Annelies en Dolf in de wereld: Happy new year!

Happy new year to everybody! We hope you all have had wonderful Christmas days and have eaten a lot of nice things. For us it was very strange to celebrate Christmas in 30 degrees. No rain, no snow and no real Christmas tree. Of course we tried to simulate Christmas a litle bit. We had pancakes for breakfast with fresh fruits and prepared our own meal. Usually we have the Khmer cooking staff, but this is the one day in the year that we cook our own European meal. It was simple, but delicious, especially because we are used to eating rice three times a day. We bought cheese (very expensive) and made our own mashed potatoes. On only a charcoal stove and no fridge it was a bit of improvising.

Some volunteers found a tropical tree with a slight resemblance to a Christmas tree and painted the tree because we did not have any decorations. Another volunteer had brought an inflatable Rudolf the rednosed reindeer. We even had a present for everybody and played secret Santa (you had a buy a present for 1 person and he didn't know who got him the present). I got a new shirt and Dolf some coffee.

We celebrated new years eve with a dinner in a new restaurant on the island. The food was good with crab, swordfish and mushroom risotto, but after dinner was finally served after two hours everybody run of to finish the evening somewhere else. Not the best start of the restaurant. We ended the evening in our standard bar with a lot of alcohol. They serve a teapot, which consists of a bottle of Khmer whiskey, a few cans of Thai red bull (apparently red bull originated in Thailand and this version is even sweeter and stronger in caffeine) and a few can of cokes. This is all mixed in a teapot and served in small glasses. If you drink this in between your beers your evening improves considerably, even with bad music. Psi (the Korean dude with gangnam style) is very popular here...

The weather has improved and we have had a flat sea for the last few days. That means the seahorse surveys can continue and we do 2 seahorse surveys a day. Unfortunately, there is a lot of current in the afternoon on the bottom which makes it impossible to continue the research, but then you can do nice drift dives. You drift along with the current without doing anything, or drift upside down and do some acrobatic tricks. The weather improvements also means no wind and an increase in temperature. It can be very hot when you are not diving as we noticed yesterday. We made a nice boat trip through a mangrove forest and a small walk through the jungle to a small fishing village where we had lunch consisting of fresh fish caught in the river earlier in the morning. We will add some extra pictures on line next time we are on the mainland.