Better than Aluminum

Aaron and I spent last weekend on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, celebrating our ten year (!) anniversary. We haven’t spent much time at the beach since arriving in SE Asia, and Koh Samui, which we’ve heard people call paradise, seemed like a good place to change that. We’ve also heard it called Pooh Samui, as the island is apparently renowned for “cleansing” spa diets and treatments. That sort of thing was not on our To Do list, however.

So, while in paradise, what did we do?

Well, we could have spent lots of time relaxing at our hotel…



Or getting massages in this little waterfront hut (to the right in the picture below)…



Or eating delicious pad thai…



Or we could’ve gone elephant trekking or swimming at one of the island’s waterfalls…





Or gone for a hike…



On our second day there, we settled on this last idea – a morning walk in the lush rainforest. When we spoke to the hotel staff about our planned hike and asked where on the island it might be best to start off, they told us, “No, no, no. Hot and far. Better to get motorbike.”

If you’ve read some of my prior postings, you know that Aaron has developed a motorbike obsession in recent months, so the staff at the hotel had said just what Aaron wanted to hear. In fact, he had started lobbying on the motorbike issue long before we arrived in Thailand. But I had read on-line that Koh Samui has the most motorbike fatalities in the kingdom. Having (sort of) conquered my fears and ridden a motorbike once while we were in Vietnam, I had no real need to get back on one. So we chose a new, closer destination we could easily walk to from the hotel and set out.

The road had no sidewalk to walk on, and was busy with cars and motorbikes… and, as seems to be usual in this part of the world, many of the motorbike passengers were very small children, most of whom did not bother to hold on… and women in skirts casually riding side-saddle at top speed… and no one was wearing a helmet…

So, you know what happened. The walk was aborted and we got a bike. Here we go again.



We gassed it up at a very nice roadside station (a table with some gas-filled whiskey bottles and a friendly attendant).





Now that we had the bike, Aaron kindly pointed out, we could get to all the island’s sights quite easily. We decided to head for a “secret garden” of Buddhist statues and other sculptures that a fruit farmer had built up in the hills. The main roads on the island were paved, but a lot of the roads into the interior of the island were nice smooth dirt.



Others were dirt, but not smooth in the slightest, and some of the roads were very steep and ridiculously narrow.

But don’t worry moms and dads, I insisted we wear helmets.

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One road was almost entirely washed out - all that was left for us to ride on was a path about a foot and a half wide, with deep ditches on either side. At one point, as we slowly climbed the narrow trail up the mountain, I told Aaron that I thought it wasn’t such a good idea, and that we should probably turn around. Yep, definitely turn around.

But he assured me that it was just like mountain-biking, which he has spent countless hours doing. Perhaps having caught a bit of Olympic spirit, he said something along the lines of, “I’ve trained my whole life for this moment,” and forged ahead.

We soon reached a freshly paved portion of the road… but it turned out the road was a little too fresh. It was, in fact, in the process of being built. My muscles, tired from clinging to the bike for hours, got a break while we waited for the workers to give us the go-ahead to pass.

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Eventually, we reached the secret garden.

Turns out the garden is not so much of a secret. As we pulled up to it, so did an elderly Thai woman and her family. They had traveled up in an SUV. She shook her head and laughed kindly at us, our helmets, our bike.

In addition to the garden, we saw a bunch of other beautiful and interesting things we probably wouldn’t have seen without the bike, including this postcard sunset we caught as we rode back to the hotel that evening.

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I was wrong about getting the motorbike. Aaron was right. So that’s once in ten years.

Dragon Deer

Just got back from a trip to Japan with my mom and Aaron. We saw temple after shrine after garden after carp pond after rock garden… which was amazing... and which will probably soon swirl together in my mind into one beautiful and well-kept blur, if that’s possible.

While in Japan we visited Nara, one of the ancient capitals. There are about 1,000 sacred deer roaming freely through Nara Park, and along the streets and around the temples and shrines, as well. The deer allow the tourists to photograph, pose with, and pet them, in hopes of getting the tourists to buy deer crackers to feed them. Some of the deer even bow their heads repeatedly, in a polite manner not entirely unlike how many Japanese bow to each other.







Aren’t they cute?

We saw lots of cute things while in Japan. They really know how to do cute there, and people seem to eat it up. There are a lot of these plush toy claw machine arcades, generally filled with adults.



Some things were so cute they were scary, though…



Anyway, back to the deer. Rather than bowing, some took a less polite approach to getting food. Aaron gave a cracker to one deer, and then seeking more snacks, she followed him around the park for quite a while, and eventually began headbutting him…





...which I thought was hilarious until later in the day, when a few of the deer I was feeding began prodding my hip and back with their antlers. And then one bit me – see below for a shot of the deer spit and grass he left behind on my shorts.



Aside from the overzealous deer, Nara was peaceful and pretty…

Lanterns along path to shrine


Art student painting in the shade


Prayer tablets hanging outside shrine


Sandals left outside shrine


We found Tokyo to be a big, fun, quirky city. Other than the run-in with the deer, I think the funniest part of our trip to Japan was when the three of us tried to board the Tokyo subway during rush hour with all of our luggage. Absolute genius! Unfortunately, I was too focused on shoving myself onto a train to get a photo.

comic book shop in "Electric Town" area of Tokyo


woman entering Tokyo subway


lantern plant


women dressed as maids, handing out flyers for a "maid cafe"



While in Tokyo, we visited the Tsukiji Market, the largest fish market in the world.





It doesn’t smell very fishy, but you can’t forget where you are as there seem to be baskets of fishheads lurking around every corner.

After the market, we went for a sushi breakfast at a restaurant down the street. I'm sure it was the freshest sushi I’ve ever eaten, but it honestly wasn’t all that appealing to me after sloshing around in the blood and guts of the market.

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We also went to Kyoto, where we stayed in a “Japanese style” hotel room, which was a lot cosier than it looks in this photo. Actually, no it wasn't - but it was clean and cheap and different.

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In Kyoto we visited the Fushimi Inari shrine, which has hundreds and hundreds of orange torii gates winding along wooded pathways. It felt exactly like The Gates installation in Central Park from a few years back (except for the Japanese writing on the back-side of the posts).

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We also visited a fancy food market filled with the now notorious $100 watermelons and all kinds of foods I couldn’t identify.

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Anybody know what this is?

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One day we wandered through one of the older neighborhoods in Kyoto and saw a geisha walking with a young man.

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I thought it was a somewhat rare sighting, but later we came across another few geishas out for a photo shoot. They seemed to enjoy the attention they were getting from the people on the street, so I took some shots while the professional photographer fluffed the flowers in one geisha’s hair. It was blazing hot the whole time we were in Japan; more impressive than the beautiful robes these ladies wore was the fact that they didn’t look all sweaty in them.

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A Week of Winter

Back in June, Aaron and I took a quick trip to Sydney. I didn't get around to posting any shots from the trip then because as soon as we got back to Singapore, we were boarding a flight to NY to attend my friend's beautiful wedding in Prospect Park. Anyhow, here are a few shots from the Sydney trip:

It was cold and wintry, but people were still swimming in the ocean and ocean-filled pools.

The Opera House, which was apparently financed through a series of lotteries run by the government. Not a bad idea, except for the whole gambling is a social ill thing.

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Hundreds of big furry bats in a park. They're cute and loud and don't sleep during the day like I thought.

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Sorry, this one I can't explain.

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