The Land of No Worries

Below is a post I wrote while living in Australia.  I believe I intended to write more and that's why I never posted it but reading it now, many months later, I see it as a perfect snapshot of the time I spent on my porch in Australia.

Since then I have experienced many changes and taken pictures of many beautiful things, all of which I intend to share with you all in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

It is hard for me to convey in words just how beautiful I am finding my life.  There exists a different pace of life here in Apollo Bay.  Surrounded by nature on all sides, I feel a sense of calmness and space.  A space that allows for a fixed state of relaxation and simply put, no worries.

As I sit here and write, the first sound I hear is the crashing of waves, the endless cycles of the ocean.  As I continue to listen, the calls of various exotic (to me at least) birds, then the chirping of crickets, a single layer at first, then a second, then a third, and lastly, the light rustling of leaves in the wind.

I find it easy to enjoy life.  I have absolutely nothing to worry about.  Not that I have ever been a particularly worrisome person, but I still find this fact incredible.  This got me thinking, when I had worries in my past what were they about and why did they occur?  What were the circumstances of my life at the time?  Is there truly any reason to spend time and energy worrying?  No, I have decided.  No there isn't.

Loving Work

This is the cafe/restaurant where I work, La Bimba, on the top floor.  The road in front of the building is the Great Ocean Road.

And yeah sure, maybe I'm there sometimes for 11 hours a day but with a view like this I really can't complain...  plus they're paying me quite handsomely for my efforts.

  I actually really enjoy my days at work, I get to spend time with a funny group of characters that I now call friends and talk with people from around the world and master the art of the latte and when it gets busy the time flies by and before I know it I'm back on my front porch with my housemates drinking a glass of Australian wine under a different set of stars.

Where I Live

Here is a picture from Mariner's Lookout, a spot above Apollo Bay that allows one to see the entirety of the town.  It is small, friendly, and beautiful.  We're now even getting 2-3 sunny days for every 5 that it rains and  this mythical entity called the summer is looking more and more likely to arrive.

Here is where I live, with a beautiful view of Marengo beach (the beach in the distance).  As the weather gets better the tourists are beginning to flock in and the hours of work are increasing, which is perfect for me because the entire plan here is to save money and Apollo Bay is an ideal place to carry out such a plan because there is not a whole lot to do aside from simply enjoy the surroundings, which after living in a large city in Southeast Asia, is really all I want to do.

La Bimba

I've been working at an organic restaurant here in Apollo Bay called La Bimba.  But for the past two weeks the restaurant has been closed so my housemate Joel and I have been working up on their farm, where most of the produce for the restaurant comes from.  The farm is about 20 minutes outside of town tucked away up on rolling green hills overlooking the ocean separating us from Antarctica.  Here is a picture I took from the tractor looking out towards the ocean.  That's Bella standing in the middle of the path... not a fan of the tractor.  

Here is a picture facing the other direction of the "beacon of hope" we've been building.  As soon as we have a day of good weather we plan to gather everyone from the restaurant for a celebration around what will be one of the biggest bonfires I have ever seen.

And now for some introductions.  First up is Tom Dooley, better known as Tom Tom.  His job on the farm is to shepherd the sheep and be guardian of the lambs.

This is one of my housemates, Joel.  

The cows. 

The mischievous piglets, George and Mildred.  They have an entire vegetable garden but they still prefer the neighbors lawn.

The chickens.

The big mama pig, Dolores, with one of her newborn piglets.

This is Jonah, a lamb who was abandoned by her mother at birth but nursed to health by Steve, the owner of La Bimba and the farm.  Now she thinks and acts like a dog, complete with tail wagging and a noise that sounds like a mix between a baaaa, a bark, and a yell.

And lastly, we have Mia, the queen of the castle.

It really doesn't feel fair to call this work.

Apollo Bay

Here I am standing on a beach along the Great Ocean Road en route from Melbourne to Apollo Bay.  I flew into Melbourne and stayed with the two couchsurfers (Joel and Nathalya) who had stayed at my place in Phnom Penh.  I was only in Melbourne for a few days before we packed up their house and made our way down to Apollo Bay via another couchsurfer who offered to drive us there out of the kindness of his heart and for some fish and chips upon arrival.

This is about 30 minutes outside of Apollo Bay in the town of Lourne where we decided to stop off at a bottle shop (liquor store) and indulge in celebratory drinks for the remainder of the drive (legal in Australia to have open alcohol containers in a vehicle as long as the driver isn't drinking).

After a lunch of fish and chips we made our way to our new home and began to settle in, a sense of excitement bubbling in all of us.  Afterwards we took a walk into town (which is a total of about four blocks along the Great Ocean Road) and stopped into a supermarket.  Here is some of the local cuisine that Australia has to offer...

The town is very small and lovely, right along the ocean just two hours southwest from Melbourne.  Every person I've met here has been very warm and welcoming and seem to want to go out of their way to help you.  The population here is around 1,500 but during the tourist season jumps up to 9,000-10,000 due to school holidays and vacation time.  Right now we're in the middle of a rainy winter but come the end of November it will start to warm up, making the ocean much more appealing to dive into.

Over the following week I took many walks in and around the town.  Essentially, working back from the ocean there is the water, the Great Ocean Road, the town, farms, and then forest (referred to as "the bush").  Here are some pictures of my aimless wandering...

Eucalyptus trees, the best place to spot Koalas.

I feel very at home here in Apollo Bay.  There is something inexplicably beautiful about living next to the ocean and being surrounded by so much nature, it is very calming.  Going to sleep and waking up to the sound of waves crashing is a sensation I will never tire of.  Here are some pictures taken from the from my front porch at sunset...

And just like that I find myself in yet another perfect situation.  I had some feelings of uncertainty leaving Phnom Penh, being that there were quite a few options before me, but I moved forward and followed my intuition and couldn't imagine myself anywhere else.

Leaving Phnom Penh

It's funny how getting ready to leave a city makes you want to take a lot more pictures of it.

Here is the street I lived on.  My house is the white one on the left.  We lived on the second floor closest to the construction site which served as a nice automatic alarm clock to get Simon and I up for school... not so much on the weekends though, when they seemed to really enjoy using the jackhammer.

Here are our neighbors, the construction crew.

This is the beautiful view from our backdoor.  We called it the coconut graveyard.  Once a week a giant truck full of coconuts would park here, armed with a crew of men with machetes and they would hack away at coconuts all night leaving what you see here.  Then a few days later when the skins had been dried by the sun they would be placed in a large pile and then set on fire.  The good news is that this meant lots of free coconuts for us.

 These two were always waiting across the street for us in the morning to give us a 50 cent ride to work.

The big green building on the right is where I worked.  Singapore International School is it's name although there is nothing Singaporean or International about it.  I taught purely Khmer students aged from 12 to 25, all at either the pre-intermediate or intermediate English level.  I asked why the school would have such a name and the director told me they had just never bothered to change the sign... fair enough.

Well.  My last post was on April 5th.  Kind of hard to believe really.  Don't quite know how to sum up three and a half months in one post so I'm not even going to try.  The important thing is that I have been so happy living here.  But I feel it is time to move on.  I will post more on what it was like to live here but at the moment I would like to tell you what's going on in my life now.

Back in March I had two couchsurfers come and stay at my house in Phnom Penh.  If you aren't familiar with couchsurfing it is a website travelers can join to find other likeminded people and sleep on their couches.  It is how me and my friend Wolfgang traveled around Europe for a month.  I know it sounds like a very iffy arrangement and that's exactly what I thought before joining but there are full profiles like on Facebook and people vouch for each other and leave references so the information is all there.  But important than safety is finding someone you want to hang out with and who shares the same interests as you.

So I received a message from a couple traveling together (Joel from the USA and Nathalya from Brazil) asking if they could sleep on my couch.  They ended up staying for a week with us and fun times were had by all.  They were very very lovely to have around, Nathalya made some amazing feijoada (an incredible bean and meat stew) and Joel schooled me in the snooker hall across the road.  These two cats are important because they are currently living just outside of Melbourne, where I'll fly to next Wednesday on the 25th of July.

The idea to go to Australia was actually planted in my head in December on a bus from Bangkok to Poipet by an Italian man who had gone to Australia, bought a van, and drove from farm to farm picking fruit and making a lot of money.  So there is option #1 for me, working on farms picking grapes, apples, stonefruits, strawberries, and the like.  But then there was a man from North Carolina named Jeremy who ended up living with Simon and I for the month of May.  He was working on his thesis here helping an NGO dealing with water management and environmental awareness in the province of Prey Veng.  Before coming here he had been living in Brisbane, Australia and had made many contacts there, one of whom told him about a construction job that would be available shortly in Melbourne.  So there is option #2 for me, working a construction job in Melbourne.  But here's where Joel and Nathalya come into the equation!  They are currently living in Apollo Park, just south of central Melbourne but are finding the cost of living too expensive there so they are looking into moving slightly further outside the city to a small town on the coast called Apollo Bay.

This week they are driving down there to investigate a house (for three?) and to confirm that the jobs they heard are available there are actually available (for three?).  So there lies option #3, move in with two likeminded people with the idea of spending as little as possible and saving up to see more of the world.  There's just too much of it out there.

Why keep traveling?  Because how can I possibly know where I want to live if I haven't seen all my options?

And here's this just for fun...

Building a House in Kampot

During my stay in Kampot I met some people at my guesthouse who invited me to come help build a house for a woman and her family out in the provinces.  I thought it sounded like a great way to spend the day so I hopped on the back of a motorbike and off we went.  The person organizing the construction was a woman named Babs who runs two schools in the rice fields for the children of the farmers.  She told me that one of her students came in asking for rice because he was so hungry.  She asked him to take her to his home and when she saw the state of it decided that something needed to be done.

I found the process of building a house to be quite fun.  The bamboo framework had already been laid out so our job was to build the walls.  You start by weaving bamboo leaves together in small segments like in the picture below:

Next, you arrange the segments of leaves into lines and tie them to the framework using wire and a special wire tying technique that was taught to us.  The area can get very windy so we had to be sure that the wall could resist the forces of nature.  Another important thing to consider was the rain, so the lines of leaves had to be placed close together so that they overlapped at the thickest point.

Here you can see the building of a table using strips of bamboo nailed to more bamboo.

Here is a picture of the inside of the house.  As you can see it is very minimal, a bed, a table, rice, water...

...and the most important, a chicken.

 New friends carrying more bamboo to finish the table.

After lots of work a refreshing beverage was in order, so one of the locals climbed up the coconut tree with a machete and chopped us down a treat.

 

The finished wall and entire house at the end of the day.

Before leaving, Babs (standing next to me) had us hold up a sign the children from her school had made wishing all the followers of her blog a Merry Christmas.  I took this picture from her blog, which you can be seen here: http://cambobabs.skynetblogs.be/

I enjoyed this day very much and was in the best of company.  It's beautiful to think that giving just a days time can make an immense difference in someone's life, even just an hour accomplished so much with all of us working together.

But most rewarding of all was the beautiful feet tan I received from wearing Toms in the sun all day.  What a beautiful sight no?

Then back to Phnom Penh for a delightfully polluted sunset.

Teaching in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Wow, one whole month since my last post.  I guess that's just the way things go sometimes.  Well, after Ayutthaya I went back to Bangkok for a few days, which solidified my urge to go spend time immersed in nature.  So I decided to spend a week camping in the jungles of Khao Yai National Park.  It was an absolutely beautiful experience full of hikes, elephant tracking, wild animals, and nothing but time to take it all in.  I have plenty of footage that I'm currently editing so I'll hold off on posting pictures but I assure you that it was a very memorable week.

At the moment I'm in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, living in an apartment with a man from London named Simon and teaching Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate English at a school very close to my home.  Quite a change of pace you say?  I would have to agree.  Let me explain.

The idea was first planted in my head in December when I was talking to some foreigners living here and making a living by teaching English.  That was the moment that I became aware that a real possibility even existed.  I left Cambodia and made my way to southern Thailand to meet Hadley and talked about it with her as a next step I was considering.  Phnom Penh left a very good impression on me so I felt a strong draw to return there.  Being able not only to break even but actually save some money while living abroad in Southeast Asia just sounded too good to be true.  So I returned to Phnom Penh, checked into a Guesthouse and began my search for a job.  It was at the Guesthouse that I met Simon, who as it turns out was doing exactly the same thing.

In one morning a dropped off my Resume (or CV) with a smile at ten different schools, trying to talk to anyone beyond the front desk and leave a good impression as I went.  A few days later I received a call to come in for an interview, at the end of which they told me to come in on Saturday to pick up my schedule.  With jobs secured, Simon and I decided to join forces and go house hunting (also done by motorbike taxi).  We found a very nice place that came fully furnished so we jumped on it.  It was especially convenient for me because I can walk from home to work.  So within the span of few days a few great leaps were made and I now call Phnom Penh my home.  Here's a picture of me sitting in our living room wearing my teacher clothes:

I don't know how long I'll be here or where I'll go next.  We'll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Playing with HDR Photography Ayutthaya

HDR Photography or High Dynamic Range Photography is the process by which multiple pictures are taken at different exposure levels and then combined afterwards on a computer.  The aim is to create a picture that contains a higher level of contrast than would be possible by taking a single picture.  The result looks somewhat surreal, like a ghostly painting.

The day I was taking pictures happened to be very overcast with a gray sky which is not ideal for taking pictures in general but especially, as I've now learned, for playing with HDR photography but here's my results.

Here are the three pictures at different exposure levels.

And here's the tone-mapped HDR imaged.

Below are four more HDR images of Ayutthaya, just for fun.