Friends and family who follow my Facebook page would have read this already, but for those who don’t, I have cobbled together a short video from our visit to the island of Ko Lipe recently. So if you have 4minutes and 47 seconds of your life to spare, and are not expecting a cinematic masterpiece, I present to you (drumroll please) “Life’s a bitch beach, on Ko Lipe :

No, I don’t think Steven Spielberg and James Cameron will be worried about me taking any Oscars home !

When you are underwater you might think that you are holding the camera steady, but when you look at the footage you realise that’s not the case. Luckily Premiere Pro’s warp stabiliser manages to get rid of much of the shakiness. The underwater scenes were filmed with a compact Canon G7X in an underwater housing, apart from the poor battery life I was very impressed with it. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the battery always died when I found something interesting !

Practice makes perfect, or so they say, so I am going on another snorkelling trip in January. This should be good fun as it is an semi-exploratory trip to the Mergui Archipelago in Myanmar, where not that many boats have been before. Hopefully we will find some pristine reefs that have not been damaged by careless anchoring as is often the case here in Thailand.

Before that though, we are off to Hong Kong for a week on Friday. I went there last year but the GF has never been before. It remains to be seen whether she will manage to last the duration without her regular intake of somtam and sticky rice ?