Butler Family Travels

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.

Highlight #1 Rock climbing in Ton Sai. Highlight #2 Christmas party at the Harkins.

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.

Toby was Jeb and Levi’s diving instructor for 3 days. He is originally from England, but now has a tapas restaurant in Edmonton, Alberta. It turns out he has great business partners who let him leave for the winter each year to travel the world teaching diving. Last year he was in New Zealand. He is a great guy who we would love to have come play in our neck of the woods someday.

Getting off the island of Kho Tao was easy enough and we knew a little better what to expect this time. In Thailand, it is common for tourists/backpackers to use local agencies to book one’s travels from one place to another since there can be so many awkward connections. If you aren’t aware of a needed transfer and fail to arrange it ahead of time, you can end up paying as much for a little 5 kilometer taxi ride as it cost to ride a ferry and a bus for 8 hours. This particular leg of our trip involved an 8 hour night ferry to Surat Thani, a 20 min. minivan taxi, a 2 hour bus ride to Krabi, and a 15 min. long-tail boat. Agencies are not always the least expensive way to get it done, but in this case it was both convenient and inexpensive, so I was glad to be able to use a travel service. They give you a sticker for each leg of the trip that you wear on your shirt. As you can imagine, these little bright stickers adorn many walls and bathroom stalls. We arrived in Railay (Tonsai, to be precise) before lunch. It is nice getting to a new place during day light hours. It allows you to get your bearing and find a place to settle. Tonsai and the surrounding area is basically nirvana for climbers. It was fun to see Rebekah looking around in awe of her surroundings! “Krabi’s fairy-tale limestone crags come to a dramatic climax at Railay, the ultimate jungle gym for rock- climbing fanatics. The atmosphere here is nothing short of laid-back Rasta-Thai haven.”-Lonely Planet guide book.

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.

We were able to easily hike back and forth between Sai Nuan and Mae Hat, the main town where the pier is, so we did that a few times in our attempt to find better food and change money. We found a Pancake Man whose sign read, “The Best of the Best Pancakes” so they must have been.

We headed to the west side of the island for our last days on Koh Tao. As we walked along the beach we found ourselves deeper in Gilligan’s camp. This is where we would spend Thanksgiving. You will see from the pictures that they (or maybe I do) have a thing for swings.

As promised, here are a bunch of pictures from our time on Koh Tao. Rebekah and I wandered the streets, shopped, ate, and read a lot while we waited for the boys to do their thing.

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.