Great White Cage Diving Video

After nearly four months, I got around to uploading our great white cage diving video to YouTube.  It would have been more exciting if there had been an underwater camera, but it's better than nothing.

Some highlights:

• 0:00 - 3:20 Our group gets into the cage and we have a handful of close encounters.
• 1:40 Our young friend Will is trying to push his self-made chum away from us.
• 6:15 This is me right after I threw up.
• 7:23 You can barely see the splash from a great white jumping out of the water, followed by birds scavenging leftover seal pieces.  We had a much better view of this in person, and I screamed in excitement like a nine year old getting a Wii for Christmas.

Warning: Unless you're a twenty-year-old European, you probably want turn off the sound.

Puppet Show

Our last night in Vietnam, we took in in a Vietnamese water puppet show.  This traditional art form originated close to 1000 years ago on flooded rice paddies in North Vietnam.  Even though we couldn't understand any of the narration, we still enjoyed it for the most part.  I'm glad, though, that its one hour runtime wasn't any longer, as I was starting to get fidgety.

My favorite part was a dan bau solo during the musical prelude:

Puppets gone fishing:

Pictures from South Vietnam

Here are most of the pictures that should have made it into the last post.  If anyone has any ideas on how to avoid getting viruses when using computers at internet cafes, I'd love to hear them.

Boat ride from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Chau Doc, Vietnam

Shotover Jet

Let me start off by saying that I am in no way embarrassed or ashamed of the fact that I did not bungy jump.  It's simply not something I am interested in doing and I do not see the point in spending a lot of money to do something I don't want to do.  I rappelled 100m, I think I proved I can handle heights when necessary.

I do, however, enjoy a little adrenaline rush and wanted to partake in at least one of the many crazy activities that are abundant in Queenstown (you cannot walk down the street without seeing at least a few people paragliding overhead.)

Due to time constraints, rafting and river sledging really weren't options.  So I decided to go with Queenstown's original adrenaline rush: jetboating.  These types of boats were invented in New Zealand in the '50s to explore the shallow, braided rivers that are common here.  They can reach speeds of 80km/h in water only four inches deep, and can turn on a dime.  Watch the video to get a taste of what Jeff and I experienced during our thrilling ride on the Shotover River.  And yes, we did come as close to the rocks as it looks.

Sorry, Mom, but I Had to Try It

More in the full post, including pictures

More on Hokitika Gorge

For the first time on this website, I'm posting a video.  We'll try to this more going forward if we get video of interesting things, but for this first time, I'm just trying to break the ice.  We took this video of the Hokitika Gorge because of the bird calls, which you can still hear, but don't sound as pretty as they did in person.