little.  I like this shot because its a little like portraiture although its technically not very good.  All you photo buffs just keep in mind that I am taking still photos with a video camera so I have no control over my aperture or shutter speed or any of that!:

Mmmm...cephalapods!

This is a really groovey Nudibranch I saw on a dusk dive.  I behaved badly though and lost my group while I was snapping away at this one.  Its also not a very good photo but it was a very cool creature!

Mmmm....sea slug.....

There were some very cool wrecks in Palau.  I wish I had explored them more.  We actually took a “wreck course” which turned out to be a bit underwhelming but I won’t go into that. This is the Jake Sea Plane, and its the most photographed wreck in Palau…or was is the world?  I can’t remember.  I have seen some cool photos of this plane with colored lights in the cock pit that were pretty groovey.  The cool thing about this dive was that there was a crocodile fish on the wing (the one pictured in one of my earlier posts)!

In the event of a water landing....

This was taken from a wreck called the Iro.  Some of these wrecks were just completely covered in crazy coral formations, sponges, clams, and everything you could imagine.  They tended to be in places where the visability was not that amazing though.

Mmmm.....corroding metal n'stuff....

There were TONS of turtles in Palau.  This is a Hawk’s Bill turtle that we followed for a long long time…or rather it was kind of following us…two of them to be exact.  Unfortunately my camera has terrible white balance capability so this is a REALLY green Hawks Bill.

Mmmm.....Hawk.....'s bill.....turtle.....

No self respecting underwater photographer can escape a dive trip to Palau without the obligatory Gorgonian Sea Fan silhouette with diver in background.

Mmmmmm......sea fan.....

One of the coolest dive sites in Palau is the Blue Holes.  There are five holes in the top of the reef that go down to about 130 ft or so and you get these gorgeous views of the holes from below.  There are some caves within these caverns that go really deep and both divers and turtles have met their fate in there.  Hence its called Temple of Doom.  One day I would like to do a tech dive in there with Tri-Mix and a reel (or two!) but that kind of diving is still out of my league.

Mmmm....Blue Hole.....

Outside the cave entrance is a really cool clam thing called a file shell I think it is.  It has these long orange tendrils as you can see and the blue part you see blinks and flashes like some kind of electrical filiament or something.  You can see this in the Planet Earth series too!  I love those moments where you are living some of the scenes from Planet Earth.  Priceless!

Disco...Disco....Clam.....I want to be...a Disco Clam....

Mmmm.....clown....fish.....

So thats it for my Palau pics!  At least thats it for the “good” ones.  Next post should be a relative short one about New Jersey and New York City I reckon.

This strip to Micronesia was truly one of the most awesome experiences I have had.  My crappy photos and my crappy videos can not begin to describe how cool the diving is there.  There is nothing like being down at 130 ft in the middle of a rushing bait ball with sharks, Napoleon Wrasse,  Trevali and Grouper swooping in all around you.  What was really cool was being able to hear the rush of the fish as they came at you.  Simpley amazing!

Ok thats all for now folks.  Be well!

I can’t believe I actually made that pun myself after hearing a thousand times over the last however long. Next I will probably say something like Colin Allcars.

Anyway, my apologies to the two people that actually read this blog. I have some more pics to upload from Palau, New Jersey, New York, and now London.  Now that I have bandwidth, it would be a shame not to upload some of the video footage at this point as well.  If London was not so gosh darn fun I would have some of it up by now but alas, I have been bizAY!

Ok more coming soon…PROMISE!

Ommmmmmmmmm.....n'stuff.......

So I am getting on another boat today.  Hooray!  Much diving ahead of me this week.  It should be awesome.  The reef is always changing here.  The same dive site is really never the same twice.  I have had some mediocre dives here at this point but no dives that were “bad”.  I really want to work on my video skills and see if I can really get some quality footage regularly on every dive.  Its a bit like photography in that you are lucky if you a few good shots per dive.  I have some already but the goal is to be more consistent.

I finally went on a land tour of the island the other day.  It was interesting in retrospect but it was a tad underwhelming.  The land tours of Yap were more interesting because the culture is better preserved there and I like the whole concept of a “Forbidden Island”.  It reminds of that Brady Bunch episode where the kids get held hostage in that cave.  It also seems like “Forbidden Island” should be the title of a Martin Denny exotica record.

Anyway, the first stop on the tour was to a big waterfall.  The hike was not vry far but there was definitely some up and down involved.  I currently have a harsh reminder of exactly how little hiking I have been doing lately and my calves are SO sore.  Its really kind of crazy actually.  I need to get into better shape.

At the beginning of the hike we saw the remnants of a Japanese rail line that was used for mining iron and taking the yummy iron bits from one part of the island to another:

All aboard the failroad....

We had to walk through an aweful lot of mud to get to the waterfall but it was very refreshing I have to say:

Mmmm....waterfall.....

This creek goes to a small pond which according to local lore is a kind of fountain of youth.  There is a legend of an old woman who was led there by a Kingfisher and when she bathed inthe pond, she turned into a young hotty.  When she returned to her aging husband he was like “umm…you are like…too hot for me now.”  Thats the part of the story that, for me, makes it fiction.  Anyway, she then returned to the pond and bathed in it again and was turned back into the old woman she was.  It was interestng to learn some local mythology.

Our next stop on the land tour was the stone monoliths.  These monoliths are the remains of a men’s house.  It must have been huge.

Mmmmmonoliths...........

To be honest, I thought the monoliths were somewhat underwhelming, especially compared to the HUGE pieces of stone money we saw and Yap.  I was, however, digging some of the pieces that looked like they had faces carved on them at one point.

He looks stoned...huh...get it?

Our next stop was the capitol building.  This things is huge considering how few people actually live in Palau:

Mmmm.....capitol......

Its funny.  The pillars are actually made of some kind of foam-like substance.  You can knock on them and they are completely hollow too.  There were soom cool glyphy bits on there though:

Mmmm....bird detail thingy....

Parked in front of the President’s office, we saw the President’s car.  I don’t why, but I found it funny that there was a bag of betel nut seeds in it.  If you look closely, you can see the little green things near the gear shift thingy:

Mmmm....betel nut seeds....

Off in the distance we saw this really groovey looking monument thingy.

Mmmmonument........

The obelisk shape reminded me a lot of my own art.  I guess its really quite a potent shape.  It turned out to be a Korean monument in remembrance of all the Koreans that died at the hands of the Japanese during WW II and thereabouts:

This is some pretty heavy stuff.

Somehow I don’t think this monument is on the Japanese version of the land tour of Palau.

There were some really groovey statues here I have to say:

This is REAL lense flare...not "Sears" Lense flare.

There are some other groovey pics from this place but I am running out of time and I need to get out of here.

The next and last stop on our tour was a bit disturbing.  It was a crocodile farm, but I am starting to think of it more as a Crocodile Prison. I did not realise what was in this pic when I took it but its pretty funny.

Mmmm....people feet.....

This Crocodile Prison also had a miniature Monkey Prison in it which made me really sad:

This monkey was SO cute and sad all at the same time.

Ok folks….I gotta run!  Be well and I will see you in a week!

Moorish Idol hiding beneath sea plane wreck

So I did end up finding some info on the Satan Slug from one of my previous postings:

http://www.seaslug.info/factsheet.cfm?base=pleugran

So my Oatmeal tastes like garlic today.  Actually it has always tasted like garlic since I started eating it at this restaurant a week ago.  It even has a little bit of curry in it today as well.  Hmmm.  Me thinks somebody has not been washing the pots too well.

Its interesting what not driving a car after you have been a driver for a long time does to you.  Relatively speaking, there are not that many cars in Palau although there is definitely a rush hour of sorts.  I have been a pedestrian for the most part here with the exception of the odd cab ride back from the dive shop.  I am now really irritated with all the traffic.  I don’t get it.  Where did all these cars come from and where are they all going?  Can’t they ride bikes?  Why do they have to get so close to me on the side of the road?  Well this latter question can be explained by the fact that most of the cars here are right hand drive yet one drives on the right side of the road.  What ends up happening is that drivers have a very good idea of where the side of the road is, and consequently where you are, and hence will get close to you without worrying about hitting you.  Its really unnerving.  My point, however, is that I am starting to realise how annoying excessive car use is!

I think I might have finally gotten a little sick on this trip.  The hamburger stand guy talked me into getting one last night as I walked by.  I was like…well…I DID hear that he burgers were good here….hmmm… So I caved in and it was indeed delicious but damn yesterday was a bad day in the life of Colin’s healthier diet.  Maybe thats why I feel “sick”.

I might be giving up on the crocodile expedition in favor of a sea snake outing.  Apparently there is a place where the sea snakes go ashore and sleep.  Rumor has it that they actually snore too!  If this is the case then I will get some sea snake snoring on the intertubez as soon as I get back in the land of good bandwidth.  Oh how I can’t wait to get back into the land of good bandwidth…..

What other random thoughts do I have to offer today?  Well I am really digging these fancy SHURE ear buds.  They are SOOOOO clear.  I am hearing new things in music that I have been listening to for years.  Some of this stuff has also been remastered though which makes a huge difference.  I collected a bunch of those Pink Floyd remastered Japanese Mini-LPs and they sound SOOOO good.  With some of these records it really makes a huge difference.  I was never a huge fan of “Animals” but it sounds SOOOO good now.

Apparently SONY is cutting 8000 jobs.  Yeah tell me about it!

Ok so on to the Fish as promised.   Some of you have already seen the first few fish pictured below and I apologize for that but these fish pics never made it into my blog, only to Facebook, so I wanted to get them up here. They are actually from Yap.

This is a Mandarin Fish. These little guys only really come out at dusk to eat and mate.  Why get out of bed for anything else?  They are possibly the most beautiful fish ever.  They’re markings are so intricate and detailed down to every last part of their fins.  Their fins flutter incredibly quickly as well so they seem a little bit like Humming Birds.  They mate 25 nights out of each month as well.

Mmmmmandarin fish....

This is a Cuttle Fish.  Possibly the smartest fish in the sea.  These things are SO coool.  We were able to hang out with it for about half an hour.  I watched it change colors like crazy and it could change its texture as well.  It would get all spiky sometimes and other times it would be perfectly smooth.  It would sometimes go under a head of coral and turn black and completely disappear and sometimes it would be bright bright white.  Amazing I tellz ya.

So cute and cuttley

Ok now on to the fish in Palau.  Here is a Napoleon Wrasse.  These guys are crazy!  They are huge and have the coolest markings on them.  There are some that seem to have a good relationship with a number of the divemasters around here.  Apparently they get fed hard boiled eggs amongst other things and are always looking for a handout now!  They are quite docile though and the divemasters here pet them and put them underneath their arm and pass them around from diver to diver and that sort of thing.  Its pretty amusing.  Sometimes the divemasters will put a piece of food near and the fish will rush in and it will seem like its going to take your arm off. Its scary!

Vivre Napoleon!

Here is a Scorpion fish.  Pretty clever masters of disguise these ones.

Mmm....scorpion....fish...

Here is a relative of the Scorpion called the Leaf Fish.  Actually I think it might be called the Leaf Scorpion fish but anyway, here is a kind of crappy shot of a yellow one:

Make like a fish and leaf...

Here is a Unicorn Fish.  This one was easy to photograph at night because it seemed to be blinded by my light.  I decided not to torture the poor fishes with the light any more though because it seemed really disruptive to their behavior.  Some of these fish could be stunned and then become easy prey.  Not nice!  These unicorn fish have the weirdest profiles.  They remind me of Blue Meanies from The Yellow Submarine.

Mmm.....unicorn....fish....

The crocodile fish is pretty darn elusive but I did manage to see a couple of them on the last boat trip.

Mmm....crocodile....fish....

Contrast the snout with that of a REAL crocodile:

Mmmm....snout....

The Crocodile Fish’s eye is especially cool looking (sorry for the crappy cyan drenched shot):

Mmm....crocodile...fish....eye.....

contrast that with an actual crocodile’s eye:

Mmm....crocodile...eye....

I have loads more fish pics but I am going to try and be more selective about the pictures I take in an effort to raise the quality there of.  That way I will be inspired to take only good pics to later upload to the blog!

Ok so thats all for this first Fish posting from Palau.  It might be a while before the next Fish posting as I am on a boat next week and will have no interwebz again for a while.  I have some other posts coming before then though…

Be well people!

OMG LOLBATZ!

Right now I am eating what seems like a gallon of oatmeal.  At some point this will cease to be about reducing my cholesterol and will be more about stuffing myself full of goo.  Mmmm….goo.  The good news is that I finally started doing my daily excercise routine again and I feel much better.  My back was starting to complain a bit.  What forced me to start exercising again was the fact that my bed at the hotel is essentially a box spring.  Apparently the Taiwanese (and Chinese) are way into really hard beds and this hotel is Taiwanese owned.  I requested a different bed and they put a cushion on top of it and its much better.  Its WAy better than the first bed I had in Yap which was like a bed of nails.

So it looks like I am getting on another liveaboard here in Palau before I leave!  Heavily discounted no less!:

Mmmm....boatz....

I just need to move some plane tickets around.  I have already changed my plane tickets SO many times that I could probably fly to London on the money I spent on rescheduling fees.   I wish it would happen sooner rather than later but I can’t really pass it up.  Darn it.  I do need to start figuring out how to spend less money though.  I was hoping I could go sit on an island somewhere and camp but that involves renting camping equipement and I would want to rent a kayak too and….there is no air conditioning.  I know I know…that is rediculous but I have to say I am digging the air conditioning here after being out in the humidity.  Its seriously MOIST here.  There I said it….MMMMOOOOOIIIIIIISSSSSSSTTTTTT. Blech.

I should probably do it anyway because there is some epic kayaking out here.  I am not sure if I am allowed to fish but that would be pretty cool if I could catch my own fish and eat’em!  Catching reef fish and eating them is not really cool though.  That is, after all , why I came here ya know?…to see fish…not necessarily to eat them.  The more people eat reef fish in the restaurants, the more people will go fish for them.  Duh.  I think I will still go on a mad kayak quest for the crocodiles, birds, and fruit bats though.  I need to work out how to go at low tide so I can see the crocodiles hanging out in the mud.  I also need to not get eaten though.  Hmmmm….

I did go on the “Jungle River Cruise” already but it was REALLY lame.  I mean really lame.  It lasted about an hour and the highlight was when they fed hotdogs to a 6 ft. crocodile.  Its not a great idea to feed crocodiles in the “wild”.  I suppose I did take advantage of the opportunity to snap some good pics and video though so I guess that makes me part of the problem.  Oopsilly Doopsilly.

Mmmm....hotdogs...

What really bothered me was the fact that had a fruit bat in a cage just sitting there on display for you when you arrived.  I was really tempted to free it.  Upon reviewing some of the video of it I realised it was making good progress in chewing through the strings that tied the door shut on the cage.  I am tempted to go back and free it in the name of Fruitbats First! Or maybe I should just buy the bat and set it free.  Maybe when I set it free, it will feel this deep sense of gratitude and accompany me on my butch bird watching tour  guiding me through the treacherous mangrove forests like some kind of Tarzan wild animal companion situation.  Ok I have to stop chewing the Betel Nut me thinks.

Mmmm....Bat Prison...

My friend George, many years ago, went on a crazy botanical tour of Australia, New Guinea, and various points in Indonesia studying orchids.  I think he discovered like 8 new species or something crazy like that.  He made a slide show of his travels and in one of the places where he was staying whilst studing various plants, there were these giant fruit bats that would hang out with them.  They LOVED the car ride into town apparently and would hang upside down (like ya do when you are a bat) in the windows of the car.  So just imagine driving down twisty jungled out dirt roads with a giant bat hanging in your window.

We ever so briefly saw a Biib, the national bird of Palau on the cheesy namby pamby jungle river la la cruise but to me it was but a flash of purple.  Here is a pic I found on the interwebz:

Mmmm....Biib....

Hopefully when I rent the kayak I can do some seriously butch bird watching instead of the aforementioned crocodile feeding sissy bird watching.  I mean, what fun is bird watching if there is no threat of being eaten by a crocodile?

So I am not diving today.  I think I am just going to find a good interweb connection somewhere and park it for a while.  I actually have quite a bit of travel planning to do anyway.  Its easy to let the time get away from you here.  It seems like when I go diving, I come up and days have passed.

I just realised that I am NOT being eaten by mosquitoes as I write this. Woo!  BUT I am next to the dump and it stinks!

Be well people!

Fuck Yeah!

After 20 days in Yap, I was SO psyched to see this upon my arrival in Palau.  At first I was concerned that there was no discernible difference between Oscillate and Pulsate but I sat there deep in thought for a while and finally figured it out.  You see, I did not realise that you can have these two settings on at the SAME time.  OMG…  Oscillate is a quick pumping action while pulsate is a slower subtler change in the water pressure.  Although the Crackle Office was equipped with the Swash 800, it did not hold a candle to this Toto thang.  I mean damn… This hotel, The Palau Pacific Resort knows how to keep the Japanese tourists coming back again and again and again and its not for the food.

I have to say, I was REALLY ready to get out of Yap.  Its simply too darn slow there.  I can appreciate that but after almost three weeks of it I was ready to get somewhere a little more fast paced.  Palau isn’t exactly a hub of activity either but compared to Yap its like frikkin’ Grand Central Station.  I was getting really sick of the bugs, and it also seemed like everyone was high as fuck…but like not really in a good way.  I think their may be a serious meth problem on Yap.  I know its been a huge problem in other island communities like Hawaii and I think there may be an “ice” problem here in Palau too.  That shit is just not good for you.  I generally don’t care what people do to their own bodies and I am all for freedom n’stuff but that stuff really tears lives apart.  I know meth is all over the west coast and particularly the I-5 corridor but apparently its an epidemic in the mid-west as well.  Blech!

So yeah I was ready to get out of Yap.  I was not too hip on the food either.  Oasis has the best food there for the money and there was really only one drinkable wine on the whole island and that was the Chardonnay from New Zealand they served on the Mnuw schooner.  There are also seemingly no comfortable chairs on Yap.  Lots of hard wooden seats that started to hurt my butt after a while.  My hotel was also a bit wonky in a few ways.  It had charm as long as you were not sitting in the restaurant that was suspended over a mosquito nursery where they served you Yap’s worst food.  OMG…  They clearly did not care that their food was complete shit and all the botles of liquor at the bar had half an inch of dust on them and about half an inch of liquor in them.  Mmmmm…..  My air conditioner broke so they moved me to a different room with a different broken air conditioner and after a week of that I was like W…T….F….. I just want to be somewhere DRY DRY DRY.  I was SO sick of feeling like a walking arm pit.  I needed to get onto an air conditioned dive boat soon!  I can deal with the tropical heat but I need some air flow or I just sweat and become miserable.

And ya know what?  I have not heard my phone ring in almost a month.  Wow!  I have not even checked my voice mail.  I can’t.   I wonder how many messages I have.  I think I shall stop thinking about it immediately.  Tra la la la la….

Palau is pretty darn cool, I have to say.  I just got off ther Ocean Hunter III liveaboard the other day and I have to say it was pretty amazing diving.  The staff is really good on that boat too.  The food is excellent as well.  Best live-aboard food I have had so far.  I logged almost 30 dives on that boat and almost 30 in Yap as well.  Thats almost 60 dives in the month of November. Dang.

We saw LOTS of fish.  We saw schools of barracuda being herded by sharks and some really big wahoo and other tuna as well.  We saw manta rays and eagle rays and a feathered sting ray and well…LOTS of other stuff.  I have some great video but not a lot of bandwidth to upload it, unfortunately, so the video will have to until late December and January.   For now its all about the photos.

As I was preparing the first batch of photos, I decided to split them up according to certain criteria.  The first batch will be invertebrates.  A bunch of the critters here are Nudibranchs.  That means “naked lung”.  They are mollusks (I think) that have their lungs on the outside of their body.  Hence the name.  They can be REALLY ornate too….and kinky.  I was reading in the book that one Nudibranch came across another one of the same species after it had just devoured something.  It decided it would eat the other one (they are cannibalz n’shit) and as it was eating, when it got up to the reproductive organ it was like oh! And it then decided to mate with the other one instead of eating it.  kinKAY!

So here we have a….ummm….a…..yeah…..its a…..ummm….yeah…well its picture #666 according to my camera so maybe its Satan’s Slimey Thing?:

Mmmm....Satanic Slime Thang!

We looked up the creature pictured above and it turns that is something called a Pleurobranch.  That probably means it has multiple lungs or something like that but I will have to get all wiki widdit and see whats up.  There this other slimey thing that I saw when I did not have my camera and it was a snail kind of thing but its shell was on the INSIDE.  Now what purpose does an inner shell serve?  Does it protect you from yourself. Is it a way of putting your inner child in daycare while you squoob yourself freely all over the reef?  I don’t get it.

Now here we have a rather odd Nudibranch looking thing which is not actually a nudibranch but some other similar invertebrate sluggy thing.  I will have to look that up in someone else’s expenive invertebrate encyclopedia.  Sorry for the crappy photo of this one too.  I should have used the light.  This pic is more about showing howing strange some of these creatures are:

Mmmm....yellow and black invertebrates....

At one point this really cool yellowish green and red sluggy thing caught my eye on this one dive.  I went to go look at it more closely and I realised it was a bloody booger stuck to the inside of my mask. OMG GREEEWWWSSSSS! …ya see sometimes one’s nose bleeds a little while diving because of all the pressure in the sinus cavities.  Nothing to worry about, mom.  I keep forgetting my mom reads this shiznit.

Here is a huge Nudibranch that we saw from time to time.  These are SO cool.  I wish I had a glossy colored groovey Nudibranch book so I could be all nerdy and supply you with the taxonomy of these critters.  Sorry folks, I am on a budget….BUT I might be able to use the one down at the dive shop.

Mmm....golden frilly bitz!

Here is a not so terribly impressive yet still rather interesting specimen:

Mmmm.....black and white mollusky bits....

This nudibranch was very strange.  It was REALLY small and I can’t believe the divemaster even noticed it.  Its the long stringy thing in this pic:

Mmm....strange long stringy nudibranch that I would never have noticed if it weren

Ok that caption was too long I guess.

And here is rather impressive big reddish Nudibranch.  I love the extra frilly lungs on this one.  I saw it on a night dive at a place called Turtle Cove:

Mmm....big red nudibranch....

Can you imagine if you woke up one morning and this thing was like stuck to your leg?  Or worse?

And our last invertebrate is not a nudibranch but rather and arthrapod.  Not sure I spelled that right but oh well.  This is a not so fantastic photo of a slipper lobster:

Ittha thlipper lobthter! Thankth for athking!

It looked like some kind of armored alien assault vehicle or something.  Strange stuff.

So that concludes my first Invertebrate photo collection.  more to come soon I reckon!

I need to publish this before I get kicked off the network when my thingy times out.

Be well people!

Amazing!...get it? Nyuck...

Ya know….I love coral.  I really do.  And I really love photographing coral too.  Ya know why?  Because it doesn’t swim!  Of course I will probably discover soon that there IS as kind of swimming coral and its incredibly beautiful and I will want to photograph that too.

I noticed an uncanny similarity between some coral I saw:

This is a close up of some groovey coral.

and a certain album cover:

Truly uncanny!

Then there was THIS coral which I TOTALLY want to upholster a couch with:

Mmmmm...mustard colored brain coral stuff....

So yeah….above mentioned mustard colored coral pattern upholstered couch would like nice in the Uberpimpin Sealab Underwater Habitat Thingy that I wanna build.  Speaking of which there is something like that in Key Largo apparently:

Mmm....underwater hotel

Some friends of mine actually stayed there too.  They said it was really cool.  Some guy dove down into their underwater hotel room with food in a water proof case and cooked it for them right there in their little habitat room.  Steak and lobster no less!  How frikkin’ cool is that.  Its about 20 feet underwater and after staying there for 24 hours you are pretty well saturated with nitrogen.  My friends both git skin bends when they came up too!  Thats when you get little nitrogen bubbles in your skin and apparently its really irritating.  Its not something they bother treating with a trip to the hyperbaric chamber, however.

So I will be making one more post about Yap with some of the cooler fish I saw there.  I wish I had better bandwidth here in Palau because I have this really great video from a trip we took to the Village of Kadai.  The Yapese still preserve many of the traditional aspects of their culture although its more and more of a struggle as the years go by.  We saw some traditional dances and ate some of the traditional foods.  We even chewed the Betel Nut!  Yep.  We did it.  It was prepared with the traditional pepper leaves and coral lime.  I have a really funny video of it….I guess that and the rest of the groovey video I have will have to wait.

Ok thats all for now.  Be well people!

Ka-Ching!

The Stone Money in Yap is, I have to say, VERY interesting.  It is in fact still used as currency but not as you might think.  First of all, when stone money changes “hands” it loses value, and it also does not actually move its physical location either.  Thats handy considering the largest pieces of stone money are 12 feet in diameter.  The record of the value of the money exists in the story behind the money which is essentially passed down through oral tradition.  To this day, you can buy land in Yap with stone money.  Its generally used for things that are somewhat intangible in nature such as honor.  If you dishonor someone you can pay them in stone money but one’s family is expected to hold on to their stone money for as long as possible.  If you kill someone, then apparently you can also make reparations for that with stone money although I suspect that is not still the case.  One person told us that you used to be able to actually take someone’s life with stone money if you wanted them dead badly enough but I am not sure if this is really true.  I am wondering if something was lost in translation in this case.

The largest pieces of stone money in Yap are on the forbidden island of Rumung.  There used to be a land bridge connecting Rumung to the island of Maap but it was dismantled by the current residents of Rumung in an effort to preserve the more traditional examples of Yapese culture.  Yap, Maap, Tomil, and Rumung make up the main islands of Yap proper but now Yap State, part of the Federated States of Micronesia, includes other islands that are as much as 500 miles away from the main islands.  Its possible that was not originally its own island but now, at least, there is a canal, called The German Channel, which separates Yap and Tomil. The “outer islands” as they are referred to, do not speak the same language as Yap proper, and there are five different languages spoken in Yap State when you consider all of the islands.

A resident of Rumung was recently hired at one of the resorts in Colonia, the capital of Yap, and since then some kind of deal was struck where by some tourists are allowed on the island of Rumung and they are allowed to visit two of the villages on the island.  Photography and video, however, are forbidden in the village of Riy, which is one of those villages.  Riy has the largest stone money in Yap.

Stone money essentailly comes in two different flavors in Yap.  There is the pre-O’Keefe Stone Money and the stone money of the O’Keefe era.  O’Keefe was an Irishman who landed on Yap in the late 19th century.  He was well respected by the Yapese and provided transportation and a more efficient means of carving the large pieces of stone money from the distant quarries in Palau from whence the money originated.    O’Keefe was even given his own island which is the site of the Mandarin Fish dives so popular amongst divers who visit Yap.

The stone money brought over by O’Keefe does not hold as much value as the pre-O’Keefe money, however.  This is because the value of Yapese stone money is somewhat complicated.  There are several different qualities which affect it.  There is the size, as one might expect.  The largest pieces of stone money are about 12 ft in diameter (the width of O’Keefe’s boat!) and one of these pieces is diamond shaped.  The largest is round and over 1 ft in thickness.  This largest piece lies flat.  This is believed to be for the purpose of protecting the good side from the elements.

So that is about it for my Stone Money post.  I have some more photos to upload of stone money and a music video as well, but alas, my interwebz are really slow here so I am not going to attempt to upload that right now.

I have some groovey photos of underwater critters coming up soon to visit back here again soon.

Cheers,

C

I know...I know...Photoshop....

Ok its getting late and I don’t know how much I can post right now.  I need to get up and dive at like 6 n’shit.  Luckily the NOT lazy Little Red Roosters get to crowin’ right about 4:30am.  I wonder if thats a tropics thang.  Since the daylight doesn’t change much, I wonder if they think there *should* be seasobnal changes necessitating crowing at different time of the day.  In other words, are roosters, posibbly brought here from other latitudes, still stuck in some kind of siderial time thang where they know what time the sun is rising over where their ancestors came from? The world may never know….

I love Nudibranchs.  The picture was heavily photoshopped when I got bored trying to figure out how to correct for not using a red filter when taking the photo without a flash.  Thre is a lot of stuff I ned to know about this.  I should be googloooglooogling it but I am not…ot right now anyway.

I love sharks too:

Mmm...sharks...

Yeha I am getting used to this photo and video thing slowly but its going to take some time lke any other discipline.  The bggest hurlde for me right now is navigating all the color correction stuf I need to do.  But like I said I have not even really researched this yet so maybe it will not be that difficult.

Yep (Yap?) thats right....theyre here....LOLYAPZ!

Awwww..shit.  They’re gonna yapture my heart I tellz ya.  They are SO cute and they are always there every morning when I eat muh brekfust.  I might have to be all doptin’ them n’stuff.

Ok I think its time to go.  I just heard UB40′s “Red Red Wine” for the 12,000th time this trip.  OMG…I have to spend an evening burning an MP3 CD for the ladies that work in this bar.  They NEED more music.  Foreeeeelz.

Ok maybe I can cough up one more photo:

German diver guy has BAD hair! Schadenfreude! Müahahaha!

Ok see you folks later.  Warrior needs sleepz n’shit badly!

Cheers,

C