GAYA ISLAND (of PARADISE, as we named it!)

6/22 – Day 1 in Gaya Island

 

This morning Serena and I woke up at 7:30 in KK and rushed to be on the bus by 8AM.  We made it!  The bus took us to the University of Malaysia Sabah, where we got three lectures:  one about the Borneo Marine Research Institute, one about carbon footprints in aquaculture, and one about Harmful Algal Bloom.  None of us really approved of any of the lecturers… they didn’t seem to know what they were talking about very much.  Universities here are so different from universities in the states. 

 

Then we went to the university aquarium, which was pretty cool.  I got to hold a horseshoe crab! It was huge and heavy with a tail like a stick of metal.  And slimy.  But its underside was SO cool.

 

Then we had to stop at immigration so that the Southeast Asian students could get their visas extended.  I listened to Serena’s ipod with Molly and took a nap.  Mmmm.  J

 

Then we stopped for lunch.  We found a bakery!  Had a real sandwich, and mini-donut and mini-brownie.  Yummm, recognizable food.  We also found a grocery store and got some dried fruit and Oreos.  It was a nice afternoon, because we’ve got a week of Malaysian food ahead of us.

 

Then it was off to the dock to leave for the island!!!!  The dock itself was gorgeous, and we could already see the beautiful turquoise color of the water in the bay and a bunch of sergeant general fish swimming around (5 stripes -- that’s how you know it’s a sergeant general!).  Then we boarded these two super fun fast boats that took us the 15 minute, 8km ride out to the island.  It is GORGEOS here.  The boat pulled up to a big boardwalk like the one that goes into the ocean in Greece in the Meryl Streep version of Mama Mia.  (Yeah, we’re listening to Abba right now, so that’s the first comparison I thought of, lol.)  There’s a little building here that has toilets and a place to eat, and the rest of the island is beach and jungle, so we’re sleeping in tents on the beach! J  It is AMAZING.  SO beautiful.  The sunset today was GORGEOUS, AND there was a huge rainbow that got pinker and pinker as the sun went down.

 

But before the sun set, we did tons of cool stuff!  As soon as we were settled in our tents, we changed into our swimsuits and got in the water!  The snorkeling here is INSANE.  And Dad, that underwater camera was SOOOO not a waste of money!  I can’t wait to show you the pictures I have!  Here’s a list of the amazing things I’ve seen so far:  sea star (turquoise!  I held it!), sea cucumber (I held that too!  So soft, yet slimy, with these tiny little suction cups that suck onto your hand – SO cool!), clownfish swimming around in their anemones (I got some AMAZING pictures of these guys – they’re territorial, so they don’t run away when you get close enough to take a picture – they stand their ground and sometimes even come closer!  Cam says they bite so I should watch out, but I was having an awesome time! J), sea urchins (HUGE BIG BLACK SPIKEY THINGS!  And you can hear this faint crunching sound as you swim, and apparently that’s the sea urchins chewing on pieces of coral!), razor fish (they swim vertical!  It’s so cool!), a spawning sea cucumber SPAWNING (yeah, I didn’t touch this one, because it was stuck straight up from the bottom of the reef squirting sperm all over the place!  Nuts!), cone snails (they’re poisonous!  Watch out!), lionfish (SO pretty, but they sting, so I couldn’t get too close), a million different kinds of coral, a bunch of schools of fish, a fish that looked like a mini-swordfish, and a ton more.   It was an amazing day.  I could stay in that water all day long, and sometimes I’ll go 5 or 10 minutes without picking my head up out of the water – I don’t want to miss anything!  J  I love snorkeling… I love how there are a million things going on visually, and yet it’s so quiet except for the sound of your own breathing.  And you can hear yourself talk.  Yeah, I found myself talking to myself as I snorkeled.  “Oh, look at that!  Hey, that’s so cool!  Look over there!  This is so amazing!”  And nobody can hear me but myself!  I don’t know, I mentioned this to Jess and she laughed at me, but I think it’s really cool.  If you’re ever going to talk to yourself and give yourself little pep talks and words of inspiration, the ocean with a snorkel is the best place to do it!

 

Anyway, after we snorkeled, we changed and ate dinner.  (The food here is SO much better than it was at Lambir!  They had HAMBURGERS!  And amazing papaya – I love papaya, I’ve decided.  And mango.  But only the really fresh mango from the market.  Mmmm.)

 

Then we had a lecture from an employee of Sabah Parks (the agency runs the facilities were staying in).  He was also a sea turtle expert, so we learned a lot of cool things.  Then we watched some more Ten Commandments, and now I’m blogging, and soon it’s off to bed.  J

 

Some random things about Malaysia that I’ve noticed and have been meaning to mention: 

 

Here, there are no knives.  The utensils are a fork and a spoon, and it’s considered barbaric to stab things with your fork – the fork is only for pushing things over ONTO the spoon.  So you have your fork in your left hand and your spoon in your right hand, and you eat that way.  EVERYTHING.  Even chicken off the bone.  It’s super hard.

 

This is DEFINITELY not an egalitarian country.  I noticed it as soon as I stepped onto the Malaysia airlines plane.  All the stewardesses had the exact same hairdo and insane amounts of makeup on.  And then I realized that ALL employed women look like that.  Secretaries, waitresses, pretty much any desk job – it’s all women, and they are all dressed up and have their hair and makeup done like china dolls.  They’re definitely dehumanized and objectified.  It’s really sad.

 

Being an American here is like being a pop star sometimes; the rest of the time, it’s like being the nerdy kid in class that everyone teases.  No joke.  Whenever we go into a store in a shopping mall – especially clothing stores – the clerks start snickering immediately.  They talk to each other in Malay, and occasionally we hear the word “American,” and there’s lots of laughter.  But then other times – like when you go into an empty dance club on a Saturday night – you’re totally the belle of the ball.  Or when you go for a run in the city.  Yeah, I guess not many girls go running in the city in shorts and sneakers, but the ones that do – the American ones, at least – get the Malaysian version of cat calls a million times over.  The guys don’t speak English and don’t know what they’re saying, so they say things like, “Hallo!  I love you!” and “Hallo!  I see you before!”  It’s kind of creepy but kind of hilarious.

 

There are cats EVERYWHERE.  The people who ran Lambir Hills National Park had like 7 of them, and they were always running around, even coming into our classroom.  And they’re SO friendly, not like American cats!  They come up to you purring and then roll onto their backs like dogs looking for a belly rub!  The people here have them, too.  Cats, cats, cats – they’re everywhere.  And their owners pick them up by the skin on their necks.  It puts them into this weird creepy trance.  Apparently it’s comforting, because that’s how wild cats’ mothers pick them up.  But it’s super weird to watch.

 

What else… I don’t know.  But I’m loving people-watching here.  Everything is different.  The way they treat their beggars is different (at the market, if someone gave money to a homeless lady, they bent down, looked her in the eye, and put the money straight into her hands – much different than tossing spare change into a cup in NYC), the way the kids play is different (often disturbingly so – one kid was using a stick as a gun and pretending to shoot his friend from behind a tree), their homes are different (clothes lines EVERYWHERE, kids constantly helping their parents with the housework, no windows – just holes in the walls and tin roofs)… everything is different.  It really is fascinating.

 

Anyway.  Tomorrow’s coral day!  The next day’s fish day!  Then a terrestrial day.  Then two days for our projects.  Then back to KK and off to Deramakot.

 

I feel so lucky to be here!  We’re on this tiny little GOREGOUS island in the middle of NOWHERE, and I never in a million years would have thought to ever come here if the circumstances weren’t what they are!  And as we’re learning, with the way people are treating the environment these days and the way rainforests are being burned for oil palm plantations and the way rising sea temperatures are killing all the coral reefs, this kind of beauty might not be around for much longer.  When I think about that, all these things – the ants in my bed, the horrible things happening to my digestive system, the mosquito bites and the leech bites – all of those issues seem even smaller than bugs on a windshield.  I feel so blessed to be here exploring it!  J J J  (Thank you, Mom and Dad, for making this and all the opportunities I’ve had possible!!!!!!  Love you and miss you so much!!!!)

 

Goodnight!

 

6/23 – Day 2 in Gaya

 

Wow.  This place is unbelievable.  It’s amazing.  Wow.  As soon as I woke up, the first thing I saw was the gorgeous view of the turquoise ocean through out ten window.  I had fallen asleep to the sound of the waves lapping up against the shore, after having a nice look at the beautiful stars – they twinkle more here, because the air in the atmosphere is hotter.  And I woke up instantly in an amazing mood because of the sound of the waves and the beauty of this place.

 

Then we had breakfast and I took some photos with Jess (we’re both photographers J).  Then we got a lecture on corals (their structure and stuff) from a guy that works here.  Then a quick break and a discussion on coral taxonic axes and stuff.  Then we were off into the water!  Gorgeous again – but more exhausting this time around.  I think it’s because I had my flippers on so I kept diving down.  The hour and a half in the water wore me out!  Luckily, it was lunchtime and then an hour’s worth of break.  AMAZING hour.  Lay down on the sand (it’s softer than Jersey shore sand, because it’s not ground up rocks, it’s ground up coral and macroalgae), then got hot, so I just floated on my back in the shallow water.  It was SO relaxing.  The water is SO warm here, and we’re in a bay, so it’s not rough.  It was like being lulled to sleep.  Awesome.

 

Then we talked about the families of corals that we were learning to identify.  Then it was off some new reefs, about a five-minute boat ride off the island.  It was AMAZING.  I saw a sea snake AND a sting ray!  And some people saw sea turtles, but I missed them.  L  Oh well, next time!  This was awesome!!

 

Then we came back and worked out on the beach, haha.  Abs, pushups, lunges, squats – good stuff.  It’s weird how low tide makes the water level SO low.  Crazy.  It was cool to watch while we worked out.

 

Then dinner (we told funny stories about home, it was fun), then a lecture that was basically just a slideshow from MS.  SO COOL!!!!  And in the middle of it we saw a wild boar out the window!  It was dark so we couldn’t see it too clearly, but it looked like an elephant in the dark because they have long beards that look like trunks.

 

Fish day tomorrow!  Good stuff.  J  Loving this!

 

6/24 – Day 3 in Gaya

 

Fun day!  Woke up – it rained last night, which was cool!  It’s neat to be in a tent on the beach in the rain – got breakfast.  Two lectures:  One on fish families by Cam, and one on schooling patterns in fish by a guy from Japan.

 

Then it was off into the ocean!  First we went to a mangrove, which was SO cool!!!  It’s a place where the ocean goes right into a forest, with no beach in between – these plants have adapted to grow straight out of mud, sand, and saltwater!  It was so cool to swim next to all the roots, fingering their way down through the water into the sand.  I’d never seen anything like it – and these things only exist in the tropics!  J

 

Then it was back to our regular bay to look for the fish that we had learned to identify.  Fun stuff, fun stuff.  J

 

Then lunch.  Then we saw some macaques!  A whole family of them was right on the edge of the forest, wandering onto our campsite!  Some of the locals started throwing them pieces of bread, which was bad, but they did come much closer, and I got some AMAZING pictures.  SO COOL.

 

Then a walk into the forest.  The trail here is MUCH easier to walk, but its’ also much more artificial, so you don’t see as much.  But we saw a TON of lizards.  Lucky Kristina – lizards are her focal taxon.  But no phasmidae for me.  L  Oh, well.  We are planning to go on a night walk soon, and that’s when we see them the most.  Too bad it rained tonight.

 

Anyway.  After the walk in the forest Kristina, Shana, Molly and I worked out.  Squats, glut-exercises, pushups, abs – it was intense.  Luckily, we jumped into the ocean right when we were done.  That was a SCARY experience.  We jumped in without even thinking about the fact that it was low-tide.  It was not until we were in the water that we realized that snorkeling at low-tide is both amazing and incredibly stupid.  It’s amazing because everything is just more densely packed together.  So the corals and fish are all SO close to you – they’re all around you!  The bad part is, the water level is SO low, and you’re just floating on the surface, so sometimes you can’t control it, but your stomach and chest are dangerously close to scraping against the reef – and scraping against the spiky sea urchins!!  It was TERRIFYING.  It made me SO claustrophobic.  We swam and swam and swam as carefully as we could out into deeper water.  Then when we wanted to come back in we were stranded!  It’s dangerous (and unhealthy for the ecosystem) to walk on the reefs – you could step on a stonefish and totally get your leg paralyzed or even amputated!  But we couldn’t swim back, because it was too shallow!  Luckily, one of the TFs walked by and we shouted to him and he showed us a way back where there was no reef and just sand.  Phew!  That was SO scary.

 

Then shower, then dinner, then a lecture on fungi.  Pretty cool.  Now we’re working on our project proposal for tomorrow.  YAY CLOWNFISH AND ANEMONES!!!!!  J J J

 

6/25 – Day 4 in Gaya

 

Wow.  What a day.  Packed with adventure.  Woke up, ate breakfast, got a lecture from Cam on how diversity between the forest and the ocean are related.  Then project presentations!  Douwe, Sreekar and I are doing clownfish; Christina, Molly, and Shana are doing the ecology of the ropes that tie the buoys together; Mindy and Le are doing hermit crabs; Alex, Andrew, and Serena are doing sea cucumbers; Jess and some people are doing butterfly fish… I forget the rest, but they’re all pretty cool.  J

 

Then it was off to do some sampling!  We went out to the prettier reef, and it was INTENSE!  The water was ROUGH!  Swells were up to 1 meter!  It was so hard to collect data, but it was fun – and Cam was freaking out like a nervous Dad, lol, and Douwe got yelled at for swimming out too far (not me, Mom!  Don’t worry!).  Then we came back in and I had a very interesting discussion over lunch with Cam’s wife, Shana, and Molly about religion.  Very interesting.  I wish Dita or Agri had been there.  Maybe next time.

 

Then it was back into the water to do more sampling.  By now it was low tide, so it wasn’t as rough, and we got lots of good data.  J  Douwe’s a great diver, I need to get him to teach me how to make your ears pop so I can stay down there longer…

 

Then we came back and had a break before dinner.  But during the break a huge windstorm came in and started blowing away our tents!  Everyone took a mad dash to the tents and tried to pin them back down – except Cam, who stood there laughing and taking pictures of us, lol.  Then someone found a snake under their tent!  Cam took pictures of us taking pictures of it, lol.  I got some AWESOME National-Geographic-type photos.

 

Then dinner.  Then a lecture about the Sabah Foundation.  Then a NIGHT SWIM!!!! Man, Dad, you told me I sound like Indiana Jones – I never felt more like Indiana Jones than I did tonight.  I was TERRIFIED to get into that water when it was pitch black out, it was low tide, AND it was raining and I was freezing!  But the water here is so warm it felt like a hot tub, and I hung onto Jess’s hand – she had the flashlight – and we saw some AMAZING things that are never out during the day!  Squirrelfish (pink and white stripes!  Beautiful!), cuttlefish (look like squids but they’re bioluminescent and translucent!  SO cool!  Cam poked it and it squirted ink!!!), Marine catfish, pufferfish, beautiful coral polyps that opened up – and we swam through a huge swarm of ctenophores.  Jess says a swarm of ctenophores is called a SMACK of ctenophores – so I swam through a SMACK of jellies!  They’re these tiny little jellyfish that you can see electrical pulses going through, and they’re really pretty – but not when there’s a swarm of a million of them!  It feels like swimming through tapioca pudding while getting STUNG a million times all over!!!  They’re just little stings, though – nothing like what Ross has on his back – but they certainly are annoying when they’re happening all over your body all at once.  Swimming in that warm water, feeling the cold rain beating down on your back, searching through the pitch black water and seeing the beam from the flashlight land on something incredible that I’d never seen before – that was an unbelievable experience.

 

Then we went on a night hike that was pretty lame.  Still no phasmids on this island L  But we did see a frog, a pit viper, some lizards, and a crazy disgusting centipede. 

 

What an awesome day!!!!  Here are some other random things that I want to remember:

 

Stonefish are CRAZY!  These huge fish that bury themselves in the sand and leave this one little thorn sticking out, so you can’t even see it, but if you step on it you could get so hurt that they might have to amputate your leg!  Cam says we probably walked past one 10 times already!  But that you have to be REALLY unlucky to step on one.  I don’t know, those odds freak me out.

 

Saw a crazy long flat fish.

 

Saw another stingray today!! It was moving SO fast, flapping its little wings, I couldn’t even get a picture!

 

It thunderstorms every night here, like clockwork.  SO COOL!  More lightening than thunder, and only a little rain.  It always starts right during the night lecture, which makes that more fun.  J

 

Good night!

 

6/26 – Day 5 in Gaya

 

Our last full day on Gaya Island certainly did not disappoint!  Woke up, ate breakfast, and sat in the beautiful tree that hangs over the water to read a little… aaaah.  J  Then it was off to a new reef to look for some anemones!  The reef was right in front of a resort with tons of Asian tourists, so that was funny… as if we don’t get enough of those at Harvard.  Doing field work with Douwe is so much fun… we were laughing the whole time, especially when a clownfish chased him almost two meters and he squealed like a girl (“For the humour effect,” he said, but really he just couldn’t control himself :-P).

 

Then we came back, took a little break, and went back into our reef in the bay.  Then it was lunchtime.  Then we analyzed data for FOREVER, and then it was back to the old new reef for our LAST SNORKEL HERE L L L.  But, that last snorkel CERTAINLY did not disappoint, because I got to see my first green sea turtle!!!  It was AMAZING!!!! I was determined to see one, I kept saying, “I’m not getting out of the water until I see a sea turtle,” and then 20 minutes one of the tourists who had overheard me called over, “Sea turtle!  Sea turtle!”  And then I yelled to the rest of the group, “Sea turtle!  Sea turtle!”  And it was a mad 20-person dash to check out the sea turtle.  I was SO close to it.  I was able to swim DIRECTLY ABOVE IT and see it wave it’s arms like angels’ wings; then I dove down to get a little closer and I could see it from the side, the platelets on its head, and the symbiotic fish swimming under its shell!  It was INCREDIBLE.  Then Douwe – the Harvard-Swim-Team show-off that he is – dove right down there and started following him.  The turtle noticed him and SHOT OFF – he went from a nice, slow, relaxed, beautiful pace to showing us that those things can move FAST!  He swam in a circle for a little bit trying to get away from Douwe, and then when Douwe ran out of breath and came up for air, he shot off into open sea.  Wow.  That was one of the most amazing experiences!!!

 

Then when we came back to the bay, Ross and MS let me and Douwe and Alex try breathing out of their scuba tanks.  It was SO cool (even though Cam got really mad and yelled at them later, because apparently we could have died since we’re not SCUBA trained or something… whoops).  I really want to get scuba certified now!  You can see so much more than you can see when you’re snorkeling and need to come up for air.

 

Then took a shower and we all watched the sunset together!  Beautiful and fun.  J

 

Then we had dinner and then we met THE COOLEST PEOPLE EVER.  I’m not even kidding, I think these are the coolest people, hands-down, in the world.  It’s a group of 14 adults from all over the world who got together and decided that they wanted to sail around Southeast Asia and Hawaii and record personal stories that show the effects of climate change – on REAL people, putting a face to an issue.  So they gave up the next 3 years of their lives and are in the middle of sailing across the world recording stories of the effects of climate change on island tribes and peoples.  They are SO COOL.  AND they are always looking for members of their crew, even if only for a little while, and they said that they would LOVE for me to join them over winter break and film their expedition, and I could TOTALLY make a VES project out of that.  I have their email addresses – looks like I found some potential (and pretty likely!) plans for winter break!

 

Now we’re all sitting here finishing our projects – presentations are tomorrow, and then, sadly, we leave this beautiful island.  Back to the city, then climbing Mt. Kinabalu.  Aaaah, so sad to leave, yet so excited to be going on a new and different adventure!  J

 

 6/27 – Leave Gaya, back to KK

 

Today we left our island paradise. L  It was so sad.  But first we presented our projects!  Douwe, Sreekar, and I proved that levels of aggression in anemonefish are species-specific, and that the Spine-Cheek Anemonefish is more aggressive than the False Clown Anemonefish.  And that colony size, anemone size, length of anenome’s tentacles, and the presence of juveniles are not statistically significant factors.  (Oh, well.  It was a really fun experiment.  J)  Then we heard quickly from a marine biologit from Scotland and about her work on dolphinids in Sabah and Hong Kong.  Very interesting.

 

Then we packed up, struck the tents, and got on the boats back to Borneo.  On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a delicious restaurant.  I drank coconut juice (yes, juice, not milk – that’s the stuff you get when you grind up the bark and press it) out of a fresh coconut; it was actually kind of gross, but pretty cool.

 

Back at the hotel, we all took a short break, and then Mindy, Le, and I took our first trip to a Malaysian movie theatre!  We saw Transformers, which I was not dying to see, but I really wanted to see what Malaysian movie theatres were like.   They were actually pretty similar to American movie theatres, except instead of candy they sell fish chips, and the large popcorn is quivalent to about half of an American small popcorn, and the seating is assigned.  OH, and you have to PAY to use the bathroom.  Yeah.  .20 ringgitts per flush, and add an extra .30 if you want toilet paper.  I have never paid to go the bathroom before.  That was weird.

 

Then we came back to the hotel, and now I’m loving internet connection!  Tomorrow’s another day off (I’m going to try to make it to the Sabah State Museum), and then Monday we leave to hike Kinabalu.  (Cam’s words:  “For some of you, this will be the highest and most diffiult climb of your life.  So stay out of the karaoke bars and get some sleep.”  Well, I knew that “some of you” DEFINITELY meant me, so I’m heading to bed ASAP!)  After Monday morning there’s a good chance I won’t have internet access until I get back!!  I miss you all!!!

 

G’night!