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.