Old joke for the New Year

What do you call 6 months of travel, 18 new countries seen, 28500 miles flown, 5000 miles traveled by train, 30 books read, hundreds of people met, dozens of new animals seen in the wild, 24 dives, 19 World Heritage sites visited, and thousands of photos taken?

A good start!

Since I started this blog, it has received over 3000 page views, which I find pretty impressive considering the number of people I've told about it, and that it consists of whatever ramblings that I can put together to break up the photos. It's been a wild year, both before and after I jammed all my worldly possessions into a storage unit and started traveling almost six month ago. At times it's been thrilling and occasionally dull, I've seen spectacular sights and depressing scenes, spent time with interesting people and been sad to say goodbye to them - in short, it's been life, but I feel like I've been paying more attention to it lately than I have for years. It's been an incredible experience and I can't wait to see what 2014 brings. I miss all my friends and family, but I appreciate your emails keeping in touch and notes letting me know that you're enjoying reading about my adventures, and I hope to see many of you again before too long, but in the meantime I'll have to be satisfied with saying Happy New Year!

Wishing all my friends, old and new, a year full of excitement, adventure, and happiness!

Temple Time at Angkor

Originally, I was just going to say something like "I loved the temples at Angkor!", post a few photos, and not get into the trip to Cambodia, but then I started writing and as you can see, it ended up being a little different. The essential message you should retain after reading all this meandering is that I really loved the temples at Angkor, and that I took a few pretty pictures.

The entrance to Angkor Wat

One of the many naughty monkeys at Angkor, but not the one that stole, and then tried to eat, my backpack

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the differences between tourists and travelers, and what makes a trip versus a journey. Time is not the key distinction; I've met people who can spend a month in a country and still be more of a tourist than someone who passes through in two days. Certainly a willingness to be open to what the place and the day brings to you is important, and a willingness to step out of your routine and comfort zone to see something new is equally needed. More and more, though, I'm thinking that the crux of the issue is to see beyond the individual people, places, and moments that happen on a visit and assemble some greater understanding and  (hopefully) appreciation for that place - seeing the forest through the trees so to speak. Places are greater than the sum of their parts, as are people, so it's very hard to take only one or two of those parts and feel like you have any coherent sense of what you're experiencing.

The Bayon

Angkor at sunset

Europeans I meet on the road love to tease me about racing from place to place, only spending days in cities or weeks in counties that deserve much more time. It's a common perception of Americans abroad that they drop in, stay a couple of days in gated resorts, and never really experience the country they're in (not exactly a gross exaggeration). For my part, I'm trying to balance my desire to see as many new places as best I can with my time, budget, and AADD (American Attention Deficit Disorder), but I think I have to admit Cambodia was the first place I really botched my visit. I still saw some amazing sights, met some great people, and did what I wanted to do there, but somehow I managed to spend about 5 days there without being able to tell you what Cambodia is actually like.

The Bayon

Ta Prohm

 Cambodia has drifted on and off my itinerary this year, mostly because the only reason I really wanted to go was to see the Angkor temple complex. Before I say anything else, let me say Angkor is absolutely one of the most incredible sites I've ever seen, so please don't think I'm not recommending seeing Angkor. But adding a country to the agenda just to see one massive archaeological site seemed like maybe not the best idea, until a friend from the Maldives let me know she was going to be there at roughly the same time I was thinking. Since traveling with a friend is always preferred, that was enough incentive for me to add a quick trip between Malaysia and India part II. Thanks to the limitations of booking frequent flier flights with less than a week's notice, I flew in late to Phnom Penh, the capital, stayed overnight, and then got on a bus for 8 hours to get to Siem Reap, the city closest to Angkor. I'm sure some of you are thinking "uh, an 8 hour bus ride", but it was actually one of the most memorable parts of the trip when I wasn't in Angkor. Much of the Cambodia countryside seems stunning (huge rivers, endless green rice paddies, small villages), the bus TV played endless awkward karaoke videos (think Lawrence Welk, except in Cambodian), and the roadside rest stops served fried locusts and spiders (I think), as well as huge mangoes and pomelo. These are the kind of things that make a new place real to me, and one of the reasons I'm beginning to like buses and trains better than planes, despite the uncomfortable seats, lack of aircon, and stares from the locals.

Ta Prohm

Ta Prohm

From there, however, I stayed in Siem Reap, which has to be one of the least likable towns I've been in. It's a fairly sizable city that exists solely to support visitors who are coming to see Angkor (e.g., me), and it's so obviously disconnected from the rest of Cambodia that I almost felt like I should have to stop at immigration and get a new stamp in my passport. The prices are many times more than anywhere else, everyone banters, barters, and yells in English (and occasionally Chinese, Japanese, or Russian), and the locals view the tourists as mobile ATMs. I found it to be a grim place, and it really got me thinking about how something so important to the local culture, like Angkor, can do so much to destroy or alter local culture at the same time. Every visitor in Siem Reap was there to see this wonder of Cambodian culture and by doing so, we were creating this completely artificial tourist trap that bore no resemblance to Cambodian culture.

Ta Prohm

Ta Prohm

So, to make a long story short, I spent the first morning being grumpy and annoyed at being asked if I wanted a massage or a taxi or marijuana every 20 feet, then met up with my friend and a couple of backpackers she had met the day before. Talking with them helped me get over myself, and the next morning I rented a bicycle, which let me avoid the street hawkers, and rode to Angkor at sunrise and spent a fantastic day exploring the ruins under my own power. The Angkor complex is absolutely massive and I think you could spend a week there without seeing all of the buildings. Since my time was a little more limited, I spent two days touring around, and focused on the Bayon Temple, one of the largest, and Ta Prohm, the "Tree Temple", which has been left in a more natural state with trees growing up out of the ruins. Even with the huge numbers of tourists and the realization that no matter what I did, I would never be able to take a photo that a thousand people hadn't also taken, Angkor still manages to feel grand and even peaceful. It's one of those places that seems more solid than the world around it.

Ta Prohm

The Bayon

After a couple of days riding around Angkor (I racked up almost 50km one day on a beat-up cruiser bike, according to Google Maps), I grabbed my flight to Singapore and happily said goodbye to Siem Reap. I won't have a post on Singapore, since I was only there 3 days and basically just ate and ate and ate and watched the new Hunger Games movie, but even so I will say I feel like I have a better feel for Singapore than I got for Cambodia in twice the time. The next post will be on India part II, or maybe "India II: the Return", or even "How I almost saw my tour bus driver hit with a metal pipe". I promise it will involve more animals, less philosophizing, and only one traffic accident.

Malaysia vol. 2 - Jungle Boogie

Anyone who knows me, knows that I like monkeys. I mean, what’s not to like? Aside from the smell, their tendency to steal things, and the fact that they carry a lot of diseases, they’re awesome in every way. So, what could be better than monkeys? Apes, of course, which are just like monkeys except much bigger and stronger*. So you imagine how excited I was at the prospect of seeing orangutans in the wild in Borneo, although I was trying to temper my enthusiasm by reminding myself that they were elusive, shy, active very early in the morning when I tend to be in bed, etc. So I planned on hedging my bets by staying in a resort next to the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, which rescues orphaned and injured orangutans, tried to teach them necessary survival skills, and then reintroduces them to the wild. I figured this would be a half-step between seeing them in the wild and in zoos.

The orangutan who showed up behind my hotel room in Sepilok

He certainly gave the housekeeping staff a shock

My last post left off with me on the bus back to Sepilok from the dive town of Semporna, but there was one part of the bus ride to Semporna that I left out: the palm oil plantations. For the last decade or so, Borneo has been in the midst of a palm oil boom, similar to the ethanol boom in the American midwest, and huge swathes of the native rainforest has been cleared to plant palms. So I began to have my first pangs about seeing orangutans, or anything else, “in the wild” on the trip to Semporna. From what I saw, most of the countryside was nothing but rows and rows of palms as far as the eye could see, and in talking to other travelers, it sounded like some of the nature camps were not much more that attempts to realize some revenue on from areas that couldn’t be converted to palm. This proved to be a sadly recurring theme in traveling around Sabah. Sabah markets itself as a wild place, where the tourist can immerse himself into nature, except the locals seem interested in nature only to the extent it can realize a profit. I’m aware of how arrogant this perspective might sound, but the fact is there is a fundamental difference between working to protect a species because it returns a profit, and working to protect an ecosystem, because an important species lives there, and that species can return a profit if managed properly. One results in sad animals trapped in a strip of land bordered by development, and the other (hopefully) results in an area where the animals can live with minimal interference/interaction with people. Unfortunately, I saw many cases of the former in Borneo, and Sipadan was probably the only example of the latter.

Gomantong Cave

Something like one million bats and three million swiftlet birds live in this cave system

Recognizing this, I checked into my hotel, which was located next to the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Center, and surrounded by a fair amount of residential development - not a great sign for my seeing anything “in the wild.” That afternoon, I walked over to the orangutan center and took their nature walk to the center of the center where the orangutans can come in for feedings if they want to. It’s a sign of success that most of the orangutans they’ve worked with no longer come back for food, preferring to live in the jungle, but I still got to see 4 orangutans for about a half-hour at the feeding. Although not exactly “natural”, it was a nice relaxed environment and a good introduction to the Sepilok area.

How many other states would you guess have a "management of edible bird's nest" system?

The next day, as I was getting ready in the morning, I heard the housekeeping staff shouting outside my window, and when I looked out, there was an orangutan walking across the back lawn and into the trees behind the resort. He was obviously pretty unconcerned by people, and probably spent some time at the rehabilitation center, but an orangutan in the backyard has to be a good sign for being in the jungle, right? I upped my game by booking a full-day excursion to the Kinabatangan River area, for a cave tour and river trip, hoping to see something unusual. The first stop was Gomantong Cave, where locals have been harvesting swiftlet nests for hundreds of years as an ingredient in a soup the Chinese love (don’t ask me why, I’ve never been interested in trying bird’s nest soup). On the walk to the caves however, what should we see but a mother orangutan and her child! A good start to the morning, especially when a few maroon leaf monkeys put in an appearance. Then, as we approached the cave itself, I had the strongest sense of deja vu, except I’ve never been to Borneo before. As the guide started telling me about the bats and swallows in the cave, how deep their guano gets and how many cockroaches live in it, how the locals harvest the swiftlets’ nests, the feeling just kept growing until I finally put it together - I had seen this featured in the “Caves” episode of BBC’s Planet Earth series. I was standing somewhere that was in BBC’s Planet Earth….nerd overload!!

To prevent poaching of the swiftlets' nests in Gomantong Cave, two park rangers spend 10 hours a night here, with the spiders, centipedes, bats, snakes, cockroaches, and probably other things I wouldn't want anywhere near my bed

Long-tailed macaque

After getting over the excitement of caves, documentaries, and bat poop, it was off to the river lodge for lunch and some downtime before the late afternoon river tour started. The Kinabatangan River is the second longest river in Malaysia and winds through some very beautiful lowland jungle and mangrove habitat, and now that I had seen 3 orangutans, I was turning my attention to the possibility of seeing proboscis monkeys, a hysterically silly-looking monkey known to frequent the area. Well, to cut to the chase, my final tally for the river cruise was 3 more orangutans, proboscis monkeys, silver leaf monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, and long-tailed macaques, bringing my final primate tally for the week to 6 different species, not to mention the kingfishers, eagles, pythons, and hornbills. At the end of the day, all I could think was if it looks like this in 2013, what did this island look like 200 years ago?

Sabah definitely had its ups and downs, and they are going to lose a lot of the island’s attractions if they keep converting everything to palm oil plantations, but it’s still an incredible place with a lot of reasons to visit. I didn’t even make it to the western side of Sabah, where Mt. Kinabalu stands (the highest peak in Malaysia), so I would definitely consider a trip back in the future and recommend it as a great option for anyone looking for a wild vacation.

Sunset on the river cuise

*Side note: if you ever want to see a truly memorable TV moment, track down a nature documentary that Julia Roberts did on orangutans, in which a large male grabs her and puts her in a headlock. Can you imagine what the headlines would have been like if America’s Sweetheart had been killed by an orangutan? Obviously, I’ve given it some thought. My top contender for the New York Post “PRETTY WOMAN KILLED BY DAMNED DIRTY APE!”

Malaysia vol. 1 - City & Sea

My primary reason for wanting to go to Malaysia was to go to the Malaysian portion of the island of Borneo, and my primary reason for wanting to go to Borneo was to see orangutans in the wild. It may see a little odd then that I only spent about 2 days out of 17 in Malaysia looking for orangutans, but that’s because I found so much else to occupy my time once I got there. I think out of all the countries I’ve visited so far, Malaysia is the most multicultural; it has a wealth of local ethnic groups, languages, religions, immigrant populations, and seems to manage to make them all work in concert toward a national identity, probably better even than India. Everywhere I went, I witnessed a fantastic blending of people that were working and living together without any tensions that I could pick up on. Once you add a growth economy, solid infrastructure, and reasonable cost of living on top of that, it should be easy to see why it’s become one of my favorite countries this year.

A divemaster looking at Elvis, probably the chunkiest moray eel I've ever seen

Elvis up close

I started off taking the bus from Thailand to Penang, which is a really beautiful historic town on the coast. I wish I had stayed there another day or two, because it has a lot of interesting history, classical buildings, and character, but I was in a hurry to get to Kuala Lumpur, which, as I found out, has practically none of those things. Don’t get me wrong - Kuala Lumpur (or KL to the locals) is a fairly attractive city, and modern, and clean, and about as cosmopolitan as NYC, but unless you’re really into shopping, it’s also pretty dull. But in some ways that worked out for me, because I promptly caught a cold when traveling to KL, so I checked into a cushy hotel using points, crawled into bed for about 3 days and watched Asian MTV and HBO, all of which are benefits of modern cities.

Nice place for lunch, right?

Everyone all together now... Nemo!

Once I recovered from my cold, I took a little time to get a new pair of glasses, get more passport pages added at the US embassy, and book my flight to Borneo to see some big orange apes… except in planning that, I found out that I was going to be a stone’s throw (i.e., less than an 8 hour bus ride, my current definition of “a stone’s throw”) from Sipadan, widely considered one of the best SCUBA diving locations in the world. After researching that the dives were about ⅓ the price I’m used to paying and that there was space at the dive resort for about $25 a night, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pass up getting into the ocean too. So, this blog post is going to be mainly about the dive trip, and next post will be about the orangutans. Spoiler - I saw some. Many more than expected, actually.

Lots and lots of white tip reef sharks in Sipadan

A wall of jacks I got to swim with in Sipadan

And even more turtles than sharks on the trip

My 7 hour bus trip took me to Semporna, in the province of Sabah on Borneo, which has to be one of the seediest, skeeviest, run-down towns I’ve ever stepped off a bus into, so I was very happy that I choose not to do my dives from the coast, but instead from Mabul Island, about a 40 minute boat ride from Semporna. One amusing side note about Semporna: the week before I got there, apparently there was a Taiwanese tourist who was kidnapped/killed (details were sketchy, and I never bothered to look them up) in the area, and for the entire trip, anytime I told someone that I was going to or just had been in Semporna, they all got this look of horror and disbelief on their faces, and asked me if I had heard about the incident, and wasn’t I terrified to be in the area? I got this reaction even from people who lived in Semporna! Generally, I found this pretty entertaining, because I doubt very much if Sabah has had more than a couple of murders in the past several years, and security was on high alert the whole time I was there, so all things considered, I felt safer there than in a lot of other places I’ve been, including many areas of DC.

Some local entrepreneur had the idea to buy an oil drilling platform and turn it into a dive resort. Not sure I'd want to stay there, but I have to admire his originality 

Bumphead parrotfish, about the size of a medium dog

Back to Mabul Island, which you’re probably wondering why I stayed there and not Sipadan. It’s because about 10 years ago, the Malaysian government declared Sipadan a marine preserve and kicked all the resorts off the island itself and instituted a strict permit system limiting the number of divers per day. They had been worried that the increasing tourism was beginning to damage the reefs, so now divers can only stop for the day on one beach on Sipadan, at a hefty fee - a policy I give the government a lot of credit for. All the dive resorts now operate on nearby islands, such as Mabul, and do day trips to Sipadan itself. I’ll subject you to a bit of a rant about the environmental vibe in Borneo next post, but I think Malaysia really did the right thing with Sipadan. Not that I was planning on experiencing it firsthand, mind you. Permits for diving at Sipadan are booked up months in advance, and I couldn’t reserve one with 4 days notice, but I figured that diving just around the fringes would be almost as good.

After I saw this turtle right off of the resort beach, I began to wonder why I was SCUBA diving at all

The dive resort I was staying in was a rustically pleasant combination of private bungalows and dorms with a good beach and about the friendliest and most capable staff I’ve ever been diving with. And, as if just to remind me that I wasn’t in Cancun or Costa Rica, there was also an illegal squatters’ camp right next to the resort. The eastern coast of Malaysian Borneo borders both Indonesia and the Philippines, and if that wasn’t enough of a problem for border control, there is also an ethnic sub-group called the Bajau, known locally as “Sea Gypsys.” Since before the modern borders were formed, the Bajau have lived a mainly nomadic life at sea, migrating between the islands in the area, but they’ve had more difficulties living that traditional lifestyle in the modern era. Many of them don’t actually have citizenship in any country, have little money and education, and as border patrols have tightened, a lot of them have taken up long-term residence on whatever islands they can find space - including Mabul, right in between two tourist resorts. To their credit, both resorts seem to have taken a very constructive response to their neighbors and have helped to construct a school on the island for the Bajau children and try to educate the community on the importance of the reefs and sustainable fishing practices. Begging or bothering the tourists is discouraged, but otherwise everyone seems to get along reasonably well, and I have to admit it added a lot of character to the resort to see someone preparing evening meals or repairing a boat next door (the garbage and wondering where all the sewage went, however, did not provide added character).

The Bajau camp on Mabul

Anemone crab

A banded cleaning shrimp

I planned on diving three days in Mabul, and on my first day, several staff told me I should put my name on the waiting list for Sipadan because there are always people who get sick or don’t show up, and there may be a chance I could sneak in. I had my doubts, but added my name at the end of the first day and was told the next morning I was going to Sipadan! Granted, that one day’s diving added another 50% to my total cost for the lodging and other dives, but it was worth it. I ended up diving 10 dives on four islands: Mabul, Kapalai, Sibuan, and Sipadan. For me, the big difference was that most of the diving here is considered “muck diving”, which is a term used to describe diving when you’re looking for very small creatures living in sand, rubble, or garbage. I know that doesn’t sound all that great, but trust me, it’s pretty cool in its own way. Muck diving started because for many years, this area had a lot of dynamite fishing, which kills all the fish, destroys all the coral, and basically wrecks everything. Then, somewhere along the way, someone noticed that there were a lot of really interesting, really unusual, and really resilient fish living in the wreckage, but they were almost all less than a couple of inches long. They had always been there, but they were either so tough to find, or overshadowed by the big stuff, that no one paid much attention before. So, a new way of diving started, one that focused on moving very slowly in the shallows, looking for very weird little fish and invertebrates that were hidden in the sand and coral rubble. And when I say “weird”, I mean really weird - fish diguised as leaves, octopus that hide in plastic bottles and pretend they’re fish, shrimp less than an inch long that live in anemones, but many of them are really beautiful, if you know where to look or how to spot them. I saw more crustaceans than I ever have on dives before, and the skill of the divemasters to see something smaller than my thumbnail from a couple of feet away was incredible. I wasn’t sure how I would enjoy just staring at the sand for an hour at a time, but it was a biology nerd’s paradise. In some ways, it was the same lesson I learned in India; pay attention to the little moments of beauty and the ugly bigger picture fades out of view.

Cuttlefish

I love cuttlefish!

Not just one, but three turtles at a time on Sipadan

And then there was Sipadan, which is known for the big critters. To be honest, the visibility was terrible the day I was there (sometimes as little as 30 feet), but even with that, I still saw some incredible sights, enough to make me agree that it is one of the truly unique dive sites. Sipadan is known for being a turtle hangout, something I can attest to, since I saw about 13 turtles from two species that day, including turtles mating, which is a new diving experience for me. As if that weren’t enough, there were also gray reef sharks, white-tip reef sharks, bumphead parrotfish, napolean wrasses, and huge schools of jacks and other fish. It’s one of those places that gives me hope that there really are still fish left in the ocean. And it was enough to seriously tempt me to stay for another day, or few days, or weeks and dive until I was sick of being in the water, but instead, I went back to Semporna (ick), took the bus to Sepilok, and started my hunt for sights of a more primate nature - and just like in Sipadan, my expectations were met and exceeded.

So many turtles

Turtle overload!

A Borneo afternoon