And I'm back from the Adang Archipelago and comfortably in Chiang Mai, settling in for the home stretch. The course was amazing. It was absolutely beautiful, in the prototypical tropical paradise sort of way, i.e. white sand, turquoise water, vibrant reefs, normalized social/ecological oppression of marginalized indigenous groups by the state and tourism, you know, everything we love. The time basically broke down as follows:

For the first week or so, we were on Lipe, which is kind of the central, most developed island of the archipelago. We stayed at one of the twenty-odd bungalow resorts there, living a pretty comfortable life laying in hammocks, eating at restaurants, snorkeling in spare time, and completing an ethnography of the island. The ethnography was really interesting, and entailed walking around for a couple days talking to resort owners, tourists and school teachers, and also the actual native inhabitants of the archipelago, the chao lay (meaning "people of the sea"). Their story is basically this: they were former sea nomads, wandering around the archipelago for most of the century, until the national park moved in and decided to declare the region a protected marine national park, and forced the chao lay to give up their maverick ways and straighten up (including a forced relocation to Lipe, where the vast majority now live). With the arrival of tourism about twenty years ago, there was all sorts of complicated land deals made, a tricky and quite unfair situation when you're dealing with a culture who had previously had no concept of land ownership. So long story short, the chao lay got kind of pushed into the center of the island, where they now live, and work for the tourism industry as boat drivers/smiling simple natives during the tourism season, and as fishermen during the non-tourism season. So as for that ethnography... that's basically what we learned, in addition to what it's like in general for them all living there, what they do, who they work for, what they think of tourism, what they think of the environment, all that. It was a fun exercise, considering we had to conduct it all in Thai.

Moving on.

After Lipe, we spent the remaining ten days or so touring the rest of the archipelago. We visited three other beaches, each of which we reached via kayak. Once there, we spent the days snorkeling and burning and the nights making funny voices and praying the tide wouldn't steal our tents. One day we went to the one remaining group of chao lay who are still trying to make their lives by wandering about the islands and collecting things and fishing ("no tourism for us!" they say). This was probably my favorite day, as I got to help a man build a temporary house out of skinny trees (temporary because they will only be at that site for the next three months and then move on), which included having a great conversation about how illegal it all is, and then a romp through the mountain side in flip flops helping him cut down some more wood and carry it back.

As far as snorkeling, we saw some really stunning reefs (minus big fish, which have all been fished out). I saw, in no particular order: a black tip reef shark, a cuddle fish (a cousin of the squid), a puffer fish (un-puffed), bat fish, butterfly fish, a ray, legions of hermit crabs, clown fish ("Nemo" fish), giant clams, sea urchins, star fish, enormous jelly fish, parrot fish, barracuda, pipe fish (like an un-curled sea horse), and probably more that I can't recall right now.

As far as kayaking, it too was really really fun. The last paddle was easily the most exciting, and probably the most physically challenging thing I've done here. It was a four hour day, with a lunch break in the middle, that included two major channel crossings. When crossing these channels, we had to withstand not only a pounding current, but intense winds that were making three-foot white caps, pushing us in exactly the direction we did not want to go. These crossings took a couple hours each or so, which was spent paddling our little hearts out and getting completely soaked by waves and spray, and playing twenty questions with Nick (who was in a double with me), in which we picked the following people: King Tut, Rasputin, Marie Curie and Peggy Guggenheim.

And that was that.

I'm working on changing my pictures over to another picture website, and the internet is slow here anyway, so you'll have to wait until probably next week before I get them up and going.

And like I said, homestretch. My program officially ends as of midnight tonight and I'll be spending the rest of the time living with six people in a four person room and working at my former internship site. I leave March 6.