1-Year Lockdown

Food Martyrs

Since most of us can’t leave the compound, we love to complain about the food. Even more, we love to complain about the people who complain that the food is too expensive. Sure, $2.50 is so much to pay for breakfast when they have to bring it all in under sanitary conditions and hire Filipinos so that Osama bin Laden isn’t cooking for us. Sometimes, the mess hall shows sparks of greatness. Everyone remembers the day they had rainbow trout with garlic butter. But mostly, it is what a friend calls “food martyring”.

Food martyring is basically this: You go to the mess hall and look everything over. You don’t want to eat any of it, but at the same time there is no other option, and you have to eat. So you order the grilled cheese sandwich with purple Gatorade… again.

This being a government compound, we also love our acronyms. My current favorite is CAFÉ, also known as Hoochville. CAFÉ stands for Compound Across From the Embassy. I don’t know if I’m more tickled that they felt they needed an acronym for “across the street” or that they added the accent aigu.

Gurkha Porn

So I’m sitting here in my shipping container home (lovingly referred to as a hooch), and the internet is out so this will get posted later. I’ve got my Wii, but I’m stuck on the water temple in Zelda and I need to get to the walkthrough, which requires the Internet. I keep getting 10 copies of each text message that comes in but I can’t turn off the phone because the hooch has no other alarm clock. I’m eating a can of salted cashews I bought yesterday because the PX is closed for inventory, even though the sign on the door says the stock check was supposed to be tomorrow. Somehow, I broke my iPod in transit.

But this is all whinging. The hooch has AC, hot water, and a refrigerator. There might be only two places to eat, but they are cheap and have a decent selection for Kabul. I’ve got a small TV with Discovery, the History channel, and AFN even if the DVD player is missing and so is the remote. As someone said this morning, “at least it’s a nice prison.”

So while I hardly ever mention my job in these posts, it’s all I have here. I can’t leave the compound. Tomorrow, I’ll have some pictures of my hooch. But on to the topic of the day: Gurkha porn. As you can tell, Kabul is one of those places without much to do. We (or rather our contractor) hire Gurkha guards, and they are great at their jobs. But they are also smart enough to figure that our filtering software can’t recognize Nepali. But we do get reports at who is using the most bandwidth, and we go after those people because our links are slow enough as it is. HoochNet, which is our Internet-only network for the residences, has no such restrictions. So my day consisted of cleaning workstations that had illicit downloads.

Fished Out

I went diving on Green Island in February 2006 and was struck by the lack of sealife. I assumed that in the summer things would be better. I can now say definitively that it is not. The only fish left in Taiwan are those small enough to swim through a net. It's disappointing to see overfishing on this scale, and I'm not convinced anyone will wake up in time to save what is left.

Lanyu (Orchid Island) is the larger but lesser-known of the two inhabited islands off the Southeast coast of Taiwan. Six of us went down for a three-day weekend to see what it was all about. There are no direct flights into either Green Island or Orchid Island. One must fly to Taitung and then either take a 25 minute flight on a turboprop or a ferry. It is a 1.5 hour ferry ride to Green Island and 3 hours to Orchid Island. We took the flight, arriving at 1:30 on Saturday. It was too late to schedule any diving, so we had lunch and rode scooters around the island. The island itself is beautiful, with lush green mountains and a rocky coast. That same rocky coast makes for great visibility when diving, with little silt or runoff to cloud the water.

The first dive we did on Sunday morning was a shore dive with a nice swim-though cavern. I bought a new underwater camera housing and flash so I took pictures of almost anything trying to get it dialed in. The other four members of our group are not certified and did an introductory dive, with varying results. Sunny and her boyfriend Pity went first, with Pity being a natural. Michelle had problems equalizing, and Iris took a while to get comfortable. We went back to the guest house for lunch and Vera and I got ready for our afternoon boat dives, during which I got thoroughly sunburned.

The dive sites themselves were fantastic. Nice hard and soft corals, interesting geography, a good combination of pinnacles, walls, and a few wrecks although we didn't have time to do any wreck diving. Unfortunately, the sea life is so depleted that there isn't much to see other than small reef fish, and I think my photos demonstrate that. Taiwan really needs to set up a massive no fishing zone around Green Island and Orchid Island if they ever want to attract foreign tourists. With no fishing, it will still take 10-15 years to recover. Even if they did, who knows if they would enforce a ban? As we returned to port, a local fishing boat was returning. They had caught maybe a dozen fish big enough to sell, and 2 dozen that were undersized. Rather than throw the small fish back, they kept them to eat themselves. No wonder.