Butler Family Travels

On a recent leg of our trip we used a remarkable mode of transportation, the bus.  Well, a bus is not remarkable necessarily, but one aspect of this particular ride was.  The ride was about 2 ½ hours and cost 150 baht ($5).  We took our seats, the stewardess brought us cookies, then coke on ice, then bottled water, then more bottled water, blankets and pillows.  About 5 minutes before our stop she let us know that it was time to gather our stuff and prepare to disembark.   I realize that this is not especially amazing; I just found the contrast quite stark between this and the last airplane that we were on. Asia Air (young, hip, exciting!) had almost enough room between the rows for me to put my feet on the ground and  6 nuts sealed so securely in a little bag that no being, mortal or immortal, can penetrate it without tools not allowed in the cabin of an airplane. A swallow of water to drink with them would have cost $2.  Three cheers for the public bus system in Thailand!   Sometimes the airplane is a better platform for picture taking, no matter how uncomfortable.  This is Koh Toa, where we went diving, taken on the way from Georgetown, Malaysia to Bangkok.

Look! We sent off the promised prizes for the last two erfings.

As you can see below on the map, we were indeed in the World Heritage City of George Town, Malaysia. Nobody has guessed yet why we had to go there. The precise reason for the detour into Malaysia would fall into the Logistics category. A little research will reveal it. 30 days into the adventure and we have a new puzzle for you. We hope you enjoy the photos courtesy Rebekah and Mom.  No captions this time! Where are we and why are we there? P.S. We had such a hard time choosing that we ended up with 2 pages of pictures. Make sure you don’t miss page 2.  

Before Rebekah took her rock climbing class to learn to lead a climb, we all went for a day of deep water solo.  Solo climbing means no ropes and gear for protection, so as the name implies we climbed cliffs directly out of the ocean and then jumped, or fell, back into the water.  It was a great, low key way to enjoy the super colorful limestone, warm water and white sand. I hope my pictures are enough to get your imaginations headed down the right track.

There are several reasons that a family may decide to set off on a trip around the world.  One is to have experiences that are unavailable or unlikely at home.  We hope for this trip to be a real positive for our family.  That sounds pretty vague and the idea was, in fact, a little fuzzy for us.  You know, kind of like Whirled Peas and The Children at a beauty pageant.  Anyway, after a month on the road, and in the sky, and on the sea, I can see that something really is down in that vat.  I may even be able to guess at what it is. I believe sometimes we all get along by learning how to more effectively ignore each other.  There are situations that I find stressful. I know that I am likely to blow my cool and be rude or worse.  An easy way to “be nice” is to physically remove myself.  That is really just a cop out. I am the same jerk hiding in another room to save face. Really, I ought to expend just a little time and energy expressing myself in a kind way.  I need to actually care for whoever is in front of me more than I care for my selfishness wants. Over here in Southeast Asia and then the Middle East and then back to the Western world we will be the same four people with all of our tendencies intact.  747s carry selfishness with no extra baggage fees.  So, it seems we have taken the family corn out behind the barn and stuffed it into a moonshine still.  Sometimes the circumstances of this trip have us mixing and boiling (just a little!), but as long as we don’t let our jug crack or become compartmentalized, we should have some real strong hooch to pour back into that bottle we call home. Chug-a-lug chug-a-lug.

Congratulations to my nephew Dillon for guessing that Rebekah doesn’t like her dad to look like some old dude trying to ignore real life on Key West.  Button that shirt all the way up!  That’s gross!   Thanks to everyone (you all obviously know Rebekah well) who participated.  We are trying to get another good puzzle ready for you all soon.

I was always quite satisfied with the simplicity of skin diving. Sometimes I feel silly about the number of activities that I have equipment and skills to participate in and Scuba was one that I figured that I could pass on. Right up until, two years ago at Thanksgiving time in Kaui, I was snorkeling along over the reef at Tunnels.  The reef there is lava that flowed into the ocean, cooled, and left a shelf with holes in it way up over the white sandy bottom.  There is all the usual beauty on this shelf, but as I drifted over a good sized hole, the realization that the frogs along the sand down in the bottom were actually full size divers, changed my mind forever. I saw the reason for all that gear and training. Kho Tao is primarily a diving tourism island.  The large majority of tourists are here to dive.  More divers are certified on Kho Tao every year than anywhere else in the world.  The other six are hippies looking for a quiet patch of sand between the granite boulders. We intended to come to Kho Tao to double the population of those looking for some quiet.  During our journey which started on a train and finished on a rusty old boat filled with sand and gravel, other travelers, predictably, asked if we were going diving and this made Levi decide that perhaps we should be.  I told him that I would, if he wanted to, and off we went to school.  So much for no book education this winter! We earned our Open Water Certification in a three day course that included three book sessions, one long lesson in the pool and then four open water dives.  Our third was the high point.  The holy grail out here is swimming with a whale shark.  Our instructor had never even seen one.  It had been four years since the assistant instructor had seen one.  On each previous dive, the boat would pull into the mooring and all the divers would begin gearing up and jumping in.  This morning, there were whale shark rumors in the air and the scene was dramatically different.  All the divers were geared up, standing in the bow and stern, buddy checks finished, while the boat was still under way.  As soon as the boat boy pulled up the mooring line every diver jumped in almost on top of each other and stuck their faces in the water to see if a shark was below.  It was!  For a few seconds it was visible beneath us, but thirty divers falling into the sea all at once sent it out of sight.  We carried on with our descent to the off-shore pinnacle that we were diving on.  WOW!  Nemo’s home!  The top of the pinnacle is covered with anemones, corals and the fishes that live in them.  As we finned along, “the edge” was just on our right.  Pixar didn’t exaggerate this scene. Well maybe the verbose sea creatures are a bit fishy, but not the rest. Suddenly, our instructor flipped over on his back. The whale shark, along with his entourage of remora, cruised over us from behind and left and continued on in the direction that we were going. This largest of all fish, whose five foot wide shovel of a nose contains a giant mouth filtering loads of food from the sea, whose pectoral fins are wings that make the best efforts from Boeing look crude, whose tail seems to move him through the sea with no effort expended, let Levi and I, with our own following crowd of other divers, swim along with it. After several minutes we turned off to leave it alone and resume looking at all the other ridiculous beauty.  The sheer, silly, volume and variety of creation continues to send adrenaline swimming through my veins.  I am going to keep learning new sports and buying gear; there is no limit to what I should see and enjoy.  That is why God made it. I am also confident that Levi has found a new passion for his life.

As you might remember, the Butlers flew away from our good home, the USA, and due to that marvel, the International Date Line, arrived in Thailand on Election Day. Of course, we are in the future and so you all had to wait another day for the big event. (Technically, so did we, but whatever. As you will see that doesn’t matter in my la la land. ) Now, I know some of you all can’t imagine what might be behind such foolishness, but I set a goal of remaining ignorant of our President’s identity for as long as possible.  Seemed like a fun game. My family participated to varying degrees.  Rebekah wasn’t about to skip out on Facebook over something so stupid, and so I believe she learned pretty quickly.  Who won the election wasn’t part of the plot in Levi’s book, so he remained ignorant.  Then he started another book.  Happy moron! Sarah was guarding our backpacks out on the sidewalk on day 2 while I changed money in a bank when some Thai lady in a business suit walked out of the air conditioning and attempted to confirm that Sarah (Obviously an American, I guess) was so relieved at the outcome.  Sarah was disappointed that she now knew, and I imagine the lady might have had a different interpretation of her disappointment, but language barriers make political discussion even less appealing than they are anyway, so Sarah let it go.  I remained the Lone Ignoramous for another week (well, so did Levi.  His book still didn’t include any of this in its narrative arc), until we were waiting for the boat to Kho Tao and I overheard some other travelers from Utah discussing their thoughts.  I made it ten days and, I guess, it turns out, “nothing changes on election day”.  –Bono, U2.   Wait, no, he sang that about New Years Day.  

So Thai don’t wear their shoes indoors, including at shops and restaurants.  In a practice quite counterintuitive to the usual travel security, everyone just leaves their flip flops out on the street while eating or shopping.  Sometimes this leads to involuntary participation in the traveling flip flop game.  I was privileged to join this game when, upon leaving the best restaurant that I have yet encountered in this world, I found that my super nice Olukais had wandered on down the street.  A pair of decent, but not Olukai, slippahs were left in their place.  This sent Sarah into a treasure hunting frenzy.  She loves shoes and a treasure chase, so checking out every pair of feet going by on the street was no chore for her.  Alas, we have left the island and I am still the, not so, proud new owner of a pair of Thai flip flops.

We are grateful for all of you. It is weird to celebrate Thanksgiving Gilligan-Style, but we will do our best and love it. Happy Thanksgiving!