Bioluminescence

One of the things that I enjoy most about living aboard is seeing the bioluminescence in the water late at night. We’ve seen different types of bioluminescence but most of what I’ve seen has been microorganisms called diatoms that light up when something moves through the water near them. We’ve all tried taking pictures of this but none of our cameras are good enough to really capture it. It often looks like blue flickering fireflies are in the water when something splashes or as the bow of the boat moves through the water. The lights are an electric blue and even though they aren’t bright enough to be caught on camera they seem pretty bright at night when everything is pitch black!

The diatoms light up when something moves in the water as a defense mechanism, in case a fish is trying to eat them. By lighting up, the diatoms hope to attract bigger fish to eat the small fish that are trying to eat them. It’s their way of saying; “Leave me alone or I’ll light you up so you can get eaten too!’.”

On this last crossing from Thailand to Sri Lanka we were lucky to see several pods of dolphins. They would come up to our boat in groups of four to twenty and like to ride and play in the waves that our bow creates. Sometimes we can hear the dolphins chirp and click to each other and its very clear that they are playing and having a good time. They usually don’t stay very long and after maybe ten minutes or so they dart off like torpedoes all at once and are gone.

One of the nights on the crossing the bioluminescence was very strong and we were visited by some more dolphins. Seeing dolphins swim in bioluminescent water was probably one of the coolest things I have ever seen. It’s hard to explain, but the diatoms would light up as the dolphins swam, making them sparkle and glow and leaving a bright blue trail behind them as the darted around underwater.

Since then we haven’t really seen much bioluminescence and there isn’t any here in Galle’s harbor. But I’m hoping that we’ll continue to see more on the rest of our trip. I’m also hoping to see some bioluminescent squid that some of the crew has already seen!

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My Laptop Adventure in Phuket

When I joined aboard in September I didn’t bring a personal laptop or cell phone with me. I sort of had the idea that I would be “off the grid” for a little while. It would be a huge change from back home where I never went anywhere without my cell phone and used my computer several times a day. At first it was a nice break to be a little disconnected and not spend so much time staring into a computer screen. But eventually I started to miss having a computer and found myself often searching for an internet café when traveling through different cities so that I could check my email, transportation schedules, travel guides, or get in touch with the rest of the crew, friends, or family. Also, I’ve taken hundreds of pictures and I’m starting to get bogged down with them!

So not too long ago I decided that it was time for me to get a laptop, something that I’d been considering for a long time. I decided to get one before we crossed to Sri Lanka so that I could get some work done while on the long crossing. On December 14^th I had one mission: to visit every store selling laptops in Phuket and purchase the best deal! The night before I did research and knew exactly what kind of laptop I wanted and I also looked up where all the major stores and malls were located on the island so I had a rough game plan of where to go. So I woke up early that morning, grabbed a map and my camera, hopped on my rented motorbike, and headed off!

I visited five places across the island. Big C, Festivus, Tesco Lotus Superstore, Super Cheap, and Jungceylon. These were all either stores like Wal-Mart of big indoor shopping malls. At each store I would take pictures of the laptops they had and their prices so I could comparison shop as I went to each place.

Tesco didn’t have any laptops like I was looking for but it did have a really cool food court. There were several stalls each selling a different type of food, Japanese, Thai, Chinese, drinks, soups, etc. Each of the food stalls was run by Tesco and they did not take cash. In order to buy food you had to go to a nearby counter to purchase a card which the food vendors swiped when you bought your meal. My meal cost less than $3 US and was very good!

While I was driving around I saw a sign for an orchid farm so I stopped to check it out. Not much was flowering at the time but the farm was huge!

Super Cheap was probably one of the biggest single stores I have ever been to. It was a massive building with a roof but it was open to the air so there was no air conditioning. It was like a Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Office Max, famer’s market, Sam’s, Costco, food court, fish market, auto store, bakery, and Best Buy combined! It seemed like everything you could want was in there and I wandered around for a long time. There were very low priced shoes but none that were really big enough for me!

The last place I visited was a massive shopping mall called Jungceylon in Patong Beach. Patong is the main tourist area in Phuket and is a pretty big city. Jungceylon is a fancy mall complete with a lagoon/fountain with a pirate ship in the middle! I decided to go ahead and get my laptop here since prices were pretty standard at every store that I went to and it was starting to get late. After I picked out the one I wanted I wandered around the main street area as the store installed Windows 7 for me. It was dark by the time they were finished and I started heading back to the boat. I found that leaving Patong was much harder than following the signs to get there! There weren’t any signs pointing back to the small town where our boat was and I think the locals would tell me one of many ways to get there! I ended up driving around Patong a lot and somehow kept ending up where I started. Eventually I found the right road that took me back up over and the down the mountains (sometimes 40% grade!) and back to the boat after a very long, but successful, day.

I’m very happy with my new laptop. It works great and now I can use it for all sorts of things. Plus, the keyboard has those cool squiggly Thai letters on it!

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Local Burger

When I traveled through Los Angeles on my way to meet up with the crew in Indonesia I made sure to find an In-N-Out while I was in town. In-N-Out is a fast food chain that is only on the west coast and has been rated one of the top fast-food restaurants in the country. Since I had heard so much about their food I was really happy to be able to stop at one. When I found one I could easily tell how popular this restaurant is by the long line of cars that stretched all the way across the shopping area parking lot at it was mid-afternoon, not even when most people eat a meal! There was also an employee who directed traffic and walked from car to car to take orders and radio them back to the kitchen to speed up the process. The menu at In-N-Out is very simple and not with much variety but what they offer is very, very good with fresh ingredients. I have to saw that the burger that I ordered did live up to its claim to fame and was probably one of the best fast-food burgers I’ve had!

Here in Malaysia there are fast-food restaurants such as McDonalds, KFC, and even a few local brands, but there aren’t any In-N-Out restaurants. That’s okay though because we’ve found something I like much better. It’s known as a local burger and can be found at most night markets where Malaysians go to get dinner. Like a lot of the food stalls I’ve found on the side of the roads these ones only offer one dish, although you can get several different types of burger. They are cooked on a flat stove, their buns are toasted, and they can come with coleslaw, cucumbers, egg, cheese, mayonnaise, special sauce, black pepper. They aren’t very expensive and you can get patties of chicken, fish, beef or even rabbit! And if you want you can get a double which comes with two patties. The person working the local burger stall makes them as soon as you order and even though there isn’t a drive through we seen cars lined up on the side of the road as they wait for their turn to get out and order. The burgers are big, messy, and delicious! Some have even been served with a fork and spoon if things get too messy. A single chicken burger costs less than 3 Ringgit and a burger with only fried egg cost only 1.20 Ringgit!

There you have it! Two delicious and very different burgers from two very different parts of the world!

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Cendol!

Before I visited the historic town of Malacca for a day I read about a popular dish served there called cendol. It’s a traditional desert in Southeast Asia and can be prepared different ways depending on where you get it but is based on coconut milk, a jelly made of rice flour and green food coloring, palm sugar, shaved ice, and often red beans or corn. Sounds like a strange mixture, and it is, but it was actually very good when I tried it! It’s similar to a very sweat snow cone with coconut cream. There were several street vendors and shops selling cendol in Malacca and it quickly became a favorite treat of mine, especially after sightseeing in the hot sun for a few hours. I ended up getting it three times while I was in Malacca (it was a very hot day) and I’m looking forward to trying different versions of cendol as we continue traveling!

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Sentosa Island And A Few Singapore Pictures

On my last day in Singapore I decided to visit Sentosa Island. Sentosa Island is a small, family themed island development in the southern-most part of Singapore. It’s designed to attract Southeast Asian families for weekend, or longer, vacations, similar to Disneyland back home. I wanted to go to Sentosa for three reasons: to see Singapore from the cable car ride to the island, to visit the aquarium there, and to visit the southern-most point of the Asian continent (according to Singapore). I was able to do all three!

To get to Sentosa I had to take the metro all the way to the last stop on the red line, Harborfront. From there I had to find my way to the cable car which was a little confusing since like most metro stations, this one let out in the middle of a giant shopping mall. Once I found the cable car it was just a short ride onto the island. The view from the cable car of Singapore was well worth the ticket! From the air you can really see how big of a role the shipping industry plays in Singapore’s economy. It seemed like the shipping ports were several times larger than the downtown area of Singapore, and you could see massive shipping vessels lined up by the dozens in the surrounding waters.

Once I got onto the island I bypassed the ticket counters selling tickets to all sorts of crazy rides, shows, and other attractions and went straight to the aquarium. I was just in time for the sea lion and dolphin show. The aquarium has three pink dolphins!

Inside, the aquarium itself was fairly small but still had some neat exhibits. In addition to the usual shark, ray, and turtle petting tanks they also had two aquariums with “windows” in them where you could stick your hand through the side wall! Take a look at the picture below and try to figure out how this is possible!

There was also a moving walkway that snaked under a massive aquarium while all sorts of sea creatures swam around you.

Here is a picture of me in front of one of the many reef colonies that were in the aquarium.

After checking out the aquarium I headed down to the beach. According to Singapore this beach is the southern-most point on the Asian continent, but Malaysia disagrees! I made it just in time for sunset.

This is a picture of me just after the sun had set. Most of the lights in the background are shipping containers!

I wandered around the island a bit more and most of it was brightly lit with neon lights illuminating water features, statues, and decorative vegetation.

There was even a giant merlion statue that was several stories tall!

As I headed back to the main island of Singapore I could see the downtown skyline rising up from Sentosa.

After almost six days exploring Singapore I was happy to finally be heading back to the boat for some much needed rest. Below are some other pictures from my favorite parts of Singapore.

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Kumai

Kumai is a small town a few miles up the Sekonyer river. The road that runs along the river is really the only major road and there are no traffic lights. We even had to take a 20 minute bemo ride to the nearby larger town to find an ATM! We spent some time wandering around Kumai and it didn't take too long to see most of it. The main road is lined with small shops and restaurants as well as with food carts and food stalls selling traditional Indonesian food.

There is a large population of Muslims on Kalimantan and it seems like there is a beautiful and brightly colored mosque on every block. During prayer hours the mosques call to prayer from loudspeakers on tall towers. The sound is kind of pleasant from a distance but when you're close to the buildings its hard to hear anything else!

Kumai isn't a popular tourist destination and only a few of the locals speak a small amount of English even though lots of tourists come to the island of Borneo to see its ecology. Because of this we usually create quite a scene just when walking down the street. Everybody greets us with a 'Hey mister!' as we walk by, whether from their store, house, or as they whiz by on a motorbike. Children are especially enthusiastic about saying hello and waving to us. Going for a walk around town can feel more like walking in a parade!

One interesting thing about this town is that it has a booming swallow industry. There are giant bird houses that look like small hotels scattered around, and many more under construction. They are made of cement, unpainted, and have small holes in the walls for ventilation. When the houses are finished being constructed they cool the building with air conditioners to attract swallows to build communities there. During dawn and dusk the swallows swarm around their homes by the hundreds feeding on insects, chirping and screeching loudly. It's actually kind of eerie to look up and see them swarming above you. The swallow houses are built so that their nests can be collected and sold to places like China where they are made into a soup which is considered a delicacy. One bowl of swallow-nest soup can cost $40-$100 US dollars!

The river is wide here where we are anchored and there is a lot of activity on the water. Canoes paddle by, tiny speedboats zoom past, larger canoes with loud motors slowly pass by, houseboats taking tourists into the orangutan park slowly cross the river, large ferries transport people and vehicles, and larger barges and fishing vessel make the trip between the town and the ocean. Meanwhile the river current is constantly changing with the tides.

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My Time in Kuta

I beat the William T. Piquette and its crew to Bali, Indonesia by about eight days so I waited at a homestay on Poppies Lane 1 in the busy city of Kuta. Kuta is right on the beach on the south-western end of Bali and is probably Indonesia’s number one tourist destination. The city never sleeps and motorbikes race through the streets at all hours. The homestay that I wandered into was run by two Balinese locals and had a very laid-back atmosphere. The didn’t even ask me to pay when I first checked in. They just handed me the key to my room and told me to stay as long as I liked!

The types of people who wandered into that homestay all seemed to have similar stories and to be going in similar directions. Most were recent college graduates who wanted to travel before starting their career or seasonal workers who traveled during their off-season. At any rate, everybody had something in common with everybody else, regardless of nationality, if only for the simple reason that they have traveled to the same locations in Southeast Asia or eventually were going to.

It is easy to make friends in the homestay, especially with other solo travelers. While waiting for the crew to arrive I spent most of my time wandering around the maze of tourists stalls, reading or walking along the beach, eating at inexpensive restaurants, and chatting with other travelers. Staying in Kuta is exhausting. Just walking down a street takes a lot of effort since you have to dodge motorbikes who squeeze by you with inches to spare and you have to resist the temptation to stop in every shop to see what the shopkeeper is selling so enthusiastically. It’s a non-stop party city and from the beach you can see airplanes arriving to the nearby airport one after another. It’s a popular tourist destination for Australians and it was common to see whole families zooming past on their motorbikes wearing matching t-shirts they had just bought at a tourist shop, the youngest ones with braided hair.

Evenings were usually spent hanging out on the beach watching the sunset. Both locals and tourists crowded the beach at this time to see the always beautiful sunset. Many of the Indonesian and Asian tourists would come to me and my new friends from the homestay and ask to take their pictures with us. I guess it isn’t common for them to see Westerners where they come from. One Saturday the beach was full of Indonesian students who came to Kuta to practice their English with Westerners. They would come up to us in groups of three or as many as eight, introduce themselves and then ask us our names, how old we were, where we were from, and other questions like that. They would always want pictures with us so they could prove to their teachers back home that they were practicing English with foreigners. It was flattering at first but soon became kind of annoying and I eventually got tired of smiling!

One day I was determined to explore an area outside of Bali. Since I don’t have an International Driver’s License and good public transportation doesn’t really exist I decided to rent a mountain bike and travel North up the coast to Tannah Lot, one of Bali’s most famous temples. After biking about an hour up the coast it turned too rocky and I had to turn off and follow the roads. I hadn’t been able to find a map but getting to Tannah Lot was pretty easy since there aren’t many roads to begin with and whenever I did come across an intersection I would just ask somebody nearby to point me in the right direction. After 2.5 hours I finally arrived to Tannah Lot! It’s a beautiful temple near cliffs on the south-west coast of Bali and its only accessible during high-tide. I knew that I wanted to stay until sunset so I thoroughly explored the area visiting smaller shrines nearby, wandering through yet another maze of tourists shops, and scrambling along the tidal pools along the base of the cliffs. It was a beautifully sunny day and the water surrounding the temple was a brilliant turquoise color. Just like on Kuta beach, a lot of Asian tourists were very interested in my story and wanted to take their pictures with me!

After an extraordinary sunset I started the long bike ride back to my homestay in Kuta. The ride home was dark since there were no streetlights other than the traffic that was whizzing by me. Balinese people don’t seem to be bound by street lanes and will comfortably ride down the road on whichever lane they prefer. They didn’t seem to mind racing past my on my bicycle at all! The ride home was pretty terrifying and I mostly just tried to stay to the side of the road and hope nobody would get too close. Other than that, it actually was pretty pleasant to go for a long bike ride past rice terraces and cow pastures in the cool night air. When I finally made it back to Kuta the peacefulness of Tannah Lot was just a memory and I was back to the hustle and bustle of Kuta.

A few days later I returned home after doing some errands and there were Adam and Amanda waiting for me at my homestay! After we reunited I joined the rest of the crew aboard the William T. Piquette and officially moved aboard on the fourth. I’m excited to be heading off to our next destination soon but am sad to be leaving Kuta, just as I was starting to feel at home there and could walk around without getting lost!

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On my way!

Hello from the Mojave Desert! My name is Matthew Webb and I'll be joining the crew in Bali, Indonesia. I'm a recent college graduate with a degree in Biological and Agricultural Engineering from North Carolina State University and minors in Outdoor Leadership and Environmental Science. I've spent the summer in Raleigh, North Carolina working for one of my professors on urban water quality projects.

My family moved to North Carolina when I was in middle school but before then we moved around every few years because my Dad was in the Navy. I've had the opportunity to do some traveling in the US and also a little around the world and am looking forward to the places I am going next with the crew!

My sailing experience is mostly limited to small boats on lakes around Raleigh so I'm really looking forward to joining the crew and getting my sea legs.

I've been vising family and friends in Southern California for the past few days and have seen some really incredible sights! The picture is of me enjoying the Devil's Golf Course this morning in Death Valley National Park, the lowest, hottest, and driest part of the country!

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