Bulgy-eyed Tarsiers and the Gentle Giant Butanding

I come home in a few days but I thought one last blog post would be appropriate. Thanks to everyone who has followed this, at times, long winded blog.

Ever since I established this long 6'2'' frame of mine people have made fun of my phalanges. I have gorilla hands or alien toes. Now, there is a new name: Tarsier toes. Tarsiers look like aliens. They are the smallest primates in the world and they are nocturnal, so naturally they have enormous eyes that bulge out of their heads, and naturally they can easily be confused for aliens. But the nickname for my toes comes not from their eyes but from their own phalanges. Like mine, they have extremely knobby knuckles that you can see on their slender, furless hands. So goofy looking. They were a must see while on the island of Bohol. The other must see were the Chocolate Hills. From the viewpoint atop the highest hill is a landscape of perfectly rounded, treeless hills scattered around you. It is borderline surreal. At some point, the grass on the hills dries out or is burned and the hills take on a brownish black hue, hence the name Chocolate Hills. Like so many things I have described, sorry about not uploading pictures. In time.

Just off the southeast coast of Bohol is Panglao Island. It was here that we stumbled upon Bohol Bee Farm, an organic beekeeping farm. Not only did they produce honey but they grew vegetables that they used in their restaurant (we ate there and I had a plate of grilled blue marlin with rice and a salad for under $6...best $6 ever,) and made their ownm ice cream (mmhmm, scoops of buko (coconut) and ube (purple sweet potato.)) It sat on a low cliff overlooking the ocean, so nice.

While traveling towards Carmen to see the Chocolate Hills, a woman gave us a hint about the BBC (Bohol Beach Club) on Panglao. In general, I abhor country club type establishments and the people who attend them, but I discovered that these things cannot be generalized, and in general, generalizations are poor form. You know that the place is going to be meticulously manicured before you walk in, and it was. They had crews of guys that raked the seaweed from the beach every couple of hours, gardeners in the gardens of flowers and trees, white painted beach chairs with grass huts for shade. But it was more than that stereotypical image. Any music playing was contained and could not be heard from the beach, there were more people by the beach than at the pool, and there was no wrinkly, leatherskinned women in sight. The staff joked with us and let us have free coffees when the rain came. They knew we were trying to sneak a taste of the dream for cheap, and we did.

When Lizzie and I planned (the little bit of planning that we did) for the Philippines, I told her that if I did nothing else I wanted to spend one day in Donsol. In the 90's WWF (World Wildlife Fund) heard that whale sharks, locally called butanding, frequently feed off of the coast of this small fishing village in the Philippines. They, along with the local population, established a system of ecotourism that allows people to swim and interact with the butanding. It went something like this: The spotter standing in the bamboo "crow's nest" of the small boat must have seen something, a dark silhouette maybe. The guide tells you to get ready.You slip on the flippers, pulling hard to stretch the rubber around your heel. You adjust your snorkel mask and suction it to your face. The mask is tight and you can feel the red lines forming that will be around your eyes and nose when you take it off. "GO GO GO!" he yells like an air force jump training instructor. You scoot your butt off of the edge of the boat and plunge into the water, careful to avoid the wing of the boat as it whizes past, and swim in the direction that the guide points. "Look down!" he reminds you. So you look. Is it there? Where is it? You must've missed it. Nothing. Then your stomach lurches and your muscles tighten as a huge open mouth looms towards you, trying to suck in microscopic plankton. It materializes quickly in the deep blue of the water but it moves slowly, drifting. But just seeing its mouth in those initial moments doesn't give you an accurate impression of how big it is. You know its big. You've been told its big. But you don't fully appreciate how dwarfed you are next to it until you are next to it, until its massive, white-spotted  blue body passes you. Its gills are the size of your torso and its tail fin is as tall as your body from head to toe. As excitement electrifies your body you begin to kick your flippers to keep up with it. How is it that this giant is gentle and eats only plankton and small krill-like fish? You spend twenty minutes labouring to smoothly swim alongside it. You look like a bigger, less scaly version of the small fish that follow it, catching a free meal of the food coming out of its gills. The butanding's black inside white eyes turn downwards and it begins to dive. You follow its last visible movements with your eyes, your body suspended in the blue water. The length of the butanding flows past. You try to count the many white spots as its dorsal fin passes. The tail oscillates slowly and gracefully until it disappears. You surface. Gasping to catch your breath you wait for the boat to scoop you up. The guide asks how it was. What do you say to that, after something like that? It was exciting as hell, but after the adrenaline subsided I thought of how they remind me of cows, a creature that amasses a great size, and in the butanding's case mostly, through eating plant matter and lives an almost exclusively peaceful life. Shouldn't we be studying these creatures for more than biological purposes, for more than how to make money from them? What do they teach us about how we should live?

Our flight back to Bangkok was scheduled for the nighttime so we had time to head to Tagaytay to see the Taal volcano, which sits in the center of a lake. Usually you can take a boat to the volcano, hike to the rim of the crater, and peer into the swirling pool of magma. However, the volvano had recently been raised to "Level 2," meaning it is at risk to explode sometime soon. They wouldn't let us climb to the edge of the crater. Bummer. On the way back to the airport I saw durian fruits, in their tan spike-covered shells, hanging in fruit stands on the side of the road. Lizzie has a lot of good ideas, one of them being for me to walk into a five-star hotel to go #2. In doing so I saw numerous no smoking signs with durian fruits edited into the red, slashed out circle and ever since I've been wanting to try this disgusting thing. Some people think it tastes like feet, others like stale vomit. For some unexplainable reason I'm drawn to the possibilities. But the vendors wouldn't sell me a small piece to try. I had to buy the whole fruit or nothing. I guess with durian, once you pop the fun stops immediately. The vendors knew that if they opened the fruit and sold me just a piece then they would have to sit for the rest of the day with this smelly sock of a fruit in the scorching sun. I didn't buy the whole fruit, because I knew that after I hated it I would have to sit for the rest of the day with this smelly sock of a fruit in the scorching sun. But the quest to try durian did not end in vain. Also hanging in the fruit stand was a bundle of mangosteen. To put into perspective the magnificence of this fruit, Queen Elizabeth once promised a knighthood and 1000 pounds to any man that could bring her a single mangosteen. My jaw muscles tickled from the sweet juice that bursted from the white, segmented flesh of this fruit. Jesus it was delicious.

If you have read this post in its entirety, congratulations. That is well done. I would've had to get up and make a sandwich to get through that thing.

P.S. I listened to rap music while writing this post. Also, Thailand has far more mosquitoes than the Philippines.

Halo Halo, Puto, Lumpiang, Crispy Pata...Why does it taste so good?

It might sound crazy, but I am happy to be rid of the Thai cuisine, at least for a while. Those coconut milk based curries and endless $1 Pad Thai are unbelievably good, but I needed a rest after three months. In traveling to the Philippines we get a break from everything but the rice. You can't escape the rice. It's everywhere.

Our first Philippine destination was the capital, Manila. It is a city with a lot of history, but even more signs of the future to come. Going to Intramuros, the old section, one can find forts, Catholic cathedrals, and Spanish villas all left over from colonial times. There are expansive parks honoring the martyr Jose Rizal and other colonial era fighters. But then there are tons of malls. The Robinson is a four story behemoth. In Philippine malls there are as many sit down restaurants as clothing stores and as many stores selling cell phones as either of those. You have at least ten choices of the same kind of food, and there are many kinds a food to choose from. These malls take cuisines from around the world: pizza, burgers, rotisserie chicken, French baking, you name it. We walked into the Robinson to buy a new SIM card for our phone so that it would work in the Philippines but we were completely overstimulated. We couldn't imagine a larger example of consumption. Then the next night, Lizzie's cousin Cleah took us to MOA (Mall of Asia) which is the third largest mall in the world. You couldn't fully explore the place if you had a week. There was an ice skating rink inside. It was big, very big. But it is interesting, They have found ways to make these malls, I hesitate to use the word but, beautiful places. MOA has a veranda that overlooks the bay. The mall in Baguio (which is where I am typing this now) has a veranda that gives possibly the best view in the entire city. The mall is on top of a huge hill from where you can watch the clouds drift through the building-covered hills of Baguio. You are literally inside the first cloud layer and you can feel their moisture as they float past you.

Anyways, we haven't spent that much time in the malls, they are just crazy and of note to mention I think. But Manila was a special place for Lizzie. In Manila, we visited St Paul's College where her mother attended nursing school before she came to the U.S. More importantly though, about 45 minutes outside of the city is the town of Imus in the province of Cavite. It was, for so long, the fabled birthplace of her mother and her other family that is now in the states. Cleah drove us to Mascardo Street and Lizzie met her Aunt Heidi for the first time. There were tears. We saw the neighborhood where Lizzie's mother grew up, a place she had only heard about in stories but was now real, concrete, streets full of houses and shops. From my perspective, it was amazing to watch someone connect with a part of themself. Just being there for it was special.

We left Manila and headed for Baguio, a beautiful town in the Mountains. It is not a small quiet town. In fact, it is large bustling town. It is hard to escape the smog of Jeepneys, even here where it mingles with the crisp mountain air. But here, unlike in Manila, we have found pockets of peace, at least for a few minutes at a time. Reading in Burnham Park is relaxing, that is until the vendors swarm you. Note to all you future travelers, don't buy anything from wandering vendors, or if you do be so quick that the other vendors don't see the transaction. I could read maybe a paragraph before a huge plate of empanadas were dropped in front of me, or oranges, or wooden flutes, or chicharonnes. And when I finally caved and bought an empanada all of the vendors converged, like sharks to a drop of blood in the water. But Baguio has been the perfect place to relax and watch the clouds.

Tomorrow we leave Baguio for Bohol. Adventures that are tentatively planned are seeing Tarsiers, dolphin and whale watching, and viewing the chocolate hills. Our last few days in the Philippines we plan to swim with whale sharks in Donsol, the only place in the world where the beasties come that close to the shore and surface and are comfortable with people swimming alongside them. Well, I hope the flowers are blooming back home.