Under the Sea and Over the Moon

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Good Morning. I've just enjoyed coffee and bread with chocolate on top for breakfast. Mmmmm. Despite the information listed above, I'm actually in Laos and it's September 11. Yesterday, I realized something. I'm going home in seven days and there is still SO MUCH I need to see. Problematic because I'm heading to northern Laos now, and I have to make it back to Bangkok by September 16 (today is the 11th). Especially distressing because in my one day here, I've fell in love with Vientiane, Laos's capital. LP describes it like this: "Were Laos, Thailand and Vietnam tuk-tuk drivers, the Thai driver would take you to your destination via a silk shop, the Vietnamese driver would almost run you over for your custom, while you'd probably have to go find the Laos driver, wake him up, and then persuade him to do some work." What a breath of fresh personal space. More on Laos later.

Ko Tao was about a week ago. But I'd like to catch you up on what's been happening with me. So we'll start with Ko Tao in this post. Next post will be Cambodia.

I don't have many pictures. Sorry, but I can't bring my Sony camera underwater. And disposable cameras are not good when you descend to 12 or more meters. I did hear that one guy pulled his iPhone out of his pocket at 18 meters, muttering a muffled "oh shit".

I was definitely nervous about diving. You hear stories about people flying on planes and having nitrogen bubble out of their blood. There are sharks. Was I fit enough to dive? Would I be calm underwater - especially when I learned you have to alternately take off your mask and regulator (the breathing device) while underwater.

The PADI diving program is done in stages. There's no "throw them into the fire (or water in this case)" philosophy here. The first day you don't even see the water - it's all theory. The most important part is realizing how much more pressure there is in water than air. When you descend only 10 meters you are now feeling twice the pressure you would at the surface. Air is compressed to half the volume it would have been at the surface. Conversely, were you to ascend 10 meters, air would now expand to twice the volume. This is particularly important because if you hold your breath while you are ascending, the air inside will expand, possibly leading to a ruptured lung. Kenji, our enthusiastic Japanese instructor, would never fail to demonstrate that eventuality with his hands and exploding pop sound. "Asher, what is the most important rule in scuba diving?" "Never hold your breath." The laborious repetitive process helped put me at ease.

The second day, you "dive" in a swimming pool, learning all the basic skills. Many of them involve what to do if ___ breaks. Much of that is related to being out of air. Once again, the course helps to put you at ease. You are trained to do the same 'skills' over and over, so that if something should go wrong underwater, you immediately know what to do. You are teamed with a "buddy", who dives with you. Our class consisted of two "buddy teams" (yes it's corny, but, again, makes you feel comfortable knowing there is always someone with you) - first, myself and an English girl named May and secondly, an American named Seth and another English girl named Laura. May was the loud one - constantly talking - making jokes while also being a keen student. I think I appreciated her enthusiasm over someone who would have turned up their nose at the kind of teaching. Laura was, in some ways, the opposite. Quiet, less sociable, but friendly. Seth, well, he was a nice guy. He was a software designer out for a career change, maybe in his 30s or 40s. He most obviously didn't fit in well with our younger group, particularly with the light germaphobe attitude he carried along. This to backpackers who have been travelling in craptitude for weeks or months. To my annoyance, he was also a self-described "conspiracy theory" nut. Making more anti-American comments than a European, he also asserted that the American financial system was controlled by five or six families. I'll admit I don't know enough to seriously argue with him, but I couldn't help thinking "how many of those families are Jewish, Seth?"

I have a particular disdain for conspiracy theory types. To me it's nothing more than an egotistical bending of the truth to satisfy what you want to be true. It's the opposite of rational inquiry. Here, you start with the "truth" and then find the evidence to support it. And better yet, you are the lucky one who knows the truth and you can tell everyone! I remember arguing once, for longer than I should have, with a girl at a party about 9/11. She was convinced the Americans did it. "So you actually believe the Republicans, as opposed to the Democrats (b/c we all know Obama is incapable of such a thing!), would kill several thousand Americans to start a war in the Middle East?" Sigh. Also, having grown up on hearing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, I can't help but wonder how far away your average nut is. If the Americans did 9/11 to start a war, why not the Jews in order to get America to attack terrorist groups? Economist Article on the Subject. The entire party heard us yelling at each other - and we were in the King Street Beer Market (for those of you who know Toronto). Fashionable changing of history bugs me just as much ("the Moon Landing was faked" for example) because it's dangerous terrority to tread on (e.g. Russia and denying the less glorious parts of her Soviet past).

Wasn't I talking about diving? Anyway, conspiracy theories aside, Seth was a nice enough guy. On the third day we actually got to go into the water. We took a boat out to the site - Mango Bay. There you gear up. My wetsuit kept unzipping down the back but my instructors didn't think it was a problem. The oxygen tank is HEAVY. You check that your buddy is suited up properly and then you jump into the water. You wear a weight belt such that when you don't swim, you sink very slowly downwards. If you ever needed to get up in an emergency, you drop your weighbelt and you become positively buoyant. Simple. Descending is an annoying process. You have to constantly "equalize" - basically blow your nose hard to make sure the air spaces in your head adjust to the pressure. It hurts your ears, badly, if you don't. Once you're down at the bottom, it's magical. It's also a bit unreal. Here you are, this ape in a borg suit, breathing air underwater, looking at fish through the air in your mask. For me, one magical element is swimming around. At any given depth, you use your legs and flippers to swim horizontally. The cool part is that to swim up or down a few feet, you control your breathing. Breathe in deeply and you will go up. Exhale deeply and you will go down. Simple as that. But pure magic when you realize you are a bit too close to that piece of coral, you inhale deeply, feel yourself rise, and then swim right over it.

I can't describe much of the fish or coral that I saw. It all looked so alien though. Everything is subjected to very different forces than what shaped evolution on the surface. Anyway, I was more enthralled with the mechanics of learning how to 'walk' in a completely different world. Perhaps the most memorable surface moment was when our ship got caught in a serious storm. Pounding rain, strong wind and big waves at the dive site. There's so much water hitting the surface that you almost can't breathe. But as soon as you go underwater, you wouldn't know there was a storm at the surface. After four open water dives, we got our certificates. I'm allowed to a depth of 18 meters.

One final quick aside - our instructors were wonderful. The assisstant was a tough Scottish woman, really enthusiastic about diving. The main instructor, Kenji, also happened to be the director. A Japanese man who didn't like Japan, he had spent two years in Israel at a kibbutz. He knew enough Hebrew for us to, poorly, converse. Strange.

After diving, I decided to go straight to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat.

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