Trip to Surat-Thani with my kids:

Here we are...

I made a trip last weekend with 5 students from my school to visit Surat Thani on the east coast of Thailand.

The subdistrict(Tabon in Thai) is called "Re-lat". Tambon Re-lat is a representative model of sustainable tourism in Thailand and the purpose was to demonstrate to the children and the teachers what values and interests are important to keep in mind when taking a stab at sustainable tourism.

It was a pretty successful trip. The community in Re-lat has strong (solid-rock) leadership and commitment from various sectors in the area. The shrimp farming businesses that threaten the mangrove and the wildlife were brought on board during the planning and discussion stages of building the sustainable tourism model. The shrimp farm waste that normally was deposited in the waterways and was contaminating the water, disturbing the ecosystem and killing the mangrove is now being sold to farmers to be used as fertilizer. This seems like a simple concept but even this small step takes serious effort to accomplish.

Most of all, Tambon Relat in Surat Thani provides hope for a different path...

Photos Here...

A teacher and myself enjoying some conversation... this trip brought together teachers and students from all over southern Thailand.

Another sweet sunset...

Monster shrimp. Kinda nightmare-ish. I bet they are delicious.

Here it is. As big as your head and could probably feed on you if it got hungry enough.

More photos are on the way...

Things have hit a routine here. I'm not a big fan of routine but I suppose I'm in Thailand so thats not very routine.

I just finished Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down in 36 hours so I feel pretty good about that book and it's author.

The next day I started Hornby's How to Be Good and 114 pages in it looks like a winner as well(but not by the same margin). A few months ago I read Hornby's High Fidelity and that was a pretty fantastic read(about 72hrs for that one - I slept a lot more). I should note that Morgan Dibble put me on to this guy and he is partially responsible for this blatant, free of charge, promotion.

So, you can see, that I get to do a lot of reading nowadays. Most of my time at work I am still planning lesson plans but I have rediscovered the invention of the internet and all the teaching resources available up there (fo' fiiii!).

I went on a short vacation with my Thai mother to Koh Rawa (Rawa Island) last weekend. It turned into a bit of a gambler's paradise for my mother and her co-workers. I, in the meantime, was out daydreaming/sleeping on the beach(it was a beatiful, but rocky, beach). We(two of the men and I) who were not playing cards went out at night in a long-tail boat to go fishing.

We caught nothing but I saw my first ever moon-rise. It was spectacular. The moon is bright red at the horizon and slowly goes to yellow, and then to silver, right before your eyes. All in contrast to the dark lightless sky - its an unforgetable experience.

There were also these mega-planes going over our heads almost touchably close. They were all headed to Phuket airport. Though some (all) of you might know this, airplanes have headlights - bright ones... We were caught in the blinding lights at one point and I wanted to surrender my body for alien testing then and there.

It was really surreal - no light pollution at all except maybe a little coming off of Phuket and these huge planes just coasting around in the starry, dark sky above me... Oh and the funky moon...

Anyhow, thats it for now...