The Day I Found Nemo (Apo Island)

If Dumaguete had an almost legendary reputation among the Filippinos we spoke to, the only place to challenge its fabled status was Apo Island, a tiny, rugged dot in the Bohol sea. We tagged along on a diving trip organized by the hostel and, after some confusion about who was going to take us from the dive site to the island, we found ourselves being rowed from the big boat to the beach in the “small boat” … which turned out to be very small indeed.

We had taken snorkelling gear almost by accident as a token gesture to participating in the diving trip, but fate was clearly smiling upon us when we took that decision, because while the island itself was beautiful, the best sights were definitely under the water around its shores.

After taking a little while to figure out how best to breathe through the mouthpiece and enter and exit the water in flippers (purse your lips as if you’re kissing and walk backwards where possible) we got the hang of it and spent a couple of hours splashing about in the not-very-deep water. The main marine reserve on the far side of the island was unfortunately another victim of typhoon Sendong and will probably take five years to recover but even on the non-reserve side we saw some amazing marine life. There was coral, some gently swaying in the waves, some lumpy like alien life forms. There were brightly coloured fish, including the little Nemo-fish I found hiding in a corner of the reef. There were hideous black sea slugs and cucumbers and strange black spiky things with what looked like shiny little eyes. And best of all there were the sea-turtles, giant and gentle, who paddled around with their wide flippers and nibbled at the sea bed, seemingly totally unconcerned at our presence.

I also had my first every experience of swimming in the sea in the rain, which is even more bizarre when you can see the raindrops splashing from underneath the surface of the water, but most of the time it was a gorgeous day and despite our best efforts to keep covered up (people in the Philippines tend to swim in shorts and t-shirts and we were slathered in factor 50 for most of the day), we all got varying degrees of redness on our skin afterwards.

The one tiny crisis occurred when my flip-flop broke walking along the beach. Setting off for four days with only one pair of cheap plastic shoes was never particularly intelligent, and wearing said shoes to scramble over boulders up a river was clearly (literally) a step or ten too far, but luckily flip-flops are practically the national footwear in the Philippines and as soon as we got back to Dumaguete I was able to limp to a shop selling hundreds of different kinds. Having bigger feet than the average Filippina limited my choice a bit but I left  the shop a few minutes later and only a couple of euros poorer with another pair to add to my collection and very appropriate souvenir of my trip.

Negros:Valencia

On our first day on Negros, we took a motorbike taxi up into the interior of the island, to the small town of Valencia. This was by far the most beautiful journey we had taken so far. Lush greenery was everywhere and tropical flowers in every colour cascaded down by the roadside. Arriving at the market place, as soon as the driver turned the engine off, I was struck by the total calm of the place, a silence that felt almost alien after the endless buzz of traffic in Cebu and Dumaguete.

Up until this point, I had perhaps believed that the tricycle taxis were an adventurous form of transport, but that was before I discovered the habal-habal, an elongated motorbike that takes its name from a description of copulating animals. Our drivers said we needed bike and driver each, but this was later disproved …

The reason for taking a habal-habal and not a tricycle taxi was that the road higher up was too rough and steep for the tricycles. So taking an even less stable form of transport, with no helmet of course, was the perfect solution. The ride up was bumpy and exhilarating but we all arrived at our destination in one piece, ready to walk down over 300 steps to the famous Casaroro falls. The guidebook made it sound like a walk in the park, so we were a little dismayed to get to the bottom of the steps and find a path that looked like this:

After about twenty minutes of scrambling over rocks in less-than-ideal footwear, we decided that we must have gone the wrong way and started to head back. On the way, we passed something that looked as though it could have been a dried up waterfall and assumed that was it. Disappointed, we made our way, hot and panting, back to the top of the steps.

Luckily for us, one of the drivers met us at the top and asked if we had found the falls. When we said we hadn’t, he confirmed that we had in fact been going the right way and offered to come with us and show us, so back down we trooped, back along the crumbling pathway, back over the rocks, waded through the river, rounded the corner ten metres from where we had stopped before, and saw this:

So in the end it was definitely worth it!

Our adventure was not over yet, however. When we got back to the top of the steps for the second time, the other two drivers hadn’t yet come back. The first driver beeped his horn a few times, but to no avail.

And so it was that we learned to ride the habal-habal Philippino style: if you've never shared a motorbike with 3 other people, you haven't lived.

And we were even more relieved to arrive back in Valencia safe and sound.

Negros: Dumaguete Part 1: Harold's Mansion

After grueling week at the chalk-face (not really – I spent a lot of time observing and the most taxing thing I had to do was re-familiarise myself with the principles of decimal divisions and attempt not to fail a trial run of my friend's maths exam) it was time for another holiday. The Salesians raved about the town of Dumaguete on the island of Negros, so to Dumaguete we did go. We took the fast ferry from Cebu, which according to the guidebook was a 2-hour crossing but turned out to be four and a half – things change fast in the Philippines, as we were to have confirmed later in the trip …

As a result, we arrived late and hungry at our hostel, which luckily was conveniently located just ten minutes’ walk from the port, meaning that we had to disappoint the crowds of taxi drivers who descended on us as soon as we stepped off the boat. Harold’s Mansion (motto “Any cheaper and we’d be sluts”) was another Lonely Planet pick which, despite a couple of initial shocks, turned out to be a great choice. Being a little of the “any cheaper…” persuasion ourselves, we had opted for the cheapest of the selection of very cheap rooms, attractively sold as being on the roof terrace.

The roof terrace was something of a building site but it did have great views down towards the sea and up to the mountains. Unfortunately I couldn’t really see these in the nine o’clock darkness and the first thing I noticed was the toilet block - attractively situated outside on the terrace.  A quick glance at the inside of the huts almost had me running back to the front desk in search of an en-suite upgrade.

Note the squat toilet with bucket flush and the shower head conveniently located in the immediate potential splash-zone of the toilet. Summoning up all my courage, however, I decided to check out the room first and was pleasantly surprised by the immaculate, freshly painted interior, complete with a large fan and reassuringly free of insect life. I was also pretty chuffed to have a room to myself for the equivalent of 7 euros a night.  And closer inspection of the toilet block revealed it to be spotlessly, spotlessly clean despite its primitive fittings. I realized afterwards that what the hostel lacked in infrastructure, it definitely made up for in upkeep, because labour is cheap in the Philippines, while amenities are not always easy to come by. 

My Bedroom Door (You can't see the outdoor urinals from here!)

The food was also tasty and cheap at Harold’s and they provided 30 minutes of free internet every day, along with an extensive lending library of Lonely Planet guides (which proved invaluable to me in planning what to do for my stopover in Hong Kong on the way back). Having survived the showers without too much pain at all, I would definitely recommend it as a place to stay. And if cleaning your teeth over a concrete basin in the open air isn’t your thing, you could always stay in one of the “expensive” rooms, all of which have en-suite bathrooms.

Cebu City Part 3: The Carbon Market

The Carbon Market in Cebu City has everything that makes the Philippines fascinating about it. It's a colourful, cramped maze of dirty alleyways and piles of strange and delicious looking food filled with exotic smells and the occasional stench. Children and livestock wander the narrow paths between the stalls and the vendors observe you as you pass but never stare, just shout the occasional "hello". It's an intensely foreign feeling and you know that you are thousands of miles from home but nobody makes you feel out of place. It feels like a place that could absorb you but as you come out the other side you realise that you have not been absorbed. For that, you would need more time, always more time.

It's a place where the pictures tell the story best, so here are some of the best pictures (with thanks to my friends, who actually remembered to take their camera!)

Cebu Part 2: Seeing the Sights

The first thing you need to know about the sights in Cebu city is that, officially, there aren’t many. The second thing you need to know is that this doesn’t matter in the slightest, because just by walking down the streets you will see sights far more interesting than any historical monument or tourist trap. Nevertheless, a couple of things are worth visiting.

We started our sightseeing trip with the cathedral. Apart from a few ugly statues, I quite liked the architechture and the interior because I'm a sucker for light airy buildings with lots of gold, but more interesting was the schedule of masses outside. Colonised by the Spanish from 1571 to 1898, the Philippines is overwhelmingly a Catholic country, and the evidence is everywhere.

Our local parish church in Cebu attracted up to 20 000 worshippers on a given Sunday, so the pressure on the cathedral must be immense. We had a little chuckle at the idea of weddings being carried out on a “first come, first served” basis but presumably this does mean when you book in advance!

The man in the picture is about to become only the second-ever saint from the Philippines and his beatification is clearly a very exciting event. I love the lack of cynicism revealed by "with more priests" being touted as a unique selling point.

After the cathedral, we went to Magellan’s cross. It was Magellan who brought Catholicism to the Philippines and he seems to have done an excellent job of implanting it in the culture before being killed by a tribal chief after he invaded Mactan island in 1521. The cross you can see in Cebu supposedly contains fragments of the original cross that Magellan planted when he arrived in the Philippines.

The final stop on our tour was the Basilica del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño is a statue of the boy Jesus dressed as a Spanish prince, and was presented by Magellan to Queen Juana, wife of the Rajah of Cebu after her conversion to Catholicism. While not officially the patron saint of Cebu because it represents Jesus himself, the locals are devoted to it and queue up to pass in front of it and touch the bullet proof glass that protects it from attack.

Then, having done our duty to official tourist, we headed back out into the streets to experience some more of the endlessly changing sights of everyday existence in Cebu.

Teaching!

After our relaxing mini-break in the jungle, on Tuesday it was time to do some work. For me, this meant being a teaching assistant for my friends' classes in the vocational education centre where they work. The students are all on practical courses, for example to become electricians or carpenters, but they also have weekly classes in English and Maths. As the classes were large, I spent some of the time just being an extra pair of hands, but I also worked on an individual basis with some of the students, consolidating concepts they hadn't understood, and carrying out mock job interviews. I was there for too short a time to make any great impact on their learning, but it was extremely rewarding nonetheless, mainly because it was so enjoyable getting to know the students themselves. In some ways they were boisterous and confident, calling out jokes in class and cheering each other on, but on a one-to-one basis, they were often either very shy or very charming, or sometimes both. I had the opportunity to talk to lots of them and also to read some autobiographies that they had written, which gave me a real insight into life in the Philippines that I wouldn't otherwise have had.

There were a few things that I found striking when reading the autobiographies and talking to the students about their experiences. Many of their concerns were the same as those of young adults the world over: friends, relationships and their place in their families and in society, but others were a testament to the differences between growing up as a poor, or even very ordinary person in the Philippines compared to most people in Western Europe. Many of the students, for example, hoped to graduate from the college and to get a job to be able to support their parents or to allow brothers and sisters to go to school. Lots of them had jobs in addition to full-time school, not for extra pocket money but to fund their education or even just to be able to eat. Some had seen dramatic reversals in their family fortunes when a parent fell ill or lost their job, which really brought home to me how fortunate we are in Europe to have a welfare system which, flawed as it may be, provides a safety net to protect us from the worst when something unavoidable happens.

Another thing that struck me in their attitudes to life was the central role played by religion. The school is Catholic and the programme places a strong emphasis spiritual as well as academic education and growth, so it's hard to say how much of this is part of the national culture and how much was specific to that particular school, but many, when asked to describe how they had solved a problem, would talk about praying to God for help and explained their goals for living as good Christians.

Having this insight into their lives, their plans, their hopes and their dreams felt like a real privilege and I would have loved to have been able to do more, but time was too short (on this trip at least!).

Cebu City Part 1

In Cebu city, the green hills behind the city merge gently into the smoky horizon and the turquoise sea laps softly at the dirty shore. Tower blocks look down on the mazes of the shanty towns and wooden shacks sit precariously among solid concrete. Advertising shouts down from every wall and roof top and rubbish builds up in silent piles in every corner. The traffic roars, the engines splutter, the crowds swirl and in the midst of it all, the people sit by the market stalls and on the kerbs, staring out at it all in quiet contemplation.

In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.

What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.



A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.