I wonder if moderation is naturally selected for

Of all the True Things ever said about me, I still like Packer's the best. (You can ask him about that.) However, I think perhaps we might all agree that moderation was never my strongest point.

I, as is my nature, have signed on for rarely taken (but often talked about in revered, hushed tones) technical trimix (breathing a mix of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen) dive training. It is so cool. You actually use gases that would kill you if you breathed them on the surface. In normal recreational diving, the manuals always tell you (truthfully) that even if you do something horribly wrong, you'll likely live happily ever after. In my tech manual, practically every other word is "death." Yeah, and in between "death," they like to insert "permanent injury." Sweet. Sounds like a proper challenge.

The standard depth limit for normal human** diving is 40 meters/130'. With trimix, I'll be able to go to 75 meters/250' (that's approximately the roof of a twenty five floor building, in the opposite direction). There's some amazing things to see down there. In the Pacific, there's a sunken Japanese WWII carrier with planes and tanks *still on the deck*. She lies in 67 meters/220' of water. I am so all over that. At those depths, there are things that very few other humans have ever seen [and lived to tell about it]. Clearly, I totally have to go there. Yup, I suck at moderation.


It's been a while since my last missive. I left the Palau ship when the season ended in June and returned to Thailand to work on my teaching chops. (If any of you want to learn to dive, I'm a relatively slick instructor now. Well, relative to before, at least.) Teaching, while rewarding, is somewhat consistent and uneventful. Mildly unworthy of an adventure note, which is my excuse for the egregious lack of recent front line reporting. I know, lame excuse. I did teach the Captain of a US Navy rescue and deep salvage ship how to dive. I felt pretty good about myself that day. Go forth and save some lives sir.


I miss you all terribly, and I know I keep promising and bailing, but I will actually make it back to the States at some point for a visit. In the meantime, next time you climb to the 25th floor of a building, look out the window and think of me.


**I think the standard depth limit for normal chicken diving is something like 500 meters/1650', but I can't be sure. I believe it varies depending on whether it's fresh or frozen. And don't even start about feathers.

oh snap!

New photos up.

I'm still floundering about a bit with the whole taking-pictures-underwater shtick, but you know what they say, practice makes a lot of deleted photos. Anyway, almost all the new ones were taken underwater, so forgive the sometimes dubious composition. Getting fish to hold still and pose while you photograph them is like herding three-year-old children who have just smoked crack and have access to motor vehicles.

One other interesting thing of note: all the main subjects of the underwater photos are animals - no plants; you'll understand why that's both cool and non-obvious if you go have a look.

Uploading 8mpix photos on a 56k dial up connection is like the least fun game ever.

It's never quite like the first time

Yesterday was my first time in the chamber.

As I surface from a beautiful dive with two guests and my videographer, I find out there's some sort of medical emergency involving one of my instructors who was out on a fun dive (no guests). She's just gone to 366 feet (111 meters) and shot to the surface.

For reference, after one hundred feet, you start feeling a little drunk. At two hundred feet, you've just pounded the ugly half of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Past two hundred, the oxygen in the air you're breathing becomes toxic. You start losing control of your extremities; your arms and legs twitch uncontrollably. Keep going, and you lose vision and hearing. Then you have a seizure and drown.

Apparently she panicked when she went blind.

So I'm still wet from my dive, and I'm arranging emergency evac for this girl who can't feel her arms and legs, and is drifting in and out of consciousness. There are so many reasons why she should be dead, I'm actually pretty surprised she's still twitching.

An hour later, we're putting her in the hyperbaric chamber. But they need a diver to go in there with her in case she seizes during recompression. The normal tender is on holiday in Bali. The nurses don't dive. Guess I'm going in.

It's a two person chamber: a metal tube about seven feet long and five feet in diameter. It is not big. Quite the opposite, it is very very small. Over-sized coffin is just about the right image.

No synthetic fibers, no electronics allowed inside; compressed 100% oxygen is serious combustion risk. In fact, there's a hose system to partially flood the chamber in case of fire. A tiny metal tube, pressurized, with a fire inside? Not cool.

We get all cozy, locked in nice and tight. Down to sixty feet we go (pressure-wise), sealed up for a few hours.

It wasn't so bad in the beginning. Mostly just chilling out, being mildly bored (I had forgotten to grab my book when I was arranging the emergency evac, silly me).

Your voice sounds different in there. It's the density of the air, I think. Sound travels faster, everything is more high-pitched.

After a while, you start to feel like you could really go all-the-way insane in there. You completely lose track of time, except for the doctor's voice over the ancient staticky radio telling you how many hours left. Nothing to do. No space. Sit. Lie down. Fidget. Sit up. The witty banter dies out. You need to pee. But you're stuck in the chamber. Fidget. Lie down. Sit up. You're hungry. There's no food. Lie down. Sit up. Fidget. Dust off the dried salt crystals on your legs from the morning's dive. You need a shower. Lie down. Fidget. Sit up. Try not to have a seizure. Fidget. Fidget.

On the bright side, cigarettes and beer are remarkably effective after you've been chambered. Of course, if you were actually sick when you went in, those things are forbidden, so it's a benefit reserved for tenders. Zing!

Epilogue.

The girl is still having motor function difficulties in her legs, but otherwise, she's made a decently miraculous recovery, considering there's a grocery list of reasons why she should be hanging out with Davy Jones right now. She was chambered again today for five hours; I was locked out for 24 hours, doctor's orders, so some other lucky sucker won the tender prize today. But it looks like I might be headed back in tomorrow. Doh.

And one more final note for those thinking about learning to dive: please don't let this scare you; this girl didn't have an accident. She fully intended on going that deep. She didn't tell anyone beforehand (because we would have stopped her), but it wasn't an accident (except maybe for the panicking part). I suspect some serious preexisting mental health problems or unprecedented stupidity, which I guess are the same thing. She's definitely getting a psych eval before getting discharged. Whatever, the story's about me anyway, not her. Focus!

Diving is fun and safe. Seriously.

Wish you were here making funny faces in the tiny chamber windows.

a moment on dry land

Just a quick note.

I've started working on a liveaboard yacht in Palau. It's amazing. We're out at sea for six out of seven days, and I've got about two hours off a week, but it's utterly and completely worth it. Sharks, turtles, whale sharks, mantas, crazy Superman currents (because you fly like Superman), and schools of fish so dense they blot out the sun. Ironically, I have an underwater camera now, but not enough free time to upload photos.

The ocean is so so so blue. Every beautiful shade of blue. Uninhabited rock islands coated with gorgeous lush jungle. Cruising on speed boats with the wind in your hair, a rainbow on the horizon (all the time here!), the blue ocean dotted with tiny islands as far as the eye can see, and the bright clean sun in the sky. Even when it rains, it's still amazing with the infinite drops splashing in the sea.

Come have a holiday with me. I'll be running the 150' yacht in about two months. Seriously, I'm training now to be Big Cheese.

My couple hours on dry land are nearly up, so I'm back to the ship.

Miss you terribly.

back on home base

I think I'm starting to find there's actually something to that whole road less traveled thing. Walking off into the jungle has a much higher probability of maximal awesomeness than, say, taking a tour of yet another city. Or perhaps I'm just getting southeast Asian city fatigue.

Safely back in Thailand now, with a medium-sized pile of fantastically therapeutic, mildly crazy adventures in my journal, I figured I should probably report in on the highlights, lest the highlights alone grow into a novella-length monster. Well, also, of course, to let y'all know that I got out of Cambodia without further incident, and that in fact, Vietnam went quite well. That's somewhat of an understatement, I suppose.

Canyoning is bad ass. It was me, a mate (met in Saigon), two local guides, and the mountains and the river. I promise I'm not allergic to other humans, but having nature to yourself seems a certain kind of special to me. It wasn't the fifty foot rappel down that sheer cliff face that was the best. Or the eighty foot rappel *in* the crazy waterfall (hang on to that rope with the weight of all that water beating down!). The best part of my day was the free hanging inverted (yeah, upside-down) descent into a waterfall called "The Washing Machine" because it spins you in circles. I like this sport. Not another human all day, hiking around the mountain jungles in the central highlands of Vietnam, jumping off cliffs, rappelling down waterfalls, and riding rapids like water slides. Didn't suck.

The very next day, we (the same canyoning crew) did a decently serious bike trip, around fifty miles. It took us about five hours. We started in the mountains right below the cloud line, and biked up a few miles into the clouds. We're literally riding in the clouds. It's cold; we're a mile about sea level. I'm soaked (clouds are made of water - cold water, I learn). But then we start a twenty mile downhill (continuous for twenty miles!) descent. I'm riding through mist and rain and mud in zero visibility, and then suddenly, we drop below the cloud line and everything opens up. The clouds are caressing amazing, lush mountains nestled with rolling green valleys. All the while, I'm screaming down curvy, car-commercial roads, whipping around deserted mountain cutbacks at breakneck speeds (brakes are for wusses). I must've whizzed past more than a dozen crashing waterfalls cutting paths through vivid red clay. I had to constantly remind myself to watch the road every now and then, as the scenery was so gorgeously distracting. The uphill bits later in the ride got pretty brutal, but at no point did I give up, get off, and push. In the end it was all worth it. We started on a mountain and we finished at the ocean. The South China Sea never looked more lovely than after that crazy ride.

Yep, those were pretty awesome. But. If you do one thing in all of southeast Asia, if you had only enough time to do one thing here before you died, you must, without a shimmer of doubt, kayak Halong Bay. Not some boat tour, not some luxury cruise. You must go to Hanoi (or Haiphong) and book the longest kayaking trip you can find (the longest one I found was three days and two nights). Yes, the water there is the purest, clearest deep turquoise I've ever seen. Yes, the majestic, towering limestone karsts thrusting from the sea to the sky are utterly, unequivocally stunning. But those aren't the reason to go. Those aren't the reason to kayak the bay. It's the lagoons. Here, an unadulterated excerpt straight from one day in my journal.

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March 10, 2008 - Halong Bay

I kayaked four today, each more spectacular than the last. The first one, we (you need a local guide) slipped through a meter-high archway at the base of one of the [thousands of] karsts, to find ourselves in a totally enclosed lagoon. Clear and blue, surrounded by massive, lushly coated karsts, and accessible by that small archway on the ocean. We're getting pretty close to paradise here.

Back out on the still blue sea, we paddled through a limestone tunnel maybe a hundred feet to get to the second. Eagles soaring overhead and complete silence save for the call of birds echoing off the cliffs reaching at the heavens. The unrippled, reflective water, a color that I thought only occurred in dreams.

A short cave off that lagoon took us to the next gem. A lagoon within a lagoon! Red-faced monkeys frolicked in the trees blanketing the cliffs, eating various leaves, leaping from bough to bough, and generally ignoring their brother primates gazing up at them from below.

The grand finale. From the postcard ocean, we entered a deep, dark cave. For a thousand feet, we made our way slowly and carefully through the pitch black cave (good thing I brought my flashlight), dodging jutting rocks and ducking stalactites. When the cave finally (it seemed like forever in the exhilarating black) opened out into that lagoon, that brilliant, immaculate, totally encircled pool, the beauty brought tears to my eyes. I'm serious. My eyes welled up. I couldn't speak. It was overwhelming. This unimaginable perfection, accessible only through this insane cave, only when the tides and currents are just right, it pretty much rocked my world. Hard. Then we did the cave a couple more times because it was so frickin cool.

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So yeah, I had a decent time in Vietnam. I'm back now in Thailand regrouping and vaguely looking for a diving gig that will open a door to somewhere new. I've got leads in Mozambique in Africa, Bunaken Island in Indonesia, and Palau in Micronesia. My friends in Fiji aren't responding to my emails. Hmm. Anyway, we'll see if any of that pans out.

In the meantime, I hope you are well, and miss you ever so much.

Taking one for the team.