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.