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.
The village on our island
Rudolf, the prsents and our Christmas tree
Christmas breakfast with pancakes and champagne
The dog felt vey wet and lonely since he was not allowed to swim to mainland in the territory of our dogs
Our trip through the mangroves
