PHOTO GALLERY 5

Looking back on this site, I was long on words and short on photos.  Rather than burden you with another 6,000 words, here's a grab bag of photos of some interesting things that didn't fit anywhere else.

Lest you think I was bullshitting you about the local fauna, here are a couple of the critters that were typical to find in the house.  For purposes of scale, that's a standard 2 1/2" piece of doorway molding in the lower right hand corner of the photo of the gecko.  That means the little bugger is about 9 inches head-to-tail.   They tended to hide under and behind things in the kitchen and scare the crap out of you by skittering away suddenly when you moved something.  But they were cute, so it was ok.  That monster on the right is a different story, though.  These things tended to hang out in the bathroom and hide behind the towel rack.  It was great fun to reach out of the shower for a towel and see one of these come scrambling out.  What a great way to wake up in the morning.

In an effort to make this site somewhat educational, here's our anthropology department.  This is a typical bai, the traditional "men's house."  Each village had one, and it was used as a central meeting hall, and . . . um . . . {cough}brothel{cough}.  After a battle, the winning village would kidnap young women from the loser and put them to work as prostitutes in the bai.  (The detail photo in the center shows the naked woman that was painted on bais as a kind of "billboard.")  On the up side, serving as a bai girl was often a way for women to earn money for their families and meet a husband, as there was no social stigma attached to serving as a bai girl.  The photo on the right shows some of the paintings on the inside rafters. Figuring out what it's all supposed to represent is an exercise left to the viewer.  Bais were the ultimate prefab buildings, often created on the premises of a bai-builder elsewhere and brought to their destination piece-by-piece.  The pieces were notched to fit together like Lincoln Logs, and didn't rely on nails or other fasteners.

Perhaps I've been derelict in not focusing enough on "island-y" pictures.   After all, this is the tropics.  So here's a handful of goodies to make you jealous.  Feel free to right click on any of them and use them as desktop wallpaper, so you can eat your heart out every time you boot up your computer.

View of some Rock Islands from the Hotel Nikko in Koror

A Rock Island that has weathered into a natural arch. 

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