Christmas on Koh Chang

The beach on Koh Chang just after sunset. It was a great place to spend Christmas, but having some family here made it all the better.Your typical 'gas station' on Koh Chang. We had a motorbike for 5 of the 6 days we were there so whenever you needed fuel you just pulled up to one of these many stands. All stored in old liquor bottles. We had our big Christmas feast on the 24th, and here is the 2 of us just before dinner.Jillene and I spent Christmas morning enjoying an nice breakfast and then catch up with some family over the phone. After which we killed an afternoon on the beach before treating ourselves to a long rub down getting a Thai massage. And here is a picture of dinner on Christams day.
And Christmas isn't complete until Grandma drinks her 7 liters of beer getting drunk and biligerant ignoring pleas from David that he doesn't need her to buy him a nice Thai girl.
Merry Christmas everyone!

More Bangkok Wats

A little more sight seeing to share. The Wats really were amazing. The next few include the pictures taken in Wat Pho. It is the oldest (16th century) and largest temple in Bangkok.
The highlight of Wat Pho is this, a 46m reclining budda which stands 15m high. It is quite the sight.And the last 2 are taken of Wat Arun. The one immeadiate one below is also taken from a water taxi.


We'll have a lot more pictures to share of all the Palaces/Wats we visited in Bangkok once we return. Tons of cool stuff here, way too many for this site!

Bangkok

We arrived in Bangkok after a long day of traveling. I didn't choose the easiest route Jillene tells me ~ but I maintain it was the cheapest! I'll spare you our detailed full day adventure, but we finally arrived to the warm welcome of the circus I like to call Khao San Rd. We loved staying here during our 4 days in Bangkok ejoying much of what it had to offer. With beers and food readily available on the street as you walk by, we only sat down to eat twice.
Our first site we took in. 'Big Budda' as named appropriately by our friendly Tuk Tuk driver.And our Tuk Tuk of coarse... a fun mode of transportation through the busy Bangkok streets.The Grand Palace now is a place where you'll drain your cameras battery and fill it's memory card doing so. A must to see on any visit to Bangkok. Formerly the Kings residence it is now only used for special occasions. Oh yeah, Jillene is the one in the front...A few more pictures of the Grand Palace...

And a picture of the Grand Palace taken from a water Taxi as we make our way through Bangkok.

Singapore

Our primary reason for coming to Singapore was for my cousins wedding, but we managed to get a reasonable amount of site seeing in during our short stay. We'll save you all from the many pics of Sentosa Island, Little India, China Town and the like, but here are a few cause we need to get Jillene in here more... Here is Raffles Hotel where Cory and Wendy's wedding was held. A pretty nice place I suppose some would say...Before the wedding, were getting Cory ready. After everyone sampled an original Raffles Singapore Sling we chased them down with a few pints of Tiger. A picture of the Family after the ceremony.
And a picture of the family during the reception. We may have had a few at this point. It was a 'free flow' open bar with an army of staff whom never let your beer glass (or whatever you were drinking) get empty. Some of us kept them running...
Was a memorable time for all I am sure. To all be together in Sinapore for such an occasion.

Tawau Hills Park

These pictures date back to before we left Borneo. Seems like forever ago, but we've yet to update the blog with them. With 4 days to kill and not much to do in the town of Tawau where we flew out, we made our way to some more Jungle in Tawau Hills Park. Not the easiest place to get to because it has about 4-5 different names, and the locals don't know any of them. But we made it there none-the-less. The day we arrived we did about a 5 hour trek that should have taken 2 to below falls. It was steep in places and very muddy the entire way. But we were rewarded with some fun falls to play around in. Here is a snap while I tried to climb up into the water. Was nice and refreshing considering it was hot and sticky out, but trust me going up was much easier than going down when you have water pounding in your face and you can't see your footing/hand holds.
Enroute to the falls before the rain came...
I think we have a picture of this centapede from past entries, but I don't think it showed the before and the after of the cool critter. Fist picture is when he is happily minding his own business.This picture is what he does when we start harrassing him as a defense mechanism. He makes a perfect ball. It realy is increadible. At least I think so....
And this disgusting picture was the result of our treking. No problems on the way there, but not so on the way back. We spent half of our time scaping off leaches, but to no avail still finding more (including these 2 on my feet) all over our legs and arms when we got back to our room.
And that was it for Borneo. A great place that was definitely worth the visit. One additional thing we did learn here right before leaving included not eating green salt water shrimp in a land locked jungle...

Sipidan

Borneo just keeps getting better and better. Below is a beach on the island of Sipidan. This is a special place because of the great diving. If you look at the picture below you'll see the light blue colour of shallow water, and then the dark blue. That is because there is a 600 meter vertical cliff dropping into the ocean. This cliff circles the island and there is more sea life hear than we have ever seen before. We have a few pictures of a small fraction of the things we saw. All the underwater pictures are courtesy of Ricard who dove with us for 5 of our 8 dives and was kind enough to share some of the pics with us.
The two of us... I am sure you can figure out who is who!
For the life of us we can't remember the name of this fish at the moment. A little help from anyone would be appreciated!
We saw probably 30+ of these. White tip, black tip, grey reef sharks...
And even more turtles. These were green sea turtles and they get huge! There must be 1000's of these around Sipidan and we feel like we saw half of them. Some of them were so big that I would barely be able to reach from one side of the shell to the other if I were to try and grab them (I got that close to one and measured ~ their not too concerned about divers)
Of course there was tons of coral.
And definitely a highlight was a couple run ins with a school of Bumphead Parrot fish. This was awesome. One sighting there were 45+ of them, and another about 25... These things can get huge, basically the size of a coffee table (the best comparison we can think of). Ricard did a great job regarding these pictures. Ricard, thank you again!


Well we never got to see our Hammer head sharks, but I guess you can't win them all! It was still a great time and we really enjoyed the diving. Pretty great place to get your Advanced if you ask us. We can't wait to dive again, we're thinking of going tomorrow! But we'll see...

Kinabatangan

We spent 3 days in the Kinabatangan jungle. It was a good time, and we met some great people. The Kinabatangan is a rapidly depleting jungle here in Borneo due to the ever growing 'palm oil' plantations. It is a bit sad really, because a number of species are becoming extinct (or dangerously close) because of the loss of their homes. We tried our best to capture some of these animals on film, and on the odd occasion we succeeded.

This is Jillenes twisted vine 'thingy' tree...
Here is a Proboscis Monkey (please don't check our spelling on all this!) jumping in between trees. We got to view some great acrobatics while doing rivers treks in the AM.
Here is one sitting still... You can't see it too well. But they have huge noses. The males more so than the females...
And a lizard...
The very rare 'king of the jungle'...
A Kingfisher. Interesting note, we didn't have to zoom in for this picture. This was during our night jungle trek and they won't fly away because their totally blind at night. Only if you touch them...
A fresh water prawn.
This is where we slept...
These were my trekking boots! Everyone wore rubber boots, I think they were all suckers. They would get stuck in the mud and guess who came to the rescue! Everyone thought I was crazy, but I think I got the last laugh.
Our group.
I think I have something on my shoulder.
Our favorite picture of all!
And our second favorite! A scorpion.
We saw lots of other things during these 3 days which we weren't able to capture on film. Crocodiles of various sizes (up to about 3 meters long), more Orang-Utans. A bearded pig, a huge Tarantula the size of my hand, and the worlds second smallest frog, and apparently the worlds more poisonous spider (don't worry, it's bite can't break human skin). The Kinabatangan trip was great and for sure a highlight of our Borneo journey...