The Women of Cho

The Women of Cho

Well folks it's finally out at www.Amazon.com and www.BarnsandNoble.com. Within a week or so it will be on Kindle, Google Books, and other options. The Women of Cho is the second book in a trilogy, Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders being the first.

In the Women of Cho Monica Won Cho Stell has been invited by the Won family to South Korea to learn about her mother and her family history. Monica's mother committed suicide when she was young to protect her daughter.

Detective Cale Dixon is driven from the hospital by his research boss and lover, Victoria Short. Dixon has recently been stabbed in the back, (near the end of Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders), and is on the mend.

The Won family is preparing for Won Chanyu's traditional funeral, and Mother Won is working on Monica's safe passage. Father Won prefers to use Monica as a pawn to find her father, John Stell, who is believed to have killed Father Won's brother in London for historic burial vault keys dating back through the ages.

John Stell disappeared 20 years ago, leaving Monica to fend for herself through pre-paid private school and university keeping her identity a secret from the Won. Monica now works for a congressman and is on leave to discover what she can about her Korean family side.

Rayman Stell, Monica's cousin lost his mother and father to the Won, and is now suspected of killing Won Chanyu in San Francisco. Both families are on edge as Cale Dixon orchestrates a convergence in Seoul, South Korea.


I hope you enjoy the book, The Women of Cho. ISBN # 987-1-63135-780-0. All rights reserved.

www.davidcdagley.com
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Bali and Lembongan Islands

Bali and Lembongan

I flew to Bali on January 7, 2016 with some dear friends, one I went to high school with and in a strange way our lives paralleled to the point that we ran back into each other a few years back and I am now his son’s nomadic ‘uncle’. The child is the cutest monster I’ve had the pleasure of watching break everything. They invited me to their villa in Sanur where time has a way of becoming insignificant.

My friend hadn’t been scuba diving in a while so I took it upon myself to invite him along and find out if he still liked it. We drove an hour north and joined up with a lovely couple from Russia. I say Russia because they’re Russian but also live in other parts of the world. They are pure class and I was honored to have lunch with them. The husband didn’t speak much English but his beautiful wife spoke English and a bit of French and acted as translator and it added a lot.

Our guide was French and he did the best he could considering there was a firm current during our first dive and we just hovered over the coral and drifted at about 2-3 knots and came up before we entered the big blue.

The second dive was also in a current zone but we maneuvered up close behind an island called Tepe Kong and found a small group of juvenile White Tip Reef sharks hanging out under a crag. We watched for a while before ascending up through some leaning boulders and out into another beautiful soft coral slope.The dives weren’t long but still enough time to get my friend’s feet wet and he came up all smiles and ready to go again in the near future.

I arranged to stay at Big Fish Diving on Lembongan Island just off the coast of Bali. I hadn’t been there before but had heard great things about the diving so I left my friends and soloed out on a Glory Express Boat (ph. # 081-139-9765) that takes about an hour from Sanur, Bali. I had emailed Big Fish to book a bungalow at Secret Garden Bungalows and all my dives. www.bigfishdiving.com +62 081-353-136-861 or email at info@bigfishdiving.com.

The grounds were clean and there was a pool out my front door. I had asked to do an afternoon dive the day I arrived and off we went straight into it. Lembongan has been a surfing hot spot long before it was a diving hot spot and now many are attracted to it for whatever reason. People can take a Glory Express boat over for the day or a few days depending on your schedule and what you want. It’s a little cheaper if you know when you are returning but in all fairness, it’s not worth the schedule to force a return.

Many of the dives around Lembongan and Penida are drift dives meaning you are in 15-25 meters of water and moving at 2 knots, more or less, with the current passing between the three island triangle off the coast of Bali. Some of the dives are a little trickier than others but the guides will access your ability and chose your dive sites accordingly. In four days I dove 10 times with only one repeat dive from the opposite end so I didn’t really notice.

Whilst out diving I met three tech divers that I was immediately interested in and attracted to for various reasons, diving knowledge, style of diving, and I do have to say beauty in one in particular, a Spanish woman working for Wicked Diving out on Komodo Island. I’m still attracted to her for her knowledge of the sea and her life choices among other reasons. Unfortunately I feel she’s out of my league but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to learn from her or her friends.

I did little exploring of the island. I didn’t have a motorbike or anything, I was just there to dive and 10 dives later I felt I had just begun. There is a bridge that joins Lembongan to the next island so everything becomes accessible.

At Big Fish Diving there were some scheduled evening talks about Coral; plant or animal? There was another talk about Manta Rays and the impact man has put on the sea in general. Big Fish Diving and Blue Corner Diving among others are working on awareness for divers and conservationists across the board. There are many groups participating in research and aquatic protection possibilities. I believe the coral triangle is part of this awareness program.

I returned to Bali with little planned but went back to Diving Indo and spoke with a woman there who set me up with a dive to Tulamben, the ship wreck of the Liberty, an American vessel hit by a Japanese submarine torpedo. The boat didn’t sink when it was hit and they tried to tow is to a safe harbor to repair it. They got it as far as Tulamben and left it there. When Bali’s volcano blew in 1963 it shook and rolled the vessel on it’s side and there it has stayed growing all kinds of colorful coral. It is shallow enough to snorkel at low tide being maybe five meters from the surface and the low point being around 28 meters. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to put my GoPro footage on to Blogger yet. There seems to be a format issue so you don’t get the full affect of turtles and colorful corals but I can make stills. That’ll have to do for now.

I went back to Bali for a few more days visiting old friends and new. One of my friends has been living there for a few years building surfboards and surfing when it comes up. I was with him and a group of college mates on a surf trip around the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra.

I did get to Ubud and a viewpoint to see the volcano but unfortunately it had changed too much for me to take a picture. I pushed biked the Indonesian main islands back in 1989 when Ubud was a quaint little artist town surrounded by rice fields and jungle. It is tethered to Sanur by houses and shops now.

It was a short trip to Bali that really worked well with my visa breaks. I got out of Thailand the day before my Thai visa expired and I returned to Thailand a week before my two month Thai visa expired entry. Here we go.

www.davidcdagley.com

Rowdy roadie Round Trip 2015

Rowdy Roadie Round Trip 2015

With a visa in hand I flew back to Katmandu and to Sam’s Bar and ‘V’. Hello V! Things had calmed down from the earthquakes but a ‘Banda’ was in place. A Banda is a nation wide strike where no private vehicles are allowed to move, only government emergency vehicles, army and police. But it depends where you are in the country because some groups have no cares for the politics of in Katmandu. And even in Katmandu there were a few motorcycles out and about. In other areas motorbikes and cars were burned and even bicycles thrown into the river. Life goes on none-the-less.

The constitution was signed by pulling something like 16 different parties together. One group in particular was upset because they didn’t get their own division and India, a democratic country, slammed the door on oil hoping to influence the outcome but Nepal was stead fast and turned away from India and towards China. And Banda was back on.

The way many Nepali look at it is that they are a hen being pecked at by two big roasters, one on each side. I went back to Thakadurwara and helped build the dinning hall and in the process helped identify a species of owl that wasn’t supposed to be there.

We took a quick stop at the river in search of Gangetic dolphin and found a few along with a Garial Crocodile fishing side by side.

Johnny Sparshatt, one of the owners of www.wildtrakadventure.com was asked to help identify an owl species that, until now, was said by specialists not to inhabit Nepal. Johnny downloaded a couple tracks of Wood Owl sounds and I brought my speaker and we loaded up the cameras in his jeep and off we went to where they had been sighted. We turned on the tracks and the speaker sung out to a pair of Mottled Wood owls who responded almost immediately with song and fly-bys. When one of them landed Johnny and I both began taking numerous pictures until we could without identify the bird. It has been corrected in the area expansion that Nepal now has the Mottled Wood Owl. Even in the Wild Trak Adventure compound owls persisted to hang around and once the lookout was up and running we tried the Mottled Owl calls there and they arrived. The whole experience was really cool.

In the end we headed up to Shey Phoksundo Lake in the Lower Dolpa region in the western Himalayas.

We trekked for around ten days or so and ended up in Jumla and we flew back to Nepalgunj where we bid farewells.

I headed back to Katmandu and met some great people like usual and said good-bye for now to Sam’s bar and ‘V’.

 My flight was supposed to be nonstop but due to the fuel shortage we stopped in Delhi for fuel and then on to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I dropped in on Malacca on my way to Tioman Island on the other side of Malaysia. Malacca was nice but I remember being eager to get to the ocean and swim and Malacca was not the place for swimming.

Crossing to Mersing town and out to Tioman was a snap and in the water I went. I met a nice couple from England whom lived in the next bungalow. We would sit on our respective porches and talk the evenings away.

Returning to Kuala Lumpur I flew to Thailand and had a short visit there before heading off to Krabi,

Koh Phi Phi,

Phuket,

And up the coast to Khao Lak where I joined Wicked Diving on a 6 day live aboard dive trip; a most excellent experience with good people. I learned a lot from the staff in regards to the condition of the Andaman Sea and how to be a more compassionate diver. That may sound like an odd phrase but considering the way we all mistreat the oceans and the life in them it makes sense to me.

I was not disappointed when I reached Khao Sok National Park either. I’ve been here many times and again up to the lake where I could hear Gibbons howling in the jungle, Hornbills fly overhead, take jungle walks, go caving, and swim out my floating bungalow front porch.

From Khao Sok I took a van, a bus and a boat to Koh Tao where I spent a few weeks around Christmas and New Year. Yes, I have to say, that it was an incredible year and here I am sitting on Koh Tao having a beer at Maya Beach Club and listening to some great DJ music whilst watching the sun go down on New Year’s Eve.

www.davidcdagley.com

Rowdy Roadie

Rowdy Roadie

So there I was on Koh Tao sitting at Maya Beach Club enjoying a sunset on New Years Eve thinking what a Rowdy Roadie year it has been. It all began in Alaska getting a new passport and finalizing the house for sale before stepping back out on that elusive path into the unknown. I met a lot of traveling friends and even more acquaintances this year and I can’t count the number of pictures I took. I managed to finish a book that is now in its final stages of pre-publishing, The Women of Cho’ should be out soon.

In the process I managed to cross the globe from Alaska to Ireland, the long way round. And again, I can’t pin down the best pictures but I’m going to give it a try in this recap. Starting off in Alaska where I still have a voting card and a P.O. box I went to California to visit my hometown, Mill Valley, where I grew up and saw a few friends before flying off to South Korea.

I still had a little research verification to do for the manuscript so South Korea was an important stop over visit on my wayward path. I spent a few weeks in Seoul hopping from some of the Palaces to museums and ancestral shrines for the dead among others. I taught English in South Korea many moons ago and that is actually what got part of the first book going and certainly kept the second book in motion and will give enough momentum for the trilogy.

I had recently picked up diving as a hobby whilst at Asia Divers Resort on Koh Tao and that sent me splashing down in such places as Borneo and Sulawesi but I wasn’t close to finished so after south Korea I flew due south-west to the Philippines where I had pre-booked some time on Sangat Island Dive Resort. I was immediately introduced to wreck diving and borrowed one of the guides go-pros so I could have a memory of it and I am still looking at the footage now that I’ve bought a go-pro myself and can now edit a little bit. The resort is one of the nicest I’ve stayed at and I will return to the Philippines to dive more probably down near Cebu. Here is a still from one of the clips. The wrecks are part the WWII fleet of Japanese boats suck by the U.S. Navy. There are also a lot of boats in Luzon Harbor to the north. I spent about ten days there and spoke with others that took a chartered sail boat from Sangat Island out to the outer reef and the stories they came back with were epic so it is a ‘MUST’ see in the future.

I ended up back in Luzon and everybody I spoke with had different places for recommended must go see. I ended up blasting through Manila and headed for Baguio, an old JI r & r spot that has grown exponentially up the mountainsides between the rice fields. I met Sigurd Hogsbro there and we still make contact every now and again. He showed me the brewery and I knew we were kindred spirits.

I flew back to Incheon, South Korea for a brief visit with the KGB Bar staff and catch an early flight to Bangkok, Thailand where I needed to pick up a visa for Nepal and fly off to Vientiane, Laos to actually sit down and finish the manuscript before heading off back to Thailand for some diving on Koh Tao just to stay in practice knowing there isn’t any diving in Nepal that I know of.

This was my first time to Nepal and boy, what a doozy; new sights, smells, earthquakes, Rhinos, Elephants, Wild Boar, deer everywhere, Crocodiles, Garials, Bison, trekking in the outback of Bardia National Park where I made some most excellent friends that I will not forget.

A Scottish friend I made in Rangoon told me to go visit a Yorkshire man living and working in Thakuduwara and partnering a trekking company called Wild Trak Adventure, www.wildtrakadventure.com. After a few days in Katmandu I flew to Nepalgunj and met Sitram and Johnny. I stayed with them for a month of trekking through the Bardia Nation Park and doing some trekking on the Babe, (phonically Ba-bay) River following tiger, bear, and leopard tracks and avoiding wild elephants en mass.

Now I can’t show every photo and some of you may have seen some of the good photos before in previous blogs so I hope I surprise you.

Returning from the jungle we felt the first earthquake and I bolted for Pokhara to see the damage and see if I could help. The damage was extensive but the supplies were not reaching the needy so I joined in with Hands Helping Hands and volunteered time and money to buy supplies and run them into the mountain areas where they were needed until Unisef and Red cross began showing up. I moved on south to Chitwan National Park to see the Rhinos there before returning to Bardia for more fun in the jungle.

 Chitwan was amazing.

Returning to Bardia was amazing.

I flew to London to get my computer fixed. Somewhere along the way the screen had shattered and it drove me crazy so I hopped a tube for the Apple store in London and they were to busy to deal with it but a lovely woman at Apple recommended another fix-it place close by. Meanwhile I did research for another book in the making as of now, among many beginnings.

I love London but boy is it expensive. I moved north by train seeing friends in Liverpool and there abouts, all people I have met on the road, mostly in Thailand be it Pai, Ton Sai, or traveling across northern Lao and down the coast of Vietnam; lovely people from all walks of life.

I spent a bit of time in Edinburgh, Inverness, Isle of Sky, and returned back to Glasgow to jump a boat for Belfast where they were still building a pyramid of pallets to be burnt in the near future. I walked that road where the British flag is on one side of me, and the Irish on the other. Not a safe place but seeing as I’m a yank and dress differently I figured I’d be safe and was safe. I had people looking after me from unseen places. Thank you boys.

A friend I met in Ton Sai grew up in Cavan and off I went to visit. This was one of the best decisions I didn’t have to make. I met a family at the other end of the world and their friends that made me feel like a long lost cousin, 3 times removed. Caroline Fay is a wonderful artist and had a painting class that I joined in. Her boy friend Rob, a part time DJ in London and a great person in general, arrived and a merry time was had by almost all. There was some late night light flickering from pops upstairs and we heeded the call for beds. I had a date with a lawn mower the next day to make up for miss-spent moments of adulthood. All went well.

Dublin was a blast just wandering around the live music pubs and watching Beck play an outdoor concert. It was a really great place to have fun before heading back to Liverpool and Manchester and south to London.

I took a train into Paris, France to be part of a movie crew but that deflated rather un-climactically but I stayed my course and took a train to Pamplona, Spain for the running of the bulls. I met two characters from Oakland, California on the train to Pamplona. We met up frequently and shared a lot of laughs; Dave is a DJ and Lee is a drummer among other things. After I had seen and had my fill I wandered up to San Sebastian and enjoyed the ocean and food for a few days. It was the end of a particular lump in my craw so from here on out nothing was intended and my mind began to wander across the globe.

But while I was on this side of the globe a quick stop in Lisbon, Portugal was mandatory due to an artist friend of mine who had painted such beautiful landscapes and life there I had to go. I took the train down the coast wanting to stop a lot more than I would allow myself but I made it to Lisbon just in time to watch a Sting concert. That was great and again just by luck. The architecture and history in Lisbon is thick and the food and growing art scene were worth every minute. I saw a bridge that looked like the Golden Gate suspension Bridge there and found out later that the same builders did them both. I saw this from a castle on top of a castle on top of a castle all buried under one another. Musical notes soared through the alleys as I wandered home.

From Lisbon I was trying to get to Sicily, Italy but the flights were so expensive I changed directions and went to Venice for a few days. Again, walking through history and the heat put me in a great mood and it was time to get on my way.

I met a friend in Sulawesi who lived in Slovenia but I missed her at the airport and then miss understood some friends in Switzerland so I didn’t go to Germany nor Poland and just high tailed it back to Paris and on to London for the return trip to some place.

(San Sebastian)

I got into Paris for two nights so I’d have time to get a ticket for London.

In London I needed a few days to get a new tourist visa for Nepal where I decided I was going to help my friends Johnny and Sitram build a new dinning hall and bring a few tools with me. Hyde Park is always calling so I spent a lot of sunset hours wandering and shooting pictures. Before I left I met up with my Scottish friend, Fergus, I met in Burma at the Strand Hotel Bar and had a few laughs with him before heading out and making a round trip.

To Be Continued

www.davidcdagley.com