I just went out for dinner with Steven and Jacob.  We had so much fun – we went to shabu-shabu style restaurant, called A Thousand Cranes.  I’ve never been to one of those before.  I’ve done hibachi, which is called teppanyaki this side of the globe, where they cook the food right at the table in front of you, and it’s a bit of a show in the way they chop and cook as well.

Shabu-Shabu is a Japanese type of cooking where there is a pot of boiling liquid in front of each person, kind of  fondue-style, into which you put different spices and then add raw vegetables and meat and boil your food right there at the table!  I told Steve this is just a way of them making us do all the work.  ‘Here, come to a restaurant and cook your own damn food.  Pay us for the opportunity to sit in our booth and do the work.’  The meat is really thinly sliced, though, and the broth is flavoured as well as the dipping sauce afterwards.

Jacob, my cousin’s 14-month-old son was really great during the meal.  He didn’t really fuss at all except for a moment when he got upset – scarred, probably cause Steven and I were both moved around quite a bit when my pot was boiling over!  Regardless, Jacob is such a happy baby.  At the end of the meal, he was in such a good mood.  I was holdling him in my lap, and he was drinking his bottle, but he was just laughing around it, holding the nipple in his teeth and chuckling.

Earlier, I was making funny noises at Jacob, (mostly doing the thing where you vibrate your lips and blow raspberries) and he finds that hilarious.  After a while, he figured out how to do it himself, in response to me.  He was standing in front of me, doing the trick and cracking himself up!  He would blow bubbles and laugh hysterically – the full belly laugh that babies do, that adults can’t help but laugh at.  After a couple of minutes, I pulled out my phone and started videoing him.  I don’t have a waterproof phone and I was in the splash zone, but I figured it was worth it, cause he’s so darn adorable and hilarious.  The video turned out pretty well, aside from the fact that I was literally shaking with laughter!  At first, I was egging him on a bit, but then he found himself so funny, it was a riot!

I kind of lucked out, timing-wise, coming here.  Steven is starting a new job on Monday, so he basically had this week off when I got here.  Both he and Caroline work nights, so their hours are a little funny.  They have a yaya (nanny) named Roma who lives in during the week and helps out with Jacob.  They get up early or stay up late during the day, depending on when they come home, so they can spend time with him, but then have to leave for work in the evening.  Since they both work for companies that work mostly overseas, they have to be at work during European or American business hours.  It’s interesting, but it works!  Luckily, Manila is very much a late-night city, so there’s always somewhere to go out to eat, or a bar that’s open….

Good times ahead in the Philippines!

(WARNING: Written while grumpy! May contain some cursing and general huffiness…)

Today was the first day of my Rescue Diver course, a class which is a prerequisite for the Dive Master course.  I am in El Nido, a town on the island of Palawan in the Philippines.  I’ve heard the diving here is great, so I decided to take my PADI Rescue Diver course while I’m here, and made plans to stay on the island of Palawan for nearly a week.  I already took the prerequisite Emergency First Responder and Oxygen Provider courses in Australia a couple months ago, and once I signed up for this class, I did most of the online coursework while still in Manila.  (Good thing, too, since the WiFi here is a bit spotty!)

It’s spectacularly beautiful here, something I only really saw once I was on the boat and headed out to the dive site this morning. I was supposed to get here around midnight last night from Manila where I’ve been staying with my cousin Steven, Caroline his partner, and their baby Jacob for the last several days. Unfortunately, due to plane delays, and even more delays from the van I took from Puerto Princessa to El Nido, I didn’t arrive at my hotel here until nearly 3 am last night!  And I was rather grumpy about it too!  Usually I don’t mind  things such as delays in departures and stuff, but I get rather irritated when people either don’t keep me informed or tell me one thing and do another.

The domestic departures terminal at Nimoy Aquino International Airport actually gives new meaning to the word “clusterfuck.”  I’ve never seen such a mess.  So many people were crammed into the terminal that every available seat was taken, as well as all the spots on the floor along the walls.  This meant there was nearly no space to walk to get to your gate, so you were tripping over  people everywhere.  It was also hot, humid, and therefore sweaty.  Every two or three minutes, the loudspeaker would blare as someone announced the delay of another flight or the late arrival of another turnaround flight.  Very rarely was boarding announced, so the room just kept getting more and more crowded.  What a mess!  Even once we got onto the plane (which had been late arriving in the first place), the plane had to wait in line to get onto the runway for takeoff.

After arriving in Puerto Princesa nearly two hours late, I left the terminal and arranged to take a van to El Nido.  When I asked the woman when the next trip was while paying, she said the van was leaving “right now”so I hurried to follow some guy out to a van where no other passengers were waiting.  Then I stood patiently by the van for a good twenty to thirty minutes.

After a while, someone came and told me to sit in the bus if I wanted, but then someone else came a little later saying something about taking the van to drop someone off and then come back, but they wanted to take the van with my stuff in it.  Not super-keen about losing all of my belongings or possibly missing my ride in another van, I pulled my bags out.

Ten minutes later, someone else brought me to a different van and put me in that.  This one was running and there was another couple in it.  I foolishly thought we might be going somewhere relatively soon.  They moved the van – into the parking spot where the previous one had been.

Then, we sat in the van with the air conditioner running for another half an hour or more.  Finally I asked the couple what was up and when the hell they though we were going to be leaving. I’d been told it was a six hour bus trip to El Nido.  By this time, it was after 8pm.  I was getting irritable.  I stated that I really didn’t mind if we weren’t leaving for a while, but the lady had told me the van was leaving immediately.  I had no desire to sit in a car for an hour and a half if I could be walking around and stretching my legs, maybe getting dinner, especially knowing I was about to be sitting for the duration of a long drive ahead!

The couple was from London, but Flipino, so they asked what was going on.  In reply, someone got into the van and drove us to Jollibee, a local fast food joint equivalent to MacDonalads.  Then, he drove us back to the airport to pick up some more people I guess they had been waiting for who were coming on the last flight.  (Really, these asses couldn’t have just told me that I’d be going on a van that would leave after the last airplane arrived?  I had to sit inside the van in anticipation the whole time?)

After picking up that family, we went by another office in town where we waited around with no explanation and then picked up a couple more people.  On the way out of town, we picked up someone else, literally off the side of the road, from what I could tell.  I’d been on Palawan for nearly three hours by then and still hadn’t even left Puerto Pricesa!  Luckily, someone had said the drive to El Nido was a little more like 4 hours than 6, so I’d calmed down a tiny bit, thinking I’d be at my hotel a little earlier than I was now gloomily anticipating.  They were wrong.  Still, the information helped me to keep my cool a bit longer.  Clearly, I do much better when I at least have someinformation about what to expect….

Finally we left Puerto Princesa.  We didn’t arrive in El Nido until well after 2 am.  Luckily, the van operator dropped us off at our hotels, rather than taking us to the bus station.  Maybe none of the tricycle drivers would have been awake that late anyway.  I had to wake up someone at the hotel to check me in.  At least the diveshop owner had alerted them that I was coming, so they were prepared.  The hotel, or pension, where I am staying is located above the diveshop where I’ll be taking my Rescue Dive Course.  My classes started this morning at 8.

While I was being led up to my room on the 3rd floor (walk-up, with crazy uneven stone steps), one of the first things I noticed was this enormous insect in the hallway, the likes of which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen.  If you’ve seen the movie Pan’s Labyrinth, and you know what the fairies in that movie look like, you have an idea of what this bug looked like.  It was nearly 6 inches long, and shaped like a mix between a mosquito and a grasshopper, with a bit of beetle thrown in.  I  was a little less than thrilled when I realized the screens on my windows were ripped and all I had covering them were wooden slats which closed as window coverings.  The door closed, however, and there was a fan, and the bug didn’t seem to have come in with us.  I did hear some scuttling around on the ceiling, but that was closed as well….  This may be a wilder trip than I anticipated!

So basically, after all that and three dives today, I’m tired.  I’ll tell you about the dive course after a nap.

I’m so glad I finished my first day of my rescue dive course.  I’m worried about the next two days, however.  There are two main things that worry  me.  There is a dive called the “hell dive” which is supposed to happen tomorrow.  It’ll probably be on the second dive.  Then the third day is basically going to be a whole “hell day.”  By this, Thomas (my instructor) and other dive masters mean that whatever can go wrong will go wrong (simulation), at any point in time during the day, and I’ll have to deal with it.

The hell dive will be with Thomas and one other dive master.  During the dive, they will both be acting like total idiots, apparently, as though they were people who had maybe gone diving after a night of drunkenness and who aren’t sharp and who are accident-prone.  I am supposed to be the diver who swims at the back of a dive group and keeps an eye on things, herding the group, and keeping an eye out for problems, and  apparently, they’ll throw all the things that can go wrong at me in one dive.  Broken fins and masks, weight belts falling off, uncontrolled ascents, tanks falling off, unresponsive diver, panicked diver, who knows what!  I am nervous about that.   I just hope I can head off the problems before some of them get bad and deal with the bad ones appropriately without freaking out!

And then the next day, apparently the whole boat will be in on some sort of fake emergency that could happen at any time throughout the day!  So I’ll have to coordinate a rescue of some diver at some point, and act as though it’s real and everyone else on the boat will know it’s not.  (…And that’s not nerve wracking or anything!)

Thomas was telling me that he was near tears after his second day of this course.  I really don’t want shit to get that bad!  So far, things have been alright.  I’ve had to do a few things that make me nervous.  I had to take off my kit underwater today.  Thomas didn’t tell me we’d be doing that, so I wasn’t really prepared.  It’s a great skill to learn, though.  I’d done it once before, I think, probably during my advance training, but it’s not something you think of doing very much when you are relatively new at diving.  I need to be able to self-rescue, and to fix my own tank if it’s coming loose, that sort of thing.  And it does happen – my tank started slipping off during a dive I did in Mallorca and since the divemaster was dealing with a panicking diver I had to wait a while, swimming around holding my tank on by hand before I could get him to help me reattach it.  It’s a good skill to have, but it seems super weird to be taking my BCD and tank off underwater, even though the regulator is still in my mouth.  I think it’s cause you think you need it for bouyancy (and also cause your air supply is attached to it)!  It is kind of useful gear to have!

I also did the rescue of an unresponsive diver from the bottom today.  That’s where Thomas pretended to be unresponsive at the bottom and I had to go to him and do an ascent with him, holding his regulator in his mouth, and carrying him to the surface.  It’s nerve wracking because if you go too fast, both you and the other diver can suffer lung over-expansion injuries.  Ah, the joys of knowing what can go wrong!  Sometimes knowing too much is stressful!  It reminds me, for example, of how it is for people who have worked in labor and delivery to give birth – we know all the worst-case scenarios, so our imaginations can run wild with all sorts of horrors if you can’t manage to stay calm.

And underwater, it’s important to stay calm.  Especially in an emergency.  But that’s why I’m taking this course, I suppose, huh?  And practice makes perfect (or at least less fumbly)!

The three dives we did today were quite lovely.  The visibility was okay, nothing so incredible as Vanuatu, but pretty good, maybe 20 meters or so.  I had the chance to work on my buoyancy a bit, and also today, under Thomas’ direction, made some headway towards using my hands less and my legs more for movement.  I need to be more hydrodynamic and use less energy when I dive.  It’ll improve my oxygen consumption and save my energy in case I need it for a rescue.  Also, it helps me be able to stay still in the water, such as when I want to look at something, or take a knee.

Today we saw a bunch of trigger fish, a turtle, a trumpet fish, and a lion fish.  We saw several nudibranchs and this cool purple thing Thomas pointed out that looked like some lacy coral, but was actually many nudibranch eggs!  We also saw one of those small purple eels, which are colored like those little nudibranchs I like, but look like little snakes.  Thomas teased it out of its hole with his stick and it brought nearly half its body out!  We also saw an amazing blue and reddish colored scorpion fish along some coral.

The second place we dove, South of Miniloc Island is a place which was originally discovered by Jacques Cousteau during a snorkeling trip!  He apparently spent a year of his life here, in three month intervals.  It was pretty cool to think that I was diving the same place he had.  There was also one of the largest gardens of cabbage coral I’ve ever seen at that site.

Thomas also showed me some cleaner shrimp, and while he held still, they crawled out and onto his hand, cleaning his fingers!  Cool to see!  I saw a fascinating starfish that had a honeycomb design over the center of its body.  There’s definitely a lot to see here.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t notice very much tomorrow, as I’ll be a bit preoccupied with my rescue efforts.  I’m glad Thomas gave me the chance to enjoy the dives today!  With my short sleep last night and my three dives today, though, I’m beat!  I’m gonna get some rest.  It’s going to be a full day tomorrow and I certainly need to be functional!

Whew!  I did it!  I am now a certified PADI Rescue Diver, so yay me!

I made it through both my “hell dive” and my “hell day” without (terrible) incident!  The nice thing about the rescue class is that it gave me some exposure to lots of the things that I’ll be learning in much greater depth during my dive master course.  Although I learned the basic rescue skills in this course, and had the chance to practice them a little, I’ll really be able to practice and refine them in the master class.  Nonetheless, simply practicing them and enacting the scenarios and practical exams were a great learning experience.

On my hell dive, Thomas and Chris (the other divemaster who was conscripted to “torture” me) threw at me as many things as they could think of that go wrong during one dive.  Stuff divemasters normally have to deal with like broken fin straps, panicked divers removing their mask and oxygen, runaway ascents, divers going loopy with narcosis, divers trying to take coral “souvenirs” etc.  I had to be on top of my game and catch things either before they happened or before things got bad!  It was a challenging dive, to say the least.

We also had a scenario that day where I had to find and rescue an unresponsive diver from the bottom of the ocean, bring him up to the surface, give him rescue breaths, get him onto the boat, start CPR and so forth.  It’s a good thing to have practiced because on my hell day, of course one of the things that happened is at the end of one of our dives, someone went back down to the bottom and faked like they got stung by a stonefish, so I had to do another unresponsive diver rescue.  Of course, I didn’t know that one was coming!  We had just surfaced from a rather lovely dive and I was chatting with one of the other divers and waiting to get up onto the boat when we realized his dive buddy was not there anymore.  Also, earlier in the day, there had been a man overboard situation I had to deal with.  Quite the drama-filled day!

We finished it off with a beautiful dive, though, at a place where we went through a tunnel cave.  The tunnel was essentially a 90-degree angle.  At the curve of the tunnel, there’s a spot where you can ascend to a little air pocket (not that you want to breathe the trapped air there!) and then go back down to continue through the tunnel.  We saw lionfish in the tunnel and just as we were coming out, there was a turtle hanging out, as if to greet us!  After looking around on the other side of the tunnel, we came back through it before returning to the boat.

It was a very beautiful dive.  Right at the curve of the tunnel, there’s one spot where you can look and see both entrances to the tunnel, as though they’re two blue holes, while right above you in the cavern are a few openings where the water surges through with the waves, making spectacular currents for your air bubbles to float up in.

We only did two dives on that third day, but after 8 dives in three days, I didn’t mind taking a nap in the sun on the boat after lunch before heading back to shore, a newly certified rescue diver!  I must admit, I treated myself to a massage in town that night as well.  At approximately $10 for an hour treatment, I couldn’t resist!  Also, I think I kind of deserved it after that challenging rescue dive course!

Next step, dive master!

I returned to Puerto Princesa today after my trip around Palawan Island.  Tomorrow, I’ll go back to Manila for a few days before taking another trip to some other islands.  Tonight, I’m really living it up.  I’m staying at a place called The Citadel Bed and Breakfast.  It’s a little bit outside of the town center, but I really don’t mind because I don’t have any major need to go into town.

This hotel is pretty swanky compared to the places I’ve stayed so far.  I’m really dipping into my budget (paying maybe $18 US a night rather than $12).   The places I stayed at in El Nido and Sabang were much cheaper, but…I just took a hot shower!  What a luxury.  It’s true, for most of the past week, I’ve been too hot to even want anything other than a cold shower, particularly since the rooms I’ve had didn’t have air conditioning.  Here, I’m spoiling myself – I have A/C and this place has a swimming pool.  After I arrived, I chilled (literally) in my room for a bit before going for a swim, followed by a hot shower.  Luxury.

Don’t get me wrong, the other places were great in their own way.  In El Nido, I stayed in a guesthouse above the dive shop where I was doing my rescue dive course.  Convenient.  And literally steps away from the sea.  But the room was cooled by a single, wall-mounted fan.  Since it was on the third floor, it could get rather toasty up there.  The room was open to the outdoors, with wooden slats over the windows, making it easy-access for bugs.  This included an ant colony which got steadily larger during my visit.  By the fourth night, the smallest had declared war and were nibbling on me when I lay in bed.

In addition, the typical toilet in the Philippines lacks a seat.  It’s just the porcelain bowl.  Luckily, the shower (which had broken the first night) was fixable, as I was so hot, sweaty, and generally gross most of the time, I needed a shower every time I returned to my room and each night before bed.

On the positive side, the building was right along the beach, so the waves crashing provided a constant lullaby. It was loud enough that I could hear it over the sound of my fan, even when it was on high.  The bay was lined with multiple “restobars” and so music from several competed with the sea for attention until late in the night.  In the mornings, however, I certainly didn’t have far to go to reach my class!  And the dive boat pulled right up, nearly to the shore, to load up tanks, divers, and other equipment.

I got up the day after completing my rescue course in El Nido and took a van to Sabang, where the Underground River starts.  It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The river goes something like 15 miles  underground and empties out into the ocean.

It’s a beautiful cave and one can take a tour that takes you into the cave and up the river about a 1.5 kilometers.  There are beautiful stalactite and stalagmite formations inside.  I went on the tour the next morning, catching a ride with the tour group back to Puerto Princesa.

One fun, rather crazy thing I did was try tamilok, a local food that is actually a grub which lives in the mangrove tree.  They’re eaten after being soaked in vinegar.  They look like large, white worms. Someone in my tour group had heard of it, so some of us tried it.  Have to say it did NOT taste like chicken…more like oysters!

The van ride to Sabang was not terrible. It was not great either.  It took several hours to get to the place where the road diverges to either Puerto Princesa or Sabang.  From there, I had to transfer to a different van after waiting at a restobar for about an hour.  I befriended a little girl there as I sat coloring in my coloring book.  When the other van came, it was pretty full, and I got to sit in the very back row.  This meant that I also got to fight car-sickness for the hour-plus curvy-road ride into Sabang.  When I arrived in Sabang, it was full dark, and the guys with the tricycles were trying to overcharge me for a ride to my hotel.  Luckily, some nice guy called the hotel and the owner’s husband came to get me.  He was strong and just carried my big suitcase along the beach to the hotel.  It wasn’t far, but apparently there was some toll road the tricycles would’ve had to take.

In Sabang, I was staying in a little cottage, also right on the beach.  There was a shared bathroom with a few rooms attached around it, each with their own entrance.  Mine faced the ocean!  It was beautiful, made of bamboo, mostly, with a thatched roof.  The floor was also bamboo, and in the morning, light shone through the slats – not exactly airtight, so this place was also a bit buggy.  And I think a bunch of the ants had hitched a ride from my last hotel in my suitcase!  Plus, there was a welcoming committee of some of their cousins on my bed already!  There was a mosquito net on the bed, but it didn’t really help to keep the ants out that were coming from below…  These ants weren’t as bitey as their El Nido cousins, luckily!

Dinner at that hotel’s restaurant was delicious.  I got to drink a buko (fresh young coconut, aka daab)!They showed me a fish that they had and then cooked it right there on an open fire by the sea.  They also made me some eggplant, cooked and then fried in egg – delicious!    I ate it in an open hut (also bamboo), the roof of which was lined with bamboo chimes.  There was a strong breeze blowing in off the ocean, carrying the scent of salt and sea, making music with the chimes.  There were kids watching Pilipino telenovelas on the tv, and I enjoyed watching them – the kids, not the telenovelas, although the shows and commercials reminded me of Indian tv.

So tonight, I’m sitting by the bar of my comparatively swanky hotel in Puerto Princesa, enjoying some fish and chips and mango juice while watching music videos projected onto the side of part of the building by the pool.  I’m marveling at some of the crazy American videos that have come out this year.  And I’m looking forward to returning to my delightfully cool room and sleeping in A/C for the night.  My toilet even has a seat on it!

Tomorrow, when I return to Manila, I’ll join Steven, Caroline, and Jacob at their American friends’ home for a real Thanksgiving dinner.  Apparently, that holiday happens already this week!  How quickly time flies!  So many things have happened.  Hard to believe I’ve been traveling for over 20 months already….  Admittedly, I complain about these little things, but there are so many contrasting positives – I love my life!

Wrecks in the Rainforest and Snakes in the Sea

Nov 28, 2015 @ 23:16

I suspect that today was so horrible in order to underscore how wonderful yesterday was.  At least, that’s the idea I’m going to go with, since any other would make me just cringe about the suckiness that ended up being my day today.

Rockin’ the Pink Scooter

I’d planned to get up early-ish in order to get to the main island of Bohol in time to go to the Tarsier sanctuary.  They have relatively early hours.  Still, since I’d had a big day yesterday (more on that soon), I slept in a bit.  When I woke up, I picked up reading the book I’d started last night – a really good Australian book called Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey.  I ordered eggs and bacon – my favorite! – and had a leisurely breakfast, since I really couldn’t put the book down.

When I finished both breakfast and the book, I set out on my scooter for my planned adventure to the see the tarsiers and the Chocolate Hills.   I was less than 10 minutes into my ride when the rain came.  It was torrential.  Zooming along on the scooter, the rain felt like needles on my chest.

I stopped by the side of the road under a tree, hoping to wait it out.  There was a little naked boy enjoying himself immensely, playing in his front yard nearby.  It was cute to watch…for a while, but I was getting wet and going nowhere.  Just when the rain would look like it was letting up, it would start again.  Finally, it seemed to be easing a little, and the dark clouds overhead truly looked like they might be passing, leaving only slightly lighter ones.

I decided maybe I could continue.  I was already soaked, and wouldn’t get much wetter, so as long as the rain stayed light, I might as well keep going.  Two days before there was a rainstorm, and it had ended after less than an hour, so I was hopeful that it’d do the same today.

View from Sikatuna Park

However, as I continued along the island, the storm seemed to be getting worse.  The wind picked up, and I could see that the trees were being buffeted by gusts.  It looked like the pictures on the news from before cyclones and hurricanes came.  Since my glasses don’t have windshield wipers on them, I couldn’t see as well as I’d have liked.  Finally, I had to turn back.  Of course, just as I got back to my hotel, the rain stopped.

Regardless, I was drenched, and needed to dry off.  By the time I was warm and dry, it was after 2:30 in the afternoon.  I still thought it might be worth a try to get up to the sanctuary again, so I gave it another go.  I arrived at the sanctuary entrance about 15 minutes after it closed.  However, even when I realized I’d be late, I had thought I might be able to swing past the Chocolate Hills on a loop back home or go to the Sikatuna National Park instead.  It soon became apparent that it would be getting dark too early to make it all the way to the Chocolate Hills, but I turned off for the national park, as I’d heard there were tarsiers there as well.

When I got to the park entrance, the gate was open a little, but there wasn’t anyone there to collect entrance fees or anything.  I asked some guys nearby who were apparently working on the streetlights and they seemed to think it’d be okay for me to go in.  I didn’t want to get locked in all night, that was my main concern!

Sikatuna National Park

So I went in with my bike and started up the dirt road.  I’d seen some video footage of the park filmed from a vehicle so I didn’t think there was any reason not to take the road, but as I continued up it, the road deteriorated.  Since it’d been raining so much, the road, made of rocks and dirt, had become slippery.  At one point, where it turned sharply uphill, the wheels slipped on some rock and skidded out from underneath me!

Although I’d been accelerating to try and get up the incline, I wasn’t going too fast as I’d been going uphill on a dirt road.  So when the bike slid and fell, I managed to (mostly) hop off.  The bike seemed okay and was all in one piece.  I was a bit shaken up, but was all in one piece. When I righted it, I parked it on the side of the path and hiked the rest of the way up to the park station.  The whole place was deserted.  I didn’t see any tarsiers up there, either.  I got the bike back down the hill (carefully) and started back towards Panglao.

The sun had set and as it began to get dark, it started sprinkling.  The scooter was running just fine, but I had noticed that the entire left side of the bike was scratched up – I suppose that’s what happens when you drag a scooter across rocks….  (I’d noticed I was a little scratched up too!)  So I was riding home in the rain, in the dark, having just crashed my bike in the mountains.

I was driving pretty carefully, when some guy driving his tricycle (covered scooter with sidecar, kind of a Filipino rickshaw) came onto the road from the intersecting road.  It looked like he was merging onto my road, but instead of turning left into the main road, he just cut across the road instead, driving directly in front of me.  I slammed on my brakes and yelled, “woah!” He saw me and did the same and we both stopped mere inches away from one another.  He immediately began apologizing, saying he was sorry and hadn’t seen me and was I okay.  I was fine, just annoyed.

When I got back to the hotel, I had to tell the owner that I had laid out and scratched up his bike.  He was mainly concerned about whether or not it was running, and once he was assured that it was still okay, seemed pretty cool about the whole thing.  I’ll probably need to pay him a little to just cover a new paint job.  Actually, the scooter is pink – NOT my favorite color, so if you ask me, that’s going to be a good thing!

Anyway, aside from some bruises and scrapes, I’m alright.  Seeing the tarsiers or chocolate hills was a total wash, though.  Basically, I accomplished none of the things that I’d planned today.  Luckily I know that tomorrow will be good, since I’m going diving again, which is what I did yesterday.  And, as I mentioned, yesterday was as awesome as today was awful.

Dive Trip with Piratas

I have heard only good things about the diving around Bohol.  I signed up with a dive shop on Alona Beach called Piratas.  It seemed to be run by Spaniards (based on the name and the clientele I’d seen while signing up) and the local girl who signed me up seemed cool too.  So I showed up at the shop yesterday morning and met a girl named Maya from Israel and then another girl from Taiwan named Erin.  Maya and I dove together with a divemaster named Zandy.  There was another staff member diving with Erin, who doesn’t dive as often as Maya and me.

The first dive we did was at Snake Island.  This submerged island is known for having many underwater sea snakes.  Although there was a rather strong current, which made the visibility not quite great, we saw many snakes, as well as a four-legged frogfish, which was crazy-interesting.  I also saw a snakeskin underwater.  Apparently, sea snakes shed their skin just like land snakes!

By Pamilacan

The second dive was at Pamilacan, and was beautiful, and then the third was at a place called Arco Point, back near Panglao island.   Neither Erin nor Maya had planned to do the third dive that day, so it was just to be me with my guide on that dive, but the other divemaster came as well.  I think he just wanted to go because the dive was so awesome.  The dive was quite relaxing, as it was mostly a drift dive, where we dive down along the wall and then came up through a bit of a tunnel, and then along the top of the reef before returning to the boat.  The guys showed me lots of cool things.  Zandy has this amazing skill at spotting scorpion fish and must have pointed out four or five on that dive alone!

Erin and Maya and I had made plans to get some fruit smoothies after returning to Alona Beach.  Since it was only the three of us on the boat all day, we had gotten the chance to talk and bond a bit that day.  We ended up getting drinks and nachos at a reggae bar on the beach.  Erin mentioned that she had gone the day before for a great massage.  There are people offering massages along the beach, pretty much constantly as you walk along, but Erin had found a place doing Thai and Swedish massage near her hotel which was fairly priced.  After we all parted ways, I went there, as I’d been wanting a cheap, deep tissue massage.

After my delightful massage, I was going to head directly home, but I realized I was hungry and went up and down the main drag, looking for something tasty.  Just as I was about to turn around again, I saw a busy, rather inviting looking Italian restaurant on the edge of town called Giuseppe’s.  I decided to give it a go.

mmmmm….eggplant, cheese, basil!

The special that night was eggplant parmesan – one of my favorites.  I asked if there was any left and the waitress said it wasn’t ready yet!  It was almost 8pm, so I was a bit surprised.  I was going to get something else, but she came back a couple minutes later, saying it was just finished.  I was so glad it was, because it was delicious!  There was stringy, melty mozzarella all over, just browned on the edges.  Perfect.

Tummy full, I headed back to my hotel having had such a wonderful day that perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the next day was so abysmal!  Luckily, I’ve made those plans to go diving with Maya again.  We have similar air consumption and are at such an equal skill level that we make great dive buddies.  Plus, she’s an awesome person.  I’m looking forward to our dives tomorrow.

Diving again tomorrow!

Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze in a trip up to see those tarsiers and the chocolate hills on my last morning in town before I leave for Boracay day after tomorrow.  Otherwise, I won’t get a chance to see them.  Regardless, I don’t plan to go diving in Boracay, and I’d rather spend more time here diving than seeing some tiny monkeys.  Bohol has been pretty great, even if I have been a bit of a clutz.  I know I’m just lucky I didn’t get myself seriously injured.  Tomorrow will be better again!