Overheard in Bali...

...while heading out to Pura Tanah Lot, a seaside temple on the southwest coast of Bali. Little girl to dad after seeing a crowd taking pictures with a large snake - Daddy, what's the biggest snake in the world? Dad - My lawyer. Little girl - Miloya? How big is it?

Diving the Great Barrier Reef

Someone recently asked me my favorite part of this journey so far...and I realized I hadn't blogged about it. If I was to take any single experience on this trip and call it a favorite, it would have to be my 3 night/4 day live-aboard boat trip around the Great Barrier Reef.

This trip had it all...new friends among strangers half-crazy like I am, fabulous food by a dive trip director turned chef for this trip (he's also an ex-chef who once worked in NY), a very comfortable boat that wasn't the last word in luxury but somehow managed to stay clean and cosy despite us all running about it everyday...and what we were all there for - some pretty incredible diving.

One of the most important things about diving is learning to manage your air - as one may imagine, it's pretty important. You need to keep breathing in water - not too slow else you may pass out to become fish food and not too hard - or you'll be up before everyone else is halfway done with their dive. My problem was the latter...for some reason I hyperventilate underwater. It may be the sharks in the vicinity, then again, maybe I've always been a heavy breather and just not realized it on land. Of the various suggestions offered to me including adjusting my weight belt and kicking my legs harder, the one that really stands out is humming underwater. It seemed like a fun thing to do so there I was humming "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid as I swam through the fish...I also hoped to generate some kinship with them while doing so. My 20 minute dive time on 200 bar (when most people were doing 60 min) shot up to 45 minutes...no kidding. I remain forever grateful for that suggestion and I'm not changing my song.

Spotted underwater - turtles, sting ray, bandit fish (they really looked like they had black face masks), a lion fish (super poisonous and it knows it - hence, it just stays there while I hovered around it), reef sharks...one of our group tried to pull its tail but it wasn't having any of that, beautiful, fiery coral, enormous clams that changed through a blue to violet spectrum as I went closer and clammed up (pun intended) when I reached out to tickle it, a very curious snapper that kept butting in while we were doing our deep dive and snapped at John's finger...he suddenly went crazy trying to punch it while the rest of us wondered if he'd lost it..., enormous potato cod, barracudas, sea horse like creatures - and more.

What a trip.

I saw a shooting star!

That's it...nothing more to add, except for the fact that I've always missed seeing them until a few nights ago when I actually saw one. It took me a second to realize it wasn't a plane that evaporated. Very cool.

Boot laundering

On the verge of leaving Australia...my only excuse for not blogging (besides being a terribly infrequent blogger to begin with) is that I've been having fun, and that too, offline. Always a good thing, isn't it? :)

I was wondering yesterday what it is about NZ and Australia that draws me here...big, wide, open, PRESERVED spaces definitely come to mind. These countries have a way of keeping their oceans blue and their lands litter-free. Which brings me to my experiences of boot laundering, and this is not the laundering of the money kind. When I entered NZ, their routine custom check required that I not only give up all fruits, vegetables, dairy and meat from another country but also have my bag and hiking shoes inspected for dirt. My hiking shoes were found wanting (not for dirt) and taken in to get chemically laundered. This happened again when entering Australia from NZ and there was another chance of it occurring when leaving Queensland and entering Western Australia, i.e. a state transfer. I thought it was pretty awesome...especially since I get shoes that smell like a chemistry lab after it's been cleaned, in the bargain.