One Big Fish

I've been diving in Koh Tao for a few days now. At the second dive today I saw my first Whale Shark, one of the big attractions here. Whale Sharks are the biggest fish in the world, although at @ 20 feet long this one was only mid-sized. This picture is the only one that came out well.



I have a few more pictures that are worth posting. Look for them in the next day or so.

Farewell To Laos

I ended up staying in Vang Vieng for a week longer than I'd planned (surprise), but am back in Bangkok now.

To wrap up the Laos portion of the trip, here are a few more miscellaneous pictures Vientiane and Vang Vieng.



And, here are a couple HDR shots from Vang Vieng. Probably not my best efforts at HDR but I was in the mood to play around with it again.



Tomorrow night I leave for Koh Tao to start the diving portion of the trip. I'll be diving around southern Thailand for the next seven weeks, after which I head to Indonesia for two months.

I'm sure the blog has been spectacularly uninteresting for the past few weeks. Hopefully I'll be updating more regularly from now on though. Prepare to get sick of pictures of fish.

Rockets

This past Friday was the Rocket Festival in Vang Vieng. This is an annual event where the locals fire off large home-made rockets as part of a celebration relating to the upcoming monsoon. The festival started in late morning and went on all day. The rockets are pretty large and the better ones probably traveled well over a mile so you could see them from everywhere in town.

Anyway, the festival was a good excuse to finally break out my camera so here are a few pictures.



Also, while I'm at it, here's an artsy crop of an picture I took on the bus from Vientiane to Vang Vieng my first day here. The full picture is rather crappy but I kind of like the cropped view.



Other than that there's not much to report. I'm back in Vientiane for the day to get a visa for Thailand so that I can stay longer than the 2 weeks they give you at the border. Assuming the visa is done on time I'm heading back to Vang Vieng tomorrow.

This Place Looks Familiar

In Vang Vieng. I decided not to stick around in Bangkok and rushed straight up here the day after I arrived. Not much of interest to say yet - I pretty much crashed as soon as I got here after the 2 days of travel with only a short break in Bangkok.

I'll be here for two weeks before returning to Thailand to start diving my way around the south. I wouldn't count of too much posting from Vang Vieng since I've seen it all before.