301st post

4 and a third years into my 'China thing' (yes the 'thing' that was originally going to last 3 months) and i am preparing to go north. Only for 2 nights and 3 days, but that will be enough. It is something I first tried to do 4 years ago, but had transportation problems. Now, I've got up the courage (and bought flight tickets, some progress financially from when i first came here as a volunteer for AIESEC!).

On Thursday me and Andrea will go to Harbin for the famed ice festival and snow festival; apparently there is (surprise, surprise) an Olympic theme to it this year. It is one of the best in the World. It will also be 20 or 30 degrees below, depending on the wind. Hopefully we'll make it back, and might even do some skiing nearby, since there is an excellent ski resort nearby (problem being it is so damn cold, it is not tempting to spend all day outside skiing!).

After the overnight trip last weekend to an excellent resort near Beijing (it was 4 hrs away by car and so much better than the place I usually go only an hour away), I am definitely getting the skiing bug (and the snowboarding bug, though my snowboarding is not as good yet). Due to the distance the resort is pretty empty, so we had lots of fun, despite one friend breaking her ski!

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the last working day before Chinese New Year. Now it is Friday afternoon and it is already hard to work, let alone tomorrow! None-the-less, in return for a whole 5 weekdays off, we need to work an extra 2 weekend days (that's the way it works here -ask the government why); so I will be back in the office Sunday week, once back from the ice festival. And, hopefully, a couple of new projects will be starting which will be nice -a bit more hands-on and hopefully get out of the office.

Chinese New Year is not really very exciting; most people just stay indoors and eat all week with different family. I suppose I'll pop over to the Temple Fairs, which is just like a school fair with sweet and crafts and some theatrical performances. There will be a billion fire crackers and some fireworks to provide entertainment, but that is about all there is to do really. Oh, I almost forgot -I need to go up North!

Thoughts of the Philippines

Dad and I had a long discussion about how to adequately describe a city like Manila or a country like the Philippines. We have opinions of both. but are they fair? How does one convey a sense of poverty, mess and run-down buildings as well as endless shopping malls, fast-food chains and smiley people, let alone the areas we have not seen, where the 60 families that own 60% of the country's wealth (or more, apparently) probably live or where the Muslim freedom fighters in the South continue to rebel? Of course China or America have similar problems I suppose.

It is hard to see if the future will be any better for the Filipinos. Despite the huge influxes of money sent home from overseas Filipinos, the population is increasing too fast. Despite the beauty of the country, and its size, few tourists go there -and too many of them for the wrong reasons (sex). The country has few resources. However, the lovely Filipinos continue to smile.

As I previously mentioned, there are the problems of the fishermen who have dreams of less poverty (and often some help from technology like cyanide) and thus over-exploit resources, like fish. is it even possible, fair or desirable to restrict this -their dreams or their futures? Balancing short-term needs and long-term needs makes sense, but in reality (as Game theory tells us), is it possible for us to accept limits and not try to 'grow'? We'll see how the modern world does now that the word 'growth' is a bad word, not a good one, in the context of profits, sales, market shares and economies.

Busuanga

An island much bigger than we expected, Busuanga depends on its fishing and nascent tourism industry. An hour flight south of Manila followed by a 45 minute bus ride and we ended up in Coron town, opposite Coron island. A week in the small town and it felt like home, with a local bakery to boot!

We were there to island/beach hop and scuba dive. There were never more than a couple hundred tourists in the town, staying at cheap backpacker places, though there were more staying on the ten or more up-market resorts situated on smaller (sometimes private) islands in the area. Coron was really just a delightful local rural town that bustled around its market and town square, especially on New Year's Eve with a popular outdoor disco and well attended firework display.

On the 30th there had been a competition amongst the motor bike + sidecars that are the main form of transport. They sit up to 10 tiny kids or 3 Western Men. With first prize of 700 USD, the quality of entrants was high: the goal to dress up the machines all christmassy and there were plenty of innovative designs and much hard work. Several days had been spent creating nativity plays on the roofs, painting a scuba-diving Santa, making lights and reindeer and all sorts. It gave us something to do in the evenings apart from eating and drinking with all the other divers in town, which kept us busy and happy all week. In fact the food in Coron was very good, particularly the chocolate mousse at the Bistro run by a French guy!

We spent two days on beaches around the nearby islands and exploring some lakes. The snorkeling was nothing too special but having a beach all to oneself with the boatman BBQ-ing some fish for lunch was nice! I spent four days scuba diving, getting my PADI advanced and also Nitrox qualifications. Nitrox sounds very cool, but is just breathing air with more oxygen in it than usual, which increases the time diving at depths. This is useful when you are 35m under water and swimming inside a 140m long Japanese ship from World War 2, something I did 6 times as well as a few smaller boats.

Exploring these wrecks was incredible. The sense of adventure and challenge; the sense of history and atmosphere; the sense of excitement and (limited) danger navigating through corridors, rooms and around pieces of metal all added to the usual thrills of diving. I was (using a torch in order to see anything) swimming through propeller shafts barely 1m x 1m, control rooms, storage rooms, engine rooms and holds looking at and touching bottles of beer, a tractor and a bulldozer and all sorts. Though visibility was not that great there was still lots to be seen outside the wrecks too, such as a crane used to life sea planes off the ship in to the sea and plenty of fish and coral life. I won't go on any more, but there is a reason why the area in in the top 5 in the World for wreck diving.

At the end of my trip I had another half a day in Manila which allowed me to visit the National Museum; which is actually very good. Of course, I am biased, as half of the displays are about the discovery, recovery and contents of a late 16th century Spanish ship and thus includes a lot on underwater archaeology. It was all very revealing and related to the diving I had done and I was easily sucked further into the underwater World.

This was the first time I had dived on a boat of 20 people and it made the whole experience more 'typical' than just small boats of a few people or diving off a beach. After the dive everyone bantered about how it was, who saw what etc. Interestingly for every dive, we had to pay a fee that went to the marine conservation park supposed to be monitoring and protecting the area from locals, but the locals still often took pieces of the ships to sell as scrap. Fees for the lakes on nearby Coron island went to the local tribe who had been given the island and thus maintained it as almost an independent country with their own laws and everything; probably getting fairly wealthy from tourism!

We saw and heard all about the bad practices of the local fishermen: using cyanide to stun fish and catch them which destroys the coral; staying underwater (to catch fish) for 5 hours breathing air from the surface down a tube which paralyzed tens of fishermen every year from decompression sickness and various others that poverty and over-population inevitably lead to. Philippine's ineffective government is trying to do something about it, but success will not be easy.

All over Busuanga and the rest of the Philippines, urban and rural areas alike, was, as last year, extraordinarily large amounts of evidence of Philippine democracy. Local elected officials never hesitate to show-off what good things they are doing for their citizens even when those good things (bridges, roads, markets, buildings etc) have not even started, or look like they will never be completed! Some of the signs by these projects really should embarrass some of these leaders as it shows their inability to get things done. Even for the motorbike competition on the 30th, there was a tent up with signs about who was responsible for bringing the event to the people of Busuanga!

Manila

Upon arrival in Manila and exiting an international airport that seems too small for a city of 12 million, the taxi driver comfortably informed me everything would still be open on Christmas day. He was wrong of course, as the Philippines is a catholic country, however the homeless and beggars were still on the streets. Not a great Christmas for them, though at least they are warm. I wonder if their existence begging in Manila is really better than at home in the countryside so they stay, in hope of something better from the capital -along with thousands of others on the streets and hundreds of thousands in slum-like dwellings.

Me and dad went to see the crazy Chinese cemetery where rich Chinese were buried in tombs that were the size of actual houses; some had two storeys, others air conditioning for when mourners came. The remarkable tombs that are elaborate and expensive (and built there because the Chinese were not allowed to be buried in cemeteries with Filipinos) are even more remarkable as they are sited alongside a river; the other side of which was an entire town made of corrugated iron. Oh the juxtaposition and irony.

Those inhabitants' living conditions were incalculably worse than their deceased neighbors, yet as with Filipinos across the country, many in poverty, they were all smiles. Indeed, they never came to us to beg, like those in the tourist area. Almost as surprising was the stubbornness of one of the cemetery's security guards (who dubs as a tour guide) who was not willing to negotiate down from his asking price of 7 USD to give us a one hour tour around the cemetery.

Earlier on Christmas Day we'd seen the opulent Manila Hotel, charming old town of Intramuros (developed under the Spanish hundreds of years ago) including a well-restored fort, and the new developments by the harbor.

Evenings in Manila's bars and restaurants are marked by prostitutes making up 2/3rds (literally) of the clientele (they keep clients buying drinks which keeps bars happy) and beggars outside, necessitating security guards at entrances.

The next day we ventured to a local town by a lake, which was marked out by their transport. Sited along disused train tracks, the kids kept themselves busy ferrying residents to-and-fro using home-made carts that seemed remarkably fast and well designed on the train tracks. We wondered into an almost finished fancy apartment complex nearby and used the swimming pool before returning to Manila.

There is a business district (bigger than i expected when i visited on my way back through Manila to China) and some nice areas, but Manila is not a pretty city; the few nice old buildings that survived World War 2 are lying abandoned in most cases. It's a city of too many people and not enough housing or jobs. A shame really; the people are nice and although it's mainly the middle classes in the lovely Rizal Park relaxing, playing and buying food and kites from the poor street-sellers, the area to one side where I watched 30 or so people playing chess, provided an opportunity to talk to locals and see how class barriers can be bridged, and how a simple game of chess can provide joy and smiles to all -for free.

None-the-less it is wise to lock taxi doors as beggars occasionally try to open them at traffic lights whilst children, knowing no better or no other life, knock on the windows looking sad before giggling and turning back to their friends to play.