Live-a-board, life on boat..

"I'm lying on the deck of the vessel,
closing my eye and facing the ocean; over the day we were studying her life and herself in a bright, scientific way;
under the starry night now I'm all alone,
no more a scientist but a little child she embrace,
indulging myself in her gentle sway... "

I was 19 when I wrote this in my "I-am-such-a-(eat-sh*t)-teenage-innocent" diary. This little paragraph entitled 'One of my dream', listed together with the rest of my innocent 'I-believe-I-can-fly' type of day-dreams.

C'mon for god's sake, it is such a shame to have this sh*t stuff reread and published here, but trust me, I just need to refer this back when, 6 years after that, I suddenly recalled it when I was really 'lying on the deck' of a boat 'under the starry night', and feeling the 'gentle sway' of the ocean, when I was having my 4D4N diving trip live-a-board during my last holiday.

The feeling was indescribable when you suddenly realized you ARE IN what you dreamt for. Look, this is not a simple 'dream-come-true' thingy, I felt more than that... .. it was like 'I-wrote-it-once-in my-diary' type of excitement, certainly much much more more more than 'I-'ve-ever-had-a-dream-come-true' stupid stuff....

Whatever.

Here we go. My life living 4D4N on a dive boat, in the middle of Andaman Sea, west coast of Thailand. The dive sites are located in Similan Islands National Park, and no mystery: 'Similan' is exactly our 'Sembilan' -- Similan Islands simply means nine islands they have all together in the national park.

..and since this is a dive trip, my life on boat is really simple. As our time table indicated, basically we dived early in the morning, came out of the water, breakfast, rest, sleep; then dive again, then came out of the water, lunch, rest, sleep; then dive, out water, tea-break, rest, sleep; dive, out, dinner, rest, sleep --- and the life cycle went on.

Sleeping was particularly important and taking up most of our time on boat during the first 2 days. Initially I blamed on the 'gentle sway' of the boat, but then I figured out it was because everytime we dived deep down, we were 'intruded' by saturated nitrogen gas in our blood and that made us sleeeeeepy.

Anyway, the resting part took over the sleeping time when all of us started to live with those nitrogen. We do some homeworks (yup, divers have homeworks to do), play chess, edit underwater pictures, study marine lives, play guitar, watch movie, mingle, learn foreign languages etc while we were resting.

The life on boat is such a leisure as we only found ourselves active and busy underwater. We even did not care about knowing what's going on out there. Live-a-board is a perfect way to cut-off from reality, and the cut-off becomes even complete when you jump off the boat and dive right in, straight to the ocean floor.

... and there's something clinking my mind after this trip. When you really ignore how today's world is shaped by all the 'ambitious' world leaders out there, when you really just shut your ear from listening to all the polluted news sending through any kind of mass media, having a common life on a boat with Germans, Thais, Japanese, Malaysians, Swedish, Finnish, Spaniard, and Australian, you'll feel that we are just a same species called Homo Sapiens, nationality and cultural sensitivity simply mean nothing. (...and yes, variation in languages only help to generate funnier and funnier spontaneous jokes).