New Blog

We've moved on from Asia to Scandinavia. Keep up with us at Jen & Peter Do Scandinavia.

Epilog (Epiblog?)

Our trip home was epic. Four days in the making and every single one of our five planes was delayed and/or canceled. The six hours we spent in the Butuan airport on Mindanao were worthwhile when President Arroyo made a surprise visit in her private jet and accompanying military helicopter. She was coming to inaugurate a new national park and we were there long enough to see her arrive and depart with all the fanfare. That put us in late in Manila and we finally arrived in China for our transit at 3 a.m. We were lucky enough to get to leave the Shanghai airport and checked into a "nearby" hotel where, almost immediately, my body picked up where it left off and I experienced respiratory and digestive malfunction and spent a tired miserable night cursing China. But the next morning, we were excited to reunite with my brother and his family (new nephew! favorite nephew!) and we all boarded our plane bound for Canada. Many hours later we were still on the tarmac and by the time we would have been over Alaska we were checking back into a Chinese hotel while our plane underwent overnight repairs. The airport hotel was pimped out Chinese style with a round bed and mirrors on the ceiling and I fell asleep worrying that the mirrored tiles would fall on my head and kill me before I could get back on a plane and head home. I slept restfully, however, and we left on time the next morning and sailed across the sea and then into Seattle and on to Spokane and the homecoming celebration was made even more joyous by the news that our best friends had just given birth to their second kid and we swung by the hospital to pay them a surprise visit. The new parents were at the same level of exhaustion as we were but it was as sweet a welcome home as we could have ever imagined. Spokane is cold but the air smells so fresh and clean I could cry. The lilacs are blooming and Peter's family sent us some coffee and champagne (and fresh-picked asparagus) in a welcome home package and I can honestly say it is good to be home.

The End

What is there to say when something like this comes to an end? Everything in the past few days has felt very final. Our last village disco was like prom night. I danced "one last dance" with every man on the island it seemed. Yesterday we went on one last motorbike ride through the island and stopped at the Flying Fox for one last German buffet, where the treasure hunter didn't remember us (been there like five times) and started, one last time, to tell us all about his gold panning championships and treasure hunting trips in the Florida Keys. Tonight it will be one last pool tournament and one last pina colada in the hut watching the sunset. The waves are dinky today, but we will try for one last surfing session. It's been an amazing three months...an amazing year really and we are of course changed but no so much that you won't recognize us when we return. We're not as tan as you might think and our surfing arms not as big as we'd hoped, but we have a new outlook on life and the world, we are on a new crusade about overpopulation and alternative energy, and we are unemployed blank slates returning to a life punctuated with more than one question mark. Please don't ask what we plan to do when we get home. All I know is that my brother is getting married and we have a lot of friends and family to catch up with in the coming weeks. If you need me, I'll be drinking an IPA next to a river, drying out and planning my next move.

Home, Sweet Semi-Permanent, Home

Well, we're down to our last week across the Pacific and we are back at Oceans 101 on Siargao Island. We were welcomed back with open arms. All the girls came running out as a screaming mob when we pulled up on our motorcycle cab and nearly ripped us off the bike with hugs. We had been gone just over a month and they all expressed their fears that we wouldn't come back at all. Not too much has changed. A few guests are still here that we know, the owner's wife is pregnant, and the kids have grown up a bit—the six year old's pool game is decidedly improved and the baby is walking. We missed a local surfing competition by a day and the closing ceremonies involved the "Miss Beach Babe Summer 2008" contest, which we attended the night we got back. All the local resorts (this word might be slightly deceiving—a resort here is usually a couple of palm huts and a short-order restaurant) sponsored a contestant who participated in the sarong round and the "summer wear" round, during which the girls paraded around in their skimpiest bikinis. And even though a rival resort's girl sprayed herself down with water and proceeded to hump the podium, the Oceans 101 girl won the crown, which probably had a lot to do with our girls' screaming and the "40% audience participation" points. She also won some plastic jewelry and an all expenses paid trip for two to Surigao City—the dirty and noisy ferry terminal we have decided is hands-down the worst city in the Philippines.

It felt good to unpack our backpacks and resume our relaxing routine, eating familiar breakfasts and surfing our favorite spots. I'm trying to be as lazy as possible because all the unknowns about the future are pressing down on me and threatening to undo three months of serenity I've had here in the Philippines. It will be sad to leave our odd home on Siargao Island, but we are, nevertheless, anxious to be home, where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs (reading Stegner again), where the handouts grow on bushes and the cigarettes grow on trees. Lookout, Big Rock Candy Mountain, we're coming home.

Sagada: Where Pine Trees and Banana Trees Live Together in Perfect Harmony

Immediately after leaving the rain forests of Borneo, we headed north from Manila into the mountains. We were pleasantly surprised by and completely unprepared for how cool it would be in the Cordillera. Our bus wound up and up over six thousand feet on an unpaved bumpy road and after almost nine hours on the bus (including a two hour rest at a landslide) we arrived, slightly battered, in Sagada. The sight and smell of pine trees and the best cup of coffee we've had in all of Asia were refreshing to say the least. We spent almost a week in Sagada, hiking to hanging coffins and rice terraces and just enjoying the clean mountain air. Now we are in the hip college town of Baguio--ex-military R&R area--waiting to get on a plane this weekend back down to Mindanao. This part of the Philippines has been a really nice place to be at the end of our trip. It's so different from anything else we've seen and is making us anxious to get home. Suddenly pine forests seem like the most exotic things in the world.

Leaving Borneo

Well, it turns out that three weeks in Sabah is too much. It's not that it's not a great place to be, but it ended up being way more expensive than we planned. Besides Uncle Tan's, there's no other affordable way to get to wildlife. Malaysia knew it had some natural treasures on its hands and let in big eco-resorts to their national parks and ex-logging areas, so that the wilderness here is for high end travelers. I should have known that if my old company did trips here, we wouldn't be able to afford it. But it was two weeks very well spent. After the Kinabatangas River, we headed to the fishing village of Semporna, which is the setting off point for trips to Sipidan Island--Borneo's premier diving spot. While not too far of shore, Sipidan is not connected to the same continental plate as Borneo, and the 900 meter trench that separates it from its island neighbors is home to a lot of marine life. Unfortunately Peter was recovering from a head cold (after food poisoning and a cough) and only was able to make one short dive before he thought his head might explode. I went on two snorkels without him on Sipidan and saw a huge school of jacks like a glittering brick wall, six or seven green sea turtles, and my first shark--a white-tipped reef shark. It really was an amazing place. Now we're in Kota Kinabalu--the big city--where we celebrated Peter's birthday by enjoying a lot of air conditioning and splurging on a nice Japanese dinner. We're headed back to the Philippines tomorrow morning and will explore the Cordillera region of North Luzon before making our way back to Siargao Island to retrieve our stuff and catch a few last waves. We'll be back in the States in exactly three weeks, which is incredibly hard to imagine. Finally, I'd like to thank the President for his gracious stimulus package. I received mine yesterday, and it has officially financed our trip to Borneo. Consider the Malaysian economy sufficiently stimulated.

Images of Borneo

Here's some pictures of some of the amazing wildlife we saw in Borneo. The best sightings were enjoyed without a camera stuck to my face, so you'll have to take my word for it that watching orangutans build a nest for the night (swinging around, breaking huge branches, etc.) was incredible and best experienced in the moment. And all the great birds were fast flying blurs of iridescence. The gigantic reptiles, however, posed and sometimes smiled while we pulled up slowly in our boat. The insects were usually accommodating as well.

Forest Apes!

We have just emerged from three days in the "jungle" (World Wildlife Fund hates this word and I agree that we should call it "rain forest"...but still). We stayed at Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp on the Kinabatangas River and on various safaris by foot and boat we managed to see huge crocodiles, 2-meter monitor lizards, hornbills and many brilliantly colored tropical songbirds, and best of all, the ultra-bizarro proboscis monkey (do a google image search for this one) and two wild orangutans. We went on a night safari in a tropical downpour and found several tree frogs, a centipede, and a scorpion the size of my forearm. Anyway, we are still reeling from our wildlife encounters. This is why we came to Borneo...to Asia in fact, and just seeing those huge apes in what's left of their natural habitat made all the bad air and food and language problems totally worthwhile. More later, because tonight we are splurging on our first hot shower in three weeks and an air-conditioned hotel room (with Malaysian cable TV!).

Where are the headhunters?

I don't know what we were thinking. Even though we knew better, I think Peter and I were both expecting to land on a mud runway in the jungle when we arrived in Borneo. We were startled and impressed with Kota Kinabalu, a shiny organized city with new cars and sensible traffic (though they do drive on the wrong side of the road). And even though we felt like trailblazers, it turns out we are not the only white faces with backpacks tromping around Malaysia. There is a good hostel scene here and our ten dollar a night room comes with breakfast and full use of an extensive library. We had an exceptional dinner at an Indian café as soon as we got into town and with a belly full of dhal and okra we decided that so far Borneo is fantastic. We did get off to a rather rough start the morning we left when our discount airline lost our reservation to Manila. We were able to buy another ticket for later in the day, but that caused for some panic when we got to Manila because our discount airline to Malaysia left from Clark airfield, approximately 1.5 to 4 hours away from the city. A very expensive cab ride assured that we made our flight and we left the Philippines under the watchful smoky eye of a clearly decapitated Mt. Pinatubo.

Sabah has a fascinating mix of cultures and we are still trying to figure out how things can be so different while we are still so close to the Philippines (closest points between the two are only 20 miles apart). But while the Philippines has the guilty reign of Catholicism and the simple laid back lives of the poor, Muslim Malaysia is surprisingly rich, somewhat decadent, and decidedly more subdued. Spices, rubber, oil, and hardwood timber have assured Borneo a solid place in trading society for something close to a thousand years and the money still seems to be flowing into this island where somehow there still are rather large chunks of untouched land. Add Muslim Indians, Filipino pirates, and savvy Chinese merchants to the fascinating cultural mix of the native populations and you can see why Malaysian Borneo is a truly unique destination. We are enjoying the ride so far, but soon we will leave Kota Kinabalu with its comforting familiars (Rolls Royce, Idaho potatoes, etc.) and surprising treats and commence our explorations of wilder places.

Borneo Bound

The very first pre-departure notebook I put together for Zegrahm Expeditions was for Borneo. I wasn't exactly sure where Borneo was, but I knew it was one of the most remote and exotic places anyone would ever want to travel to. I soon learned everything there was to know about Borneo, spending almost a full slow week researching way more than I needed to about the third largest island in the world covered in some of the most primitive forest on Earth. And so it is with great pleasure and anticipation that I announce that Peter and I will be headed to Borneo for three weeks. We leave on Saturday and I can't say I've been this excited about anything (except maybe the birth of my second nephew, Lincoln) in months and months. The Philippines has been great, but the national parks scene here leaves much to be desired. Borneo is the place to be for birds, rainforest, volcanoes, caves (remember that scene in Planet Earth with the mini-mountain of guano inside the cave? That was Borneo), and some of the best diving/snorkeling in Southeast Asia. When we found tickets for around one hundred bucks each roundtrip, we just couldn't resist. Cross your fingers for orangutan, jungle elephant, and rhino sightings, though even a hornbill or two will make our trip worthwhile.

On the Move--Padre Burgos

For those of you following along at home (I picture you with your Philippines map and your colored string and thumb tacks—it's very sweet), we left Siargao Island Monday morning on the 6:00 a.m. ferry to Surigao City, where we hopped on a jeepney to the port of Lipata and boarded another ferry for Liloan in Southern Leyte. That took all day so we spent the night in Liloan before taking a relay of three jeepneys around Sogod Bay until we arrived at Padre Burgos. For those who don't know, a jeepney is an open-air bus—a cross between a jeep and a bus. This is how the masses are transported around this country and most jeepneys look like they were featured on some sort of Catholic version of Pimp My Ride. They are shiny chrome jobs with airbrushed logos and phrases—sometimes dedicated to the driver's wife or daughter, but more likely dedicated to Jesus or La Virgen. The Filipinos take their Catholicism very seriously (this is the country where people crucify themselves every Easter) and even on the ferry they play a video of a prayer for God to protect our journey, which I pray along with usually because the ferries here are sixty-year-old hand-me-downs from China and Japan and a little prayer might be what it takes to get the rusty beast across the strait.

So, here we are in Padre Burgos, the Philippine's best-kept diving secret, home of whale sharks and hammerheads and the healthiest reef around. Peter started his open-water diving course this morning, getting up at 7:00 to start watching a parade of safety videos. This is a much better place to learn to dive than the University of Idaho swimming pool, which is where he tried to get certified before. The only thing that has been standing between him and a PADI certificate all these years is a final dive in Lake Coeur d'Alene in April, to which he said no thank you eight years ago. I think the diving around here will be well worth the wait.

As for me, I'm enjoying our bamboo upstairs room with a great balcony looking over Sogod Bay. There is a nice stretch of mountains across the bay and in the evening, when the steeply angled light of the setting sun reaches them, they look surprisingly like a green jungle version of the Owyhees and I imagine that the water is dense rows of Hell's Canyon grapes and despite being in paradise, I realize I am becoming deeply homesick.

Leaving Siargao

For the last week we have been trying to leave Siargao Island and explore the rest of the Philippines, but we can't seem to get ourselves to move on. We know we need to see as much of this country as we can in the next two months, but we have come to feel very much at home here. Our first setback to leaving was our friend Neil's birthday. He wanted to kill a goat ("My friend back in England came to the Philippines on his birthday and killed a goat and drank the blood"), so his girlfriend indulged him and bought a goat in the village and brought it to the resort on a rope. Peter helped by sharpening the knife and sure enough Neil killed a goat right here on the resort lawn. I was recovering from two days of the stomach flu but managed to witness the whole thing, though I did not feel well enough to partake of the goat curry feast that was had later that night.

A few days later it was Neil's girlfriend, Nikki's, birthday and we had to stay for that one too. There have been a lot of birthdays lately and we are getting used to the five o'clock serenades a few mornings a week. We have gotten attached to our British friends and all the characters here but have finally decided to move on for a bit. Another reason for our hesitancy is the amount of luggage we have had to bring with us because of our flight from China. We are used to being very light travelers and this country with all its motorcycle cabs and jeepney rides is hard to navigate with large duffels. We have decided to leave our big bags here for a few weeks and do some lightweight island hopping. We will return to our beloved Siargao at the end of the trip.

We have had a great six weeks here, highlighted by boat rides to tiny outlying islands, low-tide explorations of the nearby mangrove swamps, surfing and surf-watching, and buying tuna and mahi mahi from the fishermen and grilling them up with the local boys in their outdoor kitchen huts. One night after eating grilled fish we had a sing-along, which is the more laid back expression of the Filipinos propensity for karaoke. It involves a guy with a guitar and a hymnal-like book of tab and lyrics for every Phil Collins, Aerosmith, Beatles, or other love song you can imagine. We sat with the books open in our laps and everyone sang along to songs we wouldn't be caught dead knowing the lyrics to at home. It really is a great life, being on an island where singing and dancing are integrated into daily life and the party starts early so everyone can get up at sunrise and surf or fish or lay around enjoying the cool.

Monthly Report

For the first time in my life the past month has felt exactly like a month. It hasn't gone quickly, it hasn't gone slowly, it has just passed—30 days, predictably 12 hours long. Watching the tide and the moon so carefully has helped with this, I think. We have been occupying a room at Oceans 101 for four and a half weeks and it is time to move on, but we can't quite get ourselves prepared to move again. Siargao Island has become a kind of home and we will be sad to leave. But it is strange to make your home at a resort. We are craving some kind of domestic freedom: to make our own breakfast, to buy our own groceries, to sweep our own front porch. Having people cooking and cleaning for you every day sounds nice, but we are too independent for such a life.

The one thing I have reclaimed is laundry, doing it by hand in the shower and hanging it on our jagged stick fence to dry. It is hard work scrubbing our sweaty, muddy, salty clothes with a brick of soap like a slippery pumice stone. I crouch in the shower over the bucket feeling very native, wishing only that I had a good river rock to scrub against. The first time I was hanging our laundry out, one of the girls who works here walked by astonished. What is silly about the whole thing is that the resort has a washing machine, but it isn't that we are too cheap to send our laundry out but more like it is somehow the one thing that I have chosen to repossess from my former non-vacation life. She wasn't astonished that I had the nerve to turn down their services, she couldn't believe I knew how to do laundry. "How do you know how to do that?" she asked. "In my country, when I am at home, I do all my own laundry and cook my own food and clean my own house." Suddenly my skin felt very white (despite the impressive tan I've worked up) and I felt very defensive and then sad for our world, in which we constantly find ways to create power instabilities, where hard work leads to luxury for some and means only more hard work for others.

The thing that's nice about living at a resort is the constant flow of new people to meet. They come and go like the tide and we've met a whole cast of interesting characters while we've been here. Only one other guest has been here the whole month—a one legged conspiracy theorist from Australia, who surfs on his one leg, drinks his own pee, and sees UFOs almost every night over the sea. Friendly enough guy, though. The family, of course, is always here. The owner is an Australian surfer who owns a heavy equipment company back home. He spends most of his time here though where he is married to a savvy and beautiful local woman. They have three kids, and it is the six-year old we have the most contact with. She is a smart but bored and bratty girl, who won't go to school with the village kids and spends most of her time cheating at cards or pool with the guests. She has developed a love/hate relationship with Peter, who is the only one who will call her out on her deception but also really wants to make her island life a little more educational. The one-year old daughter loves Peter, too—loves to grab his goatee and touch his rough face. She is doted on like crazy around here, passed from mom to aunt to grandma to guest to uncle to sister all day. She's moments away from taking her first step if only someone would let her.

Of course there's the staff, who are like family, too, in that they are always around. But they aren't treated like family even though they live here. The waitresses are waiting all day (7 am to 10 pm) in the restaurant to take our orders and the cooks are in the kitchen prepping or blending up fruit juices for our whims. When things are slow (at one point we were the only guests here with about 10 people waiting on us), they sometimes go out and pull weeds in the lawn. They never get a day off and sleep five to a room on a foam mattress made for two. But they are charming girls and when we dance with them at the village disco on Saturday nights we are lucky to have them as dates. They dance full steam—like they have a lot to let out—and stay out until 2 am. When we see them again it is breakfast and they have slept for maybe three hours and our asking us what it is we'd like to have today while we peruse the menu we have memorized.

The Flying Fox

There's a restaurant on the road to town, where the flying foxes cross over in plain view during their evening exodus. It's called the Flying Fox, appropriately, and serves "international cuisine." On Sundays it serves all you can eat German food for about four dollars. We had to check it out. The food at our place is good, but we have been here almost a month and have exhausted the menu. Bread and sausages and kraut sounded like a real treat. When we got there, there was a table full of European men who had been drinking since the buffet opened at 1:00 pm. We went late in hopes of seeing the bats after dinner. The proprietor asked us where we're from. Peter said Idaho, and the proprietor said, "Oh Idaho. I am from Florida," in a strong German accent. "Idaho is famous for potatoes. I will never forget my first Idaho potato. Pure gold and no need for butter." Then he escorted us to the food.

It was an impressive spread. Pork schnitzel, German potato salad, crabs, shrimps, oysters, compact and firm green bananas, a salad of sweet potato greens with a garlic vinegar, fresh baked sour dough bread with fennel, and French fries made from cassava root. It was amazing and we gorged ourselves. Victor, the owner, grows most of the food on his property and praised the health properties of the sweet potato greens, which are star shaped and a bit of work to chew, but are quite tasty.

Then the bats came out. Victor calls them his babies and pretended to call them out. Of course we had already seen the bats and knew it was the predictable fall of dusk that produced their flight, not his whistling call, but we acted impressed. "Here is the king!" he said when the first one appeared—a real giant. "Now two, then four, then eight, then a hundred." It was like an episode of Sesame Street listening to him count bats with such enthusiasm. Victor bought his property because of the bats and wants to protect them. He buys them at markets, where they're sold live for meat, and sets them free. He did the same with a flying lemur a local sold him for his "international menu." It seemed that Victor was a bit of a naturalist and we were very refreshed to meet such a person.

But Victor, it turned out, is an animal lover, but he's so much more than a naturalist. Victor is a staunch anarchist (like so many of the single male ex-pats that turn up on small islands) and also a treasure hunter. He worked in Florida diving to reap the bounty of Spanish wrecks. He is also a champion gold panner. "I can show you my trophy," he says, "1986 world champion." He was also, unrelatedly, a kickboxing world champion in the 80s, and he has the trophies to prove that too. Victor made his fortune when he discovered 400 Celtic coins in the Black Forest. That was his retirement money: one and a half million dollars (converted to U.S. dollars and adjusted for inflation). He's panned for gold all over the U.S., but he swears the biggest nuggets he's ever seen are near Surigao City, here in the Philippines, just a short ferry ride away. He'd love to get in there and tear that place up with a vacuum dredge, but foreigners can't take any minerals out of the Philippines and he'd be machine gunned down if he tried. The only way to take gold out of the country, he says, is to melt it into cubes, paint it black, strap it to a belt and call it dive weights. Not sure if he's actually tried this.

The night progressed with wild drunken story telling. Eventually, he went behind the bar and brought back a Tupperware full of treasure: dozens of rings, a pair of 4,000 year old Roman tweezers, a 2,000 year old brooch, a WWII bullet casing turned into a shotglass by servicemen. Then he called over his seventeen year old Filipina waitress who was wearing an ancient silver ring on almost every finger. Victor is one of those guys who always thinks you don't believe him. "You don't believe me? I'll show you," and he would summon his twenty-four-year old pregnant Filipina girlfriend over and ask her to retrieve an artifact or a book or a trophy. It was a crazy night that could have gone on forever, but our bellies and heads were full, so we thanked Victor for the food and the stories and the bats and took our leave.

Best Birthday Ever

My birthday started early this morning (5:45!) with a surprise serenade by the staff of our place and some local villagers. The Filipinos know about a dozen birthday songs (my favorite had a line about how happy Jesus was that I was another year older) and the concert lasted almost a half hour. They also prepared a birthday tree for me—the trunk was made of the soft heart of a banana tree and the branches were ferns and flowers stuck in with 29 candles perched carefully on them. The tree was ceremoniously lit and then I blew out the candles. Everyone handed me a flower and then showered me with petals. I could get used to waking up to such loveliness.

I had mango stuffed pancakes for breakfast, then we made an early surfing trip to nearby Dako Island, which is one of the only spots around here that's good for beginners. I did not have any good rides (well, one on my knees), but Peter put on a good show, and the nice thing about reef breaks is that if you get tired of surfing, you can always snorkel around and look at the corals. On the way back we stopped at deserted Guiam Island—a perfect tiny island with coconut palms, white sand, and good tide pools. This island is so photogenic that it was the past cover of the Lonely Planet Philippines guide. We wandered around the island for a while and eventually the spear fishermen came in with some beautiful little fish. It's unfortunate that they eat such tiny colorful fish, but it's interesting to get so close to the fish—to feel and examine them. I'm pretty sure there will be no fish left in the world in my lifetime.

We had a harrowing boat ride home at the peak of low tide, so all the monster waves around the island were really rearing up. Even though we could go safely around them, the swell was enormous. We were sunburned and tired when we got back, so we lunched then napped. A spectacular sunset kept our attention this evening and then it was time to party. Peter bought me a pig, which our hosts roasted all day over a coconut shell fire. I shared my bounty with all the staff and guests here at Oceans 101 and we had a real feast with plenty of pork and rice, pancit noodles, a marinated vegetable salad, and a pink frilly cake from the town bakery to finish it off. We finished the night with sips of rum between games of pool with new friends and I must say it was one of the best birthdays ever.

Island Dates and Rock Pools

We have become quite good friends with two Swedish girls who have spent the last two weeks here with us. They are inquisitive and adventurous and nice to have around. They have also captured the attention of a handful of local surfers, who try every day to impress the girls with adventures around the island. Luckily, we manage to get invited on some of these dates. Today we rented motorbikes and headed to a place 30 km north of here called the Rock Pools, which is a unique spot where at low tide, the deep pools get separated from the sea, forming a private aquarium, perfect for swimming and snorkeling. Fish get trapped there too and some corals even grow, so it's a perfectly still mini-ocean.

We cruised around the island, driving through the lush farmland of rice paddies fringed by coconut plantations. When we would come into a village, it was like we were in a parade. The road would be lined with children and adults waving and yelling "Hello, friend," and sometimes just shrieking with delight at the sight of foreigners. So different from the icy stares and mumbles and pointing of the Chinese unaccustomed to us. I would wave from the back of the bike trying to alternate sides so as to not leave anyone out, and eventually my face would get sore from smiling so much. The beach is great, but it's this heart of the island—the interior—that's really special and I hope to get to explore it further.

As it was getting dark, our Filipino guides flagged us down and we all parked our bikes on the side of the road to watch the flying foxes—bats the size of large owls—leaving their cave home to head out to feed. Thousands of these graceful giants passed over our heads. Our timing couldn't have been better and it was a real treat to see what we're missing every night somewhere on this island while we're playing pool or watching the sunset.

Last night, the Filipino suitors, while we tagged along as they wined and dined the Swedes, made an amazing local dinner for us. In their breezy outdoor kitchen, these cool surfer kids made coconut milk from scratch for a chicken curry, cleaned and grilled six large squids, and marinated fresh tuna in chili-infused coconut vinegar. It was an amazing and delicious feast. For dessert, we sipped "Filipino Bailey's," which tastes a lot like the Irish Bailey's, but the improvised ingredients include condensed milk, rum, instant coffee, and Milo (like Ovaltine).

Stormy Weather

We are in the middle of a four-day storm. It is raining buckets, blowing a gale, and the seas are furious. Nothing dangerous, but it really makes me think about what it would be like to be a tiny island like this during a typhoon. The palm trees take the wind gracefully though, which is what they're intended to do—like models with their hair blown around by an industrial fan, they look even more seductive with their fronds all tousled. It's fine. Our arms needed a break from catching waves anyway. The storm has given the resort a nice community spirit. We hold up in the usually open-air restaurant, which is currently boarded up to keep the sheets of rain out of our fish curry. Games of pool and scrabble and watching DVDs keep our minds off the fact that we haven't put our swimsuits on two full days. Wave watching is also a common past time. If you dare to brave the mine-field of falling coconuts, you will be rewarded with views of epic waves and accompanied by a deafening roar. Even the usually calm bay in front of our place is a mess of white caps, so that even though the water is still warm and the coral still colorful, no one is daring to go for a snorkel.

Settling In

Here's us settled into our new home. We love our room. It is cool and tiled with a good ceiling fan and mosquito proof screens. Our small front porch is good for eating green mangoes,which are a local fruit--crunchy like an apple and quite sour but not messy like orange mangoes.

Our resort is like a small neighborhood in a small village and we are getting to know a lot of our neighbors. Last night we went to the local disco--a Saturday night ritual throughout the Philippines. Our village's disco has a mud floor and a tin roof, but there is a huge sound system and a DJ and an MC. There are all kinds of etiquette we are just beginning to understand. For instance, if you are the last one on the dance floor when a song ends, you have to pay. You can also pay for a private dance. All the money goes to the village. Everyone is there: grandmas, grandpas, little kids, dogs, pigs, rural drag queens. The atmosphere is of pure fun. The Filipinos are excellent dancers and even better hosts. They do everything they can to make outsiders feel welcome. Everyone buys a liter of coke or rum or beer and contributes it to a communal pitcher. There is one glass on every table and if you are offered it you have to drink it fairly quickly because everyone around you is waiting to use the same glass. Sometimes you get a nicely balanced rum and coke, sometimes you get its foamy and less potent cousin--the beer and coke, which isn't as bad as it sounds. We had a blast, alternating cooling of in the rain and sweating on the dance floor. The highlight was Peter dancing with an eighty-year-old woman to My Humps by the Black-Eyed Peas. Maybe tied with that was the same woman doing an amazing tango with one of the drag queens.

Home Sweet Siargao

We are a week in to our three-month stint in the Philippines. We have decided to stay the month on Siargao Island. It’s a relaxed place with few amenities. The small town of General Luna is a short motorcycle ride away, but the only thing in town worth doing is buying a few mangos and a bag of chips and watching the fishermen bring in their bizarre catches. We thought about renting a house, and though rent is extremely cheap, the logistics of setting up house and buying groceries seemed daunting, so we have made a deal with the owner of our resort to set up a month-long deal. So home for the next few weeks is Oceans 101, owned by an Australian surfer and his Siargao native wife. Most of the visitors to the island are surfers, mostly Australian, but right now our fellow guests are also from Japan, Latvia, and England.

It is the end of the rainy season, so every evening brings dark rain clouds from over the sea, meaning we get the stunning colors of the setting sun to the left and a rainbow to the right almost every night. A dramatic downpour wakes us up early every morning, but the days are comfortable with alternating sun and shade and a breeze off the ocean.

Most of the surfing around here is the big league, best left to professionals or hardcores, There’s a small break in front of our resort, but the current is strong and the paddling is quickly exhausting. Peter has been surfing with the big boys, going with the Australians to an island called Stimpy’s, impressively braving 5-8 foot waves even though he is still a beginner. This is how we will continue. Peter surfing and me writing every day. A mango shake for breakfast, fried rice for lunch, and a fish burrito for dinner. A few games of pool and a beer after dinner. Watching the fireflies and the giant fruit bats before retiring early for bed. We wake up around 7:30 every morning and do it all over again. It is a nice routine, calming and steady. We plan our day around the tides and hardly ever look at a clock. We are just above the equator and the sun is up and down around 6:30 with little fanfare. Suddenly light and suddenly dark. Twilight is maybe the thing I miss the most from my northern latitude life, but I can’t say that’s much of a complaint.

The New New Year

It’s more like the year of the cock. There were roosters on our airplane, roosters on the bus, a rooster sitting in the front seat of the cab, and roosters on the ferry. It seems like we are the only ones traveling in the Philippines without a crowing box with holes punched in it. The Philippines is just as we left it two week ago. Warm and welcoming with good barbecue and cheap public transportation. We will spend a few weeks traveling until we find a place to settle and call home for a month or two. Our first stop is Siargao Island, where the unbroken waves from the Pacific bring surfers from all over the world. In the fall the waves are 15 – 20 feet, but now the famous Cloud 9 break is curling over in the 6 – 10 range—a beautiful clear tube we don’t plan on going anywhere near. There’s all manor of surfing here and we will try out the baby waves and see if it really is like riding bike, if it will somehow come back to me. It’s been four or five years since either of us has surfed and I think Peter will take to it just fine, being a natural at anything that involves a board careening down something. I’m feeling less nimble, but am looking forward to paddling my heart out and working on my tan. All is well in paradise. The mangoes are ripe, the humid air good in the lungs, and we wish we you were here.

See ya, Shanghai

And so it was that on the day Shanghai showed its first signs of spring—padded winter clothes hanging to dry before being packed away, vendors emerging from their dark hovels back into the street, sweepers collecting piles of firecracker wrappers that had been preserved for weeks in piles of dirty snow, strawberries, and yellow blossoms on the tree branches that just yesterday were totally naked, I swear—that we did some spring cleaning of our own—emptying out our apartment on Handan Lu, closing bank accounts, paying final bills, saying goodbye to friends and family, and leaving. The Spring Festival brings the New Year in China, and while it seems belated to celebrate new beginnings two months into 2008, it ended up being quite fitting. We are leaving China and its ratty year and will spend the next three months in the Philippines, a place that suits us better. Three months of snorkeling, surfing, hiking, birding, a diet of fish and fruit, and finally finishing my book is a gift. It is a gift we are grateful for, but it comes at the price of saying goodbye and of uprooting again…this time after only six months, this time impulsively. We are getting quite efficient at packing up our life and we are down to the essentials. We’ve ditched our winter coats, hats, and boots, and filled our backpacks with sunscreen and goggles and swimsuits, a set of sheets, and the computer. It seems like adventure is always calling us and this is the first time we’ve answered the phone and said, yes, we’ll be there, just give us a few days to get organized.

The Philippines, Part 2: The Jungle

Rather than take the ferry back to a bigger island and ride in a bus for four hours only to get on another ferry for four hours, we decided to take a short-cut. We had our host approach some fishermen and ask them if they would take us across the open sea in their outrigger canoe to Bohol. They agreed and we fronted some money for gas and within an hour were off on a three-hour seaspray adventure. Here's the boat: While the ride was slightly uncomfortable (meant for hauling in nets of fish, not taking two extra passengers), it was definitely an authentic local way to travel and isn't that what we're always looking for on vacation? Flying fish darted out in front of the boat like hummingbirds and a pod of eight mushroom-colored dolphins crossed our path. We were cold, wet, and sunburned when they dumped us on the beach three hours later, but it was one of the best things that happened on our trip.

Bohol is famous for being the home of the tarsier--the smallest primate on the planet--and the unique geological formation known as the Chocolate Hills. Even though both of these are blazoned on T-shirts and postcards, we didn't see either of them. We spent our last two days in the Philippines in some native-style palm huts on the Loboc River. The river was good for swimming in and besides the Koreans belting karoake on floating barges coming through in the afternoon, the natural setting was really relaxing. We were in a canyon of green with birds and insects and giant iguanas. We took a hike up the canyon to a series of small caves with giant bats. Peter found this flying lizard and we realized we couldn't be happier than when there's no concrete in sight.

The Philippines, Part 1: The Beach

We spent our first day in the Philippines strenuously trying to get to a small island in the south. It took all day by plane, taxi, bus, boat and minibus, but we arrived at sunset and a young guy named Mervin took us in his motortrike to find a place to stay. We chose the first place he took us to where we took a room in a local woman's house for five dollars a night each.

We didn't leave Camiguin for nine days. The island has a ring road about 70 km around with snorkel spots all around the perimeter and several large volcanoes in the middle. We tackled Mt Hibok-Hibok and made it within a few hundred meters of the misty peak, but it was muddy and slippery and steamy hot and since we couldn't see how close we were, we turned around. We snorkeled in a giant clam sanctuary--an odd preserve with armed guards and signs prohibiting any "Immoral Activity" (including hand-holding), but run by some inspiring dedicated women who really love those bivalves that can live for hundreds of years and grow up to two meters across, and the clams were impressive with their glowing colorful mantles and their ability to snap off our limbs. We went to a disco and a cockfight and got to know many people on the island. We rode in the back of a local tricycle with girls on their way home from school in their long Catholic skirts and flip flops. We were interviewed on our views on local tourism by two girls studying ecotourism at the local college.

We made ourselves at home on Camiguin and Shanghai felt a long way away (even though there was a Dutch guy at our place who also lived in Shanghai and wanted to keep talking about it). We drank coffee until it was time for beer. We ate mangoes for breakfast, afternoon snack, and dessert. We tanned. We watched the bright tropical set of stars sink into the sea. And we tried as hard as we could to stay, but because of the Chinese holiday we couldn't change our tickets, so we chartered a local fishing boat and headed toward an unseen island.

Ash Wednesday to Chinese New Year

It was in Manila on our way home that we noticed the ashed foreheads of the devoted filipinos and realized that is was Ash Wednesday and that we had missed Mardis Gras. Which was sad, but we had been living it up anyway in paradise, so even though we weren't celebrating proper, we were celebrating. And when we flew into Shanghai right at midnight, there were little red poofs of fireworks all over the city signifying the coming of the Rat. Dirty snow and red firecracker paper literally covered the roads on our cabride home. It was late and the whole experience was surreal; four hours took us from a steamy Catholic jungle to an icy cold metropolis, foggy and hazy with the smell of gunpowder. We bolted out of bed at least once an hour, hearts pounding at the sound of explosions. Trying to process it all, but not sure we're glad to be "home" yet. We'll celebrate the holiday with Grant and family tonight and head into what feels like a somber Lenten season. I'm thinking of giving up snorkeling for Lent.

The Philippines is so much better than China

The reasons are too numerous to list. I was hoping for a purifying snow to hit Shanghai and it sounds like it has but I must say I'm glad to not be there for it. We have been happily inhabiting a small island called Camaigan towards the southern end of the Philippines. The people are unbelievably friendly, the beer is cheap, the mangoes are plentiful, the water is warm. We have been snorkeling and climbing volcanoes and eating tuna grilled right on the beach over coconut charcoals, and we are trying not to think about ever leaving. This place suits us well with its small town feel and nice balance between activity and relaxation. Attended the local Friday night disco last night. The Filipinos love to dance--teenagers and grandparents alike--and we had a great time. Hoping to stay on Camaigan at least through Sunday for the weekly cockfight, which the whole island will attend after church.

Thought we would want to be in China for the New Year, but since we can't be with our families we may as well be in paradise (sorry Grant, Gina and Win--but you can't blame us can you?). Sounds like the whole country is quite a mess with all that fifty-year snow. We'll wait it out on snowy white beaches. Pictures to prove it to come later.

It's Snowing in Shanghai...

and we're off to the Philippines! Doesn't get much better than that. Back to Shanghai and back in touch on February 7.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Spring Festival

It's still 2007 technically here in China and will be until February 7, Chinese New Year's Day, when we'll all ring in the year of the rat. The rat is everywhere. Sometimes cute and sometimes rat-like. Spring Festival is definitely bigger than Christmas and everywhere you go, red lanterns hang and red paper-cuts of rats decorate the windows.

But for some reason, Santa is still up. The Christmas decorations in China were totally bizarre with Santa reigning king. No manger scenes or reindeer, just Santa in some totally bizarre incarnations...for instance, drinking martinis and playing the saxophone. Dig it.

And apparently you never have to take down your Santas because they're in every shop window still, now next to the rats. Maybe after Chinese New Year, they'll come down and who knows what will replace them. For now, Santa and the rat are hand in hand and the lucky color is red. Everything is red and Wal-Mart has these great displays of red underwear, in which I guess the whole country will be trying to score a baby rat this year. Dig it.

Halfway Point

Peter and I keep this list of things we should or want to blog about. The list is getting long and we never seem to have the free time to compose the witty detailed accounts of our life in China that I know you have come to expect from us. So, for now, we will have to settle on an update. If we wait until we have time to write 10 polished articles to post, you will never hear from us.

So, we are halfway through our time in China. We have a nice long semester break for Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, and while we are enjoying our time off of school, we still manage to be incredibly busy. Many of our friends were only here for one semester so we have said goodbye to four friends in the last week and while a week's worth of going away parties has kept our social calendar packed, it has also put us in a bit of a funk--that all good things must come to an end sort of feeling--and we can't help but look ahead and wonder what on earth we will do when we leave China in five or so months. Peter will be teaching English at my university next semester. He wants to continue to expand his resume and the extra income will help us stock up for whatever comes next. This will be the first time we will be colleagues and I hope our working relationship will be as good as our personal one.

Speaking of work, Peter recently spent a full day working as an extra on a Chinese film set. He was a a member of a 1930s New York audience enjoying a Beijing opera performance. He was in the second row of the auditorium so we are sure to be able to spot him when the movie come out. Many of our friends and my brother went along as well, and while the entire experience was somewhat of a fiasco, they came away with many laughs, some fake facial hair, and a couple hundred RMB. The highlights were the Chinese men wearing women's blond wigs to make up for the fact that they couldn't get six hundred foreigners to show up to the shoot and when the make-up crew tried to take away Peter's real beard, convinced that they had given it to him (he lost his expensive mustache wig in the lunch buffet stampede). Pictures were forbidden, but Peter managed to snag this one of our adorable Colombian friends looking quite dashing (note blond Chinese man on the right).

I am enjoying my time off of teaching and am putting in a few extra hours at my travel job. I was recently commissioned to write a travel feature for a local English-language city living magazine due out next month, so now I can add a Chinese publication to my very short list. Peter and I will head to the Philippines next week for 10 days of beaches and jungles. We are very much looking forward to getting away from cold, soggy Shanghai. It's definitely time for a change of pace and I plan on eating my weight in mangos and getting back my tan which has been on vacation for years now.

The Spa

There's this spa that Gina introduced me to years ago when I first visited Shanghai. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in the rest of the city and possibly the rest of the world. I shared the spa with Peter soon after we moved here and we have subsequently exposed all our foreign friends to Xiao Nan Guo (Little South Land). Photos are strictly forbidden, but our friend George, who is moving back to the States at the end of the month and figured he'd risk deportation, was able to snap a few photos on our last visit. Now that our spa experience has been made public, I can share the details of it with you.

The trip begins with a long metro ride followed by a ten minute cab ride. The spa is so big it could easily be mistaken for a hotel. It's five floors of fun, but when you enter the lobby and exchange your shoes for a pair of rubber flip flops, there's no way you can know what you're getting into. You're then led to a locker room (men are separated from women at this point) where you strip down to nothing except your flip flops and enter the bathhouse.

The bathhouse portion of the experience involves a leisurely shower where you can brush your teeth and shave your legs at either sitting or standing shower stations. Once you're sufficiently clean you have your choice of soaking pools in a range of temperatures. Some have milk, some have tea, some have jets, and some are exactly your body temperature and perfectly still and make you feel like you have truly left your body. There's a steam room and a dry sauna with a TV playing Chinese soap operas. When you've soaked long enough you can sign up for a body scrub, which the Chinese take very seriously and while it borders on being painful having a mean Chinese woman take a brillo pad to your naked body, you will emerge red-skinned and purified having shed an entire layer of skin that had protected you from weeks of being sprayed with diesel exhaust and coal dust.

We usually spend an hour and a half in the bath and first-timers are very impressed thinking that the bath was a great experience and well worth the seven dollar entrance fee. But once they are toweled off by the changing room attendants and handed their Hawaiian-print muumuu and paper panties, they have a sinking feeling that it's not over yet. It's time to take in a show. Upstairs there's a huge auditorium with a stage surrounded by cushy recliners. You can pick your teeth, clean your ears, and drink a beer while young Chinese boys perform acrobatic and contortionist feats. Eventually a troupe of Russian girls in skimpy outfits entertains with an array of dance numbers and costumes. It's not Las Vegas, but the girls are endearing in their poor dance skills and you have to hand it to them for coming all the way to China to perform in such a venue (one wonders what promises were made when they left Mother Russia).

When the show is over you can join the rest of the floral-clad Chinese in any number of diversions. Play mahjong, watch TV, eat dumplings, work out, get a massage or a haircut or your eyebrows waxed, play ping pong, sleep--the possibilities are endless. We usually hit up the TV room, filled with recliners with personal flat screen TVs. We watch several different Chinese shows at once, drink beer, get our feet rubbed, eat peanuts, and chat. For an extra three dollars you can spend the night. We haven't opted for the slumber party yet, but it is always tempting when we have to get back into our street clothes, pay our tab, and get in a dirty Shanghai cab for the long late-night ride home.

I know there's nothing like this in the States...at least not for seven bucks and not with dancing Russian girls. Xiao Nan Guo is definitely on our list of things we will really miss about China. Here's the boys, Rasmus (Denmark), Peter, Andrjez (Latvia), and George (Arkansas), in their matching PJs.