Archive for August, 2009

Today saw the opening ceremony of the new marmite jar!

This morning was one of joy after pulling off the plastic seal and heaping it over four pieces of toast! (It’s a sad life I live… Maybe crazy or I dont don’t know… Maybe not so much enjoying the marmite or the wierdness of posting online)

Note the well labeled jar to ensure no marmite pikes help themselves… Having said that I did have to replace Sarah’s Jar of marmite, as I completely finished it off while she wasn’t at fieldbase! Cheeeerssss….

2 Marmite Jars purchased over the counter where the fags are sold. For some reason these are locked away, then again at nearly £4 each, it could be traded on the black market!

Just to recap on my four days of diving via photos…

Boat journey to island

Sleeping under the basher – upearly in the morning

Dive Instructors find a horseshoe crab

Random Sand foot sculpting

Ready to dive for the day (with some of the v’s)

Funny “out of air” signaling pose

Diving futher off the shoreline

Snorkling with fishfood, they love it! (aquapac camera case used)

Local Monitor Lizard with hard boiled egg

Miles & Bobby (Project Managers PM’s) doing the gun pose!

I always seem to wake at 06:00, thoughts of things swirling around in my head don’t help. The view from the beach immediately outside the basher, overlooking KK makes for a good morning view. Something at the time you take for granted, fortunately I grabbed a moment to think how amazing this all is, I’m sitting on a tiny tropically island 15 acres, with immediate beach, the sound of waves, practically no tourists and overlooking beautiful clear water that I have been diving in.

Morning Sunrise:

The days dive went well, seeing some cool stuff, stonefish, lion fish, porcupine fish, colorful fish, stingrays, seahorses, urchins and many others.
Later in the day we filmed more footage for the Raleigh group song (Queen Don’t Stop me Now) a project involving getting all the groups to act out the song with singing, hopefully getting footage from all groups to make a movie.

In the evening I sat and chilled in the dark Borneo Divers room, listening to the sound of soothing rain come down and the iPod gently pushing out the chillout album while sitting there thinking deeply about where I am and how amazing it all is.

Ambience Video

In the words of Ferris Bueller “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it“

So after a hectic changeover (3 days), trying to get the magazine layout sorted, pick photos, take photos and chase (people) for photos, I was actually quite glad everyone was leaving for their project sites again.
Changeover was very strange. I think the main reason was because of the tiredness levels for everyone that always causes social problems and stress. The atmosphere wasn’t like you would think it would be after 3weeks of people not seeing each other.
It was also very clear people were pissed off with one thing or another, not just one major problem, but a combination of many little things. This made the staff meeting very awkward!
Trouble is if you have a major issue it is easy to focus on this for discussion, but for little issues it makes them seem trivial and not worth bring up. Unfortunately this then doesn’t air all the issues and your still left with the frustrations.
Another issue is that feelings radiate, therefore people don’t know why everyone is annoyed or pis*ed off, but it gets them down too.
Anyway so after all that and 3hours sleep, I got morning (5:30) photos of everyone leaving.

Later on at 8:00 I headed into KK with A5 for dive training. 5 hours in the classroom was very hard (not too fall asleep) completing all the videos and forms before heading to the harbor for the ride out to Mamutik Island 15min away.
After getting sorted and a good night’s sleep I’m feeling a little bit more refreshed for the first dive at 10am.

More too come…

(Unfortunately no decent photos over changeover, the weather rained long and hard and to be honest I wanted a break of sticking the camera in people’s faces)

Just a warning….
YoYo Cafe

After a quick drive into Lintas to drop the washing off, we thought we would try a quickstop at YoYo Cafe (so poor this small chain doesnt even has a website I can find in google) a fresh shake & drink cafe.

I opted for the chocolate desert option, thinking it would be like a milkshake thing… instead i was greeted with a blob of jelly stuff in a tub…. it tasted as bad as it looked! So Dom’s advise stay clear of the desert section or the whole place….

Like eatting chocolate liver.