Watch out for falling coconuts

A week ago we explored the bays of Zamboanguita with Tony, the coastal resource manager (CRM) of Zamboanguita. I did not get to post it earlier due to lack of electricity and illness. Our work at Marine Conservation Philippines will be mostly together with him as a representative of the municipality, who manage the Marine Protected Areas (MPA's) of Zamboanguita. Before I explain what we did I first need to explain an MPA more in detail.

In the Philippines, there are several hundreds of MPA's, ranging in size from a few hectares till hundreds of ha. An MPA often has different zones of use. The most important part is the marine sanctuary. This is a no take zone, which means no fishing, no collecting of clams or crabs and no tourism. The sanctuary is surrounded by a buffer zone, where sustainable fishing is usually allowed (which is line fishing, or fishing with small nets). Within the MPA, other areas are usually designated for tourism, fishing and recreation.

With an MPA it is possible to protect all sea life and the coastal habitats, like mangroves, coral reef and sea grass. This is also beneficial for the fishing industry, because the number of fish will increase as well as their size and fish do not take the boundaries of an MPA into account which means they will also populate the area around the MPA.

Example of an MPA (green part). Bigger boats are only allowed outside the MPA in open water.

The CRM has already designed a whole plan for the Zamboanguita area, but because of lack of finances, manpower and tropical storms destroying buoys and coral, part of the plan is still in the implementation phase. Which is a good opportunity for MCP to jump in and help.

Yesterday we met some of the key people of the area; the head of the village and the head of the fishermen association and we visited a mangrove area which was replanted by local people. They only speak Visayan, so it's time to add another language to our repertoire otherwise we will be never able to communicate without Tony or another intermediate.

Unfortunately people only speak Visayan in the Visayas (makes sense), the official language next to English is Tagalog. It gets even worse, on the island of Cebu, which is part of the Visayas they speak Cebuano. The vulcanizers who repaired our bike on our holiday only spoke Cebuano. Visayan spoken in Bacolod (the capital of Negros Occidental, 100 km from here) is different than the Visayan they speak here. Some words have a different meaning, are used in a different way or pronounced different. Then there are some 150 other languages spoken in the Philippines. Needless to say, if you speak only English and you want to speak with the locals, you need to learn some additional languages. One small advantage is that the languages have taken over several Spanish and English words, but made their own version of it. At least we can already count, since they count in Spanish both in Tagalog and in Visayan...

Our little trip to Zamboanguit brings us to the title of the weblog. Since the whole coast area is lined with coconut palms, you are bound to pass when it is harvesting time. The palms are often more than 15m high, so you need some agile climbers. To make it a little easier, most of the trunks have 'stairs', little cuts out of the trunk for hand- and foot holds. When the palms are close to the road, they warn the traffic by laying some palm leafs on the road and thus 'blocking' one side of the road. You better stop, because at any moment one of the guys can drop a few coconuts from the tree and you don't want to get them on your head. Of course they have no control of how they fall, so sometimes one bumps one the other half of the road where traffic is just continuing. Well, they need to come down at some point anyway, because if the nuts are not harvested they will start to fall off by themselves at a random time which is even more dangerous.

We encountered our first tropical depression last week and the next one is coming in two days. The Philippines developed an alarm for typhoons, from phase 1-5. Today (last week Tuesday) we are in phase 1, tropical depression, which means just a lot of rain and a deliberate power cut. So, when we were walking along the beach with Tony, in the pouring rain, a fisherman told Tony that it was phase 1. Tony just continued walking like nothing was going on, so we guessed that phase 1 was not so bad, which is indeed the case. Depending on how bad the weather predictions are, schools are canceled as well. So, right now it feels like we're back in Bolivia during the rainy season: everybody is in sleep mode, because there is not much else you can do. The roads are mud pools, depending on whether they are paved or not, we cannot dive because the sea is too rough and even my e-reader abandoned me (you only have the charge the thing once every month, but it was almost empty yesterday evening). One more hour before my laptop runs out of battery and I will join the rest, do nothing, find a book which is not electronic, play games on your phone till the battery is dead or sleep... you just have to go with the flow.

In the end, we had only a two day power cut. Dolf won the bet on how long we would be out of power. One tree fell down in the whole village and of course it had to drop on the electricity poles. Other villages were less lucky with raising water levels and more trees falling down.

Now we are preparing for the next typhoon, which will fortunately be 250 km from here. We bought storm lamps, we have enough beer and rum (apparently the local habit is to have a party just before the electricity goes down) and food to survive a new power cut of a few days and the local people were already cutting branches from trees to prevent that trees will fall down on their houses. To prevent accidents, electricity is will be cut during storms and of course antennas are vulnerable because they stick out. No phone, no internet and no electricity at least on Sunday.