how now brownpau
Here’s me with a moderate sized pawikan, or sea turtle, which we found feeding on sea grass in the sandy shallows as we were wrapping up the Club Noah checkout dive. (Photographed by my brother Francis with his Sea&Sea film camera; he just sent me the scans tonight.)
Around 5:30PM to 7:00PM, at 10 second intervals, as seen from the balcony of our seaside family cabaña at Club Noah, 1st of January 2007. Lots of clouds, so it wasn’t quite as spectacular as it could have been, but the clouds themselves make some lovely formations.
Manila to Hong Kong
We wake up at 4:30 AM. Today my brother and I are travelling together via Cebu Pacific and United Airlines. He will get off at Chicago O’Hare while I continue onward to DC National.
We are dropped off at NAIA around 6 AM. Check in at Cebu Pacific counter for first leg of trip connecting in Hong Kong. Cebu Pacific staff willing to check through bags onward to United flight (see the Long Trip to Manila for related troubles with United earlier on), but unwilling to raise baggage allowances above their ludicrous maximum weight of 2 bags totalling 20 kilos. The limitation is bad enough, but even less reasonable is their inability to accept credit cards or US dollars for the overweight penalty. Much wrangling at the counter with intractable Cebu Pacific staff, after which my brother must go to a nearby ATM to withdraw the penalty fee in Philippine pesos. Finally we are checked in and given boarding passes. Passengers checking in right behind us are told that the flight is overbooked and they will either not be able to board this flight, or they must wait for other passengers to give up their seats. Either way, someone is going to be left behind by this plane, with a free travel voucher for compensation.
We are last on the plane, and I am stuck in a seat near the rear, wedged between two passengers. Fortunately the flight is short and the passengers on both sides of my seat, a talky Arab man from Hong Kong and a talky Filipina woman who loves her new Motorola Razr, are friendly.
Hong Kong International Airport (HKG)
Eight hour layover. First things first: breakfast. We go to Cafe de Coral in the HKG Promenade for congee. I have long wanted to try Cafe de Coral because every time I pass through HKG the only customers I see ordering from it are airport workers, flight crew, and Chinese locals, therefore it must be more authentic than other airport fare. The menu, of course, is mostly in Chinese, but we man up, approach the counter, and order shredded pork congee, and roast duck on rice. My brother receives his roast duck, but I receive chicken and century egg congee, and a mystery food item wrapped in fragrant leaves of some sort. This is very exciting. Unwrapping the leaves reveals a meal of roast pork and mushrooms with Chinese sausage in sticky rice. Someone tell me what they call it in Chinese, because I want to order it again. (Update: So it’s called machang. Thanks, Rian!)
I also buy something called a “Cutie Wife Cake,” stuffed with lotus seed paste and green tea filling.
We spend the rest of the day at the Premium Lounge, paying US$40 each for five hours in comfy leather chairs, with a power outlet for our laptops, free wireless, and the option for a two hour nap in a sleeping cubicle or a fifteen minute massage. I get the massage. It hurts.
On the way to our flight later that evening, I stop at the terminal prayer room to get some photos to add to my collection of airport chapels.
Hong Kong to Chicago
Fourteen hours of mostly sleeping, eating, and reading. We are seated in row 59, which on a 747-400 is two rows forward of the rear, where the fuselage of the plane tapers to such a point that the window seats go only two deep rather than three. This way, my brother and I can sit together, without anyone being seated between two people, and with lots of extra storage and foot space between the seat and the window. These are good seats. I try to watch The Queen, but the section’s movie projector constantly blinks off and back on, which makes viewing intolerable. Flight crew later distribute complaint forms via which one can receive compensatory frequent flyer miles or travel certificates for certain failures of service. The fourteen hours pass rather quickly at some point after the sixth hour. For most of the flight, flight attendants ask passengers to keep their windows closed so as to keep the sun out, so I don’t get to see much.
Chicago to DC
Immigration, baggage claims, baggage re-check, say bye to my brother as he heads for home, then take the train to the departure Terminal. O’Hare is a noisy, crowded, overwhelming airport, with laptop-owners huddled around every available outlet so they can use the $6.95 wireless internet. It is a relief to get on the relatively non-crowded United A319 to DC and alternate between dozing and watching driving precipitation form patterns in the strobe of the plane’s flashing running lights. As the plane makes the “River Visual” approach to National Airport, I attempt to snap photos of the view, but they all come out blurry.
Baggage claim after landing is easy. Cab from airport to my apartment takes just six minutes. Generous tip. Home. Warmth of Amy’s embrace. Day spent in chores and unpacking.
(Note: By my count, this is my 83rd total dive, although I stopped logging for a long time after high school, and only recently started logging again, starting with count of fifty as a reasonable estimate as to how many dives I’d done before then.)
Location: Club Noah Isabelle, Apulit Island, Palawan
Maximum depth: 45 feet
Dive time: 50 minutes
Air used: 2500 psi
The idea was to do an early checkout dive at 9AM on New Year’s Day, followed by another more challenging dive (or two) before noon, by which point we would have to stop to allow enough decompression time before flying home the next day. Post New Year celebration drowsiness prevailed, however, and we were only able to do the one checkout dive before it came time to stop.
The Club Noah checkout dive is meant to be an easy, shallow dive along a reef and wall right off the front of the resort. I suited up in the clubhouse and strolled out to the pier to put on my BC and regulator (borrowed from my younger brother Raymond, as my old gear had been cannibalized to provide parts for other gear sets). Right from the pier, one can simply dip into the water from the steps and, already surrounded by curious fish, fin out towards the reef and wall. Surface swell was considerable, still causing motion as deep as 15 feet, but below that the wave motion lessened — and visibility dropped somewhat due to some type of plankton in the water.
As for local marine fauna, fishes of various size abounded, from tiny needlefish to giant groupers. In a small valley between reef walls, a kneeling statue of an angel at prayer had been set up as an artificial attraction, as yet untouched by coral growth. Especially fascinating was an electric scallop embedded under a coral overhang, bright blue flashes of pigment along the lips of its mouth simulating tiny bolts of lightning. Even more exciting later on in the dive was an encounter with a moderate-sized pawikan, or sea turtle, serenely rooting through sand in the shallows before swimming off as divers crowded around it.
A fairly good dive, all in all, my only regret being we could do no more dives — not without risking decompression sickness on the flight back to Manila the next day.
Full photoset of pictures from my Dad’s A70 here. The sea turtle photos are with my brother, to be scanned soon, he says. Here’s a partial family portrait; now guess which is me:
The trip to Club Noah Isabelle consists of a ninety minute plane ride on a Let-410 UPVP-E (an old but sturdy dual-engine turboprop, cockpit labels still in Russian) to Rodriguez “Airport” (more like a dirt airstrip with a hut) in Taytay, Palawan, followed by a short jeepney ride to a pier jutting out of a nearby mangrove swamp, then a 45 minute cruise on a banca out to the island, called Apulit.
The resort itself hugs the island’s coastline, a path going along the perimeter of the main cove, around the bend of the island, to a beach halfway up the shore from the lee of the cove. All along this path are the resort’s various clubhouses, scuba staging areas, dive and boat piers, and small and large cabaña houses jutting out into the water, standing atop sturdy pillars holding them about eight feet above the waves, each cabin accessible by sturdy footbridges.
Sadly my stay at Club Noah was about two days shorter than the rest of my family’s, as I had to come later to attend the aforementioned wedding, but I managed to do one dive, the standard checkout off the pier into the reef right in front of the resort. (Dive log entry here.) I also got to see various forms of island fauna, caged and wild, including a mousedeer, a very aggressive macaw, a budgie, several rabbits, ducks and geese, cranes, swallows, and at least one monitor lizard. Mostly the trip was very relaxing, with lots of sleeping done, lots of photos taken, and not much interaction with other guests, who were mostly Japanese and Korean. The views and scenery on the journey there and back were as much an attraction of the trip as the resort itself.
See the full Club Noah photoset here.
I got these panoramas on the flight to (and from) Taytay, Palawan, aboard a lovely old Let410 UVP-E dual engine turboprop.
More on the vacation at Club Noah soon.
I was at Raffy and Carla’s wedding last Saturday, and wore for the first time the Barong Tagalog that I will be wearing to my own wedding this June. As I settled into the thin piña fabric for the first time, I entertained a vision in my head of me in this barong, standing at the front of the church five months hence, watching her coming down the aisle towards me. It felt good. There were no cold feet, no butterflies in the stomach, no gnawing doubts or worries; just peace and joy. Time will tell if the day itself — and the years and decades that follow — will truly be peaceful and joyful; I pray they will be.
Raffy and Carla’s wedding was great, a grand old Filipino-Catholic affair at the church in Forbes, with a reception in the Peninsula Hotel in Makati. I estimate at least 300 people in attendance, some of whom were old, old friends. Photos here.
I’ve been back in Manila for a few days now, but I’ve lost the “neighborly” wireless I was leeching, and what little internet I’m able to access at various coffee places in Greenhills and Makati continues to be slow to the point of uselessness, thanks to the Taiwan earthquake cable fault. (I’m getting very tired of having to order a decaf frappuccino everytime I want access to this painfully feeble trickle of connectivity.)
Flickr has gotten especially slow in these times of slower-than-dialup international throughput, so I don’t think I will be able to upload any more photos till I get home to my now-much-missed 768 kbps home DSL connection. I fly out tomorrow. It’ll be a 30 hour trip, including an 8 hour layover in Hong Kong and yet another 16 hour transpolar flight. Site feedback will be off until I get home, and later on there will be more photos and entries on what I’ve been up to.
(Of course, PLDT would finally send someone to fix our home DSL the day before I leave.)
This will probably be my last entry for the year, as my current 24 hour WIZ pass is about to run out, the internet has been dog slow thanks to the earthquake, plus I’m going to an old friend’s wedding tonight, and first thing tomorrow morning I’m off to Club Noah in Palawan for a few days of scuba diving through New Year 2007. I hope that you, faithful reader, enjoy what’s left of the Christmas and New Year holiday season, and may God richly bless you all in the year to come.
Comments and trackbacks will be off till I return. For now, please enjoy my Manila Christmas 2006 photoset, and see you all in January with a bunch of new posts, and hopefully some nice underwater photos, too.
Saddam Hussein has been hanged. My first thought on seeing the news was, “I wonder if this counts towards the ‘Three Famous Deaths’ rule, after James Brown and Gerald Ford?” Then my second thought was that wow, internet traffic’s going to skyrocket starting right now, so I’d better post something.
So what’s good about this hanging? Justice served, I suppose: Iraq gets to execute a tyrant and a murderer, under the watchful eye of the U.S. occupying forces, who achieve a powerful symbolic victory by handing over Saddam to the Iraqi government.
The bad part is that it doesn’t go far past symbolic. Osama bin Laden remains at large, Iraq is still a growing mess of terrorist insurgencies, weapons of mass destruction there are nonexistent, U.S. armed forces are overstretched between Afghanistan and Iraq, and the project to bring peace to the Middle East and safety to the rest of the world by planting the roots of democracy doesn’t seem to have had much success beyond this hanging.
(I wonder if it’s worth noting that today is also the anniversary of José Rizal’s execution. I think the prospect of Saddam’s death having similarly galvanizing effect on Iraqi resistance by raising him up as a figurehead martyr is pretty remote considering that Rizal was a lot less of a murderous demagogue.)
More on MeFi, WaPo, and that’s all the links I can muster right now because the Internet sure is slow.