Well...

So the time has come. Time for me to write about the fact that we're leaving, and make a list of things I'll miss... This is hard to write about, I've tried before, but I'll give it a shot. It's not hard because I'm so worked up I keep crying on the keyboard, but it's hard to write about because I don't think I've ever had two years of my life be filled with such strong emotions, and so many of them. On tuesday my coworkers had a lunch for me: they made a slide show with pictures of me and us, sang me songs, said nice things about how hard of a worker I am (semi true) and how handsome I am (true), and they listened to my requests for food so we had Bicol Express (my favorite pinoy dish) and sweet and sour fish, and chocolate cake, and it was really nice. It was sad, and kind of heart-warming, and I just felt happy and all over good. Two hours after that I was screaming at the top of my lungs "I hate the Philippines!" as the torrential rain that came out of nowhere filled up our front area and proceeded to flood our house (but not too badly). So in that one day I experienced sadness, nostalgia, happiness, joy, frustration, and utter disgust and anger. So now imagine that for 2 years straight, where you'll be fuming about something retarded that just happened and then someone will do something nice, and you'll be happy again.


There are a lot of great things: the smell of frying garlic coming through our window, or the gentle splish-splosh of a neighbor hand-washing all their clothes. Huge lightening displays, the moon shinning through the coconut trees at the end of our street, the cloud shrouded mountains seen from our bedroom window, the utter quietness of such a loud country at night. Watching people on boats and buses pull an endless stream of food from their bags. The fact that you can make anything happen if you just ask enough, and nicely, because there really aren't any rules that's can't be broken. The ease of getting around without a car, once you learn the system. Living in a culture where people only buy what they need. Meeting up with other volunteers and getting to use all those jokes you've saved up for 3 months because no Filipino would understand. Drinking beers at Anthology after a meal at May Lin and ripping on Carrie for requesting a song that has a 20 minute drum solo in the middle of it. Being too lazy to cook and getting fried chicken and garlic rice from Wil's. Living an hour and a half away from an amazing white sand beach, and an Italian restaurant that serves Italian style pizza made with real mozz cheese. Being able to travel to incredible places like Bohol and Sagada. Being able to walk down the street to buy a beer, or beef broth cubes, or vinegar and not having to get in the car and drive to a huge grocery store. The sheer amount of free time we have. Being able to walk to the market, and buy things from people who grew or killed that particular food (most of the time at least...). Walking to the beach, albeit a crappy, dirty one, and having a beer while watching the sunset. Bootleg dvds. The incredible, sometimes overbearing generosity of people with next to nothing. Being cut off from pop culture and all that boring shit, but being much more clued in to world events, and just having a better understand of the world period. CNN, BBC and Newsweek are all way, way better outside of the US.

I genuinely feel that this experience has made both of us better people, and I'm looking forward to getting on that plane and taking all that I learned back with me so I can lead a better, healthier, well rounded and compassionate life, one that involves friends, family, community, living local and eating well, and tons of travel. Travel, travel, travel.

A busy month: a wedding, whale sharks and COS

It's been a busy month. Not with work mind you, no silly, with travel! After we got back from the farm, the next week we were invited to a friend's wedding. Actually, it was the brother of a friend whom we had never met, but that's ok. Weddings here seem to be less about family, and more about how many local celebs you can get to show up: the vice mayor, us, a barangay captain from a neighboring municipality... We didn't see the actual service, but went to the reception expecting a party. I mean, receptions in the US are usually a party, and Filipinos can turn anything into a fiesta, so I figured it would be huge. I was wrong. It was just food, and then the gifts came out. This is where it all got weird, because you never, ever open gifts at a party here. You give someone a gift at their birthday party and they hurry it out of sight as quickly as possible before they die of shame. But here at the wedding, all the money was brought out and counted, out loud, over a giant sound system. I was really surprised by the whole thing, but no one knew because I was hiding in back, trying to avoid being brought in front of everyone to give a speech or some shit. Other interesting wedding facts: people at the reception buy incredibly expensive rice snacks and shots of good booze, as a way of giving money to the couple; the night before the wedding a traveling band of bakla (men who dress/live as woman) come by the party and put on a show, get everyone dancing, and the guests pin money on the bride and groom; everyone is expected to make themselves scarce by about 4pm, when just the family goes back to the house; local officials and other rich people are listed as sponsors, which means they get a seat of honor in exchange for helping pay for the wedding.

A few days after that we headed down to Bicol, which, if you look at a map of the Philippines, is a bit like Luzon's Florida, dangling precariously off its tip. Bicol is known for their love of spicy food, and for being repeatedly decimated by every storm that blows through the area. We went for the whale sharks that hang out there in March and April. We stayed at a really nice (and by really nice I don't mean fancy, just, you know, nice) resort down there that was within walking distance of the WWF sponsored whale shark eco-tourism project. Back in the day, the locals would just kill the sharks, selling parts in the market, and the rest to the Chinese to blend into heart powder, or whatever the hell they do with all those endangered animals parts. Now they've realized that by taking tourists out to swim with them, they can make a lot more money. That's where we come in. The weather was pretty terrible when we were down there - cold and rainy - so the first day we didn't see any. We didn't even get in the water. Despite the expense, we decided that we had come all the way down there, we might was well go out the next day and try again. The weather the second day wasn't much better, in fact it was worse, but within the first 10 minutes we were Navy Sealing off the side of a bangka. The experience was pretty amazing, they did a fairly good job of keeping the groups small, so the spotter would see one in the water, yell at us to get ready, and then we'd jump off the side of the still moving boat and follow our guide. The water is full of plankton, the main reason why the sharks are there, so the water is pretty murky. The first one just burst into view from the murk, about 5 feet below us. We ended up seeing 7 really good ones, and a few we were even able to swim along with for a couple minutes before they dove back down. After 3 1/2 hours being out in the pouring rain, we called it quits and went back, still on a high.

Those are just some pictures I took, no big deal... Wow, I'm funny. No, they're from the internet, but that's what they look like. Pretty sweet when they're only 5 feet away from you in the open ocean!

After that I had PDM, Abby came back to Calapan, and a week later we met back up in Manila for our COS (Close of Service) conference. The conference itself wasn't too rigorous, just some talks on readjusting to life in the US (ironically given by two people who had left their service directly for PC jobs and hadn't, in fact, been back to the US yet themselves), paperwork and medical. If there's one thing PC loves, it's paperwork, and boy do we have a lot. So, much fun was had by all, a few alcoholic beverages were consumed (ok, fine, an entire dump truck full) and some goodbyes were said. With that we enter our last month, saying goodbye to people in town, our friends, our coworkers, our PC friends... Between that, going away parties, paperwork, last minute work around site and facing the reality of going home, I'm kind of wishing I could just close my eyes, wake up and have it be June 1st. Am I ready to leave? Yes. Am I ready to return? Not really.

Up North: Baguio, Sagada and The Farm

Over holy week we decided to head north because it's nice and cool up there, and hotter than hell down here. Also, we hadn't been there yet. The area we went to is usually known as the Cordilleras, which I learned when I was looking for a wikipedia link means "range of mountains" in spanish, which is what they are. How convenient. It's actually a mountainous area in northern Luzon made up of 6 or 7 provinces, and since the whole area is at an altitude of something like 1500+ meters, it's noticeably cooler up there. During the winter it can get as cold as 4C, which is flippin' cold for the Philippines. The area is amazingly beautiful, and part of it (specifically Banaue) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We didn't go to that part, but apparently there's great hiking over there, and it also has the dubious distinction of being the place where Julia was killed.

We went to Baguio for a day, just to break up the 16 hour trip up to Sagada from our site, and it was nice, for a big city. Really hilly, with a lot of good restaurants, shopping and jeepney exhaust. After that we headed up to Sagada along a semi-paved road that offered great views down the precipitous cliffs we were teetering along on our little one-lane road. Sagada is a great little town with a decent tourist presence, but not too much. The people there seem to understand that a lot of tourists and/or big tour groups would really destroy the quiet tranquility that's such a huge part of the draw there. There's still work to be done, but hopefully they keep it like that, instead of going over to the dark side and becoming the Boracay of the north. We went caving there, which was pretty amazing, spending 2 hours poking around barefoot in a cold limestone cave. We also went on an incredible hike to a waterfall that led us down into a valley carpeted with rice terraces. Unfortunately we also had to hike back out, which was straight up.

The guesthouse we stayed at in Sagada

The best way to carry a giant bundle of leaves

The trail to the falls

Apparently there are no roads to the villages in the valley so they carry everything in

Unbelievable, and not even the best the Philippines has to offer (apparently)

We had to make it through the terrace maze to get down

Just called "Big Falls" I think... 72 meters tall

Great swimming after a hot hike, ice cold

The next series of pictures is from the farm that's owned by the host family of our friend Sherry. A bunch of us went there for the week to hang out and work (or in our case, just hang out). It's a pretty amazing place, an hour walk from a small town, so it's totally isolated, amazingly quiet and pretty much the perfect place to go to get away from whatever it is you need to get away from (in my case: allergies, tricycles, the heat...). We ate really well, hung out a lot, went hiking and got some amazing produce from the organic garden. It's registered with WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) so if you are ever in the Philippines and would like a week or a month of work in exchange for free lodging and awesome scenery, check it out. You can hang out with Adam and Beth.

Hiking through town

Halfway down (or up) the super steep path

The farm. It's hard to tell, but there are different terraces for various kinds of crops

Adam and Beth, weeding the green onion

Weeding for their supper

A hike we didn't go on because we weren't there yet, but still a sweet picture

Sunset from the farm

Don't ask why there's a cat in the picture, it's a long story...

Malaysia - Borneo

We went to Borneo kind of randomly (it happened to be the cheapest place for us to fly to), but I'm really glad we made the detour and stopped in for a few days. The big attraction in the northern state of Sabah, where we were, is Mt. Kinabalu, which is one of the tallest mountains in SE Asia and also one of the easiest to climb. It was also a little out of our price range, so we admired it as we drove by in the bus that took us to the Kinabatangan River valley. In truth, we weren't that interested in mountain climbing because we had a sweet homestay set up, and some jungle adventures planned. The homestay is a WWF project to provide livelihood for people in the area, so besides having families host tourists, they also train people to be guides, boatmen, back office people and anything else that might go into running such an operation. The family we stayed with was big and shy, but we got to chat with them a fair amount, watch some Malaysian soccer, eat some good food and have a cooking lesson that consisted of Abby dumping some chopped veggies into a pot and the mom declaring "done!" The boat tours were nice, it was just us and our guide Joel, so we got to putter around on the river for hours, looking for wildlife and dodging the occasional power boat of a bigger, much more expensive jungle operation down river. The wildlife was amazing: wild elephants, monitor lizards, a variety of macaques, proboscis monkeys, crocodiles, orangutans (which we didn't see), kingfishers, hornbills and egrets, wild boar and a few other things I'm probably forgetting. We tried to set up a jungle hike to maybe see some animals up close, but the hike was more like a 15 minute walk into the jungle to the eco-camp they're building, and not much else. Oh well...

There was another group there so we got to sit in on their cultural show. The cultural dances were almost exactly the same as Filipino dances, minus the weird Spanish colonial dances. I half expected them to come out and do tinikiling, and when I asked they said they have the same dance, it just goes by another name there.

They asked for volunteers to come up, so I got to bang on some drums in a Borneo version of the hippie drum circle.

Kingfisher

Monitor lizard - about 5 to 6 feet long

We happened to be there during the annual elephant migration, so we were extremely lucky to see a herd of elephants. In fact, we were so lucky our guide literally jumped up and down in the boat saying "we're so lucky!"

We came across them a second time, and this time they were out in plain view. Unfortunately it was getting dark, so most of our pictures were a little blurry, since we couldn't use a flash, obviously.

This is the best picture of a mom and baby. We watched them eat for about 10 minutes.

Proboscis monkeys, hanging out in the trees.

Macaques

The river at sunset. It was pretty muddy from the erosion caused by all the recent flooding.

A lake we hiked to.

This photo is actually the reflection off the incredibly still lake.