Full Moon Fever

Full moon party is the most fun I’ve ever had in my entire life.

I was actually contemplating not coming to this place. The travel guide books and forums online talk about how its stupid to go to a beautiful asian country just to hang out with westerners. They say you should instead experience Thai culture. They also talk about how dangerous it is and how people will try to steal your stuff, break into your room, drug you, etc.

I think these travel writers/people have never been to the full moon party.

Still, I was expecting most of the people to be party animal-types that I wouldn’t really get along with. Instead, it’s the opposite. I’d say that the full moon party is a collection of some of the world’s best, most friendly people. Everybody wants to talk to you, and almost everybody are very interesting people.

This is what I did last night:

Pre-drink with my new kiwi friends that are super super fun and great people. I was never interested in New Zealand before, but now I really want to go there.

Party with the craziest and coolest Irish guys. The guys all bought hilarious old woman-type dresses and wore them all night. The craziest Irish guy of them all wore no underwear and had no problem flashing people upon request.

Dance with a beautiful Russian girl that also happens to be a stellar dancer.

Dance and chill out with awesome guys from Uganda. They’re really good dancers, and they say every night in Uganda everybody goes out and dances. I want to go to Uganda.

Shared laughs with tons of British people.

Had a long conversation with a chef from Jackson Hole, Wyoming who is an amazing snowboarder. He said one season he rode 140 days. That’s probably how many days I’ve snowboarded in my entire life. He says its not unusual for him to ride with pros.

Hung out with a great guy that is now my friend named Donald from Kelowna. Like me, he’s interested in things like investing and poker. And travel, obviously.

Spoke some (bad) Spanish with a girl from Buenos Aires.

Had a great conversation with an aussie guy with dreadlocks who I would say is arguably the most enlightened person I’ve ever met. He’s the same age as me, and says that he takes so many different kinds of drugs he probably couldn’t name them all.

Met so many Canadians that I lost count.

Danced all night.

Didn’t go to bed until 9 in the morning.

On my way home, kissed a girl that may be one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen. I can’t remember her name, but she’s Irish.

Like the aussie guy said, “I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve a life this good”. And I couldn’t agree more.

I don’t know if I would do what Donald’s doing and just live here for a few months, but I definitely wouldn’t mind coming back in the future.

I showed up a few days early to make sure I got a decent bed. I’m really glad I did because the really crazy partying wasn’t actually on last night’s full moon party, but the few nights before hand. On full moon all the regular tourists come for the night, and they’re not really as fun as the backpacker/traveler crowd. But they’re still pretty fun.

I might do a couple of changes to my blog format pretty soon. One of my kiwi friends, Kim Spikybombshell is (what I would call even though she wouldn’t agree with me) a semi-professional blogger and she gave me a couple tips. She made a travel blog for her trip, so if you want to take a look you can follow the link.

On this post I just decided to leave the photos for the end. I only took pictures of the pre-drinking place(not the actual full moon party), but I really like all the people that were there.

The picture at the top is the pool of the place I’m staying at. I pay $10 a night for the room.

This is the snowboarder guy from Jackson Hole

These are some Thai people. The Thai’s love to party right along with all the tourists.

These are my kiwi friends. They rock! Kim, the one on the left drew my maple leaf for me.

The Uganda Guys

Me with a couple of the Irish guys.

This is the craziest Irish guy of them all. He’s so cool.

Random British people

Random hot girls

Back to Thailand

Its been over a week since I’ve written a post, but I don’t have many new pictures to share with you due to my camera not functioning under water.

I spent a few lazy days diving and snorkeling on Pulauh Weh island in Indonesia, and then was lucky enough to squeeze in a day of surfing  before I flew back to the Airasia hub, Kuala Lumpur.

At the surf house I stayed at I met this really cool old Aussie surfer named Greg. The man’s been working and surfing in Asia for over 4 decades so he gave me some suggestions on how to best get to Ko Pha-Ngan, Thailand.

He recommended I take a train to a southern Thai town called Pattalhung. His words “It’s the best train ride you’ll take in Thailand. I guarantee you’ll be the only whoite facker on it.”

Sure enough, I was the “only whoite facker” on the train. The locals were very friendly and excited to learn about Canada. One kid said I was the first person he has ever spoken English to other than in his English classes at school.

I made a stop in the very non-touristed town of Pattalhung. When I got off the train I was pleasantly surprised to see a market selling some very delicious thai food.

I arrived on the island of Koh Pha-Ngan and am counting down the days until the full moon party (October 30). People party REALLY hard here, and the tourists are streaming in by the boatloads.

Today I just relaxed at the beach pictured above.

Traveling alone has mostly been fine so far, but it was a lonely feeling coming to a party town solo. My worry  of course is completely unfounded. It seems like more people travel solo than with groups of friends, so everyone is in the same boat as I am. Plus, I've found that travelers (especially here in Koh Pha-Ngan) are all out to meet new people and are super friendly. Needless to say I've already met lots of really great people!

It’s nice to be back in Thailand. I have about two weeks and then I’ll be flying to the Philippines to finish off the trip.

I keep hearing really good things about the (few) people I’ve met that have been to the Philippines. I can’t wait.

Elephants and Ocean

I didn’t get enough jungle in Bukit Lawang, so after my ape-filled trek I took a motorbike down a long rough gravel road to a different village called Tangkahan. In Tangkahan I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to wash elephants! The elephant  that I was brushing is named Ooni, and she seemed to enjoy the scrub-down.

The villages located around the perimeter of the national parks, such as Tangkahan, have issues with wild elephants and apes leaving the park and eating the villagers' crops. To combat the issue, the government captured the problem elephants and trained them to do work. The elephants at Tangkahan are used to help patrol the park against illegal loggers and poachers.

Ooni the elephant is well trained, and helped rinse herself (and me) by shooting water out of her trunk. After the cleaning I was allowed to feed her bananas. She thanked me by shaking my hand and kissing me on the cheek!

I did a day hike in Tangkahan to get a sense of what the jungle is like away from the well-touristed Bukit Lawang area. It turns out that real wild animals are much harder to spot than the semi-wild ones in Bukit Lawang.

I did manage to glimpse one black gibbon high up in the trees. We also found a bat cave that was packed with bats. When I walked into the cave it stirred them up, and they were flying around everywhere.

Probably my favourite part of the hike was the wild elephant path that we followed through the dense jungle. The wild elephants seem to act as kind of bulldozers, making it easier for us to hike. My guide started to get nervous as the elephant tracks were getting fresher and fresher as we walked deeper into the jungle. While I wanted to see a wild elephant, he made it clear that he wasn’t comfortable with that at all. He claims that the wild elephants can be very aggressive towards people.

After feeling the size and power of elephants from washing Ooni, I can understand that facing off with an angry elephant would not be ideal. We did hear the wild elephant making trumpeting sounds a few times, but we purposefully avoided coming into contact with it.

Now I am in my final stop in Indonesia; at the very northern tip of Sumatra at an island just off the coast from the town of Banda Aceh. The island is a great place for diving and snorkeling.

I’m enjoying my picturesque bungalow, the delicious food, turquoise waters lined with living coral, and cheap prices.

Yesterday, after a much needed refresher course on my scuba diving skills, I took to the water with a group of other divers. We dove in two spots: the first was an underwater tugboat wreck not too far from the shore, and the other was to see underwater geothermal fissures.

The water is warm enough that I can dive without a wetsuit, but it was still nice to sit at the bottom of ocean and soak up the heat emanating from the ‘underwater volcano’.

Hopefully I’ll get a bunch more dives in here in Indonesia, and I might even get a chance to surf waves for a day or two before I fly back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I really love Indonesia, and I already can’t wait to come back to this country in the future. Indonesia is huge, and I haven’t even explored most of the better known places – Bali, Gili Islands, Komodo Islands – for example. Not to mention all of the active volcanoes here. Indonesia is a traveler’s paradise.

Wild Sumatra

Today I arrived back from a 2 day hike in the interior jungles of Indonesia’s huge Sumatra Island. The village I’m at, Bukit Lawang is popular with tourists, and I was therefore expecting a very easy walk through the rainforest before I left on the excursion. My expectations were completely off-base.

The hike only took us a few kilometers in from the edge of the jungle, yet it was thrilling: The path is narrow (when I could even see it), I had to fight off leeches, we had rodents in our tent, and saw lots of wildlife. It rained all last night and much of today, which made the tube ride down the river back to the village very, very extreme. We had to cut the ride short and walk after the tubes dumped a couple of the other hikers. The river is really raging.

 The main attraction at this particular jungle is the orangutans. I recently learned that orangutans, which used to live in most of southeast Asia, are now only found in Sumatra and Borneo.

A rehabilitation centre was set up to reintroduce tame orangutans into the wild. To do this, the centre releases the tame orangutans into the forest near the village to allow them to learn to live in the jungle. The centre offers them bland food so that the orangutans can survive, but also encourages them to learn to find their own food. Therefore, the orangutans that I saw on the hike are semi-wild: they live in the jungle, but are used to humans and are not afraid to come close.

The orangutans are red-haired tree acrobats. They swing around the tree tops on vines and branches, and some of the older ones come down near the tourists and pose. It is fascinating to see the orangutans because when I look at them I feel like I’m looking at a person rather than an animal. Their eyes are quite human-like.

Among the many other animals we saw, were black gibbons. They have similar looking bodies to the orangutans, but are black and smaller. They seem less controlled than the red apes. When the guide made animal calls, they started following us, and would run around us on the ground.

At the end of the trek we swam in some pristine waterfalls to wash away the dirt and sweat.

Before I came to the jungle for trekking, I stopped at Lake Toba, a large lake that is located in the crater of an ancient volcano. The volcano is said to have erupted some (hundreds?) millions of years ago and scattered ash all the way to Greenland. The lake area around the lake is a nice cool climate, and the water is clean and warm, heated naturally by geothermal activity.

The locals of Lake Toba are called Batak people, and have a unique culture that was found to be cannabilistic by the early European explorers. Their traditional culture is still evident today (minus the cannibalism) in their small villages, traditional architecture, and tribal society.

While exploring the area, I was invited for some coffee and betel nut by a few friendly Batak villagers. The man on the far left was an excellent wood carver, and I watched him chisel away on his latest masterpiece. For the villagers, cameras are quite a novelty, so I promised to print this photo and mail it to them when I get home.

Tomorrow I’m hopping on the back of a motorcycle and riding to another nearby village called Tangkahon where I am hoping to see some elephants. Yeehaw!

Surfing West Java

There are lots of tourist attractions on Java Island, Indonesia’s most densely populated island, but I only came here to learn how to surf.

The travel guide book recommends a couple of beaches in West Java for surfing, so that is where I wentafter touching down in Jakarta a week and a half ago. I endured a noisy, rocking night bus ride to the beaches and where I met a teacher who offered to give me a ride to the hotels. The unwritten part of the deal was that I go to his school and meet his class and practice English with them. Not the easiest thing to do on almost no sleep, but rewarding all the same.

The beach I stayed at is called Pangandaran. Each night there were beautiful sunset surf sessions that I took part in. I stayed in Pangandaran for 5 days, surfing 4 of them.

On my rest day I took a stroll through the national park where monkeys and deer roam.

I also took out a scooter and drove it through the countryside to a quiet spot in the jungle where I went swimming beside some small waterfalls. There was a swarm of photographers taking pictures of a girl dressed up like an Indian, so I took my best paparazzi shot.

After four days of surfing at Pangandaran I was ready for a change of scenery, so I took a bus about an hour up the coast line to another surf spot called Batu Karas. I am very glad I did, because Batu Karas turns out to be the perfect spot for beginners. While the waves at Pangandaran are hard to paddle out to, inconsistent, and very tiring, Batu Karas is the opposite. The waves keep rolling in all day long, and the breaks are a nice consistent size and shape.

Everybody rocks longboards at Batu Karas and are very friendly and welcoming (even when I accidentally cut them off). By my last day surfing, I could catch the waves and ride them all the way in to shore. It was a ton of fun!

Now I’m in the airport in Jakarta again waiting for a flight to Indonesia’s larger but more remote island to the north-west called Sumatra. I can’t wait to see more of Indonesia.