Locked and Loaded

Big things have happened under slow connections, so no updates for a while.

Anywho, me and the girlfriend have been sleeping in our hammocks for three weeks now, in pretty much every kind of weather the tropics can possibly conjure up. Remarkably, the hammocks have held up perfectly under every condition. Well, besides monsoon/heavy/firehose rain, in which case we slept in the Dive center's bar one night and got in A LOT of shit for it too.
In fact, the whole dive center seems to be a bit on the sour side over us not paying the 95RM for accommodation. They've had a few talks with us about why we don't switch to their overpriced dorms. So I'm pretty much waiting for a proper shit-fest to break out at some point with one of the instructors yelling at us. But we'll burn that bridge when we cross it. Until then, what can I say?
Haters be hatin'.

I recently got my 40th dive and somehow managed to squeeze some Sipadan in there too!
Sipadan, by the way, is one of the most fucking amazing places I've ever been to. The sheer scale of life on that island is unreal. Every animal acts differently to people than they do on other islands as well, displaying a much more feral and inquisitive nature. This may sound strange seeing as most ocean life is fine with people and pretty much doesn't fear humans at all. But in Sipadan, I had turtles swimming after and chasing me, I had sharks just passing me by, looking at me and every other kind of huge fish you could think of just swimming up and looking at me. We saw these huge flocks of hundreds of Bumphead Parrotfish, the size of a small person crunching away at the coral. In some parts, as we hung on to the coral for dear life in order not to be swept away by current we saw giant swarms of barracuda, thousands of fish strong. First seeming like an impenetrable wall of fish, then swimming toward the surface forming massive tornadoes of fish. I know I told mom and dad I wouldn't, but with one of the dive masters leading us we swam a small bit into a huge cave which is a natural graveyard for turtles, where countless turtle skeletons have been found.

And with my rescue course finished and my 40 dives cleared I'm good to go for the Dive Master Training!!!! Today is the first day and we're just sifting through knowledge reviews in waiting for the actual practical stuff to get started.


AS FOR THE APPS:
I finished the book like.. a while back, maybe a week ago. But still: BOOM!

And! I'm in the middle of making my very own first app for the iPhone. I remember trying to make an app before really knowing anything about Xcode, and the difference between then and now having read the book is just insane. I'm able to code independently on a whole different level, but also take in tips and stuff from forums and actually get exactly what they're talking about. The craziest part is that the problem solving and the issue areas of the app are actually really fun to fix. I could actually see myself continue developing apps for a while.

My first app is basically a comic book app for some funny internet comics I'm a fan of.
I'm at the point that I can gather all the comics in one place, display them on small pictures and enlarge them to be able to scroll around in them. Now I'm gonna put in an animated intro screen with functions like randomizing the comics and getting to the comics archives.

Life is so haaaaard!

No but seriously, I am so god damn spoiled to get to live on this island and see and do all the things I'm doing and seeing.

I've seen baby turtles hatching, I've been teaching at a local school, diving siiiiiiick dive-sites full of every imaginable type of animal. If I even were to list the whole plethora of magnificent and ridiculous encounters with sea creatures I've had it would take up this whole post, so I'm just gonna share one of them;
A few nights ago, we went out for a night dive, geared up with flashlights we entered the calm dark water. The whole dive was very tranquil and peaceful, but with no types of animals that I wanted to see really, until we got to the end. The dive master bangs her tank and signals for octopus, we all go down and look at this strangely shaped rock. Sure enough, it must be an octopus, but it is so ridiculously well camouflaged it is barely visible. The divers move on, but I am so fascinated by the animal that I stay behind. Watching and shining my flashlight right next to the perfectly disguised being, it began to transform before my eyes. The skin changed form from rocky and rough to smooth, from pale green to bright red. The arms suddenly in full movement the octopus positioned itself on the other side of the rock to slowly assume the form of the rock it was perched upon once again. I could barely believe that my own eyes were really seeing what was happening before them.

In my dive training I'm now done with most of the rescue course, we only have one day left now and we're done practicing all the skills and theory we need to learn. All that's left now: HELL-DIVES!
A hell-dive is when everyone in the water knows that you're taking a rescue course so they do their very best to make it as horrible and nasty as possible, throwing off their masks underwater, inflating their BCDs, unhooking weight belts, bolting for the surface, pretending to be dead, panicking and grabbing on to you, unhooking things on your BCD and even pretending to touch underwater wildlife. The purpose of all this is so that you can demonstrate how well you handle these situations.
It is god damn awesome, plus every time we get down to the jetty all the dive masters jump in the water and pretend to be drowning so you need to jump in and rescue them while avoiding being drowned by their crazed panicking.

So far in my app programming I have gotten to chapter 8, so I'm getting deeper into the world of debugging, and hopefully pretty soon I'm gonna be ready to start making some apps of my own. Things are getting faster and faster for me as my learning progresses.

Onward!

Coconut kids

We had a major rain-storm yesterday so Nishra's rain-cover got blown down. I went over to fix it while she was doing her swimming test and I see these kids pointing and looking at our contraptions strung to the trees. I try my best to tell them that we're sleeping there, to which they just shrug and walk past me to some other coconut trees.

At first I thought they were gonna play hide and seek because they were each hugging a coconut palm. When I see them one after another scaling these 10 meter tall branchless trees with nothing but their hands and feet my jaw dropped to the ground. One by one they somehow get the coconuts to fall down and then proceed to walk up to me with big smiles on their faces. 

I go: "Alright, how much?"

They say: "Three ringitt!"

I bring out my wallet and hand them the money while they giggle and whisper upon which the oldest kid (about 8) looks mischievously at me and says: "Fiiiiive ringitt!"

I laugh and give them the three ringitt anyway, and they walk off with big smiles on their faces. 

In many ways it's so surreal that I'm on this tropical island in the middle of nowhere.

Mabul

This part of my life, this part right here, is called being on a tropical paradise island learning how to scuba dive and make apps.

So for three days we have been living on the island of Mabul off the coast of Borneo. The whole place surrounded by turquoise waters and tons of coral reefs. The school here is kick-ass! Scuba Junkie sets the bar 30% higher than PADI requires it to, basically offering one of the best educations for dive masters anywhere in the world, which in turn basically guarantees you a job after you're done since people know about this place.

So far I've been getting a few more fun-dives in my log-book so that I can start the Rescue Diver and DMT courses. But nonetheless this week has been spectacular. The first day of dives I saw probably close to 10 giant sea turtles as well as countless other species of fish which I've barely even heard of just off the island. Today started with me waking up to watch turtle hatchlings crawl into the sea after which we went muck diving on this beautiful tropical island and saw so many things. Sea horses, invisible shrimp that clean other fishes and animals, super poisonous sea snakes, even a coconut octopus which is an octopus that uses coconut shells for protection. I can feel my confidence growing with each dive, and today I was really feeling how my buoyancy control reached a new level.

My app programming skills are reaching new levels too, I've managed to get apps working which let you move, shrink, grow and touch objects on the screen as well as change images with animations and redirect you to websites and other apps. Amazing.

Also it's been so good to finally see Nishra. I've missed her like crazy

I am feeling like shit right now though becaaaaaause we each slept in these camping hammocks strapped to palm trees. I know, look at the picture, looks like paradise right? WELL IT ISN'T! I slept like 3 hours last night, listening to everything from cicadas to jungle noises, worrying about villagers killing and eating us at night, rain and wind smattering at your head as well as having the trees crawling with centipedes as we put up the hammocks at night.

Not my idea of a good time, but we save like 160 SEK every night we do it.
So we'll see. One more night and I'll decide what I do the rest of the month.

Andy & Gordon

I stumble into the crummy hostel room in KL after having a really shitty flight having to listen to this Australian introduche himself and tell me all about his trip to nepal and how cool he was. I was having a bad day. Threw my bag in the exquisitely crummy locker, just feeling so fucking sick of people and turn around. I turn around and this guy dressed as a punk is sitting on one of the beds going: "This place is much worse than the place I stayed in in Bangkok." I say arduously: "Where'd you stay, the Hilton?", to which we both laugh and start talking. Then this other, older guy comes in, a lot of character in his face, kind of like a skinny Elmer Fudd and joined in. Shortly after we decided to go out for food all three of us and something strange happened. It's hard to explain, but sometimes you meet people who come from completely different backgrounds and lifestyles from you, yet you share some strange connection. It's like we had known each other for a really long time and yet we didn't know each others names.

For two days we have been sitting at our computers chatting and giggling away at the hostel, going out for beers in bars and exchanging jokes and irrelevant facts, talking about relationships, life, the economy, travel, we've exchanged websites for funny comics, been reading up funny Facebook posts to one another and everything has been so natural that I haven't even given it a single thought.

The three of us are respectively 12 and 15 years apart from each other. The older American guy worked as a computer programmer for a huge company and one day decided to sell everything he owned and start traveling. The German punk is traveling the world looking for punk scenes wherever he goes. Now we of course know each others names, stories and contact info and so on, but despite our different stories and all the shallow shit, we sit around and chat with each other like old friends.

There is really something to be said about those times when you randomly come together and form a group of friends from nothing, it's kind of like in kindergarten, but with beer.

Stuff like that makes me really happy I took this trip.

BKK

It's been a busy week.

Started out in this kick-ass hostel called Etzzz's. The rooms were huge and people were really cool, not bad for 200 baht a night. Day 2 I spent on the quest for my bike, and luckily the guy who had it was super cool. He was this Singaporean dude who was in charge of this hostel near Phaya Thai, he let me have the bike straight away. But as we talked we came on the topic of his plans to take a cycling trip to Cambodia 3 weeks from now. Call me gringo, crazy or blue eyed, but I let him have the bike until mid summer in exchange for him shipping it back to me.

Bike issue: CLEARED! *victory music*


Speaking of crazy, the other night when I wrote my girlfriend she said there was a guy on the island we were going to who was camping out with a tent. Safe to say, we decided that moment that we needed to do the same, so I went and got 2 camping hammocks complete with mosquito nets and everything. So not only are we gonna be on this paradise island in the middle of this turquoise blue, pristine ocean, but we're gonna be sleeping under the stars suspended to coconut palms. Hard life.


I'm also on the 4th chapter of my app programming book and things are getting mighty interesting! I'm at the point now where I can actually make touch gestures, which when I look at the code makes so much more sense now that I've gotten the basics down. It's like any old coding language. Bekyobenkyobenkyobenkyo!!!!


So now I just came back from an awesome night at the Singaporean biker's hostel, he took me and another Canadian guy(who seemed like sort of a douche to begin with) out for some awesome night food. Of course it was sunday and most things were closed, but we managed to find some really nice stalls, so we headed back to the hostel with a few beers and once I got to talking with the guy it turned out he had just turned 19, and had been traveling since he finished high school. My inner canvasser awoke after a few beers and I spent the larger part of the night making them both understand that the world is going to face a cataclysmic end during our lifetimes and philosophizing about what one should do with the remainder of time one is given in life.

He was a pretty sweet guy in the end.

Turns out I was the douche for judging him.

Now I'm gonna go get my Hepatitis B vaccine from the rickety thai hospital around the corner.

Tomorrow, Kuala Lumpur!

Swedish beggars in Bangkok

Good trip, but it's 3AM and my head is fucked 9 ways from Jupiter right now.

I met a really cool Japanese architect on the flight, we bonded over some Japanese nationalism and the leftovers of mine and Rubens meal from the night before. He gave me some pretty awesome tips on where to find the stranger things in Osaka. I hope I get to meet him again sometime.

Having landed finally in BKK I felt like the scene in Portlandia when they first get to LA and can't understand why the sun isn't covered by clouds. I felt cheaper than a crippled lady-boy hooker for not paying a cab to take me straight to the hostel. After walking for like 4 hours in the sweltering heat and sweating through every pore in my body I finally reached the right street. 

Out of nowhere comes this guy, mid 40s, kind of disgusting and sunburnt all over his body(you know the type) with one of those holes in his throat for smoking. He comes up to me and starts saying stuff like "Hey man! Where you from?? etc.."

"Sweden", I say. At which point he starts speaking Swedish(of course) to me instead and goes 

"Ja men jag med! Tror du att du skulle kunna hjälpa en hemlös med lite pengar, jag måste komma till flygplatsen och köpa lite mat, bara 20 baht räcker, etc etcc.."

Thailand, you may definitely not be my favorite country on earth, but you never cease to amaze me.