Liesje de boskabouter and the continuation of the fight against the chickens

Unfortunately, the weather is still not as it should supposed be. When it is raining but we still need to go out, we have taken after the local dress. You put on your poncho. Since they are only available in one size, they make Annelies look a a bit like a dwarf, hence the title of the weblog and the picture.

Not an awful lot happened since our last post.

Working with the schools improves a little, we have had another teacher training and some appointments. Besides that, we have been preparing the practicals, visiting different locations and deciding which location would be best for the students. This included some nice walks in the surrounding hills and at the other side of the river. The problem is that there have been a lot of landslides and parts of the path have been been demolished or just disappeared. The hills are sometimes very steep and with the amount of rain it is a lot of slipping and sliding. Nice for us, but not for the students.

On the other side of the river are also walking paths and they are better maintained. We went to have a look by kayak. Nice idea, but it was raining the whole morning, so by the time we crossed the river we were soaking wet. The local people looked at us like we were crazy and I can imagine that, why would you go kayaking in this weather? Even with the rain it was still fun to explore the river and walk through the forest afterward. It is a nice part of rainforest, not primary forest, but with some big trees and the path is less steep. It almost felt we were back in the Netherlands when the owner of the kayaks explained to us that we had to carry the kayaks up the path so that we could lock them with a big chain and lock against a tree. Just like your Dutch bike, if you don't lock it, it is gone by the time you return. Unfortunately no pictures because of the rain.

Dolf got a little help in his fight against the chickens by the way. We have a new ally. One night we heard someone shooting a gun in our garden and it turned out it was the neighbour hunting for an animal that had caught and killed his chicken. Dolf helped him in his search and when they found the opossum, the gun was jammed so he got away. Dolf did not mind this at all of course, because a) he has help in his fight against the chickens and b) we don't like to kill animals. One chicken down, 8 to go. The opossum was sufficiently scared, because until now he has not returned. Too bad for us, we still wake up with the lovely sound of the rooster and his chickens. Our parents have acquainted themselves as well with the noises, since we only Skype at six in the morning because that's the only time the internet connection is good enough and the chickens like to join in in the conversation.

The only drawback was that the smell in our garden and at the end in our house (remember open windows) wasn't too good. It turned out that the opossum had left the chicken and it was decomposing in the yard. After a good rain the smells disappeared which solved our problem of what to do with the remains of the chicken.

Talking about bad smells, Annelies walked through the street the other day and the smell was really bad. In the Netherlands you have the saying 'it smells as bad as a corpse' which she mentioned to Dolf.  We had a look in the gutters to see if something was blocking the water and found indeed a corpse. Of a dead snake.

Todo es posible, nada es seguro

Everything is possible, but nothing is certain. One of the San Miguel guides said this often last year and I think it is a nice saying to describe the last week and a half.

We had a very busy week in which we had our first teacher training. That went pretty well. Teachers were enthusiastic and our Spanish was ok. It is much harder to give a training in a language you don't speak fluently and it improves the quality a bit as well, but we had a very interactive training in which the teachers had to practice different interactive teaching methods so it was a nice division of doing things yourself and listening to us. We are proud on ourselves that we managed to accomplish this.

The rest of the week was a bit harder. We planned a lot of meetings but they were all canceled. Some examples: The first meeting with 1 school was canceled because the teachers had another training, so we planned a second meeting for the next day which was canceled because of the amount of water in the school (it had been raining for 2 days) and the third meeting was canceled because the teachers didn't have school in the afternoon. Other canceled meetings and trainings included no electricity so no use of laptop and projector for the training, no meeting (by now the raining had almost stopped) because it was still drizzling and it was cold so the lessons were canceled, no training because the school mentioned earlier didn't show up and we had too few participants. The second attempt was canceled because the school building was also used by the morning school (2 schools share the same building) to celebrate Mother's day. This would include a lot of music and as we mentioned before, when Bolivians turn on the music, it will be on maximum volume. Not a good idea to have a training at a distance of 50 m from the music with open windows.

The good part is that teachers are used to canceled meetings and it is usually no problem to plan your next meeting very quickly after the canceled one. The movement of the teacher training from the afternoon to the evening in a different school was a suggestion of one of the teachers and everybody who was there in the afternoon, came in the evening as well.

Next week, we will try to have the same meetings and hope for better weather. It has been raining for 3 days and as soon as it starts raining, hibernation begins. Everybody stays indoors and everything is canceled without further notice. This is a national habit and there is nothing we can do but accept it. Just sit, wait and join in (or do other useful things in the meantime).

It is quite cold now, it is overcast for 4 days in a row and the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Dutch people would think this is very normal, but we are by now so used to 30+ degrees that it feels like winter. With our open windows in our house (only mosquito netting) the wind blows through the room because our curtains are too small. We hope the sun will be out soon, both for the temperature rise and the continuation of our project. Since I forgot to post this blog and it's on my computer for 3 days, I can now mention that the weather is back to normal.

We will try to extent our visa with one month so that we can stay till the middle of August. Their winter holiday is in the first two weeks of July and interferes with our program. With extending our time here we can continue with our program after their holiday. This includes a little break to go back and forth to La Paz which also gives us the opportunity to visit the library of Conservation International. This organization has done a lot of environmental education project in the surroundings of Rurre in the past, so maybe we can find some useful educational material. We already noticed that a lot of educational material has been made by different organizations, but everybody tends to forget this and the materials end up in a library and nobody knows it exists. We gave ourselves the tasks to put interesting educational material on a website so at least the schools in Rurre have access to it.

The water quality improved by the way. We now have water when it rains and there is only very little sand in it so I guess they fixed something.

We end with this nice picture. The municipality is changing part of the electricity. In the Netherlands they would replace the old wiring. Here, they just build poles and wires on the other side of the road. They are now putting the wires in place and sometimes the trees are in the way. So what do you do: you just put up your ladder against the leaves of the tree and hope it will be stable enough. In this case, it was.

Who wins: Dolf or the chickens?

When you turn on the tap in the Netherlands, you will know there will always be water and it is clean. Yes, we do have a tap, but that is were the resemblance ends. We discovered that when you turn on the tap after a rainy period, their is either no water or the water is muddy. So you shower in muddy water, cook with muddy water and do the dishes in muddy water. That's still better than the no water we have now had on several occasions. It turns out the water to the households is closed during rainy periods. During the rainy season, there was no tap water for three whole weeks in a row, so actually we are lucky. We now keep the biggest pan we have permanently outside (in the rain if it's there), so we can still manage to flush the toilet at the end of the day.

Dolf has found a nice way to entertain himself. He bought a catapult this afternoon to use in his fight against keeping the noisy chickens out of our garden. It was of course of Bolivian quality, so it broke after one try. He is now trying to fix it and he can indeed smash a pebble pretty accurately to a chicken. Downside is that if he actually manages to hit the chicken he will probably smash its brains out, because there is a lot of force behind the mechanism.

Last week we discussed the plans for the school gardens of the primary schools with the other project partner who has an organization in Cochabamba, another city in Bolivia. The director came over to Rurre and we had three days of discussions in dutch, since he is a dutch guy. Nice to have some inside information of somebody who lives in Bolivia for about ten years and sometimes still has trouble adapting to Bolivian life. He is for instance still waiting for a building permit for his house on land that was purchased five years ago. His Bolivian wife is a cook and she has found a way to make stroopwafels which she sells on the market. Nice example of integration of two cultures.

We have all the socio-productive projects of the schools and are now trying to find out how we can turn everything into one big proposal, without losing the big picture.

Because we have decided to do our ecological field practicals not in San Miguel, but closer in the forest around the city and another place only 5 minutes upstream by boat, we can include much more students. We are now talking about practicals for big numbers of students and if we can arrange it, it is very well possible that over 500 students will do a field practical. The practical will still be given by the guides of San Miguel and eventually without our supervision. Classes are pretty big here and some schools have 70 students for each year, so it will be very interesting to see if we can manage logistically. We still have some time to organize this, the practicals are planned for the middle of June.

We will start with brainstorms with each school next week, to see how we can support each project. That will be our make or break week. If teachers do not show up because they forget the meeting or have other things to do, it will be much harder to carry on in the co-operational way we had planned.

We already noticed that our second meeting with some teachers went the same way as last year. The teachers forgot the meeting, we had to call them and one of them said he would be there in 10 minutes but failed to show up at all...If you behave like that in the Netherlands people would be very upset, here it is just normal. But we keep our hopes up, because directors of the schools are still very enthusiastic about the plans.

Living in Rurre again

We managed to find a little house of our own, even including a garden! We wake up with the sounds of the rooster and his ladies (often starting at 4.30h), but hardly any traffic because we live in a small street a bit away from the center. We can shake the grapefruits and carambolas out of our own trees (in a matter of speaking, actually Dolf gets a 3m long pole and smashes the grapefruits out of the tree). The coconuts need some more time. It is really living in the tropics. Every day we sweep the ants out of the house and destroy the new roads the termites build along the different walls. Interesting to find out that they just start on a new wall every other day.

Unfortunately the house was unfurnished so we borrowed some things from friends and bought the other necessary equipment: a mattress, gas bottle and a ventilator. It is nice to cook for ourselves again.

We can work at home if the internet does cooperate and the owner pays his electricity bills. Two days after we moved in we had no electricity. The power company cut us off because the bill wasn't paid. Apparently they did the same with half the village, because their was a very long line with people who wanted to pay their bills. Because of the long line, we had to wait for two days before we had electricity again...

We have to get used again to how Bolivians do (not) arrange things, but so far we have at least 9 enthusiastic schools who want to participate in the project. Now we have to think about limiting possibilities instead of schools not coming on meetings. Like we thought when we left last year, we finally start to figure things out, started to know the right people and know what we wanted to do. We already found out last year that schools have something called "socio-productive projects", required by law, and that this year, the district has made the schools coordinate their topics, so they all include a more or less environmental/eco-tourism topic. It also turns out the municipality made eco-tourism one of the spear head topics of education. So together with the schools we decided to include their socio-productive projects in our project, and this seems to pay off. The schools are very entousiastic, they all turned up and joined in the discussion of the first meeting and the municipality offered even more money to support our project. We try to help the schools in developing educational materials and working out their plans while we try to integrate as many project goals as possible. In this way, the project will be hopefully more sustainable and schools will continue after we have gone. All the developed materials will be placed on a website and maintained by the schools (that is at least the idea).

The topics of the socio-productive projects are quite interesting; from developing a tourist trail in the municipality forest reserve to developing an ecological corridor between the school and the river. Several schools would like to have a school garden as well. Some projects do not fit in with our mission; it is hard to see how traditional costumes of different regions fit in here but maybe this school can participate during their biology classes.

This weekend we had a short visit in San Miguel and further on in Madidi rainforest at their lodge, to assess the damage of the rainy season. The river has flushed a lot of land away and there have also been a lot of landslides. One of the landslides destroyed the kitchen and dinner room of the San Miguel lodge and took part of the path away as well. During the 2 hour boat ride we saw numerous examples of landslides that have come down. Shallow parts of the river are full with trees and plants.

Sadly, there is not a lot that can be done to prevent the landslides. The trees are replanted, but this has no use. Landslides will occur again in the next few years and the replanted seedlings are way too small and do not grow a big root system in 3 years. On top of that, the reforestation office decided to plant ceders. Nice big trees with long roots when they are 100+ years old, but they will never get that far.

Because of the landslides, there is sometimes more space and poor people decide to build their house on part of an old landslide or directly under it in Rurre. The municipality does nothing to prevent this, and that is how the 10 people died in Rurre during the rainy season. During a new landslide, their houses are swept away. This made us a little sad, especially because there are some local people noticing the problems and trying to fight it, but nobody is listening and most people remain passive, do nothing and just let it happen. The people living in the dangerous areas are going to be relocated now, but we bet that in 10 years, there will be new people living in the same places.

The whole village of San Miguel flooded and several houses have been totally washed away. The school show the height of the water level, about 2 meters, while the bank is already 10 meters higher than the river. Their pride, the football field in front of the schools has become an uneven mud field with lots of puddles with water and only a little bit of grass.

But their is also a little bright side. Because so many things have been destroyed, all the people have temporary jobs in rebuilding and replanting, so they at least earn some money. This brings in a new problem: because the reforestation project pays better than rebuilding the lodge, the whole village is replanting trees. They don't seem to get that rebuilding the lodge, brings in more tourists and more money for them in the long run... A long term vision is not very common, especially among the poorer, rural people. But then again there are always a few smarter ones like the boss of the San Miguel tourism company who really tries to get that long term vision understood by the others. But there is still a long way to go.

Wreck diving in the Philippines

We had a wonderful 10 day diving in Coron, Busuanga Island in the Philippines. We were diving with the only local dive operator (always nice to sponsor local people instead of foreigners). There are 8 Japanese wrecks around Coron. They were bombed by the Americans in September 1944. Most of the wrecks were partly salvaged after WW2 by the Japanese, so the rudders, cannons and bodies have been removed on all but one of the wrecks. Most of them have been beautifully preserved and you can still see the prints of the bombs and bullets in the hole. Part of the wrecks broke when sunk or have large holes in them because of the salvaging.

We were lucky that we were diving with a small group of very experienced divers most of the time, consisting of two instructors, one dive master and us. That meant that we were able to penetrate the wrecks through tiny openings and take the more difficult routes. It is important that your buoyancy is really good, because a lot of silt has accumulated of the years in the wrecks and if you stir it all up the visibility can become very bad.

We have been diving on some of the wrecks for 2-4 times, each time with a different route through the ship. Because the ships have been lying on the bottom, some of them are quiet deep, at 38m. This means that your bottom time is very short and you can be on that specific depth for only 10 minutes. The more you ascend, the more bottom time you have. That 's why we have also done our Nitrox course here. When you dive with Nitrox you increase your bottom time because it contains less nitrogen and more oxygen.

Penetrating wrecks is quite exciting. The light is different around every corner and at different times of the day. Some wrecks lay on their side, but others are still in the right position and it is a weird idea to swim through a hallway or climb the same ladder hundreds have done before you when the ship was still active. Nature has taken over each wreck. Coral grows on the outside of each wreck but also in the inside. The fish have made it their home and sometimes get confused, they don't know what is up or down and left or right. It is quite common to see a fish swim upside down or sideways because they think they swim along the bottom.

Each wreck has it's own characteristics. Some of them still have cargo in the cargo areas. We have seen hundreds of cement bags and camouflage nets, a kitchen with pots, a cement mixer, a bulldozer on its side. The steam engines were still visible in most of them. With some of the wrecks it was possible to swim through the long corridors for 150 m, in other wrecks we went up and down through small holes and door openings to visit different rooms. Most of the wrecks have so many holes that there is always some light penetrating in the wreck. One of them is very dark because it is almost still intact.

Two days we had to help out the instructor because he had too many customers with different courses. Dolf did a buoyancy and 2 navigation dives and Annelies took two Open water students out on a dive. That was nice to do to get some additional experience as assistant instructor and we were diving for free because of the help.

The wrecks were the main attraction, but we have also been diving in a fresh water lake and a cave which is called Cathedral. The lake was interesting, because there is a volcano underneath it and the water temperature increases on your descend, from 30 to 38 degrees. There are thermoclines (temperature differences) and haloclines (salinity differences) in the water which make the visibility weird and the water gets more brackish. When other divers are in the thermocline you can only see blurry outlines, but once you're in there yourself the visibility gets better.

The lake had nice limestone cliffs.

The Cathedral cave was of a different category. We had to swim through a small tunnel in order to come in a large cave with beautiful rock formations. Hard to put on picture, but beautiful to see. We surfaced in the cave itself (half of it is above water with an opening at the top) to have a good view. The crystal in the stones made the rocks look like a starry sky and the water was perfectly clear.

The visibility was always a lot better than in Cambodia anyway, most of the time you could see more than 10 m.

The sea life not as abundant here as in other places in the Philippines. We have seen one turtle coming out of a wreck and Dolf has seen the tail of a whale shark. Unfortunately the whale shark moved away quickly and did not come back. We planned a trip to Apo reef, for the coral and the sharks and rays but there were very few trips to that area so we skipped that plan.

Philippinos are very friendly people. Their English is pretty good and it is not as poor as Cambodia. Yes they chopped a lot of forest, but there is quite still some left and they have beautiful rough coast lines, with most of the mangroves still there.

Manila is a very busy big city and the traffic is a nightmare. The American influence is clear, with a Mac Donald's and Dunkin' Donuts around every corner, but the Americans took also great care in building a good school system which means the illiteracy rate is very low. A lot of youngsters work in call centers, which means Manila is turning in a 24 hour economy, because they work at night in order to help American or European customers (that guy you talk to on the helpdesk really isn't called Jan, Klaas or John).

Environmental wise, the Philippines are much farther than Cambodia with Marine protected areas and no fishing zones where there is really only small fishing. Dynamite fishing does occur as we noticed several times while in a wreck. You hear a loud bang and the whole wreck and yourself start resonating. But this can be very far away since sound travels very far and fast under water, so it is far out of the Marine Protected Area. We saw only an occasional local with a hook on a line out of the back from his boat, but no commercial fishing going on. We have been eating some tropical fish for lunch.

We definitely enjoyed diving here, and are leaving here with a lot of regret. The last day Dolf started making a website for the diveshop to help them out, and incidentally was asked by a hotel how much it would cost to build their website. So between diving, marine conservation and IT, maybe there could be a life for us here :)

Cambodians temples and Manila

We spent our final days in Cambodia at the temples of Angkor Wat. We started with a sunset at 5.30 am. Unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy, but the view was still beautiful. We stood with several hundred people at the same pond to see Angkor Wat reflected in the water ,but were early enough to stand at the front row. After that, most tourist in tour groups went back to the city for breakfast which meant the temples of Angkor Wat were relatively quiet. The next lines are also a reminder for ourselves and might be of less interest for people who have not visited Angkor Wat.

Most are surrounded by a moat temples and are accessed by a bridge. The bridges are nagas, snakes with 5-7 heads with their body as balustrade. They bring rain and and symbolise the rainbow, the connection between earth and sky. The temples have two guardians standing in front, an evil and a good one. They are followed by a gopura, or entrance tower. The gopuras often have beautifully carved pediments and lintels, with representations of several gods, like Shiva, Vishnu or Indra. Shiva is the protector of the universe and his wife is Lakshmi, goddess of fertility and abundance, while Vishnu created the universe. Indra is king of the gods.

We have severeal pictures of Indra on the 3-headed elephant Airavata and Shiva on Nandi the bull.Each temple has multiple prasats, or temple towers. They reproduce the sacred mountain Meru.

The temples are made of sandstone, bricks and laterite. The first material is reasonably preserved, the laterite has a lot of small holes, but the brick structures often partially collapsed.

A lot of the buildings have murals of devatas which are dancing women deities. Unfortunately, a lot of Buddhas were destroyed or removed because of a short revival of Brahmanism.

King Jayavarman 7 has built a lot of the temples at Angkor Wat and is responsible for making Buddhism the state religion.

Angkor Wat was built in 1113 and is dedicated to Vishnu. It is also the mausoleum of the builder, Suryavarman 2. In the 13^th century it became a Buddhist wat (temple). It has a lot of beautifully preserved murals and devatas. It is a huge temple and has several elevated terraces. We spent almost the whole morning discovering the temple.

Banteay Kdei has beautiful entrances with 4 heads on the entrance tower. It was build in 1181 by Jayavarman 7 and was probably dedicated to Buddha. The heads represent the bodhisattva ( a person who has forgone Nirvana to help humanity to reach enlightenment) Lokeshvara, with whom Jayavarman 7 identified himself as god of infinite compassion. As background info: the dalai lama is seen as the human representation of Lokeshvara on earth.

After lunch, it was time for Ta Prohm. This temple was build as well by Jayavarman 7 in 1186 and was dedicated to his mother. The decoration is of the Bayon period. This temple is known by a lot people, because it was used as a film setting in the movie Tumb Raider with Angelina Jolie. The temple is beautifully overgrown with trees who have only been partially removed. The entrance gopura has 4 heads of Lokeshvara as well. The temple was a bit confusing and we lost the route described in the guide book, but we made a lot of nice pictures.

We ended the day at the complex of Angkor Thom. We run out of time so we missed part of the big complex. We did however visit the best part, the Bayon and the Terraces of the elephants and leper king. Around 1 million people lived within the walls of Angkor Thom .

The function of the Bayon is unclear, but is was dedicated to Buddha. Again there are several towers with Lokeshvaras, 216 faces in total. The Terrace of the Elephants has, of course, a lot of elephants and is over 300 m long. After 10 hours of visiting, we were getting a bit tired but still noticed the sunset over the Royal palace. The Terrace of the Leper King provided us with some nice murals since they were only recently discovered and therefore almost intact.

Our second day started with one of the other temples near Angkor Wat, Pre Rup. Build already in 961, it was dedicated to Nandi, the bull of Shiva. Only a small temple, but with the nice early morning light and hardly any tourists a delight to visit.

The next temple was a tuk-tuk drive a bit further out, Banteay Srei. Unfortunately, it was also the starting point of many Japanese tour groups. Worming ourselves through the tourists and waiting them to get out of the way for pictures, we still enjoyed this temple because of the many statues, colors and general lay-out. A lot of the temple is still intact and was built by two brahmans in 968 who were landowners in the area. The local name, translated in The citadel of the women, was given because of the voluptuous devatas.

After lunch, we visited some smaller temples. East Mebon was built in 952 and dedicated to Shiva. The temple has some well preserved elephants at the corners of the temple. Ta Som is also partially overgrown but is build much later at the end of the 12^th century. Again it has two entrances with Lokeshvara on them. Neak Pean was not particularly interesting, but the nice part was a big moat surrounding the temple divided in four parts with walkways to the entrances. The temple is in the middle of a pond but because of restorations work we could not get close.

The final temple of this day was Preah Kahn. Built by Jayavarman 7 in 1184 and dedicated to his father was a city in itself and a famous center for learning. We did not have enough time to explore the entire complex because Angkor Wat closes after sunset and the tuk-tuk driver decided earlier in the afternoon to drive of to Siem Reap and let us wait for an hour, but the half we saw was pretty impressive with several walk troughs and side temples.

Day 3 was spent at 3 temples much further away. The ruins of Beng Mealea, the jungle temple of Koh Ker and the much disputed temple on the border of Cambodia and Thailand and Unesco World heritage Preah Vihear. I will update this part later.

After three long days we moved to Bangkok, Thailand. The easy bus ride proved to be less comfortable in a minivan instead of a normal bus and took much longer than expected, mainly because of the border crossing and change of vans. All the minivans drive on lpg, but it takes a long time to get in the fuel, so and extra hour was spent on the gas station waiting to continue. Instead of 3.30 pm it was 8.00 pm, but we made it to Bangkok were we had dinner in a wonderful restaurant with a nice view on a well lighted bridge.

A last minute flight brought us to Clark Airport near Manilla the next day. It was a small disaster to get in Manila. The promised two hour bus trip turned in a late arrival because of the rush hour (Sunday was no exception). Instead of 5.30 pm it was 8.30 pm before we arrived at the hotel. We weren't in the best state of mood at that time but after a good night sleep we were ready to explore Manila. Hotel rooms without window are quite common here, since the cars, buses and jeepneys are really testing your hearing. After a morning walking next to roads it is nice to sit inside with only the noise of the airco.

Besides the horrible traffic Manila is not particularly interesting. We still had to find out what the best places to dive are in the Philippines and unfortunately the flight we wanted to take was a bit too expensive which I meant we spent more time in Manila than we wanted to. We did have an interesting conversation with the Department of Environmental resources for the possibility of volunteering in their ongoing biodiversity, marine and coastal research and walked around at the wildlife center compound, looking at all the confiscated animals who cannot be released in the wild because they are exotic/ maimed/ earlier maltreated. Unfortunately, part of the cages were way too small for the animals. Seeing two tigers together in a 4 by 5 m cage did not make us happy but they do the best they can.

The old center of Manila was mostly destroyed at WW 2 and most buildings have been rebuild. The most interesting location was the Asian mall, which was huge. A lot of electronics are definitely a lot cheaper than back home. The amount of fast food chains are incredible, which show the ties with the USA. Tomorrow we fly to our diving destination.

New adventures

I wrote this web log almost a week ago, but because of failing internet connections and a murdering travel schedule with days from 5.00 am – 20.00 pm we were not able to post it up to now.

We have said the island farewell and are now in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We have had a nice last week in which we finished our exercises for assistant instructor and spent a wonderful weekend diving with the volunteers on Koh Tang, a small island 3,5 hours by boat from our own island. The visibility was incredible. During our deep dive, which started at 32 m, we were still able to see the surface. That's a slight difference compared to our normal visibility of 5 m, or 8 m on a good day. We saw a lot of different coral patches and some small fish, but unfortunately the overfishing seems as bad as on our own island which means no big fish. Wonderful Christmas tree worms in 20 different colors though (it is a worm which attaches itself to a rock and looks like a garland in the form of a triangle, hence the name).

We did see a school of small barracuda and some fish we rarely see near our island. We will upload the pictures later. For the night, we put up 15 hammocks on the boat and mattresses on all elevated areas which turned the boat into a nice jungle of hammocks. It was a good way to finish our dive time in Cambodia. After we have send in the paperwork we're official assistant instructors!

We have started out travels with looking at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, by paying a visit to one of the killings fields. Because Pol Pot's regime ended in 1979, there are still survivors left and they told their own stories on the audio guide which made it even more horrid. In almost four years the regime managed to kill 3 million people out of a population of 8 million. After that we visited Tuol Sleng, or S-21; a school converted in torture and killing center in Phnom Penh. Most of the 20.000 people who died here have there own picture on a board. It was good to see this bad part of history in Cambodia, but we ended our day with much happier seeings; a visit the the Royal Palace and the silver pagoda. Built only in 1866, the buildings still looked beautiful as you will be able to see in the pictures later on. In the twilight we paid a visit to the Wat Ouna Lom, the epi centre of Cambodian Buddhism. In a nearby temple, the monks were so happy that we visited that the flashing lights went on immediately and he insisted that he took our picture in front of it.

Cambodians love flashy lights, so you see them everywhere were they can afford them. On billboards, buildings, as part of their karaoke show (yes, they love karaoke as does the rest of Asia) and apparently on their Buddhist shrines. But the thing they love most is our purpose of the next few days: Angkor Wat. We already noticed on our island that Angkor Wat is part of your everyday life: one of the 2 beer brands you could buy is called Angkor and the cutlery we used had Angkor Wat engraved in its design, and of course Angkor Wat is on the Cambodian flag which every small fishing boat has.

Next blog will be from Siem Reap and after that, diving in the Philippines!