After spending a day of researching hotels/bungalows in the Phuket Province and finding prices on the internet more than we wanted to pay, the guidebook led us to Baan Krating Jungle Resort. It only mentioned how to get there, and said nothing more than it is set in an idyllic spot on a beach that had some tsunami damage but the shops on the beach were rebuilding. Okay, well, we'll see if there's a reason it's cheaper than the guidebook price quotes.

It ends up that we lucked out. The resort is on a beautiful hillside, lots of cicadas chirping, but the buildings, beach and privacy are just what we want.

The bungalows are private and beautiful inside with teak wood traditional thai bathrooms with all the modern amenities and wood floors. There are only 30 or so bungalows, so it's a very laid back environment. Oh, and there's no evidence of any effects of the tsunami.

The Thai taxi driver we hired looked around and said, "Wow - I bring my girlfriend here!"

The view follows a little path to a deck by the private beach with decent reefs to snorkel over.

There's also a nice pool and restaurant where we've met several good folks over the last few days. We are loving this place.

The Hardy Reef at the Great Barrier Reef is a platform reef, which means that it has reached its full height and is now expanding outward. This means that when you dive or snorkel around it, there is a wall that goes from the surface to the sea floor, which is about 20-30 meters down.  Swimming over it felt like flying out over a cliff.

I was in awe. I had never seen such a reef and it convinced me to get SCUBA certified soon, but it won’t happen here- not enough time.

The water, the fish, the coral, all amazing...but what I enjoyed the most was the giant clams, which seems like a rather banal thing to be excited about. 

First it was their sheer scale.  Despite what you may have seen in a OO7 movie, they don’t eat people, but they do react and close up if you get near them. The rings that you see are like tree rings- one per year.

Second was the color.  They were by far the most brilliantly colored animals on the reef.  Some of them glowed in the sunlight and designers couldn’t put colors together more beautifully.

Third was the variety.  They say that clams are like fingerprints, there are no 2 that are exactly alike and I never two that were even close.

A few nights of staying in the cheapest backpacker places possible (I think we’re well versed in distinguishing drag racing engine sounds at 3AM) allowed us to splurge a little at the Mercure resort on Great Keppel Island (USD$126) – a room without A/C.

Snorkeling was our morning activity and I was excited - Warm clear waters and a sunny day. The girl at the water sports hut gave us fins and snorkel gear and said “you guys won’t be needing stinger suits – we’ve had no reports of stingers (jellyfish) in 5 weeks and there’s only 14 days left in the season. I’ll show you the secret - how to get to the really cool coral.” Despite another vacationer advising us “just in case”, we decided on no stinger suits.

So we headed on a 45 minute dry and sandy trek across to Long Beach. It was in the mid-90’s with a blazing sun, very humid, and the last section was slow in super heated sand. We saw a broken sandal left in the path and wondered how that guy survived without severe burns. Eventually it opened up to an almost deserted beach from one of those brochures… 

In preparing to snorkel, we took a few strokes in the cooling water and I saw something that was familiar from Hawaii – A Man O’ War jellyfish. Aussies call them Blue Bottles. This sight would make our steaming 45 minute trek meaningless.  There we were, hot and sweaty with beautiful water in front of us, all geared up and no where to go- without stinger suits.

So back we went for another 45 minutes trek through the hot sand dragging our snorkel gear and water. Now it was close to high noon. Ugh!

As it turned out, all the snorkeling we wanted wasn’t 45 minutes away but only a 4 minute swim from our back door. This time, we wore the very flattering suits and saw rainbows of coral, fish and even a few stingrays scurrying along the bottom. Not one transparent jellyfish in the lot.

A few years ago, I went to the Bahamas with my family and I did a thing where you “swim with dolphins”.  These were well trained and captive dolphins in an enclosed area. I think I got a picture of one giving me a kiss.  This Dolphin Encounter was much, much different.

Kaikoura, New Zealand is next to a great underwater canyon that goes down over 1200 meters.  The waters are nutrient rich and many pods of Dusky Dolphins and Sperm Whales live off the coast of Kaikoura, making it a huge destination for folks like us, wanting to see marine mammals.

Like Sachi said earlier, our goal is to be “in” something and not just watching from afar, like the Kawarau River and Franz Joseph Glacier.  This time, a company called “Dolphin Encounter” gave us this opportunity for $125NZ ($90US) per person.  Note: Make reservations well in advance.

They suit you up in wetsuits and snorkel gear and take you out to the open ocean and drop you into the water near a pod of wild dolphins that often come investigate.  For about an hour collectively, we were in the dolphin’s underwater world, watching them through our masks as they navigate just feet and sometimes inches from us. It was an indescribable feeling to see them appear out of the blue and swim by.

What struck us both was that, for a fleeting moment, you got a feeling of connectedness a dolphin or two.  They would swim by and turn there body to make clear eye contact and sometimes keep that contact while circling you. As the dolphin encounter people said, we are sometimes entertainment for them, especially since we were ,coached to make “dolphin sounds” underwater, which I’m sure they found entertaining.

The Dusky Dolphins are quite acrobatic and a few theories as to why they jump are:  To scratch their back (remove loose skin), attract a mate (they are very promiscuous by the way) or purely for fun.

The Dolphin Encounter company is highly regulated by the government and can only allow so many people into the water for so long, so many times a day.  The dolphins, though surely not used to swimming with people, are well protected – something New Zealand does very well. 

Explorer Capt. James Cook was not bashful about naming all the geographic features of New Zealand and Doubtful Bay is no exception. When he came upon it, he figured that if he went in, he might not make it out because of the prevailing westerly wind.  He was “doubtful” he should do it and the name stuck.

Thankfully, we have motorized boats that enable us to explore what he missed, and did he miss a lot.  Doubtful Bay is part of the Fiordland Region of New Zealand and is stunningly beautiful in a way that cameras can’t really capture, with 1000s of feet of sheer cliffs plunging into dark, deep, cold waters.

It’s no small feat to get there too. You have to take a boat across a lake for 45 minutes, then a van over Wilmot Pass on a dirt road for another 45 mins just to get started.  We felt alone for a majority of the time with a couple of boats in the distance that represented a bit of “congestion”.

We hooked up with an independent overnight tour operator called Deep Cove Charters, LTD.  The boat was called “Flyer”.  The skipper, Chris, was great and has to be the hardest working man in the Fiordlands.  He does these tours every day (and every night), sometimes up to 20 in a row, dropping a group off as he picks up another. We were all very impressed with Chris and the trip.  It was about $300pp NZ ($212 US) per person, but it included a freshly caught crayfish (think lobster) lunch and venison and blue cod dinner and breakfast.

Flyer holds 6 people and we figured we’d end up with 4 non-english speaking folks, which might have been fun too.  As it turned out, we spent 24 hours with 2 couples from Minnesota who are traveling together.  It was surely the most time we’ve spent with Americans on the whole trip and they were great folks.

Other than the scenery, the highlight was surely fishing.  Sachi caught a bunch of Perch that were used for bait and finally a giant Blue Cod, which we ate that night.  I caught a nice sized grouper.

Look at the size of that thing!

OK, it wasn't that big...

 Here's my Grouper

A note about “Fiordlands”…

It is supposed to be spelled the Norwegian way “fjords”, but the current spelling stuck since the 1800’s.  We learned that a fjord is a body of water that was carved by glaciers and links to the sea as opposed to a “sound” which is formed by a river. Many of the sounds in New Zealand are actually supposed to be fiords, or better yet, fjords.  In fact, we think Seattle is actually on Puget Fjord instead of Puget Sound.

I just had to share this photo from Kaena Point.  Despite having our car broken into, the waves and scenery were amazing.  The waves have such power that they give me goosebumps...

Every time we come to Hawaii, I always try to get out to the North Shore.  It's partly the fact that it's a very cool place, with some of the best and biggest surf in the world, plus, it's just a naturally beautiful sight to see.  I can sit and watch big waves crash all day.  There is a very big part of me that wants to be out there surfing, but that would surely be a trip-ender at this point.  I don't claim surfing skillz, at that level anyway.

There are a few spots on Oahu that are close to Honolulu, but don't really get the tourist traffic. One of the local favorites is called Sandy Beach, or "Sandys". 

If I could paint a picture of what a Hawaiian beach should look like, it would look a lot like Sandys.  Fine light colored sand, palm trees, ocean in 5 shades of blue, crashing waves, surfers, boogie boarders, skim boarders, tan bodies and the smell of cooking food in the air.

At the same time Sandy's makes me feel very haole.  Walking down the beach, I felt like people had to squint from the reflection off my lily-white skin.  I'm sure the local boys picked me out as a tourist.

 The surfable waves break out on a reef, but the shore break is ridden by the boogie boarders and body surfers.  I've never seen waves break on the shore the way they do at Sandys.  The stack up 4-6 feet high and crash on bare sand, which makes for pretty hardcore body surfing.  I got pulled over the falls a few times and held against bottom- and I was only there taking pictures.