April 2015

Hello everyone,

Just a few images as asummary of our month of March. We had left you at one of our "airport days" in Bangkok; since then it was ove at first sight for Luang Prabang, a small town in Laos whose pretty houses have been classified as World Heritage by UNESCO ; then we sailed a few days on a catamaran in the Bay of Phang Nga, Thailand ; if the number of tourists really increased too much around Ko Phi Phi, we still were able to find beautiful locations, and I had fun showing Francette the village on stilts of of the Sea Gypsies, dominated by its brand new mosque. Finally, we made a trip to the Philippines to photograph the karstic rocks of the island of Busuanga, especially a site that had made us dream forlong and we were able to take photos and shoot of them; really, these karst landforms, like those of Ha Long Bay in Viet Nam, of Lindéralique in New Caledonia, like Cuba's Mogotes or Dominican Republic's Haitises, really offer unforgettable views

You can find some pictures of each stopover on our Facebook page "Les voyages d'Antoine"; enjoy them without moderation, and do not forget to "like" us as they say!

Antoine's Principle

And now we are back on board Banana Split; on a small beach with a bright yellow bush we shot a small presentation video of our future book about ... 50 years of "Elucubrations" (divagations) for therepresentatives of our publisher, Gallimard; also, returning to the boat, I found again the essence of what I have immodestly called Antoine's Principle, that says more or less :

"Any mechanical device has a natural, normal, stable, state, the state breakdown; it is only with continued efforts that one can maintain it for a limited time, in an abnormal, unstable state, the state called "operating".
These days it's a rudder that has taken a sudden and disturbing wobble, an engine that has suddenly stifled because a foreign body had slipped into the fuel filter (maybe one of these tiny shrimp locally called Yabbies "and that fishermen extract from the mud to use them as bait. Not even mentioning having taken a green marker for another I climbed with Banana Split on a mud bank and then, extracting myself with an anchor carried astern in the boat's dinghy, I lost the anchor .. When Antoine's Principle meets Murphy's Law.