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Travel Log Entries:

• IAD-SFO-HKG-MNL
• Holiday in Manila and Coron
• Dive Log: Wrecks of Coron
• Oceans and History in Hong Kong
• HKG-ORD-IAD

We were originally supposed to fly through SFO on a 777 but at some point United did a schedule change and it became a 747 to ORD. The change meant departing an hour earlier, and our seat reservations were wiped. We lost our pair of rear window seats and had to settle for middle seats, one by the aisle. This turned out okay since I got an empty seat beside me. Our plane was a B744 with registry N122UA.

The film “Moneyball” played twice, and “Dolphin Tale” played once. I wasn’t paying attention to the inflight movies but since Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman kept appearing, the overall impression I got from glances at the screen was a like SE7EN, but with baseball and dolphins.

Food was much more palatable on this flight than on SFO-HKG; I’m guessing from better outbound ground catering at HKG. Inflight meal selections included stir-fried chicken with pickled vegetables, chicken and pepper noodles, and cheesy fettuccine. (But same old tasteless danish and banana for midflight snack.)

On arrival at ORD the line for immigration was inordinately long. At one point the contraband-sniffing dog singled out a woman who had brought a banana off the plane. The banana was confiscated.

Also a reminder to self: try to route flights home through non-US layovers, so we don’t have to go through the idiocy of bag-claim and recheck at port of entry.

I got a few nice aerial shots of Chicago from my window seat as we departed for Dulles. Some haze clouded the view but Chicago is always a photogenic city from the air regardless.

We walked the wrong way from gate on arrival at Dulles, couldn’t find SkyTrain, ended up riding wrong mobile lounge to Terminal A (rather than Main Terminal). We were further delayed by an Air France A380 powering up on the tarmac, its wingspan so huge that it jutted into the mobile lounge right of way, so we had to wait for it to move.

Baggage claim, taxi home, with bonus fun time listening to Washington Flyer Taxi dispatch guy complain about lazy coworkers. Then sleep, and take a month to post about the trip to weblog.

On arrival at HKG we left our heavier suitcases at Left Baggage for the duration of our visit.( Total cost for three days was about USD90 but worth it not to lug two weeks of packing on the train.) Quick late lunch at the Food², buy some Octopus cards, then a quick Airport Express and MTR ride to North Point.

Ibis

As before we stayed at Ibis North Point, but this time around I splurged a bit on a “Superior Harbourview” room. (Previous stays here had been in Harbourview rooms without the “Superior.”) The splurge was worth it; we got the same view of Victoria Harbour and Kowloon, but with a wide panoramic window dominating a slightly larger room. (Still a small room, but overall cheaper than a bigger room with similar amenities elsewhere in HK.) As an added perk, Ibis North Point now has free hotelwide wifi, and the connection was delightfully fast.

For dinner we tried the neighboring Chinese restaurant, recently renovated since we were last there and now called “Taste Fresh.” Staff still didn’t speak much English but with some menu pointing we got some fillet of grouper with corn sauce and bok Chou with mushrooms — more than enough to box for takeout. At some point a picture of Justin Bieber peeked in through a window from the side of a bus. There is really no escape.

Ocean Park

Easiest way to get to Ocean Park is to take MTR to Admiralty, then transfer to the Ocean Park Citybus (dodging scalpers at the subway exit). You can get tickets at the ticket booth before boarding the bus, or just swipe an Octopus card and get tickets at the park itself, just a 15-20 minute ride through Aberdeen Tunnel.

Ocean Park has changed greatly since I last visited: the rear Tai Shu Wan entrance has been closed (though the giant escalator still serves the slope), the cable car is now supplemented by a funicular tram called “Ocean Express,” and sea life from the old Atoll Reef has been moved to the new Grand Aquarium.

We hit the Grand Aquarium first, marveling at the fisheye domes and grand viewing window. Lots of reef life — fish, rays, and sharks — and also several tanks on the side with interesting specimens like spider crabs and sea dragons.

After leaving the main tourist flow of the aquarium, we lunched at Neptune’s Restaurant,where we could watch more fish through the grand viewing window as we ate assorted antipasto, steak, and squid ink pasta.

Sea life in the Grand Aquarium is just part of the Ocean Park experience; right nearby is the Asian Animals habitat, with panda bears, red pandas, salamanders, and assorted breeds of goldfish. The red pandas at play were especially fun to watch.

The Emerald Trail had a nice little suspension bridge, though I found the fake “Temple of Doom”-style snake-and-waterfall decor to be a totally unnecessary touch to what was an otherwise engaging nature walk, with assorted butterflies, birds, and “exotic” North American turtles.

Ocean Express is a campy “sea experience” tram ride; blue-tinted windows on the train darken the cabin to direct focus to the ceiling LCDs, which play an underwater video montage with a half-hearted action plot in which an octopus attacks the train and gets scared off by some dolphins. How engaging.

On the other side of the park we rode the Ocean Park Tower elevator, saw some sea lions at Pacific Pier, took the famous long escalator down the mountain, and rode the Wild West-themed Mine Train roller coaster.

We also checked out the Sea Jelly Spectacular, which was a lovely experience only slightly marred by obnoxious Vanessa Mae background music in one gallery.

As dark fell, we finished up Ocean Park with one last visit to the panda habitat to watch the panda bears eat, and I bought a round red panda doll to bring home as a pillow. The bus ride back took a bit longer due to traffic, but was painless, and we got back to the hotel with lots of time to eat leftovers from the previous night’s dinner.

Post-script: the plushie souvenirs were adorable.

History Museum

Our previous visit to the Hong Kong History Museum had been marred by poor timing; too much of the day spent in the downstairs exhibits on ancient history and ethnic identity, only discovering the upstairs galleries with less than an hour of visit time left. Our second day was spent rectifying this oversight with a return to the museum for that upper floor. Still, the first floor did deserve a few picturesque stops:

One particularly immersive upstairs exhibit is the “Old City” recreation, an early 20th Century street scene of commercial establishments and other cultural highlights, complete with boat on acrylic-water harbour and a trolley you can walk through.

On a grimmer note, there was also a bunker-like gallery about the three years Hong Kong spent under Japanese occupation during World War II, and a replica of living conditions in Shek Kip Mei Resettlement Estates.

I was fascinated by the period toys and advertising for a plastic student briefcase similar to one I used to have as a child:

There were also two cases of 1950s-1960s miniature comic book covers which provided an intriguing peek into the popular visual art style of the day — untainted by the current pop culture preoccupation with anime.

I found this Yu Yi, “object of auspicious significance” presented to Sir David Trench in 1970, a real head scratcher. Meanwhile, downstairs, a group of mainland tourists in bright neon caps gathered.

Kowloon Waterfront

After the museum, we walked down to the Sogo food court to grab some ramen and dim sum, then walked along the scenic Kowloon public pier to take in the skyline view before getting on the Star Ferry to Wan Chai.

(I love riding Star Ferry to Wan Chai simply because there’s a brand of frozen Chinese takeout in the US called “Wan Chai Ferry” and whenever I see it I can say I’ve ridden a Wan Chai Ferry for real.)

The red panda doll we got at Ocean Park is now named “Xiang Tau,” which roughly means “Like a head.” Here he is in front of our hotel room window before we left for the airport the next day:

Coron’s main draw for scuba divers is the fleet of World War II Japanese shipwrecks sunk around the Calamian Islands by US bombers in September, 1944. Around an hour by boat (give or take a few minutes depending on which wreck) from Coron proper, the wrecks sit on various reefs — or have become reefs by themselves — in relatively shallow water, some as deep as forty meters and one as shallow as the surface itself.

We only had time for two dives on January 30th, 2011; “Wizard,” our divemaster at Rocksteady Dive Center, suggested we do two relatively easy, shallow wrecks: East Tangat Gunboat and Morazan.

The trip to the dive boat was an adventure itself as we rode on the flatbed of the same cargo tricycle that had delivered our diving gear to port. The dive boat, “Three Little Birds,” (there was a was a long and involved story behind this name which I now forget) was a luxuriously large banca, brightly colored with the distinct red and gold of the German flag (after the dive center management’s nationality) and appointed with tank racks, generous seating, space for dive gear, steps to the water, a full size outhouse, and a Hyundai steering wheel.

Dive #89: East Tangat Gunboat
Max Depth: 19m
Air consumption: 290-30 bar
Dive time: 55 minutes

Originally Tamakaze Maru, the nomenclature for this particular wreck site might be a bit confusing, as it is called East Tangat but is located beside Sangat Island. As Wizard explained it, “tangat” in some local dialects means “gap” or “channel,” and the wreck sits in the channel between Sangat and Busuanga islands.

A “sub hunter” gunboat, this wreck is notable for the periscope under its hull used to scan underwater for enemy submarines. The gunboat sits on a slope, shallowest at 3m and extending down to 19m, resting at an angle with its cargo hold and engine room wide open for diver entry, and the bow readily visible from the surface.

The wreck teems with life: a cloud of chromises and damselfish greeted us on entry, a small nudibranch undulated along the deck near a spotted sea slug, moray eels peeked out from holes in the hull, and ethereal juvenile ghost pipe fish slithered through the thick coral crusting the gunboat. Above and below the gunboat, its towers, cannons, and sub-hunting periscope formed hollow cylindrical mini-reefs of their own, covered with coral and anemones inside and out.

An old T-shaped entryway and multiple openings in the hull from previous salvaging blasts afforded entry to cargo hold and engine room spaces big enough for a family of divers to fit inside the boat, with sunlight streaming into the space. The interior was relatively unpopulated with sea life, and rather silty, such that divers’ movements kicked up debris and reduced visibility.

Through the coral-crusted holes of old chocks we took goofy photos of each other making underwater jazz hands.

On the way up, Mom found a small conch, the shell still oozing with its snail-like tenant. It was still alive, so we threw it back into the water.

Dive #90: Morazan
Max Depth: 22m
Air consumption: 290-0 bar
Dive time: 65 minutes

Mistaken in the past for the Olympia Maru, it’s now known that Olympia is another nearby wreck, and this ship was the Morazan Maru, a captured English/Central American freighter pressed into Japanese service and sunk here, on the opposite side of Sangat Island from the East Tangat Gunboat. Morazan is a much larger wreck, and rests on her starboard side in about 25m of water.

There was a bit of a current at the surface, but the water calmed as we descended the buoy line to the wreck. Part of the coral-encrusted hull appeared to have been colonized by an inert species of marine worm.

Elsewhere on the wreck, the hull gaped with large entry holes, damage from war and later salvage operations. Inside, the wreck had vast, empty spaces for cargo — quite dark, of course, so a light was necessary, though occasional beams of light filtered dramatically into the cargo holds from cracks in the hull or old portholes.

We were able to traverse almost the entire length of the wreck, passing at one point through the engine room and coal furnace, where kaolinite insulation bricks still bore their manufacturer engravings. Along the walls, small giant clams fed from the silty water, while batfish peeked at us through chucks and coral-lined portholes.

At the rear of the wreck, we turned a corner and headed forward through the ship’s #3 propeller shaft, now empty and navigable, back to a wide mid-deck salvage hole, through which we exited and returned to the ascent line.

Along the way, I saw a school of banana wrasses swimming along the outer hull of the overturned wreck, and a pair of groupers resting near our ascent point.

My computer, a very conservative Suunto, demanded a five minute decompression stop — difficult, since my air was almost down to zero, necessitating a few inhalations from the divemaster’s secondary. The surface current wasn’t helping matters. Still, I completed the deco stop and returned to my primary regulator with just enough air to get to the surface.

A final note: they served San Miguel Beer on the boat post-dive; perfect for the return trip.

Full Coron Wreck Diving photoset here.

• Full holiday photo collection
• Philippines photoset
• Videos on YouTube: Coron Island Hopping, Snorkeling, and Manila Ocean Park
• Resorts and Tour Provider: Sunz en Coron, Busuanga Island Paradise, Calamianes Expeditions

12/23/2011: Day 1. Banking chores, then Teriyaki Boy for lunch, and Watson’s for basic supplies. Amy is on a strict “cooked, bottled, and canned” rule, so we’ll need a few liters of distilled water.

Around Greenhills I note with some amusement that there are far fewer of the notorious “DVD boys,” replaced instead by “download boys” calling to shoppers from storefronts. In a way Virra Mall (I refuse to call it “V-Mall”) seems to be returning to its floppy-copying roots.

We’re staying in my brother Javi’s room while he’s away in France, so we get to actually live at home with my family this Christmas rather than in a hotel, which is nice. We spend the afternoon completely knocked out from jet lag.

12/24/2011: Christmas Eve. In the morning we join Mom at a deli to get some salmon, and visit my aging grandmother, who is mostly bedridden at home.

Another jet-lag-driven afternoon of sleep, but late in the evening the family heads to Dasmariñas for our time-honored Christmas Eve tradition: midnight mass and Noche Buena with the Bautistas, massive clan of my father’s sister, spanning the offspring of eight children, countless dozens of grandchildren and a growing fourth generation of great-grandchildren. And some cute puppies.

12/25/2011: Christmas morning. I receive a scuba mask, cardigan, Yoda magnetic board, and Three Tenors Christmas CD. To my Dad I have gifted a Lifeproof case for his new iPhone 4S, to Mom a Scottevest, and to my brothers coffee cup car power adapters.

In the afternoon we take advantage of the malls being open to check out Muji in Greenbelt and drop by Landmark for some cheap clothes. Muji is a bit too pricy but at Landmark I purchase large quantities of underwear, socks, and handkerchiefs. At PowerBooks, Amy gets some Tagalog vocabulary enrichment literature. I note with amusement that “Dianetics” has been miscategorized.

As with every year relatives come visit us for Christmas dinner at home. There is prosecco.

12/26/2011: Crystal Jade La Mian Xiao Long Bao soup dumplings for lunch. They’re amazing. Later at the Chinese snack shop I find a bag of Chivalry Pusit.

12/27/2011: Fly out of MNL Terminal 3 on an AirPhilExpress Dash-8 to Busuanga with the family for a holiday in Coron, an up and coming seaside resort town on the south side of the island. For the next three days we will stay with the Bautistas at Sunz, an inland resort on the outskirts of town. My cousin Criselle has assembled a family-friendly itinerary of sightseeing and island hopping with Coron Ecotours.

For our first day there we see a souvenir shop. Above the shop is the meeting space for an evangelical church group, billboard with biblical quote from Isaiah (in Tagalog) over the store entrance. Lining the walls beneath the banner: carved wooden masks, a common Coron motif.

Next stop is Lualhati Park, a mostly-paved public waterfront space beside the local port, sitting atop a reclaimed peninsula, flat and empty but rich with the promise of further development. “Lualhati” translates as “glory.” Across the channel Coron Island (separate from the town, despite having the same name) looms craggily.

Further inland a hill displays a Hollywood-style sign with the town’s name, and a cross sits atop a taller hill, Mount Tapyas, where we go next. A 750-step stairway climbs the slope of Mount Tapyas from the peak of which you can stand at the foot of the giant cross and view the town and the hilly landscape it nestles in. It’s a moderately tough climb as I am out of shape, but the view is worth it.

(The bible verse billboard, the evangelical Christian meeting space, the hilltop cross, the park of “glory,” combined with the town’s vibrancy, all interest me — all point to the hard work and influence of evangelical Christian missionaries in the islands; but even for those locals who remain Roman Catholic, the country at large has always been a domain for passionate, public expressions of Christian faith.)

Last stop of the day is well outside town, down a dirt road to Maquinit Hot Springs. Here a natural geothermal spring pours down the slopes to feed an artificial pool where visitors can bathe in steaming hot, slightly salty water.

It’s a nice way to end the day — would be nicer if there were more than one dressing room per gender, preferably not covered in mud and infested with mosquitoes. This is the Philippines.

12/28/2011: Island-hopping on the itinerary today. The clan crams into multiple tricycles down to the port, and then into multiple bancas to cross the channel to Coron Island, ancestral domain of the Tagbanua people.

A steep, rocky climb up and down a ridge leads to Kayangan Lake, a clear, brackish lake populated with tiny needlefish, and surrounded by towering cliffs. A too-narrow pier at the end of the trail serves large numbers of swimmers.

After a few minutes in the lake, another climb out of the island, then to a coral garden for snorkeling, and a beach on Coron Island for lunch. There is a rooster here, and a snake.

After more snorkeling, an interesting late highlight in the day is Twin Lagoons, where one lagoon’s only outlet to the sea is a low tidal tunnel, big enough to swim through. On the other side, the inside lagoon sits nestled amidst craggy volcanic cliffs. At high tide, the tunnel disappears underwater. My camera battery runs out at this point.

By the time we return to Coron, night has fallen.

12/29/2011: Breakfast consists of five pieces of tocino, a scrambled egg, and a cup of rice.

Then, more island hopping. The first stop of the day is Calambuyan Island, about an hour and a half out from Coron by banca — a trip made far longer by our boat’s rudder breaking in rough seas near Lusong Island, necessitating a lengthy wait for pickup by a backup banca in the lee of a cove.

On arrival at Calambuyan there is just enough time for lunch and a quick snorkel in a swift current before the next stop, another coral garden near a pearl farm.

Last stop of the day is back at Lusong, at the shipwreck of a small Japanese WW2 gunboat, sunk in waters shallow enough to snorkel. With a number of small, lightly stinging jellyfish in the water, Amy opts not to go in, but I go under for a few minutes just to get video — and seven mild jelly stings. Mosquitoes of the sea. Lovely sunset on return to Coron.

That night we transfer to Busuanga Island Paradise resort to stay till New Year, while the Bautistas return the next day. BIP is farther inland but has larger grounds and rooms in a natural rainforest setting — and faster wifi. With the exception of a thick cloud of bees hovering outside our rooms the first night, the resort is quite lovely. Staff tells us there is an apiary on the grounds producing local honey. I feel like the hives might be right in the rafters, but mostly the bees are no bother, but mostly the bees are no bother. Anyway, the geckos do a pretty good job of controlling the insect population.

12/30/2011: Family scuba day! We take a shuttle to Rocksteady Dive Center to meet with our divemaster, nicknamed “Wizard,” then ride the flatbed of a cargo tricycle down to our banca for two wreck dives: East Tangat Gunboat and Morazan. See the upcoming dive log entry for details.

On the way home we drop by Coron Public Market, where Mom buys some lato (an edible seaweed). It’s quite a market.

12/31/2011: Calauit Island: north of Busuanga, former Tagbanua ancestral domain, forcibly turned by the Marcos regime into exotic wildlife refuge, now in a state of gradual decline. It’s a sad state of affairs but you can still go visit to feed giraffes, pose with zebras, and view assorted other animals of various local and international origins.

After leaving at 4:30AM, it’s a grueling two hour drive over rough, unpaved roads of dirt and rock to get to Calauit, plus a four minute banca ride. From the landing we are served packed breakfasts in the barebones visitor center, then board a cagelike safari truck, on which we spend the day traversing the grounds. Highlight of the morning is definitely the giraffe-feeding. We also get to pose near some zebras.

(Low point of the day is the drive back to, over the same rough dirt roads. Grueling.)

Afternoon lunch at Bistro Coron in town, prepared by a foreign chef who now lives here. The food is excellent. Then, a swim in the pool.

We are so tired from today that we sleep through midnight of New Year 2012.

1/1/2012: Flight back to Manila at noon delayed due to low visibility from heavy New Year fireworks haze. We drop by the neighboring shop (“God’s Blessing” Pasalubong, more evidence of missionary zeal) to pick up some souvenirs and a nice mesh bifurcated snorkeling gear bag.

Flight back is indeed fairly hazy on approach to MNL. After landing, lunch at Shakey’s, then home to rest.

1/2/2012: Meetup with old college friends at Podium, upscale mall in Ortigas beside Megamall. We have lunch at Yakimix, an Asian buffet with sushi and a smokeless table grill. It’s great to see everyone again.

Later that night I try some meatless bopis from a vegetarian food stall in Greenhills. It’s an excellent mushroom-and-TVP approximation of minced pork lung — but has been sitting on a counter in a street-market-style food court all day. The resulting stomach flu has me resolving never to go there again. On an unrelated note they have placenta soap in the drugstore.

1/3/2012: Day at Manila Ocean Park, a new marine attraction behind Quirino Grandstand that I’ve been curious to check out. First, lunch at Pancake House. Amy has pancakes but my stomach is still in tender enough condition that I just have a cup of asparagus soup.

The main “Oceaniarium” consists of assorted tropical aquariums and habitats leading to a central plaza with large tanks for larger fish, and a tunnel through a grand tank of decent size with fish, rays, and even a sawtooth shark.

A large shark tank follows, full of reef sharks and leopard sharks, at the center of which hangs a cage, where a visitor in an Aquanaut helmet apprehensively snaps photos with her waterproof camera.

Upstairs, we also check out the penguin exhibit, which proves somewhat disappointing. The habitat is depressingly small, and the space seems inadequate for the number of penguins visible. The attraction includes a slide, on which visitors ride tubes down an ice ramp; and a “Snow Village,” which we skip altogether, having already come from a place that gets snowy winters.

By the way, I’m happy to report that the restrooms at Manila Ocean Park are usable.

1/4/2012: Last day in Manila, afternoon leisurely spent in Greenhills browsing tiangge for post-Christmas sales on clothes, crafts, clocks, pearls, and corn nuts.

In the evening, a family dinner at Cafe Juanita in Fort Bonifacio. Amy discovers she likes pochero. I capture a classic iPad moment with Steph, Uno, and Mom.

1/5/2012: Fly out to Hong Kong. NAIA horrible as always.

But a good visit to Philippines, happy to have spent quality time diving wrecks and feeding giraffes with family. Full Philippines photoset here.

Whoa, just saw a power line transformer blow up very loudly at Gallows and Park Tower/Prosperity in Merrifield. @vnangia you hear a boom?

— brownpau (@brownpau) December 21, 2011

Dulles Airport: horrible as always, a mess of cordons and barriers and other obstacles built to try and adapt a 1960s airport to 21st Century needs, and failing at it with added misery. The check-in agent at least got us seats sort of back together for the flight — across an aisle from each other.

Security was the usual hurried, harried dance of laptop-out-of-bag, shoes-off-feet, liquids-in-ziploc; then get it all back on and together while being hustled along by passenger momentum without chairs or tables for those trying to put belts and shoes back on while hauling bags separated from their laptops. Security, of course, missed (or ignored) my more-than-three-ounce bottle of cough syrup. At least this time we avoided the radiation scanners.

At Potbelly in Terminal B, I stood in line for breakfast sandwiches behind a high-maintenance customers who demanded her bacon be thoroughly patted down with a paper towel and couldn’t decide whether to get coffee or not. There was no milk. When someone finally brought milk, the pitcher had a sheet of foil for a lid.

After we had boarded, our 777 was delayed at the gate for nearly an hour, first by late passengers, then a faulty anti-ice valve and the ensuing paperwork. The flight itself went smoothly, at least, and our coach seats included personal touch screens. I whiled away the time watching X-Men First Class, while Amy watched Tree of Life. I didn’t have a window seat, but stood up to peer out the exit hatch window over Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado.

Most of the delay was made up inflight and we landed at SFO with more than an hour to make our connection to the B747 to HKG — enough time to sit down for paninis at Caffe del Mondo near our gate before boarding.

We were in seats 58H and 58J on the 747 — first of the three rows at the back of coach where the tapering fuselage cuts the window seats to two rather than three, so no third passenger between us and the aisle, plus we had an extra pocket in front of us. This made the flight no less miserable, with obnoxious recliners in front of us immediately pushing their seats all the way back into our faces (indeed, trying to force the seats even farther back at times) and leaving them that way for the entire 14 hours (then, for large swaths of the trip, not even using the reclined seat backs but instead resting heads on tray tables).

This being an older 747, we didn’t have the personal touch screens from the last flight. Instead I had the iPad and a bottle of codeine for my cough, and spent most of the trip in an awkwardly splayed limbo between sleep and half-hearted self-entertainment, reflecting on how international air travel had entirely lost the luster with which it had shone in my childhood. On the up side, the SFO-HKG Great Circle Route afforded lovely views of Siberia in polar twilight.

Food on board was bad, even for United coach: oversauced yunan beef shortly after takeoff, a tasteless danish midway, and chewy fried noodles before landing.

After our landing at HKG, the transfer to Cathay Pacific went smoothly. (I had booked the transfer separately since United doesn’t fly to MNL.) We overheard a humorous conversation. Security was no problem at all, and we had enough time for dumplings and milk tea before boarding our 777 to MNL — which my cousin Kara also happened to be riding, just a few rows behind us in coach.

HKG-MNL was short and painless, and we marveled at how nice coach seats on the Cathay 777 were compared to a United 747 or 777. A slight delay at the gate pushed our arrival time back about 20 minutes, from late night of the 22nd to early morning of the 23rd, but otherwise arrival at MNL (old Terminal 1) went well, and we soon joined my brother and his wife at the arrivals annex to pile into a car going home.

Full photoset of the trip here.

Hyperthyroidism
It was shortly after our move to the new condo that Pandora lost weight precipitously, dropping from 16 to 8 pounds in under a year. While she had been previously overweight and had now reached just about average healthy weight for a senior cat, the suddenness of the weight loss, combined with apparent difficulty swallowing and periods of uncharacteristic agitation, prompted a blood test at the vet. Results showed hyperthyroidism, a common ailment in older cats.

Compare Pandora’s size between 2006 and 2010:

Caused by a swollen, sometimes cancerous thyroid gland overproducing hormones responsible for weight regulation and metabolism, hyperthyroidism eventually results in death by organ failure, and is most commonly treated with Methimazole (or Tapazole), a thyroid hormone inhibitor which the cat must ingest daily for the rest of her life. (We opted for this treatment rather than invasive surgery, or much pricier but more awesome radiation therapy which bombards the thyroid with cancer-targeting radiation beams — extremely effective, but leaves the cat a technical radioactive hazard for days after therapy, and the owner several thousand dollars poorer.)

Renal Failure
As Pandora’s thyroid levels stabilized, later blood tests showed elevated BUN and creatinine levels, blood markers for kidney dysfunction. High levels of these indicated that Pandora’s kidneys were not working as efficiently at removing these toxins from her bloodstream. Again, kidney failure is common in older cats, but in Pandora’s case the hyperthyroidism had masked this problem by elevating blood flow to her kidneys and causing them to function with deceptive efficiency. (Leaving her hyperthyroidism untreated for the sake of kidney function was not an option, as this would cause other metabolic complications, like hypertension and organ failure.)

It was a bit hard to notice the kidney issues because the symptoms were largely indistinguishable from Pandora’s usual troublesome behaviors — occasional litterbox aversion and vomiting. However, the vomiting had changed from hairballs to clear gastric acid spit-ups, and while her litterbox behaviors have improved over time she had begun going far more frequently since thyroid therapy had begun.

To address the gradual onset of renal failure, the vet prescribed Azodyl, a probiotic supplement consisting of yogurt-like cultures wrapped in an enteric capsule. The bacteria in the capsule bind to specific toxins in food so they flush from the intestine with solid waste before absorption into the bloodstream, thus cutting some of the kidneys’ filtering load.

Medication
Those of you with felines needing medication probably know what a trial it is to pill a cat. At various times I’ve tried Pill Pockets, prosciutto, bacon, yogurt, and Flavor Doh, but Pandora is a slow eater, picky and licky and quick to reject things that have pill smells.

The Tapazole pills are tiny enough to embed unnoticed in her canned food, but the Azodyl presents a special challenge since it comes in full size enteric capsules that even some humans would have difficulty swallowing, let alone house cats. The instructions recommend against opening or crushing the capsules, but there’s no avoiding it; the only solution that works for Pandora is to blend the probiotic powder into something more palatable to her. For a while she acquiesced to licking it with yogurt off a spoon. When she got tired of that, sprinkling it straight onto some tuna or other fishy-smelling cat food worked fairly well.

Veterinary compounding has been the best option for the Azodyl. A pharmacist at the Vienna Rexall down the road takes the powder and blends it into a grainy, tuna-flavored syrup. which I can then feed to Pandora via oral syringe. It’s still a bit of a struggle, but it goes down more quickly and easily, and is far less stressful for her than having a giant capsule forced down her throat after repeated attempts. Only problem: the compounded Azodyl is far less efficacious than the whole capsule. Apparently Vetoquinol has introduced small capsules, but they haven’t made it to my vet yet.

Still Alive
For now, Pandora is surviving remarkably well for 20. There are few signs of arthritis, and she’s even spry enough to venture out onto the balcony, or wake us up at 5AM by jumping onto the bed when she wants food. (She hasn’t been allowed on beds since the Pee Incident of 2005 so I have to wake up and carry her off to her bowl.)

For what it’s worth, she’s actually a bit healthier now thanks to the weight loss. Whereas she was well overweight before, her post-hyperthyroidism stabilized weight of 8 pounds is just about average for a senior Persian cat.

For now we make provisions for her gradually failing health with daily medication, frequent litterbox cleaning, and multiple layers of washable throws on the couch (her main hangout spot where she’s most likely to spit up a hairball or her last meal). Hopefully Pandora has many years left in her, and I’ll do all I can to make those years comfortable and painless.

Additional links:
Feline Adivsory Bureau page on hyperthyroidism
Veterinary imaging – feline hyperthyroidism
Tanya’s comprehensive guide to feline chronic kidney disease
Long-term Medical Management of Feline Chronic Renal Failure

Old tweets are still not organized in any kind of list or dated format; there aren’t even next/previous buttons on individual tweets. As a result, Twitter entries tend to fade into forgotten unsearchability after a few days, weeks, or months — depending on the user’s post frequency. Previous promises to offer native archiving have fallen by the wayside, and the Google Realtime deal expired in July 2011, transforming into open hostility between Twitter and Google. Nor have we heard much about the Library of Congress Twitter archive project since it was announced.

Had I known my tweets would continue to be so ephemeral years later, I would have implemented a third-party backup solution much earlier. As it is, years of my Twitter use are in limbo and for now effectively wasted. That said, I’m thankful for an XML file provided to me by Russell from an archiving script, containing my tweets up till 14 Feb 2009 — back when it was easier to crawl Twitter for full posting histories. From that I can glean my first tweet in 2006, and use one of the features I do like about #newtwitter, easy tweet embedding:

Im in ur twitter txtng ur fons.

— brownpau (@brownpau) October 8, 2006

Despite my protestations regarding archival impernanence, I know there are people who’ve switched to Twitter as a feed reader replacement, so in the fashion of @kottke and @gawker I shall indulge these “tweedreader” types by auto-feeding RSS from How Now Brownpau through Twitterfeed to @hnbp. (I’ll also be using @hnbp to follow preferred RSS-auto-fed Twitter streams to test viability as a feed reader versus my current RSS-reading web app, Google Reader.)

Through all this, I’ll be tweeting as usual at @brownpau but always with the full knowledge that all things there are tenuous at best, and what I wish to preserve should go to my site rather than be lost to an eternal scrollback mist.

Gate agent: “Country of origin for this trip, ma’am?”

Saucy Pinay lady: “United States of America, which is our home.”

“And what city?”

“Texas.”

Two days of clogged eustachian tubes and sinus congestion got me interested in this chart.

I was prescribed azithromycin, an antibiotic, on the chance that the infection was bacterial, and a bottle of antitussive syrup to soothe coughing through the course of the trip. By lunchtime I was feeling well enough just from general placebo effect to have lunch at Maneki Neko, a Japanese eatery in Falls Church. I sampled a couple of Kumamoto oysters and finished a bowl of Okinawa Soba noodle soup with roast pork, quite therapeutic for my tortured throat.

I write this the next day aboard a trans-Pacific flight to Manila, still a bit sniffly and phlegmy, but feeling otherwise comforted by a mild codeine-and-analgesic haze. The symptoms are subsiding more quickly with the antibiotics, which might mean that the bronchial infection was indeed bacterial — or if it was viral, has simply run its course. It’s the sickest I’ve been since my shingles experience: another illness that hit me on a trip to the Philippines, interestingly enough. Pre-travel stress does that, I guess.