Under the sea!

We are in an inflatable boat in the rain, and we are soaking wet. The seas are running to 3 metres and we lose sight of the only land for 500 miles as the wind blows whitecaps off the waves. I tell myself that I am not crazy, but after 20 minutes of this I don't believe me. We hit the water and are under the massive waves instantaneously.

Welcome to Cocos Island diving.

As we descend through the gloom we see lots of little fish swimming in the ripping current, which lets up a bit when we reach the bottom at 30 metres. A quick fin over the nearest ridge and there it is, the reason for all that surface insanity. Hammerhead sharks, stacked, packed and racked 10 to 15 deep swimming by almost within touching distance. There are countless sharks, and just when you think their numbers have no end they are gone, off into the blue. The majestic giants return in numbers 10 minutes later, this time covering the sun. All around there are curious one metre Almaco jacks (trevally), cruising yellowfin tuna and octopus in the rocks.

This is just a sample of our week in Cocos Island, Costa Rica. The diving was challenging and rewarding in equal measure. We have met and dived with legendary people, including a famous underwater photographer and someone we suspect may have featured on a cover somewhere. The photos won't do it justice, in large part due to the relatively poor visibility experienced at Cocos following the large earthquake off the coast a couple of weeks ago. In any case it will be a while before we get them sorted for posting. But the memories of the diving are crystal clear and don't need any Photoshopping.

And the sinuses? They worked just fine for the most part. A few dives where it took some time to equalise the pressure but in the end A-OK.

So Cor and I are now in the Arenal area of Costa Rica, drinking $4 cocktails in the shadow of an active volcano after a hard day of zip lines and hot springs, looking forward to a day of sloths and lava tomorrow.

Palya!

On the road.... again!

A quickie to say we are off on the road again.  The last week has been a frenzy of packing and form-filling for the next 3 months, and now we are about to set off for Costa Rica and what will hopefully be an awesome 10 days of world-class diving. 

Despite all the prep and packing we still managed to get another day out on the boat squeezed in last week, and we were rewarded with breaching humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins playing around the boat, a mackerel (that I landed) and a tuna (that I lost).  North Queensland is a really special place in the winter.

We will put photos up here when we can, until then there are a few new ones in the Ingham folder to the right.

Palya!

A Lucinda life less ordinary

It has been a while since the last blog post, and for that I make no apologies.  Our two months here in Ingham has flown by, and it is now only a week before we jet off to Costa Rica, the USA and Micronesia for 3 months.

We have been surprisingly busy here in my home town, entertaining guests from out of town, going to birthday parties, getting our boat licences, sorting out our transition back to Australian life (driver's licences, Medicare cards, bank accounts, getting our house shipped over, that sort of thing), running on the beach, and of course, going fishing.

There have been quite a few fish caught, no real monsters, but it has been a cooler than normal winter, and we have had some busy days on the water nonetheless (by cooler than normal I mean we have occasionally had cause to wear jeans at night).  Cor has christened her fishing rod and is turning into a bit of a fishing demon.  It has been a real treat to be here, and it is now with some regret that our time at the beach house comes to an end.  If only it could go on for longer, but the next stage is coming and it promises to be exciting.

Thanks to everyone for the messages of support and good will over the last couple months.  It is great to know so many people care and get the whole carpe diem thing.

To give everyone an update I have had some further news on my sinus issue.  It would appear that while exacerbated by my broken nose, the sinusitis was also partially caused by what appears to an abnormal bone growth in my left cheek which has nearly closed my left cheek sinus.  The doc can't say for sure that this is what it is until he biopsies it, but as that test also needs a period of non-diving recovery this is going to have to wait until we get back from our next leg of travel.  He will drain the sinuses at the same time so for now we have our fingers crossed that we will get to Cocos Island in a couple of weeks and all will be OK.  The doc has said I am OK to dive but who knows what will happen when I get to 10 metres?

So that is where we are for now, stay tuned to see where we will be in a couple weeks!

The Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything...

...is 42.  Everyone who has read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy knows this.

But this post is more about what the meaning is for us, or in other words why Cor and I are on this journey in search of "the good life".  We are often asked why we left good careers, a happening place like London (in an Olympic year), and all our friends, to go off travelling the world.  Well, actually that part people understand, but what they don't understand are our plans of buying a smallholding / hobby farm and growing our own food.  That seems just like a crazy amount of work, right?  Why go to all that trouble?  So a post to explain a bit seems in order.

Back in December 2010, Cor and I were back in Australia on holiday driving from Ingham to Albury when we had a nasty car accident on the highway between Mackay and Rockhampton.  We aquaplaned off the road at about 105 - 110km per hour headfirst into a ditch and flipped the car over.  We were lucky, and for the most part walked away mostly unscathed.  I had a broken nose (check out the Disaster post for the issues this is causing now), whiplash, a gashed leg, a busted head plus some soft tissue bruising courtesy of the seatbelt, while Cor had a tiny scratch on her foot.  But more than anything else it was a wake-up call.

If we had come off the road 5 metres earlier we would have hit a massive gum tree and be dead.

There was lots of water on the drive and if there had been just 1 to 2 feet of water in the ditch, we would be dead (upside down, it took us a while to get out).

Take a good look at the photo of the inside of the car.  See that small tree above the driver's seat?  6 inches lower and one of us would be dead.

See what I mean about wake up call??

We owe thanks to our family Justin Burnside and Vayne Monzeglio for coming to our rescue after the accident.

At the time we were living in London going through the motions, but after this we decided that it was time to reassess our lives and live where we could engage in what made us happy, which is being outside.  Whether it is climbing, running, diving, fishing, camping, hiking or skiing, we love being outside.  So we decided to move somewhere we could do that from home, rather than living near work and commuting to what made us happy.  Our friends Tim and Lynne had done this with their new massage business and were an inspiration.

The other thing we love, though, is food.  We love growing it, cooking it and eating it.  We had an allotment and a great garden in London and were largely self-sufficient for fruit and vegetables 8 months of the year.  It had always been our dream to do a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Gourmet Farmer, raise our own animals and be self sufficient in food as much as possible, but that was always off in the future in a semi-retired state.

Well, after our wake up call, we aren't putting it off anymore.  Bucket list?  Doing it now.  There is no point being rich but dead and therefore unable to dive Sipadan, or climb El Cap, or ski some insane off-piste.  The time is now.  And as for a smallholding, well why wait to do the things we have always dreamed of?  Some people ask if we have enough money to do it, and as anyone who has followed their dreams will tell you, you can keep chasing "just a bit more" but you will never have enough.  Far better to get out of the comfort zone, and see what happens.

I hope this goes towards explaining why we seem a little crazed, and perhaps inspire a bit of craziness of your own.  Perhaps we'll see you on that dive boat this year or maybe coming up the drive of our little farm one day for a cold cider and a warm welcome.  Palya!

Northern Territory Road Trip

Palya y'all!  When we last posted we were pretty low after getting the bad news regarding my shnoz and the cancellation of our Mt K. climb, but since then I have taken a metric tonne of antibiotics, rested up at Cor's parent's place and tackled a two-week tour of the Northern Territory.

When we flew into Darwin, Jetstar screwed us around as usual - a 3-hour delay resulted in us missing the first 3 days of our 9-day tour.  We are so pissed off with that airline.  They truly suck and will never form part of our travel plans ever again.  Adventure Tours did a decent job getting us onto a couple of day trips to Kakadu and Litchfield parks, but these brief trips only reinforced our desire to go back with a four-wheel drive and explore these marvellous places more thoroughly.

Once we joined our tour, we headed from Darwin to Alice Springs.  We were a bit disoriented to begin with - Katherine Gorge is called Nitmiluk, the Olgas are called Kata Tjuta, Ayers Rock is Uluru.  OK, the last we knew but the others were a surprise.  We had a really great group and did some sleeping in swags under the most stars you will have ever seen.

The area around Uluru wasn't the red desert we were expecting.  Instead, it was full of life, and there were so many animals, edible plants and even waterholes by the rock.  It is no wonder that it is such an important part of life for the indigenous peoples of the area.  It is culturally important too.  In a culture where their stories (tjukurpa) have physical manifestations (tjukurja), these are all over the rock.  There are areas for shelter, and areas for teaching young people how to hunt and gather.

The moon over Uluru

We didn't climb Uluru, and the Anangu people ask you not to.  There are a number of reasons which were explained to us by Rebecca, our Anangu guide.

1.  Uluru's water, food, stories and ability to teach is around the base, so why climb?

2.  The climb is a sacred path taken by two of their ancestors in their stories.

3.  The climbers have worn the oxidisation off the rock, leaving a white path to the top.

4.  The Anangu people feel responsible for people at Uluru.  35 people have died climbing the rock over the years, and the Anangu people feel their spirits can now never return home.

For these reasons we felt that climbing Uluru was not a necessary part of our trip, and I hope the new management plan that is pending removes that option.  Visitors will still come as they always have, and will learn so much more as a result.

One of the other cool things that we learned was that the Anangu people prefix edible plant names with "mai" or "food".  So the bush fig they call ili is "mai ili" so they know it is edible.  They do the same with medicine plants and the like - how cool is that??  Imagine if we had 50,000 years of trial and error and prefixed our plant names with what you could use them for, rather than just its Latin genus?  That would be awesome!  OK you would still need to know whether it needs cooking, or grinding or whatever, but it is still brilliant.

To finish off, we took the Ghan rail line, so named for the Afghan camel trains that were our first lines of communication and supplies through the red centre of Australia, from Alice Springs to Darwin.  What a great train trip.  Now that is the way to travel!

So now we are back in Ingham, North Queensland, to spend a couple of months with my parents doing some fishing, some beachcombing, and some general relaxing.  I will do a post at some point about our motivations for this trip and our plans for when it finishes..... until then there are pics on the links to the right as usual.

Palya!  (This is Anangu for hello, goodbye, OK and a whole host of other stuff - a really great word.)

Disaster!

Well under normal circumstances this week I would be posting about a wonderful climb up Mount Kinabalu, accompanied by some awesome pictures of the sunrise from the top and Cor and I together on the massive via ferrata.

These are not normal circumstances.

While on Mabul I was getting some intermittent sinus pain, which I thought were simply a case of a reverse block caused by diving.  After leaving Mabul, I came down with a week's worth of intense sinus pain.  Cor's father got me into see an Ear Nose and Throat specialist who he knew when we arrived in KK on Saturday.  As suspected, I have sinusitis.  See the black spots above and below my right eye on the scan below?  These areas would normally show black spots indicating empty sinuses.  As you can see from the scan, the ones on the right of my head are partially full of fluid, the ones on the left are chockers, hence the killer pain.  Normally the ENT guy would drain it and job done.

They scanned for a brain too, but nothing showed up on these tests.



Enough medication to kill a horse

The bad news is that the nose I broke in our car accident 2 years ago means that for now while it is infected it is impossible to drain.  If you have a closer look at the scan you can see my giant shnoz is as twisty as the corkscrew corner at Laguna Seca, and on my left the sinus is as tight as a nun's..... well you get the idea.  The ENT specialist advised us not to climb Mount Kinabalu, as the pressure change would be extraordinarily painful.  He also advised against diving until it clears up.  And here comes the kicker.  This is particularly scary as we have our trips to Costa Rica and Micronesia booked for later in the year (and in the case of Costa Rica, paid for), and if antibiotics don't clear it up, and it can't be drained....... let's just say it doesn't bear thinking about as it involves surgery and a long convalescence completely and utterly unpunctuated by diving.

Not many people know that the car accident Cor and I had in 2010 was the impetus behind us leaving London and embarking on this journey in search of the good life.  I plan to tell the story of the crash in a later blog post, but to have the legacy of that same car crash threaten our trip of a lifetime has made the last couple of days very tough for us both.

So at the moment we are back in Lahad Datu for another week, I am hopeful the antibiotics work, that it will clear up completely or make it possible for the sinuses to be drained, and everything will be peachy.  But for now, this is as close as I will get to Low's Peak on Mount Kinabalu......

Super Sipadan, Magical Malaysia

So we are dry now, finally.  After 52 dives by me and 55 dives by Cor over the last few weeks, we needed some serious dry land time to de-prune the fingers and toes and we are currently at her parents' place in Malaysia doing this.

For those not "in the know", we have been spending our time on an island off the coast of Borneo doing some scuba diving.  During the three weeks, we completed our Rescue Diver course (apparently adequate care provided is better than perfect care withheld, who knew?) and dived the islands of Sipadan, Mabul, Kapalai, Siamil, Sibuan, Mantabuan, Timba Timba and Mataking, plus did a couple of pretty interesting night dives in the port of Semporna, where you really don't want to know what's in the water, you just look for the crazy little creatures that come out at night.

Nudibranch

First the diving.  In a nutshell we dived the number one dive site in the world a few times, plus did some brilliant diving at a whole host of other places.  The diving was incredibly varied, with Sipadan having stacks of big fish schools, sharks (our friends) and more turtles than you could poke a stick at.  Then some of the other islands were havens for small stuff like octopus, cuttlefish, camouflaged frogfish, incredibly cool nudibranches (which you will see from our pictures are an obsession of ours), plus some really weird things we have never seen before like sea moths (essentially a crazy-looking fish).  There is no other way to describe it other than brilliant.

We stayed on Mabul with Scuba Junkie and they were great.  The instructors, divemasters and staff all made our stay fantastic.  The accommodation and food was really good, though we only spent time in the room to get much needed sleep.  Scuba Junkie is a rare company that cares about the environment in which it operates,  plus the community that it works with, something that pervades the attitudes of everyone there.  Highly recommend using these guys if you ever go.

Frogfish

They run a stack of initiatives.  Please support the Semporna Shark Sanctuary petition by following the link, signing up and posting it on Facebook.  When you see firsthand the devastation caused by shark finning to the populations of these amazing animals, with 10's of millions of sharks being hauled out of the sea every year, having their fins cut off and thrown back to drown, you realise how insane and unsustainable the current appetite for shark fin soup is.

Scuba Junkie also have an innovative scheme relating to turtle nests.  In the past when a turtle came ashore to lay its eggs, the locals would either eat the eggs or sell them to others for food.  SJ pay the locals 10 ringgit per egg when a nest is found, and then their marine biologists carefully relocate the nest to a controlled location, re-creating the conditions of the nest, such as depth, shape and temperature.

On one of the nights we got back from a day's diving to find that one of the green turtle nests had hatched and we were privileged to hold a few of these amazing little creatures in our hands and help them on their way to the ocean.  111 turtles were released that night, and over 1000 have been released this year.  It was AWESOME!

We met some fantastic people out there, and dived with some incredible people.  Thanks to Rohan, Carys, Dave, Kev, Khai, Charlotte, Sofia, Ollie, Richbro, Astrid, Shane, Eric, Nas and Corey, plus Ann for those morning yoga sessions when we weren't too tired to get out of bed.  And we never even mentioned Aziz and the rest of the band night crew - you guys rocked!  Thanks also to those amazing people we met and dived with out there, Joachim and Cinzia, Sara, Luis and Sarah, and everyone else for making it such a special trip.

We were very tempted to stay on and do our divemaster course but we have other plans now that include climbing Mt Kinabalu in a couple of weeks, then a 9-day tour at the start of July from Darwin through Kakadu down to Uluru.  The divemaster training might have to wait until the end of the year.  We know a number of the DMs and instructors at SJ are keen to put us through our paces!

As usual, some selected pics are here, and the best of our 800 or so via the link on the right!



Matt and his school of bumphead parrotfish