#so i just estimated a blanket day of filming to be on the conservative side

[dramas-vs-novels]

Do you think the finale episode of TBNW will come up with an original NC scene since they skipped the bigger ones already? Or is there one from the book they could still use? Also, it there’s no final NC, imma be pissed lol

There is so much to get through, I would not be too surprised if there is no NC at all...

There is still one NC from the novel they could technically use, but they might also save that for the special episode.

Honestly, the way the ep was cut, I wouldn't be surprised if the box set had the missing NC scene. It had everything leading up to it and cut right before it would have started.

That being said... Boss said they spent around 5 days filming NC scenes, and so far what I have seen... my professional opinion, as someone who has worked in TV for 11 years, is that what we have seen would probably be done in 3 days of filming or less...

[memsmedic1]

Family, Work, and Divemastering (Nov 5, 2018-May 23, 2019)

At noon on Monday, November 5 Nathan and I, along with a couple of our more adventurous team members, took our scuba tanks and gear into downtown Yangon to the public pool I’d scoped out the week before and gotten permission to use from the pool manager.

We were going in order to practice some basic diving drills to refresh our skills (and have fun) in preparation for an upcoming dive. Nathan had been diving several times over the spring and summer since he was working on his instructor certification, but I’d always had other responsibilities and hadn’t been able to go with him. I’m pretty sure nobody at the pool had ever seen anything like it before because soon we attracted several amazed spectators!

The night of the 7th Nathan and I met up with one of our friends, Dr. Than Win, to drive 5 hours northwest of Yangon out to the small coastal fishing town of Ngwe Saung, on the Bay of Bengal, to go scuba diving again. Arriving at the beach after an exhausting, bumpy ride over narrow, primitive roads, we parked in a vacant lot for a few hours until dawn and then hauled our gear bags over a rickety wooden bridge spanning a small estuary and across a wide sandy beach to the predetermined rendezvous point with the boat.

The boat, was, as we should have expected, enormously late. This was not a problem though, as it gave us the opportunity to watch a sunrise wedding photoshoot and visit with three other young divers who were traveling the world on a cruise ship while enrolled in a ‘study at sea’ type of college program!

A small outboard motorboat finally arrived to ferry us out across the crystal clear water, just a little bit warmer than the early morning air, to the larger boat we would be diving from. This boat was a great hulking wooden monstrosity, with a huge, loud, water-cooled, underpowered inboard engine taking up the entire hold. When the engine cranked over several liters of greasy oily water belched out from the bilge directly onto the deck of the boat moored next to us and commenced spreading out in a thin film over the water.

As soon as the gear was stowed and the anchors weighed we started on what was supposed to be a 45 minute ride out to some small islands where the dives would take place. The problem though was that our boat was slow. We were on the slow boat to India! We couldn’t see it on the way out, but this boat was so slow that on the way back the incoming swells were rolling past us as if we were standing still!

Scuba diving in Myanmar is relatively uncommon, probably because it’s like trying to herd cats to get anything done here; very little English comprehension, outdated regulations, atrocious roads, restrictive lodging requirements, and the list goes on. (Could the not-uncommon Saltwater Crocodiles be another factor?)

Safe and conservative diving is recommended when diving in Myanmar because Myanmar healthcare facilities and infrastructure are so substandard. Also, poorly maintained equipment, minimally trained “instructors”, or instructors and Divemasters with expired licenses result in the level of professionalism and the quality of the dive gear being lower than what international divers would expect. Diving accidents should therefore at all cost be avoided.

I was glad we had all our own gear, including a fully stocked custom-built med bag to deal with any unavoidable diving-related emergencies that might arise, whether medical or trauma, because it’s a bloody long way back to anything resembling a hospital, and even farther to Monkey Point Naval Base in Yangon, which currently boasts the only operable hyperbaric chamber in the entire country!

Finally we arrived at the dive site just off Bird Island, and after getting geared up, entered the water to start our first dive. The water was warm and pristine, with crystal clear visibility for over 100 feet! This amazing visibility gave us a nice buffer to keep a sharp lookout for Saltwater Crocodiles, which are commonly seen in the area, but fortunately we didn’t see any.

Sadly though, unbridled fishing practices including heavy dynamite fishing has decimated the coral reefs and other marine life, and the water was sparsely inhabited in general. I was, however, able to see a lionfish, a bluespotted whiptail ray, several nudibranchs, small reef fish, and flying fish while on the way back to shore.

Diving here reminded me of a fascinating though disputed story that occurred on an island just north of our dive location during World War 2: for six weeks during January and February of 1945, Ramree Island, situated just off the coast of Burma in the Bay of Bengal, was the setting for a bloody battle between Japanese and Allied forces.

The Battle of Ramree Island was part of the Burma Campaign during WW ll, and was launched for the purpose of dislodging Japanese Imperial forces that had occupied the island since early 1942, along with the rest of Southern Burma, and establishing an airbase there.

They were met with stiff resistance from the Japanese, and vicious fighting ensued. Finally, after a long and bloody battle, the Allies captured the enemy base, but a platoon of an estimated 1,000 Japanese soldiers escaped, and since they were surrounded on three sides by the British, they decided to retreat straight across the island through 16 km of dense tidal swampland to rejoin a much larger Japanese battalion on the other side.

Traveling through the thick, muck-filled swamps, over maze-like mangrove roots, and under tangled vines was slow and exhausting work, made worse by the clouds of mosquitoes biting to distraction and spreading malaria and dengue fever, as well as leeches and the various poisonous spiders, scorpions, and snakes slithering through the mud and underbrush like it was the forest of Endor.

During the night, as the fleeing soldiers struggled on towards the safety of their reinforced beachhead, British troops reported hearing panicked screams of terror and gunfire emanating from within the dark swamp. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the swamps of Ramree were infested by countless, very large Saltwater Crocodiles, which can grow over 20 feet long and weigh over 2,000 pounds.

Drawn by the tasty sounds of the weary and bloodied soldiers thrashing clumsily through their territory, the opportunity was just too good to pass up, so they didn’t. Out of just under 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive by their reinforcements the next morning!

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On November 12th I was “surprised” by visitors when my mom and little sister Lexi came to see me! They flew into Yangon where I met them and we all went out to a Burmese restaurant for supper and to catch up on everything. They came loaded with food and gifts from my family and some of my Montana friends which was another big surprise and very much appreciated!

The next morning we took a taxi to the bus station and caught the bus traveling from Yangon to the small hill station of Kalaw, high up in the mountains of Shan State, the same town that hosted the half-marathon Trail Run our ambulance stood by for last year.

Kalaw is also one of the best places in Myanmar to go trekking, which is the reason we were here. I’d already researched the best trekking outfits and found out who was available, so that evening after checking into our hotel we went out and talked to a couple of them in person and made reservations for the next day.

Early morning on the 14th we started on the 3 day, 36 mile adventure by walking through the expansive early morning street market in Kalaw with our Pa’O guide, David, and 4 other adventurers with whom we became very good friends by the time we reached our destination of Inle Lake, on the other side of the mountains.

During the 1st day we walked through high pine forests, grassy wildflower strewn meadows, small scattered villages, and rich mountainside farmland where farmers were plowing with water buffalo and cultivating crops of ginger, chilies, mountain rice, and niger seeds.

In the afternoon a sudden rainstorm blew through, even though we were already several weeks into the dry season. Very quickly the trail became cold, slippery, and treacherously muddy. There were several spills and one of our group even had both their shoes sucked off their feet going through an especially wet and leechy stretch of the mountains!

In the evening we came to the village where we would be spending the night. After taking a bucket bath from the open communal well in the center of the village, I went up the stairs to the large communal bedroom that one of the villagers rented out and rolled out my blanket, then we all went to another villagers house and had a delicious (spectacularly) supper.

Maybe it was all the exercise, but the food on the trek was some of the best examples of Burmese and Pa’O (the predominant tribe in this part of the country) food I had while living in Myanmar, with a few exceptions when foreigner food was attempted (the pancakes on the final morning would have made great pothole fillers).

On the second day after breakfast we struck out again, soon leaving the high mountains behind dropping down into an expansive valley interspersed with rolling hills, small villages, and a cantankerous cow. We passed villagers shelling cobs and laying the corn out to dry in the sun, harvesting tomatoes and ginger, and weaving intricate baskets out of delicate strips of bamboo.

It was substantially hotter in the valley than the mountains, so when we came upon a medium sized river meandering along beside the trail and our guide suggested we stop for a swim and a rest, we were happy to take him up on it!

This was actually the very same river whose terminal end we would canoe out of and into the lake at journeys end, but David explained that its course was too serpentine and roundabout to warrant building a bamboo raft and floating out on it, which I had been thinking would be far more ameliorative for my blistery feet, the shoes of which were disintegrating before my very eyes as the trek unfolded.

Late in the afternoon we finally reached the lower bamboo and jungle clad mountains on the other side of the valley, which we began ascending for a couple hours. Just as dusk was falling we arrived at an enormous, ancient wooden monastery, which appeared to have been built in the middle of nowhere, and here we stopped and were granted lodging for our second night.

The fun thing about staying here was that a couple dozen small novitiate monks lived here in the monastery, and they challenged us to a game of pickup football (soccer) with them when we first arrived before it got dark. I’m convinced the only reason we were beaten so roundly was due to the various hardships of our journey, for example blisters and leech-induced anemia!

Early on the third morning, after finishing breakfast and patching up our feet as best we could, we continued on, first up, then down through the mountains, eventually coming upon a beautiful cobblestone road left over from colonial days which we followed all the way out of the mountains into another beautiful valley, and on towards Inle Lake, the second largest lake in Myanmar, and one of the highest, at 2,900 feet (880 meters). Near the lake, the ground is at or below water level, and the road was flooded in several areas even though the rest of the country was well into the dry season.

Finally the road ended entirely and we climbed a rickety wooden stile, crossed a rickety wooden catwalk over a boat canal that connects the village to the river, balanced along a slippery, muddy dyke, and finally arrived at a villagers house where we could rest and have lunch.

After lunch we walked back over to the canal and climbed into a long, wide, wooden outboard canoe and started on the last leg of our adventure. First we floated past all the houses through the village, then we entered the river from the day before which shortly opened into a huge area which was nothing but amazing floating tomato gardens, the rows of vines clearly bobbing up and down over the water, with the farmers (settlers? colonizers?) living over the lake in stilted huts and doing all the trellising, harvesting, and other farm work from their small wooden dugout canoes.

These are the Intha people, a very small tribe who only live around Inle Lake and who make their living farming on the lake and fishing, using unique cone-shaped basket-like fishing traps, and an even more unique method of paddling using their leg to grip the oar, standing on the other leg in the back of their canoe.

Finally we entered the open water of the 13 1/2 mile long lake and sped along up the lake enjoying the sensation of effortless movement, taking in the spectacular views of the surrounding mountains, Intha fishermen, and all the other boat taxis and lake traffic out enjoying the fresh air and pleasantly warm sun on the sparkling, though very murky, lake. Arriving at the northern end of the lake in Nyaungshwe, a small fishing town with as many boat canals as roads, we bid our guide and traveling companions farewell and went our separate ways.

After the trek the three of us traveled to the capital of Shan State, Taunggyi, to attend the annual Tazaungdaing Fire Balloon Festival, where hundreds of amateur teams compete over 4 days to launch the best hot air balloons, sometimes shaped like various animals, birds, and mythological creatures, and filled to capacity with homemade fireworks. Sometimes the balloon is too heavy or poorly designed to even make it off the ground before the payload ignites, or it catches on fire soon after takeoff and plummets into the thousands of spectators. There are fatalities every year but there’s just the right twinge of danger to keep it interesting. The festival occurs close to the end of the Buddhist Lent and marks the official end of the rainy season. While a huge celebration and local phenomenon, its deeper purpose, like so many “Buddhist” traditions, is to ward off evil spirits; the giant balloons are just upsized Chinese sky lanterns.

On November 18 we had to take a night bus back to Yangon in order to make it in time to catch our plane! The only bus I could find that was able to take us was a bottom-tier 3rd class bus with absolutely no legroom and innumerable stops throughout the interminable night.

Early the next morning we flew from Yangon to Kuala Lumpur where my mom had some meetings and had invited us along, then we flew to Malaysian Borneo to go scuba diving. My mom had been a diver in college and my sister had wanted go diving ever since I myself started diving, so now they both finally had a chance! Diving was wonderful, with my mom deciding to renew her license and Lexi vowing to get hers.

From Malaysia we flew up to Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, for a few days, and then, after meeting up with friends, drove out to Sunshine Orchard, where Lexi would be residing while interning as a paramedic at a small nearby clinic in the middle of the jungle.

After seeing all my friends at Sunshine Orchard and visiting for a few days I had to return to work, so I told my mom, sister, and SO friends goodbye. On December 4th my mom and I drove into MaeSot where my mom took a bus down to Ayutthaya to spend one more week before flying back home and I walked across the Friendship Bridge to the Myanmar border and took the night bus back to work. Lexi of course stayed behind to work at the jungle clinic.

During the last week of November and first week-and-a-half of December Nathan was back in Thailand finishing his scuba diving instructor course and upon completion received his NAUI Scuba Instructor certification!

On December 7th I took a taxi to the bus station and traveled back up to Kalaw to join my ambulance and partial crew already present to stand by at the Trail Run for the second year in a row. This event is a fun assignment for several reasons: The crisp, sunny, humidity-free days and cold, invigorating, mosquito-free nights are a pleasant change from the oppressive lowlands, the food at the antique Kalaw Heritage Hotel where the race is hosted is delicious, and it’s fun to see our friends there, especially my friend who is the doctor for the Australian Embassy in Yangon, who collaborates on projects with us from time to time.

The morning of Sunday the 9th the race began, with nearly twice as many participants as last year. We were fairly busy treating the expected maladies- blisters, twisted ankles, scraped knees, heat cramps, but there weren’t any major injuries.

After the race was over and most of the people had left we packed up our gear and drove directly to the very old city of Sagaing, in central Myanmar, where we would begin teaching an EMR course to 24 students from Sagaing Emergency Rescue Team and a few volunteers from other nearby groups the next day. This is why I hadn’t ridden to Kalaw in the ambulance, because we needed a team to go early and drop off our training materials in Sagaing on their way up to the Trail Run.

The leader of SERT, Mr. Soe Min Oo, had been our best student at our fourth ever EMR training, and he had been trying to get an EMR training for his group ever since, but there had been major scheduling issues on both sides until now.

The Sagaing EMR training ran from December 10-21 and was unusual in that it was covered by a major national television channel, so I’m happy to say that it went very smoothly and was probably the best overall EMR course I had ever taught!

I did have to go intercede on one students’ behalf though because the rescue group he works for was making him man their “dispatch center” every night even though he was the only person from that group attending our course! They were doing this to low-key punish him and try to make him fail class for trying to get training which they hadn’t endorsed and would put him at a higher-trained level than the leaders of his group. But despite this he was still coming to our class and arriving on time in the mornings! Fortunately, after all the formalities of the visit to this rival rescue group were out of the way they agreed to find someone else to fill in for him until training was over, and he ended up being one of our students who passed the class and received our internationally accredited EMR certificate!

After the EMR course, we packed up and brought all the training supplies back to Yangon to be cleaned and stowed until next time, and then spent the next week catching up on end of year paperwork, delayed CPR-AED and First Aid trainings, and continuing to respond to emergencies.

At 9 AM on Sunday, December 30th, Nathan began instructing his first scuba diving course to 4 students, with myself as an assistant. We spent the first day in the pool in Yangon, familiarizing the students with the equipment and teaching basic principles and skills like how to use the buoyancy control device (BCD) and regulator to breathe underwater and control depth. The next morning we drove out to the beach at Ngwe Saung and again spent the whole afternoon in a pool there teaching and practicing skills, although Nathan and I did manage to squeeze in a shore dive that evening!

January 1 and 2, 2019 was the open water component of the course, a fantastic way to start the New Year! As luck would have it, we happened to draw the same boat as last time, and found ourselves putzing along at a feather-star pace (one of the most graceful animals in the sea, though never known to win a race). At least we certainly couldn’t complain about the location, scenery, or company!

On our way out to sea for the 2nd day of open-water, the boat decided to needle us a little more than usual and the engine died about a quarter-mile offshore, leaving us at the mercy of the incoming tide and letting us drift dangerously close to a small, rocky island before the “engineer” could get it started again. We finished the voyage and scheduled dives without further incident and after putzing back to shore late that afternoon, washed the saltwater off us and our gear, ate supper, and then drove back to Yangon during the night.

Early the next morning on January third, just a couple hours after arriving back in Yangon from our scuba class, Nathan went to the airport and flew back to our school property in Thailand to begin preparing it for a Remote First Aid class that we were scheduled to teach that next week. The day after Nathan left I also started traveling to Kanchanaburi, taking the night bus from Yangon to Myawaddy, and crossing into Thailand the morning of the 5th. I really wanted to stop for breakfast at one of the amazing restaurants in MaeSot, but as I was hoping to catch the day bus down to our school in Kanchanaburi, I took a Songtau straight to the bus station and bought a ticket for a van that would take me over the steep, always-under-construction mountain road to Tak, an hour and a half from the border, where I could catch the bus I needed.

Arriving in Tak I rushed to the ticket counter and discovered that I had just missed the morning bus and would have to spend the day in the bus station until the night bus arrived at 11 PM (story of my life). After a day spent thinking about taking two night-busses in a row and all the other things I could be doing instead, I finally boarded my bus and arrived in Kanchanaburi mid-morning on January 6, then jumped on a local bus which took me out to the village near the school where Nathan met me in our ambulance.

The rest of that day and all the next we worked around the property getting it brush-hogged and trimmed and weeded and watered, then we cleaned out and scrubbed down the classroom we would be holding the training in.

Monday evening after work we drove into Kanchanaburi to pick up my sister Lexi at the bus station. She had been working the medical beachhead along the Thai-Burma border ever since I’d last seen her (no joke either; suturing knife wounds, treating breasts hollowed out by mastitis, sick babies, drowning victims, strange and wonderful tropical diseases...). For some reason, she had decided to have an ocular emergency of her own which had prevented her from traveling south with me when I crossed into Thailand. Now she was coming down to accompany us to a real beach and finally get her diving certification at the next scuba diving class Nathan had scheduled to teach immediately after the RFA.

From Jan 8-10 Nathan and I taught the Remote First Aid class to local rescue volunteers plus the owner and some of the employees of a Bangkok-based rock climbing company specializing in guiding climbing tours to scenic and remote locations across Thailand. They had been looking for a company to give their guides some medical training in case someone had an emergency and they were thrilled to have found us.

On Friday Nathan and I loaded up our Thai ambulance with scuba tanks and dive gear and with Lexi we drove out to the local military base where we have a quid pro quo that allows us to use their training pool for swimming and diving. Along the way we picked up Pi Top and Pi Game, two of our local friends who were also taking the scuba diving course.

At the pool, the 5 of us met 5 more prospective students sent by the local rescue diver foundation, who had given Nathan and I our first scuba diver training two years ago. Now that Nathan was a NAUI Instructor, the foundation leader was sending him the first of many foundation divers to receive real training, since all their previous training to date had been 2nd or 3rd hand at best and entirely empirical.

So, the former students taught the former teachers, and I was again assisting as with the first course to provide an adequate student-instructor ratio and just to help streamline the process. For instance, if someone panics or has trouble equalizing their ears while practicing underwater skills I’m there to help them regain control or fix their problem instead of having to pause the whole class and bring everyone else up also.

The next day we hung out at the school, picking fresh limes and making fresh limeade, and just relaxing. Early Sunday morning we reloaded the ambulance and all piled in to drive 10 hours farther south to the ocean near Krabi, Thailand for the open-water part of training. Heading out of town we parked our ambulance at Pi Top’s gas station and transferred everything into Pi Game’s vehicle, which is also an ambulance, but it’s bigger than ours and we needed all the space we could possibly get since both he and Pi Top were coming along, plus Lexi and I, and Nathan with his family.

On the 14th and 15th we rented a wooden longtail fishing boat and dove as many times as we safely could. This completed the first level of scuba diver, and our two friends went back home, but Lexi and Nathan and I stayed and got a couple more dives in on the 16th to start fulfilling the requirements for Lexi’s advanced scuba diver license, since she loved it so much.

We weren’t able to finish that course immediately though, because Nathan had some family of his own coming over to Thailand for a visit and had to leave, leaving Lexi and I to poodle around the beach on our own for a couple days. This was great fun and also gave me a chance to look around for a dive shop that might be looking for someone to intern with them.

(I had completed my divemaster training over a year before, but in order to be certified I needed to have a certain number of logged dives, and despite our best intentions, with all our other responsibilities Nathan and I hadn’t been diving as much as we’d have liked, which would have more than satisfied my pre-DM-cert dive quota. So... before our Remote First Aid class we had talked and decided that after the next scuba training I would stay behind and try to find a divemaster internship to complete my training.)

I was worried about finding an opening because Thailand was currently experiencing an unseasonably low volume of tourists due to recently changing their tourist visa requirements, but when I checked at one of the very first shops I came to, which I only knew about because this is where one of the instructors who’d helped teach Nathan and I our initial divemaster course now worked, they were delighted to have another diver help them out and offered me the ternship!

After seeing my sister off back to her clinic internship on the 19th, I started my divemaster ternship the very next day, Wednesday, January 20. This entailed learning and doing everything a divemaster does, plus helping the other divemasters and instructors with everything they needed help with, in exchange for gaining the essential experience I needed to qualify me for my DM certification.

On Sunday night, February 24th, I took a 12 hour bus ride from Krabi up to Bangkok where I immediately switched busses to take another 12 hour bus ride on up to MaeSot where I switched yet again to a Songtau and went up to visit Lexi and everyone else at Sunshine Orchard for a few days before continuing on to Yangon on March 1st. I had to make this trip back to Yangon in order to apply for a new Thai visa, and also to pack up and move my stuff out of our office/house, as there was a contemplated upgrade on the horizon. I brought my stuff back to Thailand and parked it temporarily with a friend in MaeSot. Here I again met up with Lexi, who had taken a Songtau down from Sunshine Orchard and was going to accompany me back down to the coast, because Nathan was now available to finish teaching Lexi her advanced scuba diver course.

From March 19-21 we dove off the coast of Krabi and Phuket, completing the necessary skills for Lexi to be certified at the advanced level including: light salvage, underwater navigation, night diving, shore dives, wreck dives, and Nitrox dives, plus Rescue Diver skills.

Afterwards, I went back to complete my DM internship, working there until May 24, when I started making preparations to go to Africa and work at a rural clinic in Ethiopia!