OCEANS!
...was amazing, incredible, beautiful, awe-inspiring, magical, tropical, chill, sandy, and sublime. Oceans is the last and "capstone" course at ISDSI. The issues involved in the costal and island communities are super complicated and really interesting and engaging. We stayed with two different communities during our time down south. The first was a Thai-Muslim costal community in a village called Ban Jao Mai. The second was the Urak Lawoi community that likes on Lipe Island in the Adang Archipelago farther south. The whole thing was beautiful sunrises and sunsets, gorgeous reefs (but I don't have any pictures of those), super cool beach nature friends, fish, sun, sand, surf, and awesome people.
It was the best ever basically. In so many ways.
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| First look at Ban Jao Mai! BJM is a muslim fishing community close to Trang. It's also home to the most wonderful host families ever! They were so good to us and fed us ridiculous amounts of food. Such a wonderful, beautiful place! |
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| More of the beach. In Ban Jao Mai our time was mostly spent learning about mangroves and their importance to costal communities. Ban Jao Mai is a fishing village but is becoming less so as fisheries dry up and marine resources become more scarce. |
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| The Mudflats! One of my favorite activities. Basically we got to wander around on this HUGE mudflat/sandbar during low tide and observe all the different crabs and mudskippers, and shellfish that live there. Lots of fun, super interesting and reminded me a lot of similar things my dad and I have done on pervious beach excursions. |
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| Another sunset. I took a LOT of these. Just so beautiful! |
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| Ma Noo and Nong Meen! One of my favorite host family experiences. They were so kind and loving and happy to talk to me about the sea and their lives and food and anything else we could think of. Talking with them made me realize just how much my Thai has improved over the course of this trip as well as all I still need to learn. |
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| Rotii!!!! The best thing ever! It's basically fried rice flour dough with condensed milk and sugar on top with ridiculous amounts of margarine and oil but it is also the greatest thing in the world. Ma Teh taught us how to make it on our last day in the village and it was so much fun. This is Sara, the Rotii Queen, with her creation and Eli creeping in the background. |
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| My beautiful family! On the last night all the host families and students had a big dinner together at the restaurant by the beach. The Ma's all played Thai-Muslim barbie with us so we all wore hijabs and had a ridiculous amount of makeup caked on our faces. After a delicious dinner of seafood and a goat that had been slaughtered earlier in the day, we all gathered and the students made speeches about how we would miss our families and all the cool things we did with them. It was lots of fun and a great way to say goodbye to our amazing families. |
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| All the host families and students. So many pictures were taken. So. Many. |
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| Nong Meen and I! He was the best. I miss him. |
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| After Ban Jao Mai we headed south to the Adang Archiapelago in Tarutao National Park, right on the boarder with Malaysia. |
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| Longtail boats off of Koh Adang in the sunset. |
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| These guys! I LOVED our group on Oceans. It was the first course where us students really got to spend a lot of quality time together while camping in the archipelago unlike other courses where we were separated in homestays. I got to get to know some people that I didn't know well before and also get to know some well known people even better. All in all it was lovely. |
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| Harriet the Hermit Crab! There were crabs EVERYWHERE on Ko Rawi where we were camping. They were a lot of fun to watch and play with. We saw (and facilitated) several crabs moving into new shells which was soooo cool and dug a trench so we could race them down the beach. So many nature friends!!! |
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| Another sunrise. Most of us slept right on the beach sans tent so I have a lot of these. I don't think I could ever get tired of watching the sun rise or sink over the ocean. |
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| Making friends on Lipe! Lipe is the only developed Island in the Adang Archipelago. However mot of this development has happened rather quickly in the past 10-15 years. As a result things like waste disposal, police, and medical services are poor or non-existent. This makes Lipe a super interesting case study especially since it is still home to the Urak Lawoi, a semi-nomadic community of small scale fisherfolk who have lived in the area for centuries. |
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| The morning we left the Andaman. A sad, sad day. |
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| Boat ride home. |
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| Surprise! Our host families came to drop the other group off at the airport so I got to see Ma Noo again!!! |
