Winter Paddling near Las Vegas

The weather has turned cold in Southern Nevada, the kayak tour business, near Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, has slowed. This is actually our favorite time to paddle from Hoover Dam as the hot springs are wonderful when the air is cool.

What we consider cold isn't all that bad as it stays above freezing most of the time. The sunny days, with the temps sometimes getting into the 70's, actually feel warm, especially for someone who went to school in Nebraska.

Another great reasons for visiting Black Canyon this time of year are that there are few people on the river for a nice wilderness experience.

Desert Adventures is using this slow period to sell used tour and rental boats to make way for the new canoes and kayaks coming in the spring. These boats are a great deal as they sell for half of the retail price of a new one. The boats have had many trips down the Black Canyon of the Colorado river and on Lake Mead but have lots of life left for a private owner.

Our store is a 1647A Nevada Highway in Boulder City, Nevada 89005. Phone number is (702)293-5026 email: info@kayaklasvegas.com.

Flying, Lake Mead, Colorado River

My friend Joe Kahl and I flew a Cessna 170B borrowed from friend Doug Mueller to Pearce Ferry today. Joe works with birds and other animals for the Bureau of Reclamation in Boulder City, Nevada. His field work takes him along the Colorado River between Lake Mead and Yuma, Arizona.

Joe also hosts an American folk music program called patchworks on Sunday afternoons with KUNV 91.5 for the university of Nevada-Las Vegas radio station.

We flew over Iceberg Canyon and ended up at Kingman for breakfast. The airport restaurant is a popular place to fly into for a meal. We met with up with Paul Gaines that owns a composite aircraft repair shop at the Kingman, Arizona airport.

Angkor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia

We flew into Siem Reap, Cambodia from Bangkok on an atr72, the flight was less than an hour and uneventful. We processed through immigration by getting a visa at the airport, we forgot to get a passport size photo for the visa but they took care of that for an extra $2 usd.

It's interesting that everything priced here is in U.S. dollars, they take the local currency but there's no need for it. Sometimes you get the local currency as change. We had a one hundred dollar bill, a lot of money in Cambodia that was hard to spend, so best to bring $20 bills or smaller.

We had our hotel, the viroth, arrange transportation and our car and driver was waiting for us when we were done with immigration and customs. The hotel is moderately priced, the rooms and service is very good. They don't have a tour desk so we went to the neighboring soria moria hotel. The staff there was great and we booked a full day tour of the Angkor area with them.

The next morning we had breakfast at the viroth at 7 a.m. then met our tour guide and driver, then off to the temples in a car that I think was a toyota camry. Our driver didn't seem to speak much english but the tour guide's english was outstanding as was his knowledge of the area and it's history. He reminded me of our guides at desert adventures in Las Vegas who do a great job for us day in and out.

Our driver Tony and guide Lee took us to Angkor Wat first. The temple was originally built in the 12th century as a hindu temple, it's now Buddhist with two monasteries. It took hours to go through the temple as it's very large. Our guide explained the stories that were carved into the stone walls of the temple, mostly of battles fought and folklore. One wall was about the sea of milk story of hindu creation.

Much restoration work is in progress, some of the damage was from natural causes such as water, other damage, bullet holes and artillery hits, were obviously man made. The blocks of stone are quite large and heavy so the work must be very difficult as building the place must have been in the 12th century. Holes were drilled into the blocks to insert pieces of wood so that elephants could drag them from the quarry from a quarry 40 km from the northeast. More info on the history and construction can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat

We visited another temple that was used for the filming of tomb raider, had lunch then visited Angkor Thom, the big city. There were once a million people living within the 3 km square area. 

The temple we visited there is called bayon. It was very beautiful with many stone buddha faces all over the building. It was later converted into a hindu temple and many of the buddha images were destroyed or converted to hindu gods. It's interesting that the large faces remained mostly intact.

We took the next morning off and spent lunchtime at the Angkor Museum. The museum was well done and worth a couple of hours to see the all the great art work and displays on the history of the area.

Diving in Thailand

We traveled to koh phangan island in the gulf of siam, thailand to do some diving. My wife Pam is a new diver, I haven't done much diving since high school in the 1970's so we were looking for an easy but interesting place to dive.

We flew United Airlines from Las Vegas to Bangkok via San Francisco and Tokyo. The new business class bed seats are pretty awesome slept well on the flights. From Bangkok to Ko Samui on Bangkok Airways then a ferry to Ko Phangan. There are two ferries that run to the island, a normal one that leaves from a dock near the airport and a faster catamaran ferry that is a little longer bus ride to the dock. We took the normal boat to the island and the catamaran back. The cat was considerably faster but the longer bus ride made the travel time to the airport about the same.

Our first dive was at Ko Tao, the island just north of Phangan. We took the normal ferry and ended up diving off the big boat as it's used as a dive boat before it's next run to the South. There were many divers and even more snorkelers but our small group of 5 including instructor Don Dunlop were able to find an area we could explore without too many divers. I was amazed that the coral in Thailand seemed darker and more intricate than the ones in Hawaii. There are also many large sea anemone with clown fish living within.

Our next three days of diving was at Sailrock. We kept going back in hopes of seeing a whale shark. There seemed to be millions of fish, so many that you couldn't see the some of the other divers in the area through them. One of the videos that Don shot of our dives is at http://www.youtube.com/user/lightwatertv#p/a/u/2/i5RFLBYXI1E

Some of the fish that we observed were groupers, lion fish, clown fish, and barracudas. One barracuda looked like it was 2 meters long, the groupers were very large as well. Don is a great instructor with photography as well as diving and I learned much about shooting pictures underwater from him.

In the future, we would like to dive the nearby national park and the areas out of Phuket.

Ko Phangan's north end is very quiet and a great place to relax, the hotels and beaches are very nice, we would like to go back again.

Tourist?

Our friend Lynda who is working with the Peace Corps in Thailand said that were "doing the tourist thing". I replied that we are tourists, so we booked an all day tour yesterday on Ko Phangan island in the Gulf of Siam.

Pam got to drive me around on an elephant. It was amazing that such a large powerful animal can be so gentle. The elephant walked up to me and I hugged his trunk as suggested by the Mahat (elephant trainer). Pam rode on the neck of our elephant, named Zoe, with me in the seat on her back. She seemed very hungry as she wanted to stop and eat quite often.

When we were done, Pam fed an elephant a basket of bananas, they were eaten very quickly.

We also rented a pair of scooters rode around and went snorkeling. It's good to be able to get away from all we have going on at home. The hotel that we stayed at was on Salad Beach called Salad Hut. It's a great place, we had a beautiful air conditioned cabin just steps from the beach. http://www.saladhut.com/

There are a number of nice hotels and restaurants up and down the beach. We had dined at most of the places over nine days and enjoyed them all. Our favorite was on the south end of the beach up the hill. Cookies Resort had the best food that we had the entire trip and a great view as well. http://cookiessaladresort.resort.phanganbungalows.com/

Japan

Pam and I got to Japan to spend a day with my uncle. We were lucky enough to get a couple of lay-flat business class seats on the united 747-400 from sfo to nrt. Almost no turbulence for the entire flight, late summer and fall is a nice time to fly.

My uncle, who is a retired electrical construction company owner, picked us up at narita baggage claim and took us to a hotel in Itaka, Japan. The hotel was the itaka hotel and on a river in a rice farming area north of narita. We rode a boat on the river and soaked at the hotel bathhouse.

The next day we toured the large standing budahh near narita and a very nice shinto shrine not too far away from the hotel.

We took the 6:30 p.m. united flight to Bangkok and checked into the queens garden hotel near the airport for the night.

San Francisco to Tokyo

We're at San Francisco airport trying to fly space available to Tokyo. As airline employees that like to travel, we sometimes get stuck at an airport when the airplane is full. After factoring in extra nights at a hotel, it's sometimes cheaper to buy a full fare ticket. An advantage of space available is that you can change your mind about where and when you want to go. On this trip we are probably returning through Hong Kong instead of Tokyo but that may change if the flights out of hkg look like they're filling up.

We took the 6 a.m. flight out of Las Vegas giving us 4 hours between flights at sfo. We chose to take the early flight as the later flights didn't have as many open seats.

This three week trip will hopefully take us to Tokyo, Bangkok, Ko Phangan (island in the gulf of siam), Siem Reap (Angkor Wat, Cambodia), and Hong Kong before returning to Boulder City, Nevada.

The above shot is of a B777 parked at sfo scheduled to fly to Beijing.

Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites

I've had the pleasure of getting to know our neighbor Sandy Nelson who is known for creating 'let there be drums' made popular in the 1960's. He's really fun as he has a great sense of humor and an interesting take on life.

Sandy's latest project is called Sandy Nelson and the Sin City Termites. We have posted a youtube video with the first track of his new album as the sound track.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URuE_iSX74

Snorkeling Maui

Airline layovers are usually not long enough to allow scuba diving so it's been snorkeling on the Maui and Kona layovers. My friend Matt Ragan also of Boulder City and a pilot was vacationing on Maui with family, joined me one morning in the water near the makena boat ramp where a lot of kayak trips start.

We found a rocky cove with public access just north of the point near the boat launching area. Swam out to the five caves turtle town reefs that are popular with tourists. We only spotted one turtle but there were lots of fish, most interesting was a snowflake eel and barracuda.

I later read that if we wanted to see a shark this would be a good place. We didn't see any sharks, maybe next time.

Snorkeling in Hawaii

Hawaii is a great place to snorkel and I've been going out every chance I get. Last week near Kona we spotted a dozen or so sea turtles (honu in Hawaiian) while snorkeling. The local kayak operator wouldn't rent us kayaks due to the offshore winds so we swam out and had a great time anyway.

Grand Canyon West

This Saturday was the 21st anniversary of the opening of Grand Canyon West, the Hualapai Tribe's Grand Canyon viewing area on the west rim. My wife Pam who does some work with the Hualapai Tribe was invited to celebrate with them and I was allowed to tag along. It was an honor for us to join them in this celebration of a very spectacular and popular part of the Grand Canyon.

Pam's co-workers drove a company vehicle for two and a half hours to get to Grand Canyon West, we flew the super cub. Although the cub is one of the slowest airplanes ever built, it only took 36 minutes from Boulder City. The airport is very nice with a long paved runway and a cut out in the special use airspace.

A new road to west rim is being built and should shorten the drive considerably. It's worth the drive as the view from the rim is known worldwide for being incredible. We went out on the skywalk and had pictures taken sitting on the glass. If you have a problem with heights, there's steel below the glass on either side that we noticed a number of people walking over. We were happy to walk on the glass as it's very thick and looked safe.

A number of other tribes from around the country came to celebrate with them, some of them were dancers in full traditional costumes. Some of the dancing was very athletic and we enjoyed seeing them perform.

MDA

Just finished a stint in the mda lockup, didn't make bail but got more than halfway there. I'm a bit hoarse after running a full battery down on my mobile phone.

As someone that feels less than comfortable asking people for money, my thinking changed after meeting two youngsters that have muscular dystrophy, strength was developed to start calling for donations. Both are named Josh and were very pleasant to be with.

The worst physical problem for me is some back pain, after today no more whining about it. It would be tough to be in a body that doesn't cooperate with what we want.

Got a lot of small donations that were very generous considering the current economic climate.

The following link is to the donation page:  https://joinmda.org/2009bouldercity/lasjim