Singapore Slings and Philippine Flings

It’s the last week of my three week trip. Very sad… Sunday, May 27, 2007 This morning, I took the Singapore Airlines flight that I was initially supposed to take yesterday. It was pretty empty. But apparently, most Asian airlines have absurdly low weight limits for intra-Asian flights. As such, I was about 10 kg over, which cost me about $100. The only reason I had an extra 10 kg to begin with was because of all of the shopping that I did at the Silk Market. Oh well, I guess there goes all of those savings… I also didn’t have time or patience to argue with the attendant, and in retrospect, that was a bad choice in itself. I realized later on that I could have pulled stuff out of my bags and carried on a “personal” bag. Oh well – live and learn. In any case, Singapore Airlines lived up to its billing as the world’s most awesomist airline around. Sure they still fly you from point to point just as any other plane would, but they do it a little bit better (no, they don’t give you a happy ending – and yes, that was for you, Rupa). It’s just in the details – for example, there are at least 50% more flight attendants for your beck and call, the food actually tastes good, the orange juice was poured for you in a small glass instead of a flimsy prepackaged piece of plastic, the headsets came in Ziploc bags, the bathroom had aftershave and cologne in it, the flight attendants had an extremely large kitchen area, there were footrests at each seat – and this is all in economy class. After I got into the taxi in Singapore, I noticed a few things about this country that are shareworthy: 1) they must have been influenced by those smarmy Brits because they drive on the wrong side of the road, 2) it is indeed very clean here, 3) many of the streets are very tree-lined – not just little itty-bitty trees but really tall and lavish trees, and 4) there’s an awful lot of construction here too. Also, the sky was blue instead of smog-gray. I felt like Ahhhnold at the end of Total Recall when he on the surface of Mars outside of the space station sans spacesuit and he gasps and gasps for the fresh air as the atmosphere is just starting to be created. Or maybe like those people in the Claritin commercial as a layer of unclarity is peeled away from the screen and fresh air is abound. And there was much rejoicing. After checking into the hotel, I ventured out of the Sheraton Towers and onto the streets for a brief walking tour. I got about two blocks when I turned back to change into something lighter – it’s quite humid in Singapore. When I ventured back out, I was about to cross the street and I caught myself jaywalking – so I ran back to the curb and dutifully waited for the light to change. Fortunately, there weren’t any police around to take me to jail and cane me. Call me stupid (not that you needed a reason), but I didn’t know that Singapore was the shopping mecca that it is. There were a ton of shopping malls, and I was right near one of the major shopping districts on Orchard Street. Even though I hate shopping, I enjoyed walking by the storefronts. Not because I wanted to look inside, but because of the anticipation of the inevitable burst of air conditioning that would cool my feet. Twas nice. I also learned later on this I was there in the middle of the great Singapore shopping sale, and to top it off, sales tax was increasing by a few percentage points in a few months, so these ridiculously low prices would never be seen again. Our prices are insane! I decided to people-watch and had some dinner at an outside café. I ordered a pesto chicken pizza, which I later realized was my first real Western food in two weeks. But when it came to the table unfortunately, I realized that I had forgotten to tell them to hold the mushrooms. There was simply no separation strategy on this pie without completely obliterating the food. So, I closed my eyes and dug in. Yes – you heard it first here, I actually caved in and ate some mushrooms. Ewwwww – slimy fungus! But I will withhold further comments on acceptability of such fungus for daily consumption. Basically, I figured that after yesterday’s debacle with the sautéed 5” fishees, I couldn’t really refuse my food twice in a row. That’s just a wee little too picky. After my ice cream dessert, I headed back to the hotel in case my lactose intolerance tendencies should flare up again (it’s spotty, for whatever reason). Monday, May 28, 2007 I got up, ate breakfast, and headed to the subway to get to the P&G Singapore office. The hotel was at most 100 feet from the subway, and the Singapore office was only one stop away – very good location. Despite this, it was so humid that I was sweating when I got to the office and needed about 30 minutes just to cool down. I would have thought that 2 weeks in Beijing would have been enough to get acclimated to warmer weather. I would have thought wrong. The Singapore subway system is very clean and very neat, which is exactly what you’d expect from the sanitized existence in Singapore. The subway platforms themselves are enclosed from the tracks, similar to the way an airport tramway might be, and this keeps it quiet and air-conditioned as well. Jolly good. I stayed at work until 8pm – I had to finish up a Birkman personality test for an all-day team-building offsite that our plant’s leadership team has scheduled on the day I return from this trip. I’m not going to claim that I completed this personality test to the best of my ability – the questions were quite annoying – asking me to decide if a particular phrase mostly applies or mostly doesn’t apply to society in general, then the same 120 questions for me, and then asking me pick a first and second choice out of four professions about 50 times. I’ve done this test before, and I’m curious to see if the same results come out. I think your current state of mind can completely alter the answers that you give on personality tests. For example, my Broadway choreographer ex-roommate had filled out the personality survey on eharmony.com and was matched up with all of these biker dudes. Whereas all she was looking for is someone dreamy. Someone dreamy who she could then move in with and leave me hanging. No, I’m not bitter. P.S. I hate you Lisa. I ventured out a little bit tonight to grab some dinner – I went to Clarke’s Quay. I still don’t understand why people insist on using crazy spellings for very simple words – just call the damn thing Clarke’s Key. Every time I see or write this, my mind pronounces it as “kway”. Anyway, the Kway was chock full of bars and restaurants and would have undoubtedly been quite the lively scene had it not been a Monday night. I sat down and ate at Renn Thai, which my Singaporean co-worker Yogesh had recommended to me. The food was pretty good, but the service was terrible – a fact that Yogesh confirmed with me the next day. In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure why Yogesh recommended this to me after all. Tuesday, May 29, 2007 After a non-descript (for you) day at work, I spent a few hours this afternoon finalizing travel plans for the rest of the week. My co-worker Belle was leaving the office for the week this afternoon, the other team members who I could have met with were in training tomorrow, and Thursday was a national holiday – so it looked as though my services would not be needed beyond today. What does that mean? Another day of vacation! Yippee! I could tell you where I’m headed, but then that would spoil the fun of you reading all about it for yourself a few short paragraphs away. And that would just downright cruelness. In the evening, I joined Yogesh’s family for some authentic home-cooked Marathi food. For those of you who don’t know, my family is from Maharashtra State in India, as is Yogesh’s. Since Yogesh and my mom are both reading this, I’m going to decline any comparison between the two, other than to say that it was very yummy. In fact, I actually felt bursting-at-the-seams-FULL for the first time this entire trip. A completely random topic of conversation after dinner, Yogesh’s 9 year old son told me that Chinese people didn’t like the number 4 because the sound of the number approximates the sound of the word meaning death (or something like that). Then he told me that many buildings here (and in China) don’t have a 4th floor for this reason – immediately, my mind flashed back to that exact realization in the Sheraton elevator earlier in the day. But they do have a 13th floor. Wednesday, May 30, 2007 This morning, I headed to the airport to get on a Philippines Airlines plane to Manila. Yep – you guessed it, I’m going to the Philippines. For those of you keeping track, this is country #33 for me, so I’m well on my way to 100. Since I was flying business class, I didn’t need to worry about luggage weight constraints. Somehow I managed to book a business class ticket to Manila followed by another business class ticket from Manila to Beijing for roughly the same price as my initial business class ticket on Singapore Airlines straight to Beijing. Go figure. By the way, I thought it would be good for you to know that drug trafficking in the Philippines is punishable by death – it said so right on the customs and immigration form that I filled out on the plane. They mean business, folks. Personally, I think I’d rather be caned in Singapore for jaywalking than die in the Philippines for smoking some weed. Almost as soon as I stepped off the plane in the Philippines, I was frequently asked if I had a Filipina girlfriend – apparently, this is quite a common thing for foreigners to do when they come to the Philippines. In fact, the whole “marry a foreigner” seems to be a very common and very acceptable practice for Filipina women, if not a desired outcome. From what I could tell, Filipino men didn’t appear to have too much of an issue with this. In fact, they frequently espoused the benefits of Filipina women – beautiful, caring, sweet, loving, honest, loyal, and I suppose somewhat submissive. I suppose that for males with a strong sense of ego and with a desire to maintain the “traditional” roles in the household, this must seem like heaven. Indeed, if my dating acumen does not undergo a step-change in the near future, I might want to consider taking another trip to the Philippines. Beyond all of this, it appears that it is perfectly acceptable and perhaps even expected for married men to have “girlfriends”, though the reverse is clearly not okay. For such a seemingly sexist society, I found it quite odd that the country has freely elected two female Presidents in its history. Perhaps “sexist” is the wrong word. Regardless of what the right word was, this whole Filipina girlfriend thing was so pervasive that I almost felt bad that I didn’t have one and that I had no plans to find one. When I arrived in the Philippines, it was much different than I had expected. Other than the immigration line taking about 15 minutes, everything else was actually pretty quick. Belle (my Filipina co-worker in Singapore who told me to go to Boracay) had scared the living bejeesus out of me, telling me that traffic is really really bad and that the airport lines required a 3 hour advance arrival. I needed to go from the international terminal of the international/domestic airport to the domestic terminal of the domestic airport. It’s really quite strange – both airports seem to share the same land, however the entry points are on opposite ends of the same field. I couldn’t figure out if they use the same runways or not, but I’m sure that they need to coordinate efforts, else air traffic controllers lose their jobs. The next leg of my journey was a short 35 minute plane ride on Asian Spirit airlines to Caticlan, which is a small town that basically serves as the main access point to Boracay. Boracay is a separate island in the Philippines, so I guess you could call it a singular Philippine, right? Asian Spirit only permits 10kg of checked in luggage per passenger, and I was about 20-25 kgs over. Fortunately, their rate/kg is very low and I only needed to give them an extra $20 or so to cover the penalty. The Asian Spirit plane that I was on had enough seats for maybe 150 passengers, yet there were only 10 people on board. And somehow, they still have a flight every hour. You would think that with such a low fill rate, they’d decrease the frequency of flights. Instead, they’ve artificially increased their fill rates by removing random rows of seats in the airplane. Initially, I thought that these were emergency rows. After looking around, I realized that there were three such rows completely missing, and the vacated windows were clearly not emergency windows. To top it off, the other rows were still “Asian-sized” – so you either had a ton of legroom or no legroom. But the best thing about this flight was their drink options – water or a wannabe orange Capri-Sun. I hadn’t drunk from a foil pouch in ages, and this just brought back good memories of my lunchbox in grade school: a Capri-Sun, a piece of Sara Lee poundcake, and a peanut butter sandwich (I’ve never liked jelly – it belongs to the same slimy food group as mushrooms). Lunch was almost as good as the staple breakfast at our house: three Eggo waffles in the toaster oven or a microwaved pack of Tennessee Pride sausage biscuits (we weren’t a Jimmy Dean family). After I arrived in Caticlan, I had to take a trike (standard Suzuki motorcycle with an elaborate side cab bolted on to it) from the airport to the boat ferry, then a boat over to Boracay, a trike to the street corner near the hotel, and then a 10 minute walk to the hotel. So let’s recap today’s traveling mechanisms: taxi-plane-taxi-plane-trike-boat-trike-foot. Exciting and new. My hotel for my stay in Boracay was a 15-room place called Turtle Inn. It was built about a year ago by a fellow named Troy, who moved to Boracay from his hometown Miami with his Filipina wife Mhalen. The inn itself was laid out against a mountainside and each floor only had two rooms so that each had its own balcony looking out over the island. Unfortunately, we weren’t high enough up a mountain to see the beach or the ocean or anything, but it’s the thought that counts here. There was definitely an art deco Miami flavor to the whole place as well. I was a bit pooped from the traveling, so I hung out with Troy and a couple of the other guests for a while. One of the fellows was a dive instructor from England, who had recently found a job on Boracay and was looking for a more permanent place to stay. The other fellow was a guy from Houston who worked on offshore platforms who was in the Philippines meeting with a lady he met over the internet, who he’s hoping he’ll get along well enough with to get married. She brought three of her sisters on this trip to Boracay too, so I think she was probably looking for a bit of family approval as well. And then there’s Troy. There’s lots to be said about Troy; he definitely falls along the thresholds of what is acceptable for a married man to do in the Philippines. As much as I disagreed with some of Troy’s choices, I had to admire him a little – he’s a seventh grade educated fellow who has built a beautiful place, has a wonderful wife, he knows what he wants in life and in his business, and he makes no bones about it. We talked quite a bit during my stay and learned of this travelogue – knowing that I wasn’t quite his breed, he wondered aloud what I’d write about him, and ultimately agreed with my assessment. After a local dinner at the hotel, Troy took me to a local hangout that he goes to called Red Pirates. It was a bit shabby with a makeshift roof, but then Troy explained that it was completely wiped out during a typhoon in January and the owner is still working on putting it back together. The owner is a British girl who shared that when it rains, her bedroom is pretty much under water. After a few beers at the bar, Troy and I joined a couple of Filipina girls staying at the hotel to go to the local hotspot called Cucamunga’s. There were a ton of foreign guys there with Filipina girlfriends or foreign guys looking for Filipina girlfriends – it actually reminded me quite a bit of Thailand where the same is seen almost everywhere. Thursday, May 31, 2007 Initially I had planned on starting my scuba diving today – the diving is the reason I came here and it’s supposed to be excellent. However, after I learned that Troy was renting a boat for the day to do some big fish fishing, to motor around some islands, and then go to a waterfall, I figured that I’d postpone the diving till the next day. So off we went at 5am to do some fishing. I think this was the first time this particular boat crew had ever gone fishing, because no matter what they did, Troy was at odds with them non-stop. 4 hours later, we hadn’t caught anything (or “we ain’t found sh*t” as the token black guy combing the desert in Spaceballs would have said). However, in that time, the boat crew had managed to screw up two of Troy’s reels and tangle a few lines as well. Troy’s brother in law John claimed that we weren’t getting any bites because the moon was bright last night which enabled the big fish to do their eating at night. Now, I don’t know the first thing about fishing and frankly I don’t want to know, so I have no idea if this rationale is legit or a bunch of malarkey. For all I know, he could have told me that all the fish went to McDonald’s last night for a Mac Attack and it would have had the same “umm… okay, whatever you say” effect on me. So I basically spent the first six hours frequently moving around the front of the boat to stay in the shade of the tarp to minimize my baking in the sun. What? A tarp? On a boat? Yes indeedio. This was a traditional bangca – a boat made completely from wood. Think oversized canoe with a box hut from the middle to the end of the canoe and a lightly colored tarp as cover on the front end. Such an overgrown canoe would have a massive tendency to tip over in the ocean waves, so they’ve installed two bamboo beams parallel to the canoe about 12 feet out from either side in catamaran fashion to act as steadying forces. And it works. Somewhere around noon, we stopped in Caticlan to grab some lunch in a dimly lit restaurant showcasing food in buffet trays that didn’t appear to be the freshest in the world – possibly due to the dimly littedness of the venue. I tried to pick the least offensive looking item and pray that I wouldn’t be afflicted with the Philippine version of Delhi-Belly. Mystery meat (beef surprise?) on rice with a bonus bowl of beef broth complete with random floating bone piece, to give it that authentic feel. Troy and John had a beer. I had a big bottle of water. My mouth was parched and all we had on the boat were sodas, beer, and a few fruit juice cans. I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t have water available on a torturously hot morning. I think Troy thought I was a pansy. And I can hear you all in the background muttering “Hell, I could have told him that.” Thanks for being a friend. You’re all great. Troy’s intent for this trip was to do some scouting with John – he’s trying to help John develop a one-day tour package that would be offered to his hotel guests, and the intent of this trip was to scope out the area a little. So, from Caticlan, Troy wanted to take a minivan to some waterfalls on the island. After a bit of discussion with our boat captain guide (who was from Caticlan) and a bit of problem finding an available minivan that could take us, we ended up boarding a public bus for 35 minutes. I caught up on some sleep since I was operating on only 3 hours and the motion of the boat was not conducive to a solid rest, especially considering the sun-evasive maneuvers. After passing out for a half hour on the bus, I awoke to the sound of us rushing to get off the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere, except for a few food stalls and road headed into the hills. I guess we needed to take this road. There was a trike headed in that direction which at first glance appeared to be full – but the other passengers waved us on and somehow we fit four more people onto the trike. And no, these trikes are not that big. We were riding Asian-style, with a complete disregard for fire code and all those other codes that have been invented in our bubble-wrapped “civilized” Western society. Of course, we also weren’t able to go any faster than maybe 10 mph with all the passenger weight – I seriously contemplated getting out and pushing. After a 15 minute ride through alternately paved and completely unpaved road through some stunning mountain scenery, we stopped at a place called Hurom-Hurom. Troy had been mumbling that the area had looked familiar – the boat captain guide-dude had led us to where he thought we wanted to go, which was a cold water spring resort in the mountains that a lot of Filipino families frequent to swim and bathe in natural spring water. There were no waterfalls in sight. Yet somehow, Troy found it interesting enough to have us sit there and watch for three hours over four beers. I more think that he couldn’t peel himself away from gawking at some of the more attractive women and girls that were in their swimming clothes – he kept muttering “Oh lordy, I’m going to hell”. Towards the end of the visit, John and I finally caved and jumped in – the water was very cool and refreshing. Troy stayed out from concerns of shrinkage. After a half a lap, John and I were sitting next on the opposite end of the pool, and some random woman sidles up next to me and starts invading my personal space, which causes me to shuffle over a little, and back and forth. She introduces herself as Kiki, and I try to limit conversation. I get a little freaked by personal space invasion, since I’m mildly claustrophobic (we’ll save that discussion for another day). And, truth be told, Kiki was no Salma Hayek. Actually – writing both of those names in the same paragraph is an utter disservice to all things Salma (I beseech thee Salma, please forgive me). Finally, Kiki made her way to the other side of the pool and took a beach ball and started tossing it at me (not to me, but at me). I try to be cordial and toss it back and continue a conversation with John. After 10 minutes, it gets old and I hop out of the pool. Troy’s words of comfort: “Well, it’s better to be found attractive by an ugly girl than by no girl at all”. This, of course, does wonders for my self-confidence. Thanks Troy. After a quick trike ride back to the main road, we try to get on the first bus or jeepney (see tidbit at the end) back to Caticlan. Then Troy gets seduced by a local to have a beer in his little shanty of a bar. It only takes a few minutes to realize that these two old men are completely wasted. Back on the side of the road after finishing a beer, one of the men tries to get my room number so that he can send me a Filipina prostitute. I tell him that I appreciate his concern for my sexual well-being, but that I’m diving tomorrow. And yes – that statement was completely devoid of logic on many levels. But he was drunk and I could basically say anything I wanted to. When we got back to the jetty and the boat, we found that it was low tide and we’d have to climb down to sea level and take a little canoe over to our bigger canoe. On the way down, I lost my footing and slid down 20 concrete steps on my ass, resulting in a bruised back side and pretty-well scraped up ankle. Boat captain dude felt horrible and kept trying to wipe the blood and wound with his dirty hand, while I kept shooing him away to leave it alone – the blood would keep it cleaner than his dirty hand. Amidst the hubbub, I lost my knockoff Oakleys – my superfly pair of sunglasses that I had tied my future coolness to. Superfly, wherefore art thou, superfly? Alas, I am destined to an existence of sub-coolness, mired in the silly dorkiness that you all love me for. After a chicken curry dinner at the hotel, I head out to the beach at night. The weather has cooled and the scenery is the epitome of perfect. The beach is mostly empty. The moon is out. There are a few clusters of clouds in the sky, but plenty of stars leaking through. And I’ve stolen a plastic lounge chair to lie back and soak it all in whilst listening to my odd mixture of oldies and has-beens on my ipod nano. This is just a perfect evening. I did try taking pictures, but I think I need a better camera – it was too dark and nothing would come out. So for all of you out there who enjoy these notes year after year, how about some payback and get me a new camera? J Troy was really worried that I didn’t have any fun all day – I spent a fair amount of time in quiet, but that’s just how I am. On the contrary, I thought today was great. I love completely random days. For as anal as I can get when I’m at work or at school, I love being the exact opposite in my personal life and on vacation – c’est la vie, que sera sera. If you plan all the details out, you’ll get so wrapped up in it that you miss the beautiful parts and you either won’t see or won’t be able to take advantage of opportunities that come up along the way. Of course, it also helps to travel during off-peak periods to permit this travel style. Friday, June 1, 2007 After some pancakes and juice at the hotel for breakfast, I headed to the beach to start my full day of scuba diving. One of the hotel employees had walked with me on the beach to compare prices on the first evening I was here, and I ended up just going with the dive shop that the hotel has a loose affiliation with called Dive Gurus – the price was about the same as any other shop and they were in low season and I’d be the only diver and they’d go wherever for however long I wanted, without charging me an additional “solo diver” fee. Last night, I had swung by and discussed with my divemaster Edwin what dives we would do the next day. After about 2 seconds, I realized the fatal mistake I had made in delaying diving by a day – all divers know that you’re not supposed to fly for 24 hours after your last dive. This would severely limit the number of dives that I could make. So we decided to try to get 3 real dives in on Friday morning and afternoon (pushing the 24 hour time limit slightly) and a shallow night dive in that evening. That’s not too shabby. I did, of course, take advantage of the opportunity to tell Troy that I had to cut my diving back sharply (which was the sole reason for my trip here) so that I could go with him to not catch any fish and to not go and see a waterfall. Everybody say “Thanks Troy”. Since I haven’t gone diving in 5 years, I took a quick refresher training just to make sure that I knew how to not die under water. As I expected, it all came back very quickly, so I ended being an apt pupil. Heck – Edwin and I both had a problem coming out with the same answer on the answer key on a few questions that use a table to figure out the residual nitrogen in your body – everyone uses computers nowadays so the tables are outdated. This dive shop actually gave me a computer to use for all of my dives, and you divers out there know that this is not typical at all. At 10:30am, Edwin and I joined another divemaster Jung Eon with her student Gaylord (who was taking classes for advanced certification). We took a bangca boat to a dive spot called Angol Point. Edwin and I were in the water for 52 minutes and got down to 17.1 meters. The water was quite clear (~20 m visibility?) and very warm at 30C. Even so, I opted to wear a wetsuit to protect me against scraping up against any coral. Any diver knows that an inadvertent scrape against some fire coral will remind you of your mistake for many moons. We saw lots of pretty fishees and stuff. Actually, for all three of daytime dives, we saw lots of pretty fishees. Describing fishees is not all that easy, but here goes the list of what we saw on this dive: a blue ribbon eel, black frog fish, porcupine fish, nudibranches (sea slugs), and a bunch of standard tropical fish. The porcupine fish reminded me of a pufferfish – I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen a pufferfish before or not, but my memory flashes back to an episode of the Simpsons where Homer adamantly demands a pufferfish meal, even though most of the fish is deadly to consume other than one small sliver in the middle; and the cook is freaking out pleading to not have to try and get that small sliver. I did quite well during this dive – I was impressed that I was able to control my buoyancy and not have to constantly inflate and deflate my BCD to keep from floating away or sinking (for those of you not in the know, this is a very common problem for beginners). As a result, I was able to hover in any physical orientation I needed to in order to get a view. In fact, later on in the day, I took advantage of my perfect buoyancy and started doing somersaults and cartwheels and backflips – I, of course, tried to do this when Edwin wasn’t looking, lest he realize that I’m a freak. We returned to the dive shop for a lunch break, and I went down the beach to Mario’s and had a pizza and a mango shake. The shake was huge and was unbelievably delicious. It was by far the best thing I’d had since I had arrived to the Philippines. Super yum. The pizza wasn’t too shabby either, and it was actually kinda comforting to have some Westernized food for a change. We did the second and third dives back-to-back with a 45 minute rest on the boat. Edwin asked me if we could do this instead of returning to shore, and my only concern was whether or not I’d have to use the restroom in between. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. By the way, when wearing a wetsuit, you are not able to freely contribute to the ocean as you might be able to when merely wearing a swimsuit (stop pretending you’re grossed out – you’ve done it before). Wetsuits are not easily water-penetrable. Dive 2 was at a dive spot called Balinghai, which is basically just a large coral shelf. The water was still crazy warm, and we dove for 45 minutes with a maximum depth of 21.6 meters. At the beginning of this dive, I started getting a little panicky – remember how I mentioned that I am mildly claustrophobic earlier? Well, try putting a constrictive wetsuit on with flippers and a BCD and oh yeah – you can only breath through this mouthpiece. That can trigger a little bit of a panic attack, which increases oxygen consumption pretty dramatically. I think I would probably do much better without the wetsuit. I took Edwin finding some interesting fishees to snap me out of my minor panic attack and relax me enough to enjoy – I’m sure he didn’t even realize that he helped me by doing that. Over the entire dive, we saw lots of neat stuff: 2 blue spotted stingrays, lionfish, yellow goatfish, bigeye fish (named so because they have very very large eyeballs), a moray eel, long nose emperor fish, blue fin trevally, and lots of standard tropical fishees. Lionfish are really really cool looking – so go and google it so that you can see. Go on, I’ll wait. By the way, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I keep referring to standard tropical fishees. I don’t really know how to describe them better – think of little fishees in all sorts of colors, some yellow, some red, some orange, some rainbow, some blue, some Nemo fish (yes I know they’re called clownfish), and so on. On this dive, these standard tropical fishees hovered all over us and we got to play with them. If you were still enough, some of the fish would venture right up to your facemask for an up close and personal view. ‘Twas very cool. The third dive was at Friday’s Rock, so named because it’s straight out from Friday’s beach resort. At this dive, a speedboat from a larger dive shop called Calypso Divers with 8-9 divers and only one divemaster came by and went in a few minutes before we did. They weren’t the agilest of divers, so we tried to keep our distance from them. However, Friday’s Rock wasn’t the biggest rock in the world, so we kept running into them. As you can tell, I like not diving with a whole lot of people much better. It lets you focus on the fishees. On this dive, we saw 3 small bamboo sharks underneath a rocky outcrop, big red reef snapper, mantis shrimp underneath a rocky shoal, a school of large golden trevally, a school of large barcheek trevally, 2 lionfish, and lots of standard tropical fishees. The key thing that I remember from this dive was the very large schools of fish that kept swimming by – where were these fish yesterday when we were trying to go fishing? Overall, Edwin told me that I was diving extremely well and that I should have done the advanced diver course so that I can go deeper and see more things. I think he was comparing me to Gaylord, who was having some minor issues with buoyancy and equalization, and just thought that I would have had a much easier time getting my advanced certification. I suppose I should probably do that next time. Maybe one of these days, I’ll actually take a vacation where the focus of a good bunch of the trip is to go diving. For that, I’ll need to have someone with me who wants to go diving. So, all you’uns out there, let me know if you’re interested. We had a few hours before we had to go out for our evening dive, so I went back to the hotel and showered because I felt disgusting from all of the salt water. The shower was so refreshing that I was extremely tempted to cancel my night dive. In retrospect, I probably should have done just that. At about 6:30pm, the sun had set, and Edwin and I loaded put on our gear in the dive shop and walked into the ocean from the beach and swam out a few hundred feet. The deepest we got on this dive was about 3 meters and we stayed down for about 35 minutes. Because we were so shallow, I was having a terribly hard time establishing buoyancy, especially with the waves whipping me up every once in a while. Because I couldn’t get my buoyancy right, I kept inadvertently whipping up sand and mucking up the already-shoddy visibility. We still saw a few interesting creatures – Edwin found an octopus that was trying to avoid us and kept playing with it, then he started bothering a squid, which sprayed some red ink and swam away. There was also a wasp fish, a big hermit crab with conch shell, and a Spanish dancer. This was all neat and such, but because of my aforementioned diving issues, I signaled to Edwin to call it quits and we swam back ashore. I just wasn’t having any fun and being out there was more of a chore than a joy. After paying up, I headed up the beach to find some sushi. It had been 3 weeks since I had some good sushi, and I figured that being in the ocean, we’d probably get some good sushi here. Well, it wasn’t all that great unfortunately. But at least it was cheap. That’s really no consolation though. Saturday, June 2, 2007 I slept in this morning – I honestly don’t remember the last time I was able to do that actually. It felt good. The weather today was hot in the sun, but nice and cool in the shade. I don’t like weather like that because you’re either sweaty or chilly, and that’s just plain weird. I took a stroll up the beach – my only objective for this morning was to get some cash. My destination? A place called D Mall, which is a collection of stores like an actual mall. I don’t know if there’s an A Mall, B Mall, and C Mall. I hope there are though, otherwise it would be tricky to explain why there’s a D Mall. By the way, I must say that the mango shakes on this island are really something else. I spent more on my mango shake than on my pancakes, but it was still just a $5 breakfast. But the mago shake was huuuuuuuuuuuge. And it was oh so good. Come to think of it, you would also probably spend more on a mango shake in the States than you would on a couple of pancakes. So maybe this isn’t as strange as the initial glance. At around noon, I began the journey back to Manila. First was taking the trike back to the jetty, then a boat over to Caticlan, and then to the airport for the flight back to Manila. This plane was the precise opposite experience as the previous Asian Spirit flight. This was a turboprop plane that was fully booked and reeked of mildew from a damp interior. The A/C didn’t work too well, so it was extremely stuffy inside and when we were airborne, the A/C kicked in and quickly began to drip on me from all the condensation. The saving grace was the wannabe Capri-Sun. I even got two of them because my neighbor didn’t want his. Yay. My hotel was in Makati City, one of the safer sections of Manila that is a big commercial center for the city. I think P&G may have their Philippine headquarters there or something and they had some unbelievable rates with some top-notch hotels. So I went out of my travel norms and stayed at the New World Renaissance Hotel for what’s got to be less than 50% of normal price. Security at the hotel was nuts. Before they let the taxi in, there were armed guards who looked into the vehicle and had mirrors on poles to look underneath the vehicle. I asked the guards later on if they had ever found anything, but they just smiled and responded to an entirely different question – I don’t think their English was very good. And I figured that since they had guns, I wasn’t going to probe any further, so I said thank you and smiled back. Before I could even walk into the hotel lobby, I had to walk through a metal detector, my entire luggage had to go through the standard airport security luggage car wash (also known as an X-ray machine), and there was even a K-9 unit on hand to sniff out for drugs. After relaxing for an hour or so, I decided to venture out for some food. The area had a lot of very Westernized shopping malls. Prices were pretty solid, and if I wasn’t completely shopped out from China, it probably would have been a good idea to spend a few hours browsing. Come to think of it, I’m never really in the mood to shop. So I continued on to find some food. I passed by a nice looking place that had a nice picture of a steak on the little menu board thingamabob, and boy that looked enticing. So I went into the W Grill, which was modeled after a Texas roadhouse – it had a mechanical bull inside, and all the menus had country or ranch type themes. The beer came in a few sizes: Bottle, Big Ass, and Pitcher. I definitely didn’t want a pitcher, so I ordered the big ass. When I got the beer, the plastic cup was a mold of a guy from waist down with his pants pulled down in the back exposing his very rotund backside. I kid you not. I ordered a porterhouse steak, medium rare. I didn’t really get a porterhouse steak. I don’t know what it was, but it was very thin and very tough. That probably serves me right though – when traveling to the Philippines, it’s probably not the best idea to order a steak if they’re not well-known for good steaks. So I left a wee bit on the disappointed side. But the beer glass made it all worth it, without a doubt. I had a few chores to do before I called it a night. First was to find the Hard Rock Café, so that I could get a Manila shot glass for my friend Rajesh, who collects them. I think he’s got to have at least 50-60 by now. Heck I have four sitting on my shelf here that I still need to give to him. Next stop was for my friend Julia to Max Brenner’s, a chocolate-themed restaurant with a slogan of “Chocolate by the Bald Man”. I had a Venezuelan hot chocolate and a piece of cake for dessert. The hot chocolate was very tasty. The cake was not the greatest. I actually wanted the chocolate soufflé, but that would have required a 30 minute wait. And I’m not really a waiter, I’m an engineer. Sunday, June 3, 2007 Today was a long long travel day. I got up at 5:00 am to leave by 5:45 am to get to the airport by 6:15 am to get on my 7:30 am flight to Beijing. I asked the hotel to get me a taxi, so they booked an airport transfer. When I was checking out, I found out that the airport transfer runs 2100 pesos (~$45), whereas a metered taxi would run about 100 pesos (~$2). Granted, the metered taxis were absolute crap-mobiles that probably wouldn’t pass any Western car inspection, but that’s just a huge differential. So I asked for my metered taxi instead. The taxi driver kept refusing to turn his meter on and was trying to charge me 300 pesos for the trip. I told him that I’d pay 150 pesos max, or to take me back to the hotel. He muttered something in Tagalog and proceeded. After a relatively uneventful flight from Manila to Beijing, we landed and I had to retrieve all of my bags, go through Chinese customs, and then check back in at Continental. I was a full 3 hours early for check-in, yet there was still a line at the Continental booth that was about 45 minutes long. Apparently, Chinese labor is too expensive for the idiot Continental tightwads, so they installed 3 kiosks that they expect everyone to use to check in. Nutty. In the waiting area about 15 minutes before boarding, Liang and his girlfriend/fiancée/wife Chenlu arrive and we start swapping stories about our last week. Originally, we had booked our flights online and selected seats so as to be able to sit next to each other on the plane ride back. However, somehow Liang and Chenlu were moved. We asked the fellow next to them if I could swap with him, but he was for some reason being really paranoid about being separated from his carry-on. Not very friendly, methinks. We were stuck on the runway at Beijing for 2 hours before they let us take off, presumably due to weather and traffic. The pilot was unbelievably candid about this, and it was clear that he was irritated with the tower because they wouldn’t give him an estimate on when we’d be able to take off. And he kept mentioning every 5 minutes that flight time was 12 hours and 25 minutes, and that he’d try to make up time in the air for those with connecting flights out of Newark. Once we finally land in Newark, we’re stuck waiting for another 30 minutes while another plane moves from our gate. Again, the pilot was not very happy and shared his frustration with us. After going through customs and then an additional agricultural screening, we took a cab back to Liang’s place and he dropped me off at about 9pm. In total, that means that I was in transit for about 27 straight hours. Fun fun. Okay – that’s it for this trip. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along. My next trip? I don’t know. Since my school is virtually up, I have a lot more leeway in specific timing, but I think I have a week or two that I might be able to take this fall. Last year, I had mentioned that I was planning to go to Kilimanjaro this fall – since this time, my brother-in-law Chris told me that if I waited a year, he’d join me. So, I’m postponing that plan for a little bit (will that still work for you, Hemangi?) and I’ll have to pick somewhere else this fall. If anyone is up for some nice hiking and camping, I’d be more than up for that. Chile anyone? Heck – I’d even go back to Peru again if someone’s interested. Toodles! Tidbits: 1. Philippine Airlines accommodates for Asian-sized passengers by providing a step at each row of seats to help people reach their luggage. 2. Why is it that the country is the Philippines, but the people are Filipino? Can we please standardize the spelling of the “ffff” sound in this nation? 3. Around the Philippines, a common mode of transport is by what they call a jeepney – it’s basically a scrappy old Jeep Wrangler front end with two long bench seats running on either of the extended cab in the back. It probably seats about 12-16 people. Beyond this, most of the jeepneys are lavishly and cheesily lined with shiny metal, and painted with caricatures and random phrases or whatever. It’s the poor man’s version of a pimped out ride. About the only way to make it better would be to give it a Dukes of Hazzard horn. 4. A lot of places in Asia charge extra if you use American credit cards. The upcharge is sometimes more than the 5% that you’d normally expect. Because I was paying in Philippine pesos, the hotel bill came down by about 8%. Moral of the story – always pull out money from the ATM, which has no fees. 5. About 10% of the Filipino workforce works abroad and sends money home. In fact, money coming in comprises of a significant portion of national wealth. Working abroad is so pervasive that overseas workers even have their own line in customs at the airport.