The (Mis)Adventures of Matt Lyon

bSo the trip to Kuala Lumpur was a bit longer than expected. 4 hour ferry to the mainland. 1 hour overcrowded bus ride the the transport hub. 4 hour wait for the connecting bus. When it shows up, there are 7 seats too few and since its supposed to be an overnight bus, we protest and after an hour on the side of the road the driver arranges for a minivan to transport the spillover. We drive at a snail's pace and after 5 hours arrive at Hat Yai around 8PM. At this point, the bus driver forgets all his English leaves 40 travelers at a hotel, waving. Long story short, all of us arrange for a bus to pick us up in the morning to take us across the border and to Kuala Lumpur. Staying in a hotel instead of the bus was fine with as we had added in 2 days buffer before our flight to Borneo but others weren't as far-sighted and had planes to catch the next day. Lots of screaming and yelling. Another 10 or so hours of travel the next day landed us in KL around 8PM the next night. We stayed in a hostel with no windows in Chinatown. The manager had a pet monkey. Mildly entertaining. Mostly saddening. We spent 2 days wandering KL, but generally ended up at the Petronas Towers, once the tallest buildings in the world, wandering the pristine mall and taking in a midnight showing of Avatar 3D. On January 6th we boarded a plane for Sandakan, Borneo. About 20 minutes into the flight, the captain comes on and tells us there's been a problem and we have to return to KL. We were supposed to circle for 20 minutes to burn fuel. 2 hours later we were still circling and Meghan had worst-case scenarios worked up in her head. Thankfully we landed safely, but with no explanation as to why we circled so long or what the problem really was. Everyone deplaned and boarded a new plane. Meghan was having none of it. After about 90 minutes of going back and forth we decided we would try again in two days. So we went back to KL, got a nicer hotel room and spoiled ourselves with Italian dinners and movies. Dr. Parnassus. Could've been so much better. Two days later we successfully made it to Sandakan. We passed the taxis offering rides into town for $8 and got the bus for 50 cents. A small triumph against overcharging travelers. Sandakan was nice but not great. It allowed us to get our feet wet in Borneo and we arranged a trip into the jungle. We arrived to Bukit on the Kinabatangan River in Sabah and spent 3 days on river and jungle treks, searching for Orangutans, Probiscis Monkeys, Elephants, Kingfishers, Hornbills, Crocodiles, among others. It was really great, although the Palm Oil trees sometimes came right up to the riverbanks. Its really sad. A lot of Malaysia Borneo has been sold out to foreign Palm Oil companies and enormous swaths of land have been bulldozed to make way for Palm trees. Along with the trees go the ecosystem and habitat of countless species. No doubt many many animal and plant species were made extinct because of this. It is a total disgrace and we all use palm oil without ever really knowing it. Like so many things in this world, the products we use tend to have a significant effect on the environment and of course the corporations are none too happy to publicize these inconvenient truths. Unilever, for example, makes everything from peanut butter to shampoo, all with the help of palm oil. It is a real shame. (Step off soap box.)

After Kinabatangan, we took a bus to Semporna, the eastern tip of Malaysian Borneo and gateway to SCUBA paradise. A night at the Dragon Inn, a 'floating' hotel and a scramble to find a dive shop we liked landed us in the worthy hands of Sue Keevil, a lovable Brit. She sorted us out and the next morning we were on a boat headed to the island of Mabul. On the way we got to see Semporna from the water. I like to call it the 'Venice of the East'. Row after row, canal after canal of stilted houses and hovels. An amazing way to live. We arrived to our homestay on Mabul and spent a total 8 days diving and drinking, drinking and diving. Funnily enough, a kid we met at the airport in San Pedro Sula Honduras last year showed up as our divemaster on Mabul. We shared a bus to the coast and had dinner together, then parted ways the next morning. He's our motherloving dive instructor in fathercuddling Borneo. Small world once more. The island is a meditation on balance between the rich and the poor. A smattering of dive shops on stilts and inland, villagers just living. You can walk around the whole island in about an hour. There was a resort on the other side, a literal stone's throw from shacks. The unluckiest on the island weren't even on the island at all. "Sea gypsies". Filipino refugees living on boats, 'docking' at low tide. When it rained, vigilance was needed day and night to bucket out the water. They fish and cook on the boat. Pretty wild stuff. Anyway, we had an amazing time diving unbelievable sites. Among the strangest encounters were ornate ghost pipefish, lionfish, cuttlefish, parrotfish, frogfish, stonefish, reef sharks, nudibranchs. Google any of these and be prepared for a wild ride into Mother Nature's mad laboratory. Just downright weird, most of them. We got our Advanced Open Water certification. We did a night dive, got into some pitch black bizarro realms. The mind is a funny thing, likes to make something out of nothing. A fun little trick is waving your hand in front of you and seeing it light up with phosphorous. I loved it. The wreck dive was also a trip, looking for pieces of eight on the fingers of skeletons. Not exactly, but surreal nonetheless. Seeing the wreck appear out of the blue with thousands of fish all moving in synchronicity was a nice little mindscrew. I love diving. Love it. We did 3 dives at the famed Sipadan, the place Jacques Cousteau described, “I have seen other places like Sipadan… 45 years ago. Now we have found again an untouched piece of art.” He was right. An island in the middle of the Celebes Sea, with a towering coral wall that is just teeming with sea life. Anything and everything can be seen there. It is fantastic. I highly recommend you go. Now. I'll wait.

We had to bid a found farewell to all of our new friends and our new home and set sail for Kota Kinabalu. Kota Kinabalu is the biggest city in Sabah, but was a bit of a disappointment. Meghan got a viral infection and was bedridden for about a week. So our time was spent laying around watching movies and surfing the interweb. I caught the Saints Vikings game on ESPN dot com. Just the gameday play by play, which had my jumping up and down at every update. That was really the highlight of the week to be honest. We saw the hospital. That was neat.

So we flew back to Kuala Lumpur and went straight to the bus station and caught a night bus back to Hat Yai Thailand. Goodbye Muslim America, hello Land of Smiles (for the 3rd time). That morning we spent an hour eating breakfast and then hopped a van to Krabi. Got to the pier in mid afternoon, put our stuff on a longtail boat and made the 20 minute ride to TonSai. Oh what a delight! Clear Turquoise water with jutting rock formations and white sand beaches. Our new Argentine friends found a couple of bungalows 50 feet off the beach for $12 a night. It's yet another paradise. Rock climbers come the world over to this beach. Imagine climbing up a rock wall 90 feet up then looking out to the most beautiful beach with limestone formations offshore at sunset. Guess its hard to imagine. SUCKERS! I kid, I kid! It was amazing, though. I highly recommend it this also.

A couple days after we arrived, Meghan's friend Colin came with his man friend Dave. They stayed at Rayvadee Resort. $800/night. Amazing. But still not worth the $784 difference. The pool was amazing though. Looked right over the beach. It was nice having him there because it gave us an excuse to go out, which we have rarely done on this trip. It was a good place to do it. We found this place called Small World tucked into the forest. Had cheapish drinks and firedancing tightrope walkers. I kid you not. It was just about the coolest thing I've ever seen. I have a video that will be on facebook once I return. Our time on Krabi was great. One day we went kayaking, one day went rock climbing, one day went caving and hiking. Then it was on to Koh Phi Phi. I wasn't too happy about this, as I've heard its just a built up tourist trap. It is. But I had no choice as it was Dave and Colin's choice. I forced myself to have fun and drink buckets of booze and party all night on the beach and fire jump rope, and fire limbo, and jump through a ring of fire. It was hell. Gosh I am a spoiled little shit. Brian and Emily from Madison joined us in Phi Phi as well. They are teaching English in Korea and jumped ship without papers to be with us. I jump roped with Brian. It was bromantic.

We said goodbye to Dave and Colin, who headed to Phuket while we took an overnight bus to Bangkok. We had to connect in the same hub where we waited for 4 hours for the connection. This time it was 20 minutes. Matty likey. Bangkok Khao San once more, but this time just for 4 hours. Jumped online then headed to the local bus station for bus to the border to Cambodia. At the border the tourist police tried to rip us off. Yay, Cambodia!!!

We hired a taxi to take us the 1 1/2 hours to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat!!!!!

Luang Prabang was generally nice. Very relaxing days with a nice hotel room in a place called SokDee (Good Luck). Great Mekong sunsets and mellow night market ramblings. Our friend Karen got food poisoning without our knowledge. Andrea had to take her to the hospital. While in the emergency room, she was with a bunch of bus crash victims. Nothing too serious from what I hear, but they kept coming up to her and asking for money. She kind of shrugged them off, as you regrettably have to do too often over here. You can't help everyone. But then she realized these people were going straight to the pharmacy to buy medicine. A couple things about communism in poor countries: All the social securities we associate with communism/socialism ie education, healthcare, food stamps tend to be nonexistent. If you are sick in Laos, your family has to kitty up the money for your care. If you are imprisoned in Laos, your family has to come feed you. Or you starve/eek out a living trading anything you have of value to inmates with fat families. Another thing that just occurred to me: Lots of American contemporary Country songs praise working hard for its own sake. Lots of Communist countries praise working hard for its own sake. Yet the two groups seem to be diametrically opposed. Just goes to show not much is what it seems.

But thankfully, Karen fully recovered in Luang Prabang while Meghan, Andrea, and I got a slow boat up the Mekong for a 2 day travel excursion. A slow boat is basically a long wooden boat maybe 50 feet long with a huge monster of a diesel engine. It is covered, yet is open air. It has wooden seats, but some have old car seats nailed down for the first class passengers. It sells beer. So we load up, maybe 10 westerners and 10 Lao and slowly head up the river. We immediately become surrounded by beauty. Huge rock formations, sandy beaches, tiny villages tucked into the mountains, people fishing, swimming, bathing, and playing on the banks. Locals got on with handfuls of food or a basket full of chickens, or a wall fan, would stay on for a few hours and the boat would stop on the bank, and they'd get off and be greeted by their family, and you realize that this person probably traveled at least 2 days to bring what they had in their hands back to their family. It may seem like a poor life, but it is only seemingly so! They aren't tied down by mortgages and credit card debt and car notes and bratty kids who just threw their iPhone on the floor and are demanding another one. None of that Western shit applies here, and I am sure they are exponentially more wealthy spiritually and familially without all that Prozac and Valium and Ritalin that we consume to help us just get by. One thing I've learned over here is that you are only poor if someone tells you so. With movies and television and cell phones, people in the city know they are 'poor' compared to the West, and it is a shame because you see the wanting, the envy. But in the country, people seem to be so content with what they have. They are never in a hurry to go anywhere, will spend hours cooking dinner, and can meet with a friend at any hour, at the drop of a hat. That doesn't sound like poverty, that sounds like what all the working folks in the west are working for. Just a little chicken soup while we work in our little ticky tacky cubicles.

So we spent the night in Pak Beng, the village that just so happened to be halfway between Luang Prabang and the Thai border. We went out with Andrea and and a man from Germany-can't remember his name just now, and James, a bloke from where they call guys 'blokes'. A great dinner and conversations ranging from drugs in England to real poverty in Cambodia to...wait for it...American politics. Drank a little too much beerlao at the encouragement of Andrea, the not-so-closet lush of the group, and went to sleep in the upstairs of a family's house with my head spinning and my mind still floating downriver.

The next morning whilst boarding, I confirmed my suspicion that a couple travelers on the boat were indeed speaking Czech. I had a brief broken language conversation with them and bid them a hezky den. Another glorious day on the boat playing cards, reading, pondering, waving to naked children playing riverside, and generally loving life. That evening I invited the Czechs to dinner. Lo and behold, Ondrej works at Commerzbank, my old teaching ground in Prague! It dawned on me that I had seen him wandering the halls of the IT department and here he is on the Mekong in Laos! Small world! Really nice to brush the rust off of my Czech and get excited about the possibility of stopping there 'on the way' home.

And so it was time for us to hire a tiny shuttle boat across the river. Goodbye Land of a Thousand Elephants, hello Land of Smiles. This time we made a beeline to Bangkok and before I knew it I was back on the dreaded Khao San Road at 4am. Khao San embodies all the culturally bad things about backpackers in SE Asia. There are English pubs, McDonald's, KFCs, Burger Kings, 7-11s, t shirt touts, tuk tuk drivers, women in faux hilltribe garb selling wooden croaking frogs, and Thai hookers. I guess its not all bad. It would even be pretty fun if it was Bourbon Street or if you flew all the way to Bangkok just to party. But arriving after an overnight bus is walking into a world of depravity without the lubrication of alcohol to lessen the blow. But thankfully we had an out this time. Al NaChiangmai is back from living in Chicago and was more than happy to show us around. The next night he and his friend drove us around in her Mercedes and gave us a tour of the Old Town. We ate at an outdoor restaurant and then went to a Jazz club called Brown Sugar. A great night with great friends. We met Al a few more times to go shopping, play pool with his dad, and drink and talk about Thai and American politics and his culture shock after living in America for college.

After a few days in Bangkok it was time for us to head south to the southern island of Koh Pha Ngan, home of the world famous Full Moon Party. Another overnight boat and a sunrise ferry had us on the island by mid-morning. A nice little bungalow on the northwest side of the island 100 feet from the beach. Perfect. We spent Christmas and New Year's there, 10 nights in all. It was really nice to 'settle in' and not have to pack and unpack and repeat. Our days were spent reading on the waveless beach and our nights were spent enjoying great Thai food at slightly steeper prices. For Christmas and New Year's Eve we went to the parties. Christmas was a nice warm up to the real thing a week later. Here's the gist: Huge soundsystems pump out mediocre electronic music. Fire dancers. Black light body painters. Clubs selling weed and mushroom shakes. Endless homemade bars line the top of the beach selling Thai whiskey and coke buckets for $5. Think a child's sand pale filled with 2 pints of whiskey or vodka and your mixer of choice. Plus about 10 straws in case you are 10 girls who enjoy letting perfect strangers take pictures of you all drinking at the same time and the fellatio innuendo therein. But it is fun enough. I got hit in the back of the head with a flying 24 oz beer bottle.

The next week is a bit of a blur. We woke up, ate homemade sandwiches and laid at the beach. Period. The NYE party was a bit different from the Christmas one. Firstly, this was a true full moon party. It was also a blue moon party, meaning two full moons in the same month by some definitions. It was also New Year's Eve. Whereas Christmas had maybe 5,000 people on the beach, NYE had upwards of 30,000 people on the same beach. The music was better, the bonfires were bigger, the people more energized, and the party lasted much longer. The downside: waves of shards of beer bottles were cutting everybody's feet. In short there were lots of nice and fucked up people doing lots of nice and fucked up things. Meghan literally dragged me away from the jungle soundsystem at sunrise. I lost my shoes.

On the ride home a car passing us ran over a dog. The image melted into my brain. Meghan looked horrified. We got back around 8 am and I laid in the hammock on the porch listening to the Grateful Dead coaxing my mind down from its overloaded night. I marveled in the fact that, while it was 8am in Thailand, it was 8pm in Atlanta and Miami, and the festivities were just underway at the Panic and Phish shows. I wanted to stay up another 12 hours just to be conscious while my friends were throwing down. A homesick morning to be sure.

A sidenote: Its funny how what we read affects our perceptions. Meghan was reading Obama's autobiography at the time and he was scolding fellow revelers all night about how irresponsible and juvenile they were being. I was reading The Right Stuff and first man in space Al Shepard was judging who amongst us had it and who didn't. Obama scoffed at my hedonism while Al saw plainly that Meghan was completely devoid of that righteous stuff.

We woke up New Year's afternoon to the dive shop owner up the road asking if we wanted to dive the next day. Dazed and confused, we gathered our wits and decided, yes, we would dive in the morning. We loaded onto a huge diver's yacht with about 20 other divers and headed to Sail Rock, a dive site between Pha Ngan and Tao with a towering rock shooting up out of the water 30 meters and down into the water a few hundred meters. It was Meghan's and my first dive in a year and our divemaster jumped in and said "Going down!" With waves lapping and boats crashing around us, we both wondered if we had remembered anything about diving. As we released the air out of our BCDs and went under we both had a mild panic attacks and had to shoot to the surface. Shit, can we do this? We both comforted each other and took a big mental breath and went under. It took several good breaths and a lot of mental hula hoops to realize that we would be under water for the better part of an hour. But after the jitters wore off, it was two great dives. Fish from all over come to this rock to feed and it was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fish surrounding us. A strange surreal experience that quickly shook off my hangover and left me beaming.

After ten days of doing nothing slowly and everything quickly, it was time for us to head to Malaysia.