---

The effects of traveling finally caught up with us and after our last post Colin got hit with a 24 hour bug that put him in bed for 36 straight hours (he's fully recovered now... and 24 hour bugs somehow last 36 hours here). We posponed diving for the day and James and Matt went into the middle of the island to find a game of basketball. We found a well maintained court a couple minutes outside the resort and after wandering around aimlessly in the village for a few minutes someone threw a basketball out of their house for us to use. After about 30 minutes of one on one we had a crowd of about 15 people watching and we tried to challenge two of the locals to a game. They waited another 30 minutes (it was about 95 degrees on the court) during which Matt turned his ankle and then decided to play. We pulled through 7-5 and they begrugingly took the picture you can see below.

After a day off Colin and Matt went to a different dive site to finish their certification. It turns out you can't dive if you've had a collapsed lung so James decided that risking certain death wasn't worth it anymore and spent the day on the beach instead of the boat. Diving was pretty uneventful due to bad conditions (pretty serious current, strong waves, and low visability) but it was decided there would be a concert on the 12th so we spent a few hours practicing some new songs.

We woke up on the 12th to find a stage, tables, chairs and balloons set up on the beach. It turns out our concert coincided with a birthday on the island so the locals went all out. After seeing the stage we decided we needed to practice more and spent a fair amount of the day inside relearning songs. We went out to eat dinner at 6 and found out we were going on in 10 minutes. We played for a little over 2 hours and it turns out Philippinos don't know 90's rock quite as well as we do. The Europeans on the island seemed to know the songs much better and between us and them we had a great time.

When it started raining we went into the restaurant, had far too many beer bought for us (especially without dinner), made some German friends, tought our new German friends that Bourbon was from our part of the US, tought them how to run up a bar tab ordering too much bourbon, learned some new words in Korean and Japanese (evidentally all the words we knew in Korean were wrong... thanks Albert), and went to sleep.

We've got a boat waiting on us to get to Cebu City, then on to Manila and finally Malaysia so we've gotta run. Next update will probably be from the Perhentian Islands on the east coast of Malaysia. Hopefully we don't get eaten by tigers on our nights in the rainforest in between.

-Thai Fighters featuring James Galante


...we're working on new band names

---