The Morning After

The vague, stuporous idiot grin belies a long, painful day coming on with sunrise of the morning after the full moon.

Kids These Days

As we've seen from previous photos, there are always party casualties. Doc in the box to the rescue! Of course, not everyone takes his recovery seriously. Note the IV bag and the the smoke. What you can't see is that he's shoeless. I know this because he wheeled his IV cart outside the clinic to have a smoke. He sent out for a pair of slippahs while he loitered outside pumping fluid into his veins and nicotine into his lungs. Which reminds me, there's a booming market in mismatched flip flops the day after the party and on subsequent days. Kids wander the streets with woven baskets full of recently collected lost shoes.

Fire Down Below

Not all of the fire folk are professionals. There is quite a bit of amateur fire dabbling at the Full Moon Party. I need hardly go into the details of what happens when a bunch of drunks who've been up for a couple of days voluntarily get into close proximity with flaming arches, jump ropes, spinning hoops, balls, and the like. Kind of like a train wreck, in that you can't help but watch. And photograph. For the observant amongst you, the lady in the foreground with the fantastic legs? Not a lady.

Proximally Advantageous

Fire dancing is all the rage at the beach. The Thai guys are incredible; they are, for all intents, professional fire dancers, with all the skill, poise, and confidence around flaming objects that this entails. Still, note the green cross of the medical clinic in the background. Just in case.

Crowd Control

And, as long as you're going to be in a big crowd, try to, well, you know.

Abunoriginal

Most folks at the Full Moon Party wind up painted like day glow aboriginals. Might as well go all in and do it up right.

Bin Laden Lives!

And he's serving drinks on a beach in Thailand! Not strictly in keeping with the teachings of the Koran, but he seemed to be having a good time.

Rockstar

At least this guy had the good sense to order a couple beers before he passed out so he'd have something to start on when he woke up.

Done

This guy didn't even bother to dig himself a moat. Mmmm, sand. Tasty.

No Man is an Island

But each can still dig a moat around himself if he so desires. Nature's subtle way of saying look but don't touch?

Full Moon Fever

The bumping beaches of Hat Rin's Full Moon Party teemed with tens of thousands of people for the week surrounding the night of the full moon. Many were your average international party folk: drunken Australians, Euro-ravers, English lager louts, the very occasional American out of his element... There were definitely some standouts, though.

Bandwidth!

Greetings from lovely, highly industrialized Cebu! Blog has come full circle in that I am back where the blog journey started, once again drydocking the boat in the Philippines. More on that and the crossing from Chuuk later; for now let's enjoy some bandwidth access and unload a few photos from the Thailand trip earlier this year. I know this is confusing, jumping from one location to another, but I hope the photos entertain regardless.

Sunday Go To Market

If someone offers you a deal on a room that seems too good to be true, chances are, it is. Says the guy who checked into a room directly above a bar on a Saturday afternoon before an all Saturday night party kicks off at said bar while said idiot who thought he’d hit the jackpot with his three dollar room stayes awake listening to the sounds of standard Australian revelry and the clanking of bottles. Things finally quieted down at around 3:30 AM, allowing for blissful slumber until 5:45 AM when the bottle clanking resumed, resultant clean up from the seemingly just settled debauchery.

The complete lack of sleep and the early morning wake up did have a silver lining, driving me out of bed early to look around my new neighborhood in Chiang Mai on a Sunday morning. I found a local market, a block long metal roofed open air shed with stalls selling everything you can imagine, much of it food related. I was the only white guy in the place, watching in fascination as the locals selected their breakfasts and the ingredients for their Sunday meals. I barely knew where to start with ordering food, as much of it was downright unidentifiable. Cloudy red gelatinous cubes of...gelatin, green leafy vegetables that might have been field or collard greens, everything you can cut off a pig but the oink, tubs of live fish still writhing and fighting to be at the bottom of the bucket where the water pooled, brightly colored sticky rice confections, whole tables full of bowls of all types of stewed meats and veggies that sit there all day, a world of cakes and breads, ten different types of hand made sausages, shredded squid, noodles of all makes and models, flats of quail, chicken, and duck eggs, drink stalls with vats of liquids that get ladled into plastic bags with a straw inserted, an overwhelming sensory overload before even considering the surrounding stalls peddling flowers, sundries, and trinkets. If you’re going to be kept up all night because you saved six dollars on a place to sleep, you might as well go spend it in a place like this. Though might I suggest that you personally witness an open flame under anything you eat before you eat it? I jest, and can’t speak highly enough of the cleanliness, quality, and freshness of even the most ramshackle street food vendors, but I got here pretty soon after this market opened, and all those bowls of curry were already out and sitting at room temp. When did you make it again?

Okay Already!

Yes, I'm generally lazy. Yes, I'm a bum. Yes I was off for five months, traveled to a bunch of fun places, and posted very little. Yes I am back at work in Chuuk with a backlog of brain droppings (thank you, George Carlin, you are missed) that need to get on the page. No I am no longer in any of the places that I am going to try to start posting about, this is all half baked stuff that never made it onto the screen before. And, most importantly, yes I am deeply grateful and gratified for the gentle and not so gentle prodding I have received from may of you who have nothing better to do on the internet. Thank you for your kind and encouraging words. So, let's see what's been languishing in the to be posted pile for months at a time. And a side note from a guy who has an unexpected on shore time and internet windfall in the middle of the week: eating at a buffet in Chuuk? Generally a bad idea.

Nirvana in the Strangest Places

Are these people serious? All the ice cream I can eat in forty-five minutes? For just under two dollars? Do they know who I am? Apparently not.

Say Wat?

They say the pun is the lowest form of humor. If that is the case, my travel partner Randal and I have been wallowing in the gutter ever since we discovered that the Khmer word for temple, thus used throughout Thailand and Cambodia, is Wat. I know you see where this is going, but I’ll nudge you along, just because I’ve had a couple weeks of practice and, let’s face it, wallowing is fun.

When traveling and passing one of myriad temples, signs for temples, outlines of temples on the horizon: “Wat’s that?”

“Wat?”

“That.”

“Wat.”

“Right over there, with the spires and decorated roof line.”

“It’s a wat.”

“That’s wat I’m asking. Wat do you think it is?”

“Wat do you think I’m saying?”

“Wait, wat?”

“Exactly.”

“Say wat?”

“WAT!”

“Huh?”

“Wat, are you deaf, or just slow?”

You get the Abbott and Costello idea. Even more amusing when the cab driver gets involved and tries to help.

The list goes on: “Wat are we doing today? Wat’s next? Wat time? Wat will we see there?” Especially fun when the specific wat has a name that we can run with, like the below mentioned Wat Po, which can be slurred into sounding like What For, or What Fo’. See what you can do with that one. Fun, isn’t it?

Big and Buddahful

Here’s Thailand’s largest reclining Buddha, measuring in a 45 meters long. He lives at Wat Po, Bangkok’s oldest temple, which predates the city itself. That he is reclining means that his earthly time, all that sitting and smiling, is at an end; he’s gotten it right and is about to enter Nirvana. I hope Nirvana is large, because this guy is, to put it in perspective, larger than the boat upon which I work and, being made of gold painted plaster covered brick, heavier as well.

Peek-a-Buddah

Sole Man

The soles of his feet are breathtakingly inlaid with 108 mother of pearl depictions of Buddhist holy symbols. The craftsmanship of the work is stunningly intricate. It’s the longest I’ve ever stared at the feet of an inanimate object. It is also, unfortunately, the longest I’ve stood at a choke point and been inundated with a constant flow of tourists. I felt like a rock in the middle of an Asian salmon stream.

Lucky Rain

The building wall that runs along the Buddha’s backside is lined with 108 metal bowls that, if a small coin worth about a penny is placed in each, provide the depositor good luck. There are enough bowls and enough people seeking good luck that the sound of metallic rainfall is an eerie constant while gazing at this religious marvel.