Sawadee kap friends, family and intrepid travelers, We just wanted to take a moment and offer you and yours an invitation to the Ko Ra Ecolodge (http://www.thaiecolodge.com/), Heather and I will be living and helping out on this truly special island for the foreseeable future. Our friends Kim and Awe are working so hard to make this lodge a model of sustainability, an example of what can be . . . bungalows constructed with local materials, a solar array, organic garden, waste separation, gray water recycling, locally-produced foods, community-based tourism. The ecolodge has simply set dif [View Full Entry]

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Saying goodbye to Koh Tao is harder than we thought... After just 2 months it was getting to be like home (with a few differences of course...) We are wrapping things up here. Jarod is doing his snorkel test tonight where they pour a bucket of alcohol down his snorkel. I can hardly wait to take care of him after that! It feels like we are back in our college days here... This is his final test to be a DM, don't think its PADI required though :) Jarod had his 77th dive yesterday and I got my last two fun [View Full Entry]

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While visiting Kim and Awe, Jarod and I got to go on a community tour of area villages. We spent three days visiting about 8 communities that have been engaging in some sort of eco-tourism since the tsunami. The communities were all small Muslim Thai villages that were mainly focused on fishing and are doing tourism activities like basket weaving, tye dye, batiking, homestays and cooking lessons, mangrove forest restoration and tours, etc... It was a great eye-opener for us to see more of Thailand away from the major tourist destinations. We had translators throughout the visits as all i [View Full Entry]

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Just thought that you might all enjoy a few pictures of the foods that we have been eating. In Thailand, food is often served almost more like a work of art and the Thais definitely love to eat. We were also told that "if it moves, we eat it!" We went to a large market in Chumpon and saw an assortment of interesting things to eat. I have to admit that it was a bit overwhelming for a westerner like me to see whole pig's heads on display though! A lot of sights and smells that I am not used to [View Full Entry]

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Jarod and I took a break from Ko Tao for a week or so and headed down to Kuraburi to meet up with our Reef Check/Ko Ra Eco-lodge contacts Kim and Awe. We had a bit of adventure on the bus as we missed our stop at Kuraburi altogether and had to tell the driver in front of all of the passengers what we had done. After a bit of staring and phone conversations about the farangs (foreigners) and thirty minutes into jungle and out of town, the bus pulled over and we ran across the highway to get on another [View Full Entry]

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Last Sunday I had a young whale shark swim by at arm's length. I swam right along side this "gentle giant", and estimated him to be about 2.5 times my length - I'm 6 ft. Words and photos just can't capture the emotional response I felt gliding so close to this magnificient being . . . how can I convey it . . . awe, ecstasy, rapture, tranquility . . . humble pie, maybe? It was so beautiful it hurts, do you know what I mean? I am so thankful that there are still whale sharks in this world. "The most [View Full Entry]

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I am doing well with my volunteer project. I have been busy with daily beach clean-ups, teaching the kids swimming on the weekends, hiking and surveying a grass planting area after a massive rockslide on the island, etc... There are about 15 volunteers, most of them in their early 20s. They are from the i 2 i program and most are English. Very nice group! Half are teaching English at the school and half of us are doing conservation work. I am thinking that I will split my time between both projects. Basically we clean the beach every morning at 8:00 [View Full Entry]

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Sa Wa Dee Krup, While diving yesterday George Harrison's India-inspired 1967 lyrics were swimming in my head . . . "When you've seen beyond yourself then you may find peace of mind is waiting there And the time will come when you see we're all one and life flows on within you and without you" What I find most beautifully alluring about coral reefs is that there is this other world, teeming with life, a billion dramas of existence - that does not revolve around us. Human existence is simply immediately irrelevant in this sphere. Sea cucumbers arched upward waving in [View Full Entry]

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Hello All! We have arrived in Thailand and are loving our new life here on Ko Tao. We will be here for about 2 months. We arrived after a long flight to stay in a fancy hotel in Bangkok. It was a five star hotel that we would never have been able to afford in the U.S. We hired a car to go to train station and then booked a sleeper car to the small town of Chumpon. Our train ride was fun. It was about 7 hours of watching Thailand go by. We had good food and three Singha Beers. [View Full Entry]

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For the past year, we have been volunteer divers at the Texas State Aquarium. Not only have we been fine-tuning our dive skills, but we have met up with an interesting cast of characters (both below and above the surface.) We have swum with eels like Houdini and Scooter and had the pleasure of helping to feed Popeye into his old age. We have fed the always friendly and hungry sting rays Harley, Abigail, June, Lois, Clark and Newbie. On our second volunteer day, we were already following Deanna around in "Off Shore" learning how to dodge Tammy Faye the queen [View Full Entry]

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