Do You Know the Way to Talisay?

Not wanting to spend over a month in the Philippines servicing a dive boat without doing at least one dive, the boys and I arranged to make a two-tank boat dive off the south side of our island, Mactan, on our day off. The method for choosing amongst the many dive companies: open the phone book, pick the one with an English advertisement. Simple. We found out that an English ad is no guarantee of English speakers in the office, but we did get our reservations booked.
Came Sunday, Jonah was at our hotel to pick us up and take us to the dive shop. I was a little put off by the fact that we were being led to a boat by a man named Jonah; turns out he was just the van driver. Once at the dive shop we met up with our captain and guides for the day, as well as the owner of the shop, a lady who has apparently been instrumental in creating marine sanctuary legislation that has closed some of the local areas to fishing. It was to one of these areas that our dive guide, Edwin, suggested we go.
We schlepped our gear down to the shore and boarded a 70’ diesel powered outrigger, a unique experience for me but a common vessel type in the local waters, used for fishing, tourism, short inter-island hops, and, from what I can tell when driving over the bridge that connects Mactan to the island where the shipyard is, beaching in the mud flats for no particular reason. Basically a big canoe with pontoons rigged on either side for stability. It was roomy and spacious for the four divers and five crew, with a shaded lower deck, a sundeck above, easy water access, plenty of room for gear, everything a dive boat needs.
We motored away from Mactan and headed east across a wide channel towards the northern tip of Olango Island and a dive site called Talisay. I know you probably couldn’t care less about the names; I am writing them more for my memory than anything else. The journey took about twenty minutes. Talisay, according to the dive shop owner and due in part to her, has been a protected area for about three years, which has given the fish population a chance to recover somewhat. Seemed like a popular spot, as there were several tourist boats, mostly snorkelers and day cruisers with a few dive boats moored up along the reef.
It’s funny to be in a foreign place and not know the language but still know exactly what someone is saying. I’ve been in the dive business long enough to know what the first question is when you pull up next to another dive boat, and I can now ask in Tagalog if there is any current.
Oh yeah, there was current. My four friends and I, accompanied by Edwin and his mildly muddled sidekick Peter, went on a great drift dive. Water was 84 degrees and shallow where we hopped in, eel grass sand with healthy patch reef. We kicked off shore fifty feet and descended over the lip of a steep wall, letting a maybe one-knot current pull us along. A quick word on drift diving from a guy who makes a living figuring out how to get his customers back to the place they started their dive, the boat. Love it; not having to worry about how to get home is a great way to dive.
We descended to about eighty, kicking back by not kicking at all, and watched the world pass by. Huge sea fans, healthy hard and soft corals, not overly abundant but colorful reef fish, and schools of durgeons and some sort of silvery fish you’d expect to see someone around here chasing with a net to put in a can whole with some spicy tomato sauce. Highlights included a clown triggerfish, several nudibranchs and flatworms, lionfish and scorpionfish, a cuttlefish, and not having to worry about the other divers in the water.
Clown triggers- how does nature select for a fish whose lower half is black covered in big white spots shifting suddenly in the middle of the fish to neon highlighted stripes with orange lips? What evolutionary function says, “Oh yeah, let’s select for that color pattern. This guy’s a survivor,”? Mystery.
We slowly worked our way back up the wall and over the lip into the flats, passing a partially burned wooden vessel surrounded by schools of colorful reef fish of all types in about forty feet of water. Not spectacular but enough to give the wreck-heads with whom I work something to discuss.
Speaking of colorful reef fish, you know how clouds of juveniles hover in close proximity to coral formations for protection? There are really large, healthy table corals around here that support such schools, and I had a flashback to my childhood diving days as I watched our assistant dive leader, Peter, garner great joy from jumping at the juveniles, watching them dive down into the table coral in a single wave of color, only to reappear a few seconds later so he could spook them again. My enjoyment of his childlike (simpleminded?) interaction with the reef faded quickly over our two dives together as I watched him pull out one of those stupid metal pointer rods and use it to jab at stationary fish such as the myriad lion and scorpionfish we found, just to watch them startle. When I saw him using the stick to carve words and initials into the corals and hold himself stationary in the current, I was done, and by the end of the second dive I was wondering maliciously just how the hell someone holds a regulator in his mouth with, and I’m not kidding here, one visible tooth. The reef is now protected from fishing. I wonder who is going to protect it from Peter and his ilk?
Between dives we pulled up to an offshore restaurant for lunch. This place was an island unto itself, moored on pilings a hundred feet offshore. It catered to tourists and served seafood. Live seafood that we got to pick ourselves. As soon as we stepped aboard the restaurant (neat, huh?), a couple kids hustled over to a hole in the floor in the middle of the dining room and started hauling nets and baskets out of the ocean beneath the hatch. They brought them over to a display table and started transferring all sorts of live and recently deceased animals into tubs of water on the table. Huge prawns, reef fish (not from the sanctuary, promise), whelk looking mollusks, small abalone, squid, and some sort of bivalves, all spread before us for our gluttonous inspection and selection. We picked our victims and the cooking style and they whisked them out of the tubs and off to the kitchen. While trying to choose, I noticed one of the small green abalone oozing out of its tub towards me. The lady overseeing the selection process knocked it back in the tub. By the time I had picked a squid to be calamaried, the same abalone was back out of the water, again headed my direction, thus sealing its fate in the sauté pan with garlic, onion, peppers, and butter.
After our lunch of ridiculously fresh seafood, we went back out for our second dive. The current had changed direction, so we did a similar dive profile going the other way. Many of the same cool sights, especially the lion and scorpionfish and another cuttlefish. Also, a stationary filter-feeding organism on the order of a sea fan or sponge called a sea quill, the first I have ever seen. In an underwater world where many things appear alien, this thing is straight out of area 51. Picture a squirrel’s bushy tail, shaved flat on the side closest to its body, stuck into the ground at its base. The remaining what would be furry part of the tail in our analogy was an intricate series of small, spongelike vents designed to filter food out of the water. The base and central stalk ware a beautiful lavender, and the vents were lime green. Seeing new things underwater makes this job worthwhile, and makes one forget that the next day will be spent tearing the fresh water manifold out of the engine room.

No Thanks, I'm Sweet Enough

Everything in a Philippine grocery store has sugar added to it. You can’t buy a can of corn doesn’t have sweetener on the list right after the corn. Want bacon? It’s all ‘honey glazed’, really sugar and artificial and natural flavorings. If you leave a dried mango slice out of the bag in this warm, humid climate, before long it is oozing melting sugar on whatever you were dumb enough to set it. Canned meats and vegetables have sugar added. Is no tinned food sacred? Everything from tomato sauce to hot dogs (a duo they serve together at the local McDonald’s; McPasta, anyone?) has some form of sweetener as or tucked in right behind the first one or two ingredients. High fructose corn syrup, brown rice syrup, glucose, sucrose, maltodextrin; whatever guise it wears, it all boils down to sugar.
Sugary foods in fact, monopolize about a third of every Philippine grocery store in which I’ve shopped. The above-mentioned dried mangoes take up an aisle. There’s at least one local cookie isle, filled with regionally made baked goods, the most popular of which is otap, a flaky pastry cookie dusted with, any guesses? Sugar. Also in this aisle are shortbreads and a variety of other gooey treats like the heavenly butter cookies covered in a chewy layer of sugared peanuts and flavored with lime. Sounds weird, tastes great. This baked goods isle is not to be confused with the regular packaged cookie aisle. You know how, in American grocery stores, the cookie aisle is also the chip aisle? Not so in the Philippines. The cookie aisle is jam-packed both sides with packaged cookies, with some crackers thrown in. There is a separate isle for chips.
Neither is the cookie aisle to be confused with the bakery stand just on the other side of the cash registers. Most grocery stores here have a food court at the entrance. There is always a bakery, serving, aside from decorated cakes, a selection of white breads, mostly pastries and buns stuffed with sweets like chocolate or peanut butter or heavenly coconut paste died, for reasons unknown, bright green. As long as I am eating bleached white flour and corn syrup, what’s a little food coloring amongst arteries?
Back inside the grocery store, there are two candy aisles, one for small servings like candy bars and bags of sweets, another for bulk candy. Not to be confused with the separate section of the store, the duty free type area that sells the booze and imported chocolates and candies.
Then there is the ice cream isle. It is actually a regimented maze of small isles made up of flip door or glass top waist high freezers chock full of all kinds of ice cream sold in big tubs. Nestle is in the ice cream market here and in many foreign countries, and they put out some outstanding flavors, like banana with graham cracker chocolate pieces and caramel swirls, and just plain old delicious mango. The ice cream islands are intermixed with the frozen meat section, so don’t be surprised if, in your ice cream frenzy, you crank open the lid of a chest freezer and are suddenly faced with a sea of unidentifiable chicken parts and cheese injected hot dogs loaded with, you guessed it, sugar.

Merging Culture

Riding around in Cebu is quite the experience. Once you get past the initial terror involved, it is entertaining. Though the fear never dissipates completely, daily, utterly miraculous avoidance of potentially catastrophic incidents serves to habituate or at least anesthetize one to the real potential of collision. The first couple weeks I puckered up something fierce at every crazy near loss of life, but now I don’t even blink when a jeepney loaded with passengers whips into the intersection or a motor scooter veers into our path. Which happens quite often. Cebu has few stoplights but plenty of intersections, few crosswalks but lots of pedestrians, a galaxy of vehicle shapes and sizes, and more than enough crazy drivers to pilot them on what range from pockmarked one and a half lane dirt tracks serpentining through semi-rural areas and slums to heavily crowded urban streets whose narrow shoulders hardly contain the foot, vehicle, and commercial traffic spilling over like clogged gutters in a rainstorm. Don’t get me started on what the roads look like when there actually is a rainstorm.
From what I can tell, the two most important components of driving in this town are a functioning horn and a great clanking pair of brass balls. Merging, changing lanes, and bulling a path through crowded, unregulated intersections are all done by sheer force of will and guts. Crossing intersections involves choosing a line and sticking to it in a game of chicken played at ninety degree angles with other drivers trying to cross from the left and right without the use of brakes, much less traffic signals. Add pedestrians and a slew of motor scooters weaving through infinitesimally small, constantly shifting gaps and you get the idea.
No sexist offense meant with the brass balls comment, and quite accurate, as I have seen extremely few women driving here, maybe one in a hundred drivers. I don’t know if I am seeing an accurate cross section and I have no desire to make broad sweeping generalizations, but the drivers in Cebu seem to be almost all men. You’d think it was a testosterone thing, and there is a certain amount of that. Driving here is a series of fearlessly foolhardy acts performed for fleeting temporary gain and personal gratification: testosterone in a nutshell.
That’s where the testosterone factor ends though, because here’s the astounding part: there’s no road rage. None. The angriest gesture I’ve witnessed on the road is a horn blast lasting more than half a second. Horns are in constant use, and mean many things: “Hey, I’m over here so don’t merge into me,” “I’m passing you,” “OK pass me,” “Thank you for letting me pass you,” You’re welcome,” and so on, but almost never, “Screw you for cutting me off,” or whatever insane maneuver is occurring.
And folks do indeed pull some of the craziest moves I’ve ever seen on the roads here. Inconveniently placed median or ramp between you your destination, forcing you to shoot a U and backtrack? Nonsense! Cross into the oncoming lanes and drive to your destination, against traffic, on the shoulder. Oh, you do want to shoot that U? By all means, even if it is against busy oncoming traffic and requires a five point turn that will stall all four lanes of a two way, four lane road. That oncoming traffic is going to stop, right? Right? I really hope so, seeing as to how I’m riding in the van’s crumple zone if we get broadsided. Go up the wrong ramp or cross street? Throw that thing in reverse! Back up to where you started and try again. I’m not kidding, I’ve seen it all.
The point is, other drivers will stop for you if you nose into the gaps and, in essence, insist. The amazing part is that they will do it graciously, patiently, and stoically. No expressions of exasperation such as yelling, rude gestures, or even a roll of the eyes. No grudge braking or cutting you off a few miles down the way to get even. No honking, other than maybe a short beep to say, “Sure, pass me on the uphill side of this two lane bridge even though you can’t see the oncoming traffic and I have nowhere to go if somebody pops up over the crest of the hill.” Once you get used to the terrifying maneuvers and traffic, riding around is quite pleasant because there isn’t the constant fear of retribution when you piss off other drivers. They just don’t get upset.
I may have painted the driving here as wacky. Totally intentional. So where are all the traffic accidents? I’ve spent about two hours a day in the van since we got here. I’ve seen the aftermath of maybe two or three accidents, and witnessed none. When I got my first taste of the driving here I thought people would be careening into one another left and right, but apparently not so. Unpredictable, crowded, aggressive, and…safe? Amazing. Granted, one of the accidents I did see was a three axle truck whose trailer brakes had failed during a turn, tossing a steel cargo trailer into a busy street and, if the ambulance was any indicator, squashing at least one person. Still, an impressive number of drivers on the road behaving in an irrational fashion in tight quarters and making it work.

Mango Madness

Maybe Billy Bob Thornton was on to something. I have really adapted to this orange food thing. Specifically mangoes. Living in the Philippines has, in fact, made me an addict.
If you buy a mango in the store, whether fresh or dried in strips with sugar and sulfur dioxide and packaged, chances are that it came from the Philippines. Mangoes are big business here, and they grow and sell them everywhere. Any place that sells fruit, from the fanciest supermarket to the most ramshackle roadside stall, has a pile of ripe, juicy, pale yellow mangoes stacked and arranged like jewels. I bought them five or six at a time, six days being about as long as I could keep a ripe one from going over the hill in the fridge.
Morning mango became a daily ritual, and it was usually my first conscious thought upon awakening. One of my first conscious thoughts. Breakfast is a good time for mangoes, as you have to be near a sink to eat one; not a fruit you just pop in your lunch pail and snack on in your business suit. You eat a mango, you’re going to make a mess. A delicious, sticky, juice all over your hands and running down your chin mess.
The bartender at the hotel restaurant showed me how to prepare one. I thought I knew what I was doing when I lived in Hawaii. It wasn’t until I really began paying attention as Manuel deftly lifted the yielding flesh away from its pit with practically no waste that I realized I had been a rank amateur fumbling in the mango dark. Wash the fruit. Wash all your fruit, in fact, as you just don’t know where it’s been. Rest the mango in the palm of your off hand, stem end facing you. Lay the flat of a long sharp knife on the meat of your palm, very close to the stem. I can’t be responsible for what happens next when you try this, but start moving the knife back and forth through the fruit, using your palm to guide the blade. You can feel it scraping right against the edge of the pit; don’t wander away from it. Stay close all the way through. Flip it, do the same to the other side. If you do it right, there will barely be any meat next to the pit, it will all be in the two halves you cut. Then use the tip of the knife to cut a grid pattern in each half through the flesh but not the skin, turn inside out, and either bury your face in it or spoon out the cubes, depending on how genteel you want to be. Me, I’m standing over a sink trying to wolf the thing before I go to a filthy shipyard. Gentility is not my watchword.
Side note: if you dump all those mango cubes in a blender with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a big slug of dark rum, good things happen.

Adhesives I Have Known and Loved

White caulk. Silicone caulk. Crystal tub and tile caulk. P-tex boat caulk. Two part marine epoxy. Two decks worth of three part self rubberizing deck paint applied in four steps. Multiple cases of liquid construction adhesive. Rubber cement. Contact cement. Lock-Tite. Wood glue. Super glue. Carpet glue. Grout. Tile sealant. Lacquer based putty. Water based putty. Plus enough stain, varnish, and paint to cover all of that adhesive. It’s sticky out here.