Fiesta...party time!

Each city or village celebrates the day of his Patron saint. For Zamboanguita that was May 15 and nicely coincided with Annelies' birthday. Festivities already start a week before the actual date. Motorbike races, elections of miss Zamboanguita (the winner gets an astonishing 20.000 pesos), extra cockfights, boat races, disco and lechon parties are all part of the festivities. I'll elaborate on the nicest activities.

We visited the boat races on Saturday. There were two competitions, one for the fisherman boats, which had to peddle a full round (some 600 meters) and the race competition. 10 guys had boats they made themselves from marine plywood and metal outriggers with nice aerodynamics and a small engine. They had to race against one other competitor for two rounds. It looked a bit like a formula one race with nice maneuvers. Unfortunately, both in the semifinal and the final one of the boats gave up prematurely because either the outrigger broke, or the engine stalled. Look for some pictures on the facebook page of Annelies. The races were originally created because everybody has a hangover after the big party on May 15. People go to the beach anyway to have a swim to get rid of their hangover, so the municipality came up with some nice entertainment. Apparently the same guy wins each year, but because his engine stalled in the final somebody else won. The public demanded a second race and indeed, if his engine would have functioned he would have won easily.

We were invited for three lechon parties in two days. A wedding lunch, the birthday of the mayor and an invitation of a good friend of a friend. When Filipinos throw a party it includes food, and a lot of it. Prime dish is the lechon, or roasted piglet. A whole piglet gets roasted over a fire and they stuff some herbs in its belly. The result looks like some medieval painting, only missing the apple in the pigs' mouth. Prime parts (for Filipino's, not for most foreigners) are the ears, eyes and nose. They make a sauce from part of the blood and finely chopped organs (yummie). The pig is served on a wooden dish in the shape if a pig and two big carving knifes so you cut a part of meat of your choice with some crisp skin. The taste is pretty good (of the normal meat part), but after three lechons it is time for some vegetables again. Vegetables are not part of a special meal, you just have the choice between 5-7 different meat dishes and accompanied with rice of course. We got instructed that with parties it is very normal that if you are not a close friend of the birthday boy, you eat the food and then go again. The richer people are, the more people they invite. After two hours everybody has eaten (you're only supposed to stay for about an hour) and you continue the party only with family and close friends.

The wedding lunch was also nice because it gave us a peak into Filipino wedding customs. Everybody marries in church (that makes sense, the whole country is devotedly catholic), but very few people have enough money to rent the whole church for the service. So you marry with more couples at the same time. In this case mass started at 7 in the morning, so 16 couples could be married before various wedding lunches started. Tony, our Coastal Resource manager and close friend explained that when he married there were an additional 52 couples. He was last in the alphabet, so by the time he had to tell his vows he had already hard them 52 times and so it was easy to remember for him what to say.

We were only invited for the lunch since we didn't even know the bride, we had met the father a couple of times though. He used to be a sailor and had even been in the port of Rotterdam.

We visited one of the disco parties on Thursday evening. That was not really a success, they had a huge music installation and light show on the main square, but the square was so big that even with 300 people on the dance floor it seemed half empty. The DJ had a different opinion about good music than us, so we kept it at one party.

The municipality with the nicest Patron saint is the neighboring municipality of Siaton were we often dive. Their Saints day is on December 6 and is also known in the Netherlands as Sinterklaas!

Meeting interesting people

We have been pretty busy the last few months. Supervising volunteers, designing and carrying out the biological research, writing research ideas for new thesis students and interns while trying to relax a little bit in between all the activities as well.

We have had some good talks with local institutions. We had a visit from the director of the marine research institute of Siliman University in Dumaguete who was interested in what we are doing and were we live. Hopefully we will be able to cooperate with the university and for instance be able to use their marine lab if thesis students want to make water samples to check the level of pollution and sedimentation and see if we can help them with collecting data. Now it's time to visit the marine lab and talk with professors and teachers to find out exactly what they are doing and if they have data from this area.

Dolf attended a three day conference about seahorses in Dumaguete last week (somebody had to take the volunteers out diving so Annelies could only attend the fist day) and came back full of ideas and a new social network. At the least we can at least contribute to their seahorse research, because yesterday evening during our night dive we found two seahorses, including a pregnant male (yes you read this correctly, the male has a brood pouch).

We now have a good relationship with the mayor of Zamboanguita as well, which resulted in some useful talks and a cooperation with the municipal agricultural and environmental office.We are very lucky that the municipality starts a project in our own barangay (neighbourhood), with money from the GIZ (German embassy, we saw GIZ projects when we were in Bolivia as well). In two barangays of Zamboanguita Marine Protected Areas will be re-implemented or re-enforced. The MPA's will be enlarged and neighbouring sea grass beds and mangroves will be included in the MPA as well. They are important, though often neglected, because they have both a nursery function for fish (juvenile fish hide between the roots and leaves and are safe for predators) and function as a sink for sedimentation from land and thus protecting the coral reefs. We had a nice conversation with the provincial environmental department who is responsible for carrying out the project together with the municipality. We need some patience though: the project was supposed to start in January 2015, but the money still needs to be transferred to the municipality before it can start. The projects also contains a plan to start a mangrove nursery so people can replant mangroves. Our role will be to do the scientific monitoring of the area, to organize activities for the local monitoring team consisting of fishermen and to help out with the mangrove nursery and replanting.

We start coming Friday with finding the sinkers of the old MPA. The MPA needs to be visible for everybody which means the demarcation line will consists of buoys who need to be attached to concrete sinkers. The sinkers are still there from 6 years ago when the MPA was implemented the first time, but the buoys are long gone because of the 2011 typhoon.

The peace corps is very active in the Philippines and the municipalities of Zamboanguita and Siaton have their own volunteer. They work a lot with the local community and speak Visayan fluently. Unfortunately, both volunteers leave in September but we could take over their Visayan books, so now it's time for us to include Visayan lessons in the program and practice with our cook, who speaks both English and Visayan. The Zamboanguita peace corps volunteer already does a lot with environmental education and she even has two environmental clubs/ groups for high school students which we will take over when she leaves.

So, slowly slowly we start working together with more and more people and some of MCP's ideas are starting to take shape.

Daily life at MCP

I have time to write this first part of the weblog, because the electrician had just cut the power which means I finally have time to write. It has been a busy time the last month with working days from 7h30 till 18h30, but we are functioning more and more as we have envisioned Marine Conservation Philippines to be and that is nice.

Of course there are ups and downs. Car problems arise on a regular basis and then there are the small funny problems. It turns out that in our house the lights are a bit weird. The porch light is permanently on, unless we cut all the power in our house and the switch for the porch light is an actual master switch with with you can turn on and off all the lights in our house. By the time it is fixed it is two weeks later, but look on the bright side, at least we always have light.

We are getting more and more in an organized daily rhythm, because the cars do not break down that often any more and we are getting more volunteers which means we have to start to work in a structured way. Our daily program is two dives in the morning, which takes actually the whole morning and part of the afternoon depending on where we dive and have lunch between 13h00 and 14h30.

The afternoon is used for presentations (learning different fish species, what MCP is about), data entry, watching a nature documentary or practical work on the base which ranges from making hammocks to design a fireplace, make a recycling system for waste or making concrete weights for the gym (unbelievable, I cannot even lift them 1 cm from the ground but that's just me).

The cook prepares really nice food, Filipino but also international. We even had sushi last week! We work from Monday to Friday, on Saturday we have a fun dive and Saturday afternoon and the complete Sunday we have weekend. Each Saturday evening we have a BBQ. So far we have not been doing overmuch during our Sundays. It is very nice to lie in Dolf's homemade hammock of fishing net and just read a book. Sometimes we go to Dumaguete, or just visit a restaurant and have a nice western meal for lunch.

There are a lot of small things that still need to happen, but for the coming months we have two workers permanently on the base who are making bamboo furniture, make small adjustments to the cabins and do a lot of other stuff. Each week we see the improvements. Not as fast anymore as in the beginning of course, because the other 25 workers are back to fishing again.

Researchwise we are now focusing on fish on species level on each dive site. Since there are 2000 different fish species in the Philippines, we only pay attention on the butterflyfish and angelfish for now. That is already a challenge, because it turns out we have 31 species of butterflyfish. By now, Dolf and me can recognize them all, but it is a challenge for new volunteers because some of them do not even know what a butterflyfish is to begin with.

But we designed a teaching system in which they learn a few new species each day on land through a powerpoint presentation, and we point them out underwater. After a few days they are able to do a test both above water and underwater and if they pass they can join in on the research.

We are now trying to analyze the first data, but that takes a while because our statistical skills are a bit rusty and of course we have to use an open source statistical program which works way different compares to the program we used in university. But with a good free online manual it's just a question of time before we can say something useful about our first results.

Since the weblogs are not that regular anymore, I advise people who want to have more info on a regular basis to have a look at the Marine Conservation Philippines facebookpage or like it. We upload pictures every once in a while as well as marine information (both semi-scientific or just newspaper articles as well as nice pictures about diving).

It is more fun in Zamboanguita

I wrote this weblog for the MCP site, but forgot to post it on our weblog. By now it is three weeks later, but the info is still correct.
We rephrase the national slogan of the Philippines which is used everywhere: it's more fun in the Philippines. The last two weeks we have been working together with our first three volunteers, hurray! At the moment we have a rescue course and we continue with data collection for our marine biology research, while we are exploring new dive sites in the meantime.
By now we have discovered some very suitable dive locations which can be used both for courses and research. We also had a look at the other site of the hill were we are living. From some lookout points we have a view on Tambobo bay in neighbouring Siaton, a nice small natural bay, which makes a perfect harbor.
After some climbing on rocks to enter the water, we discovered that if we had walked another 100 meters we would have had an easy beach access.  The coral looks very diverse and you can dive on a continuous reef for an hour. It seems we have found our perfect fun diving area with a white beach with palm trees nearby to relax afterwards. Palm trees remain dangerous at all times though. We had to wait a few minutes before we could enter with our car because people were harvesting coconuts. This  means that two guys climb into the trees and start dropping coconuts. You do want to wait because a coconut makes a nice dent in your car. One of the first things you learn here as a driver is to watch out for coconut palms when you park. Make sure your car is not under it!

One of the more difficult dive sites to reach with a car has now been explored as well. The first time we got stuck with our Kia Bongo in a bamboo fence. The road was very narrow and we thought we could just squeeze trough... Apparently not, because we didn't take into account that the fence wasn't actually straight. The lower part was bent outwards and one of the bamboo poles got stuck at the side of the car. Because a palm tree blocked our way out at the other site we had to maneuver back and forth with the bamboo scratching and scratching against the car. Eventually we got loose and now we have a big dent at the side of the car. We couldn't turn so we had to go to the dive site. The designated parking place was on the beach, were the car got stuck in the sand and we had to pull it out. Grumphh.
Today we returned to the same place but a 100 m to the south. This road to the beach was a much better option, even for people with limited driving skills in a big car since we managed to reach the dive site without car injuries. The dive was very very nice. The dive site is part of an MPA which has been enforced since 2009 and that shows in the size and occurrence of the fish. A lot of (big) groupers, parrotfish, sweetlips, a lot of snapper species and a lot of adult fish in general.

We have started with some pilot studies to figure out on which fish species we need to focus later. We started with looking at abundance of fish at family level in all the different dive sites, but it turned out that that idea was a bit too general. Most families occur at most dive sites. So we have gone down to species level. Since it is impossible to identify a lot of species at the same time, we are now focusing on butterflyfish and angelfish. Then you definitely see a difference between dive sites. In the meantime we learn a lot of new species as well. We take a camera with us on each dive and make pictures of a lot of fish. That is very useful. We thought we saw about 5 different species of snappers, but after identifying some pictures it seems we have about 9 species. If we discover a species and we have no clue what is it, even after flipping through several fish books, there is always id please, a facebook page were you post your picture and some additional data. Within 30 minutes you get a response of somebody who knows much more than us and that is usually correct.  Hopefully we increase our knowledge to an extent that instead of only posting pictures we are actually able to id pictures of others.

In the meantime construction work on the project site is going fast. The third hut for volunteers is almost ready, one of the staff huts is finished and the other will be done (hopefully) soon as well. The common area is looking better each day and the storage room in the kitchen is not a sleeping room anymore but can actually be used for groceries. The stupid mistakes workers sometimes make we take for granted (why cement and even paint a wall if the pipes for the water still need to be in the wall and make exactly the same mistake at the second hut... or why does it takes 3 efforts in 5 days to cement a bed at the right size so the mattress actually fits), because usually they are working really hard and do a good job. It all takes a bit longer, but in the end we will be having an awesome project site.

Our first volunteers

We have some time to relax and catch up with reading news and sending mails after a very busy 10 days. We have had our first volunteers for MCP the last two weeks, 36 at once! Ranum Efterskole, a Danish boarding school visited us with 33 students aged 15-16 years old and 3 teachers. They stayed at Bongo Bongo Divers in Dauin and we did the diving from there.

Half of the students did their open water and (part of their) advanced open water, while the other students followed a biology diving program, organised by us. The biology program consisted of learning to identify a few fish species and some invertebrates and try to identify them during a timed swim or along a transect line.

We were incredibly lucky watching whale sharks in Oslob. Most of the students have seen over 10 whale sharks and some of them almost run in to a whale shark while filming another one. The visibility was not that good, but because we were diving it was easy to swim from one whale shark to the next and looking back at some of the pictures people made, the view was still good enough to have a proper look at these magnificent beasts.

We don't know which dive students thought was most exciting, watching the whale sharks or their first night dive. It is a whole different world on the reef during the night, with (hermite) crabs, mantis shrimps, cuttle fish who sometimes look like moving rocks, and the waving arms of the corals.

Our last diving day with everybody was a trip to Apo island. Counting the number of burned backs of people I would say we got more than enough sun. The coral was beautiful and we saw turtles, sea snakes and of course a lot of (big) fish. There was also some time to explore Apo Island itself.

The program did not only consist of diving. We visited an elementary and a high school in Zamboanguita. That caused some interesting scenes, since the transport went by open truck. It is not very common to see 40 white people in a truck and this caused a lot of pointing, laughing and waving by Filipino's. Some of the smaller kids had actually never seen somebody with blue eyes and blond hair and started crying, but after it was time to go again they were hugging goodbye and told the students not to leave so their fear was easy to overcome. One of the students even got permission from the headmaster of the Dauin high school to join the Filipino students for a whole afternoon of classes. Apparently the Danish schools are much more relaxed than the Filipino schools, which invoked students to mention that from now on they would always do their homework. No uniforms, no Sir and Mam and rules are less strict.

The visit to the local waterfalls of Red Rock were well liked as well; it is always nice to try to swim as close to the waterfall as possible especially after a steep walk up the hill.

Dumaguete has been thoroughly checked out by everyone, some students went there 4 times. Since there is only so much you can do in this relatively small city, we guess the local Mc Donalds probably had a good week! A lot of the students bought a ukelele as a souvenir and unfortunately only a few knew how to play it well but heir repertoire was a bit limited ....

It was a tiring but very nice 10 days. The students behaved very well (only broke a peddle of a kayak), were enthusiastic and most of them had a good level of English which made it easy to communicate (although if there are 38 Danish people and only two Dutch it is easy to switch to Danish again).

We are still at Bongo Bongo at the moment, because the building of our huts is still behind schedule, meaning we don't have a house yet, as our earlier rental house is now vacated by a botanist of the arboretum. The new temporary sleeping room will the freshly painted storage room in our new kitchen.

In two weeks the first two volunteers will be arriving, so it is time again to hire some extra workers (again) so one of the volunteer huts will be finished as well. Now we have time to supervise them again, which usually means they work a bit faster.

So far, we have a finished kitchen, 1 almost finished hut (our house), 4 huts with finished concrete foundations but without roof and walls, a half finished equipment room for dive gear and an unpaved access road which is now in much better condition because endless loads of sand, gravel and stones have been added. At the busiest days, we had 25 construction workers walking around in the arboretum, but the last two weeks we had to scale down to about 12. Have a look at the MCP facebook page for pictures of the building.

It is definitely nice that we can start working with volunteers and finally go from the planning phase to the exploratory part of the research, starting with a follow up of the reef check course in a few days and hopefully some dives in Zamboanguita.

Strengthening MPA boundaries

Happy New Year everybody! We had a nice party at Bongo Bongo yesterday evening with a wonderful dinner and of course lechon (a whole roasted small pig and everything of it is consumed). Filipino's like the ears and tongue best, which suited the Europeans just fine, they could focus on the meat, accompanied by an intestine and liver sauce (or not) but also a wonderful ceviche (raw fish with a lot of lime) of marlin.

Filipinos have a nice habit of starting the New Year: anything that you have that has an engine needs to be started asap in the new year. The noise of the engine brings good fortune to the car/ motor bike. Since we can use some good luck, Dolf happily put the habit to the test. Let's wait and see. We certainly had a lot of exhaust fumes in our lungs as a start of the new year. Because of two days of continuous rain, the road to and from the arboretum has become very muddy at some parts. Yesterdays work consisted of strengthening the road by throwing large and small rocks, gravel and sand in some puddles. It only helped partially. The car still became stuck when we were heading to Bongo Bongo in our party clothing. Fortunately the workers just finished their day and they were able to pull the car out of the mud for us.

Hurray! We finally moved over to Zamboanguita a few days ago. In the morning, we do not hear pigs, goats, cars and church bells but birds and creaking bamboo (and the occasional motorbike). The arboretum is a wonderful place to live, in the middle of nature and a bit secluded from society.

Unfortunately we do have brownouts every day, meaning we have no elektricity for 15 minutes up to two hours. The internet is connected to the solar power grid of the owner of the arboretum, so funnily enough we do have internet during a brownout. The village of Zamboanguita itself is a 15 minute drive with the car, so it is for instance not possible anymore to walk over and do some shopping. As long as we do not have any more problems with our car and motorbike, this is no problem. In a few more months we have volunteers running all over the place and we do not have time to do our own shopping anyway. The constructors are (of course) behind schedule, but we have now 10 people walking around doing the building, so in two weeks we have at least an equipment room, kitchen and two huts, we hope.

One of the first official happenings in which we could participate as MCP in the municipality of Zamboanguita was helping setting the boundaries again for an already existing Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Dalakit. The MPA is enforced for quite some years, but the demarcation lines disappeared after several typhoons, which makes it hard to show where the no-fishing zone starts.

The coastal resource manager Tony managed to motivate a team of enthusiastic local fisherman to help with the work. They prepared 46 concrete blocks, used for sinkers and made a nice system for attaching rope to the styrofoam buoys.

The first part of the day was already a challenge: get the marine patrol boat into the water. With 10 strong man slowly pushing the boat forward from the sand in the water, we eventually managed to get the boat in the water. The concrete blocks of about 100 kgs each were moved with a digger as close as possible to the water. One block was tied to the boat and dragged in the water, until it was deep enough to float. Then the rope and buoy were attached and the block was dropped at the right spot. The boat could only take one block at the time, meaning that it had to go back and forth to the coast to pick up each new block.

Unfortunately the water was a bit too murky to check if the sinkers were dropped correctly while scuba diving, so that task still remains. We did have the opportunity to have a look at a 20 year old artificial reef which was full of fish and also included some hard and soft coral.

The strong points of this MPA is not the coral reef, because it hardly exists here, but the extended seagrass beds, the nearby river mouth and adjacent mangroves. There are a lot of young fish to be found here, who now get a chance to grow up relatively undisturbed. Most young fish spent part in their life hidden away under the mangroves or in or near river mouths were there are relatively few predators. But most important, the local people of this neighborhood thought it was really important to start this MPA, have paid the expenses out of their own barangay (neighborhood) budget and are willing to help freely with the implementation and enforcement.

Of course there is always way for improvement. The styrofoam buoys will deteriorate in several months and need to be replaced constantly, which means the residue will disappear in the sea. The blocks were dragged through the seagrass beds, instead of lifted over it because the digger could not drive in the water. On the other hand, with a very limited budget, it is still possible to work actively on marine conservation. We as MCP now have a role in helping develop a less destructive way to set up marker buoys and see if we can increase the budget, so that we can for instance use buoys of hard plastic that last several years.

After a hard day of work about 15 sinkers with buoys were dropped, so work continued the next day. The final result is an MPA of around 500 m in length and 300 m wide. The patrolling will be done by the locals themselves. We will be monitoring the site regularly to see if any changes occur. It is really nice to see that local people can get so enthusiastic in conserving their own environment!

Filipino bureaucracy

Getting a drivers license can be a pain in the ass. We thought to make it easy for ourselves in the Netherlands: let's get an international drivers license. Done in 5 minutes. But not good enough for the Filipino ANWB. They want a translation of the embassy with official stamp. The nearest embassy is in Manila, so that's not gonna happen. Solution: you buy a temporary student license for a month and after that you do a theory exam and a practical exam. Nice detail: you only have to do the practical exam if you bring your own car, since do do not have cars of their own. You do have to pay for it though, even if you do not do the test. Sounds easy, just pay and you have your temporary license. But no, that is not how it works. After 5 hours which included 4 hours and 55 minutes of waiting and 4 minutes of walking to 6 different counters we walked out of the office again and we can repeat the whole exercise next month for the real license.

Of course if you now the right person in the office you can also pay thrice the amount of money and you just get your license, no exam, no drugs test, no medical test and hardly any waiting. Apparently we already now two of those persons through different friends...

Ok, you have a drivers license. The next step is a car. MCP has a second hand car since a couple of weeks. We have been driving around happily for 5 days and then the problems started. We have a month guarantee on the car, but unfortunately that does not guarantee that the mechanic will actually fix the problem. We are now in a state of mind that we wouldn't be surprised that the car will fall apart on day 31 (figuratively speaking of course), so we have to pay the mechanic for multiple problems.

Good mechanics are hard to find and even if you have one, the cheap Chinese parts they use to replace the old ones are not really helpful because they tend to malfunction after a couple of months/weeks/days according to your amount of luck. And that is were the real problem lies. Second hand cars come from Korea or Japan and are usually stripped to the bone in the Philippines and rebuild again with the earlier named cheap Chinese parts. From the outside everything looks fine and the first few days actually everything is fine. But a new car costs a fortune and will eventually break down at some point as well and the same song starts all over again. Who do people have cars here in the first place? From my mildly aggressive tone you have probably figured out by now that we some slight issues with our lovely car. Fortunately our motorbike is still working properly. 

I am happy to inform you that I wrote this particular part of the blog 1 week ago and the car is still functioning.

Not everything we do is frustrating though. We had a four day ReefCheck training Mid-December given by the developer of the training. We were incredibly lucky that this training was planned at the place were we are staying now and that we could join in. With a group of 20 participants including students from the Siliman University, different dive shops and Marine Conservation Philippines we followed an interesting program of lectures, diving and snorkeling.

With ReefCheck surveys you measure the abundance of human disturbances by looking at different indicator species of fish and invertebrates. You also look for abundance of coral and damage to coral trough for instance dynamite fishing, anchor damage or typhoons. In each area you want to research, you make two transects of 100m at a shallow depth and a bit deeper. Monitoring takes place as often as possible.

Since this research is simultaneously done in over 90 countries, Reef Check is a good tool to look at human disturbances worldwide. It is a relatively easy method to learn because it focuses only on a limited amount of species, which is also the disadvantage. Ecologically more interested species are left out, in favor of heavily over fished species or edible inverts. You do not very often see a Bumphead parrotfish or Humphead wrasse because they are well liked on the dinner table and grow quite big. Other common fish you find on the reef, like rabbitfish or angelfish are not part of the survey. Still, it can be quite difficult to recognize all the different kind of snappers and to not confuse them with other fish species!

MCP will be using Reef Check for part of the research and so it is useful for us to be qualified as Ecodivers from now on. We can use the Reef Check methodology and upload to data to the worldwide database. Our next step is to become official Reef Check trainers so that we can train our volunteers up to Ecodivers. For now, we will be using the extended documentation material and powerpoints to train our volunteers so they can help with the surveys. We will add some extra species because we are interested not only in human disturbances both also in the actual health of the reef ecosystem.

With the now existing Reef Check group of about 20 people we will be doing surveys in Dauin, Masaplod and Zamboanguita four times a year, starting already in January with a practice survey in Dauin. As MCP we will develop several more transects in Zamboanguita, both in- and outside Marine Protected Areas to see how bad the human disturbance is in our area and whether there are any differences inside and outside MPA's. If we find any human disturbances, we will try to find the cause and see if we can prevent or diminish it by looking for solutions with the local community, municipality and other involved parties.

The unfortunate cocks

In the end, the typhoon Ruby/ Hagupit only caused one night of rain and a few days of overcast weather. Nothing scary. The day after the typhoon we found out that if the typhoon does not come to you, it doesn't mean that it will not affect you. We wanted to get our Filipino drivers licenses, but that was not possible because they could not make internet contact with the head office (?? We had internet). Their working hours are already interesting. We were warned not to come before 9 (computers are still off) and not after 11 (early lunch time), but even within this limited time frame we were told to come back another day. That was the start sign of 2 days without internet, which gave Dolf the time to mess around with our new second hand car. After blowing some fuses he did manage to change the car radio all by himself. All other small stuff which had to be repaired was done by the mechanic (who does not necessarily do a better job than Dolf).

I forgot to mention that I visited the national sport in the Philippines a few weeks ago, the cock fighting. This is a brutal fight between to cocks, who both wear a knife at one of their legs, so they can slice open the other cock. I went with Marvin, the dive master of Bongo Bongo, who used to work there before. Taking an insider with you definitely improves your understanding.

Each Sunday afternoon, there are cock fights in the pit, the stadium. Dauin only has 5000 inhabitants and is not very rich, but the pit is some like a small concrete football stadium with a ring in the middle for the fights. Before each fight the most interesting part of the process takes place. Everybody starts shouting like crazy to place bets on other one of the cocks. A bet on one cock can be has high as 20.000 pesos (around 400 euros, all bets combined) on a normal Sunday. Before the betting starts, both owners of the cocks show how aggressive their cock is by letting him pick at the other cock three times and let the cock prance around on the ground for 30 seconds.

The actual fight can be over in less than 30 seconds if one of the cocks jumps on the other and slices open his whole belly/ neck/ other body parts so the wounded cock can't do anything anymore and sags through his legs. Both cocks are picked up from the ground and dropped again. If one of them does not attack anymore, there is a winner. The looser ends up in the owners frying pan in the evening. After watching 8 fights you get the general idea and it was time to leave again.

Because you are sitting 5 m from the ring and the arena is surrounded by a 1.5 m plastic wall it doesn't look that bad, because you only see the feathers flying around and only a limited amount of blood. After each fight, the blood and feathers are swept away and the blood is removed from the wall. If you visit an illegal cock fight in the garden of the neighbor, it looks a bit more bloody. The looser was showed around with blood leaking from him and the entrails hanging out...

On Super Sunday which is once every 1-2 months, cock fighters from a much bigger area come and fight, sometimes even from Manila. The entrance alone is already 500 pesos (the average payment for a job like construction worker is 300 pesos a day) and people (males) wager their whole salary on a fight.

When your house is on fire, you first save your cocks and only then your wife and children. This common joke shows how important cocks are in Filipino society. Half of the families in Dauin have 5 or more cocks in a cage or on a leash in their garden.

When you see a large group of people making a lot of noise you think they are watching a fight between two people, but most of the time it is just trading or selling cocks or an actual cock fight.

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.

Holiday on a motorbike

We took a week off to explore a bit more of the Philippines. After all, up to now we hadn't seen more than Coron were we only explored the wrecks under water 6 months ago, Manila and Dauin.

Since we are already renting a bike anyway, a holiday on motorbike was an easy solution. We started on Negros, the island Dauin is on and drove 180 km up to San Carlos, explored the nearby hills and then took the ferry from San Carlos to Toledo, on the is land of Cebu. From Toledo we drove to Balamban were we crossed the mountains to Cebu City. From Cebu we drove down to the ferry in Lilo-an and back to Dauin again. We drove some 500 km and only had a flat tyre twice. With a gps on the phone it is pretty easy to plan your trips and see where you are in a big city. You can always stop your bike somewhere to check were you are. All the traffic stops randomly anyway.

It is nice to tour to the country side, we were the only foreign tourists during most of the route and some people were pretty surprised to see us passing by on a motorbike. The roads were well paved, except with part of our tour through the hills in San Carlos were we drove some 30 km off road or on roads that were once paved (a very long time ago).

We admired rice paddies, the 'small' Chocolate hills near San Carlos and some wonderful mountain views on three different day trips and the Tumalog waterfalls near Oslob, as well as the many villages and views along the road.

We planned to go to Bohol as well, but in the end we decided to do that some other time and rent a moped on Bohol instead of taking it with us on the ferry. There are several ferries were you can take your bike or car, but depending on the size of the ferry there is an interesting trajectory before you can put your bike on the boat. First, there is the normal charge for passengers and bike. Already the bike is twice as expensive as a passenger. Then some police checks your id. There a helpful guy was assigned to us who showed which offices we had to visit to pay some additional fees. Harbor fee, small bribe for some person, another fee in some office at the other side of the harbor, some more fee..., pay the helpful guy who made you pay all the fees, which adds up to more than three times the price of a passenger. Interestingly enough, the other ferry from Lilo-an was much easier. You just pay once and the fee includes one person.

Riding a bike was not that hard, except in Cebu city with all the jeepneys, tricycles, trucks and normal cars. On a motorbike you weave in and out of the waiting lines and try to maneuver to the front. By now Dolf is quite an experienced driver. Driving in Manila is still a bridge too far though.

It is no problem if something is wrong with your bike during the trip. Along the road there are vulcanizers, or mechanics every few kilometers. They have an interesting way of setting up their shop. It is usually a bamboo shed and most of their tools are self made from different truck or car parts. Everything will be reused, so they throw nothing away. The tire is fixed by putting some sticky rubber on the hole and then heat that part either with a self made ironer which they put on the aluminum foil of a packet of cigarettes or they lit some oil in a big sparking plug which belonged to a truck. Then they put the whole construction under a bench screw made from the shaft of a truck and let the whole contraption stay there until the rubber is firmly attached to the tire. And they ask the shocking amount of 30 pesos (75 euro cents) for the repair, which was probably still too high.

Cebu city is much nicer than Manila, because it is smaller (800.000 people) and it is surrounded by hills on three sites and the ocean on the other site. Downtown is a bit crappy, but we had a nice hotel in the northern part of the city close to the mountains. We visited a beautiful Taoist temple in the hills, the most important basilica (devotion of Filipinos has a complete other dimension if you compare them with catholic Dutch people; they kiss and touch all important statues when they walk by) and they Yap house, a wooden house in its original state from the 17 century from a Chinese merchant.

We also bought some electronical parts for Dolf. That was quite a challenge. We knew in what neighborhood we had to be, but walking in 35 degrees, with an overpowering sewage smell in your nose and honking cars everywhere make your senses a bit overstimulated. We did find what we were looking for, so I was happy that we could mingle ourselves in the traffic once more. The traffic looks extremely chaotic as you look to it from the side, but when you're right in the middle you actually discover some system where traffic lights and advice from police offers do not necessarily have to be followed.

We were back in Dauin after 6 days, so we could join in a dive trip to Aligay, a small island before the bigger island of Mindanao (there is no main land in the Philippines, so I always have to talk in islands). We did some nice dives on pristine reefs (divers hardly come here, because it is pretty remote). We spend the night on the island. The group was pretty big (20 people), so we din't have enough tents. That would not have been a problem because we slept on a grassy area, but the weather did not agree with us. In the middle of the night it started to rain big time. We scrambled into one of our tents, were two people were sleeping and we managers to sleep in the 2 person tent with 6 people, 3 in the inner tent and 3 in the outer tent. Fortunately it stopped raining after an hour and because we were lying so nice and cozy our sleeping bags actually dried overnight. If you look on the facebook page of Bongo Bongo divers, you will see a nice picture of a sleeping Dolf with his head sticking out from under the tent (6 people was a bit too much after all).

We saw pilot whales and dolphins near the boat both on our way to the island and back.

Now it is time to do something useful again, so I am sitting outside with 35 degrees and sweating behind my laptop while a big ventilator tries to get the temperature down. As long as you just sit quietly or drive on a motorbike the temperature is ok. In these 6 days our coloring improved amazingly, even with factor 45 sunscreen.

We already have some pictures of the trip on Dolfs facebook. We'll add some more and add them to the blog as well.

Treasure hunting

We spend last week in Dauin, a village between Dumaguete (the big city) and Zamboanguita (the probable MCP location). We are renting a moped so we can see something of the surrounding and stay at Bongo Bongo Divers, a nice place close to the beach.

Of course the renting of the moped did not entirely go as planned. We drove from Dumaguete to Dauin, and after a few kilometers I started to smell burned plastic. There was nothing wrong while driving, so we just continued. In the end, it turned out that the back brake was a bit stuck and during the 15 km drive we actually achieved in demolishing part of the brake. The smell was the rubber of the brake which was totally gone. Luckily, the shop found it no problem to drive over to our place and change the moped.

Today we drove to the Siit arboretum near Zamboanguita, which is one of the options for MCP's location, together with Soren and Helle, our future 'bosses'. It was nice to visit the location. It is very green, with a lot of trees and situated on the top of a small hill. That's also the more difficult part, because the see is 1-2 km downhill and part of the road needs some construction before we will be able to drive up and down all day with the volunteers and the dive gear.

We marked out the places were the huts for the volunteers and us should be build and now we are hoping that the constructor is indeed going to build two huts in the coming two weeks as he promised to do. It would be nice if he keeps his promise so that we can officially start with MCP, but of course you never know what's going to happen. If this will be MCP future location, we will be very nicely situated. The huts are in the middle of a large garden, with lots of (fruit) trees and it is in the middle of a rural area. Along the main 'highway' are a lot of rice fields and waterbuffalos and it is less populated the further you are from Dumaguete.

Dunaguete itself is a friendly city with a 100.000 inhabitants, a movie theater, a big supermarket with all the western necessities (yoghurt, muesli, cheese) and a mall with enough American restaurants when you do not want to eat rice or noodles for a change. Luckily, Filipinos eat bread as well, so there are plenty of bakeries, although the bread is mainly sweet.

We also did some diving near Dauin. The quality of the reefs is good, except for the parts hit by the typhoon Yolanda last year. Visibility is quite good, especially in the morning and certainly much better than the usual 5m in Cambodia. There are a lot of different fish and also large fish as well, which is an indicator that there is not much overfishing. Which is good, since this is a Marine Protected Area, which means that people can only fish in a sustainable way. No dynamite or cyanide fishing, or big trawlers which destroy the bottom with their nets. Also no particluar fish or invertebrate species who is dominating the area, which is also a sign of a healthy reef. In Cambodia the bottom was crowded with diadema sea urchins, but here you see them very little.

If we want to go diving, we can just grab a tank and walk into the water. The reef is only a small swim away. We also went to Apo Island, a famous place for diving in the Philippines and in viewing distance of where we stay. Unfortunately, half of the dive sites are destroyed by the typhoon, but the other half of the reef is still intact and beautiful with coral gardens and lots of fish and green turtles. I think we have broken our turtle record on one dive, because at one point every five minutes we saw another turtle.

Yesterday we went on an interesting quest. Supposedly, between Apo Island and the big island Mindanao there is a hidden shoal, an elevation of sand in the ocean. Very few people know it exists and supposedly it is very beautiful down there. Fisherman told (of course) different stories of the location, the depth and what you can catch here. A 100 kg grouper, for instance. Two local fisherman joined us on the boat and with 15 people we went looking if we could find this secret place. Including some rough navy maps with depth data Dolf was able to collect and 50 m of rope and 40 m of anchor line but without depth finder (stuck at customs in China) we started our exploration.

The first group went down on a location which was pointed out to us by a fisherman sitting in his small boat fishing in the middle of nowhere. After 55 m of descending they saw the bottom, but it was very deep. There was a slope going up though. Group 2 went down a bit further up the slope, we were part of the third group and still could not reach the bottom, because it was at 70m. The rest of the area is 300 m deep, so maybe we did find the shoal after all. No big fish or other interesting things to see of course.

It is interesting though to go down the anchor line into the 'blue nothing'. When you look up you can see much more compared to when you look down. 50m down, we were still able to see the rope of the anchor, all the way up to the surface. When you go down, you only start to see the bottom when you're more than 30 m down. It is beautiful to look up and only see the sun and the water. The anchor was drifting above the bottom however, and not touching the ground at all.

There was hardly any current and if you just continue to hold on to the anchor line going up and down and keep an eye on your computer it is perfectly safe to go down that deep. Because the rope is near you cannot get confused which side is up or down. Usually, it is not so interesting to do that because you can only stay that deep for not even a few minutes before you have to up again. On the way back we did another dive at Apo Island, to see at least some coral and fish.

For Magnus, the owner of the place were we are staying this was already attempt 2 for the treasure hunt. To be continued...

On the move again

After visiting the Netherlands for almost 2 months, it is nice to be on the move again. We were glad to spend so much time at home, so we could visit family and friends and enjoy some Dutch food and Belgium beers.

Our first stop was Hong Kong. Compared to what we have seen so far of Asia, this city is very efficient. Of course we knew that space is the limited factor in Hong Kong. The airport is made on an added strip of land. On the bus drive I noticed an area with only one floor of stores between all the skyscrapers. I wondered why, but then it turned out a big parc is build on top of the shops.

Although the website of the hotel mentioned our room would be 11m2, it turned out to be around 7m2, including bathroom. Not a lot of space when you arrive with two suitcases, one big backpack and three smaller bags. They solve part of the problem by elevating the beds, so even our luggage fitted in the room.

Hong Kong is highly efficient. Each metro arrives about every two minutes. The taxis have virtually now business from the airport. You take the train to the central part of the main land and from there, free shuttle buses bring you to various hotels. And here we are, at the 16nd floor of our 7m2 room, with a 'lovely' view. Well, we still have a window. A lot of the cheaper rooms are just boxes without window. We are surrounded by three skyscrapers with aircos sticking out next to each window.

After visiting several dive shops (that's what you get when you are small, wetsuits are not made for people with short arms and legs), we also had time to enjoy the view on Hong Kong. Unfortunately, taking the tram up to the hill is the most popular tourist attraction, so we waited an hour to get up and 2 hours to get down, but the views were worth the waiting.

After spending a lot of money of dive equipment we flew to Manila. Fortunately, we were allowed to take our 80 kg of luggage and 20 kilos of hand luggage with us (maybe a bit too much...) Manila, what can I ay about it. I was not very positive on our first visit, but somehow it has improved a bit. Why I cannot say, because there are a lot of slums, the lines for a taxi at the airport had increased to 5 hours of waiting because they are working on a new Skyway (road above the old road) and we squeezed ourselves in the metro at rush hour were we really felt like sardines. Good the airco still functioned because this was bad compared to rush hour in the trains in NL.

We are in a friendlier neighborhood than last time, with lots of restaurants close by. We visited the dive shops to now what they have here, bought some more equipment for the camera (never ending story) so we can use it under water as well and made some visits to interesting organizations for our new job. Which means we're still in Manilla after 5 days, because making appointments is not that easy in tropical countries. At both organizations we were very welcome though, so our time is well spend.

Unfortunately, Marine ConservationPhilippines doesn't have a location as of yet, which means we have to find some other work for a few weeks, which we are trying to organize at the moment. But our hotel is nice and cheap and we get to know Manila better. If people are ever going to visit us, we advise them to bypass Manila though and fly from Bangkok or Hong Kong to Cebu. Much closer, and probably a lot cleaner.

Old cultures and new habits

Oops, I discovered this blog a bit late, but it might still be interesting to read for people.

In the last two weeks we have been looking at several old d cultures and the highlight of the current culture in Mexico, lucha libre fights. Staring at the lucha libre fights, those are the fights of big muscled people wearing masks in a boxing ring. Usually you have the goods fighting against the bads. Everybody in the audience picks a favorite each fight and then they start. Almost everything is allowed so people jump on each other and it looks like they are slamming each other hard. It is all fake though. The first fights you see that clearly, but the last fight are the most experienced fighters and they do the most spectacular stunts. Taking pictures was unfortunately not allowed. It is nice to be part of the audience, because part of the Mexicans are really fanatic, scream a lot and even bring instruments (like a Dutch dweilorkest, but then better adapted to this situation). Unfortunately we were put in the tourist corner were the noise was less pronounced. You can buy lucha libre masks anywhere and a lot of kids went home with a doll or mask. Mexicans are great lovers of buying useless stuff. When we visited Teotihuacán we saw one family with fake obsidian dolks, bow and arrows, annoying flutes which roar and small statues. I think the Mexican tourists buy more than the other tourists.

It is unknown who built Teotihuacán in 800 AD, but the Aztecs were so impressed by the city 500 years later that they took over part og the gods and the building style and told themselves they were descendants of these people. The complex is well renovated (although they discovered later that one of the biggest temples had a platform too many). The main temples are the temple of the Sun and the Moon. The first temple is a breathtaking climb up, but you get rewarded with stunning views of the surroundings and a breeze. All the platforms of the many temples (over 40) have been rebuilt, but only one complex has been restored, including murals. We only had a guide book as background information because the guides are the most reliable. One question of a tourist was: Why are the stairs uneven? The answer of the guide was that during the building of the city they not take any measurements because they didn't know how to do that. That seems a bit unlikely with 40 platforms in perfect rectangles or squares. Maybe the stairs have been a bit corroded after 1200 years of use? Anyway, after this answer we decided to do all the exploring of the temples on our own.

Fortunately we had visited the anthropology museum the day before. This is a huge museum, of which we only saw 1/4 in a whole day with the beginning of life in the Americas, Teotihuacán, the Toltecs and the Aztecs. It is a good museum with a lot of information, displays and rebuilding life size or small size of temple complexes and if you want you can spend 3 days in here. We already had to skip the Mayas. It was good to understand which culture arose in which time and who met who.

In Yucatan we spend two weeks diving and visiting some Maya ruins in between. The ruins were nice but not spectacular, compared to Tikal in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras. The most famous old ruins of Yucatan, Chichen Itza and Mayapan were too far away but the museum partially made up for this. Tulum and Cobá on the Yucatan peninsula are old Maya ruins. Tulum is a 'recent' city, with its decline just before the Spaniards arrived and is different than other ruins because it was build on the coast and probably even had a lighthouse. Cobá is from the same time as the city of Tikal in Guatemala, with its highlight around 1000 AD. Not much is known of the city however and a big part of the temples are still under a layer of trees. We climbed a 42 m high temple and all the hidden temples were still visible in the forest from our viewpoint. We explored the city on a bicycle (smart guys, to rent these out) in the early morning. By the time we were finished, the tour groups came in. Sometimes it helps to get up at 6 AM and catch the first bus, which we learned after visiting Tulum at 12 in the morning when it was so hot that we sometimes needed to stand in the shade to cool down a bit.

We will definitely come back to Mexico, not Only to visit Auke en Yolí, but also to see more of the country and the history.

Diving in cenotes or: Ohohoooo, sometimes I get a good feeling....

.....it's a feeling that I've never never never had before. For those of you who now the Avicii song, that is basically how I feel right now. Today was one of the best diving days ever. We have been diving the Cenotes in Yucatan, Mexico for the last few days.

For those of you who don't know what a cenote is, here is a one alinea summary (feel free to skip it, but it is quite interesting if I may say so myself): Some 65 milion years ago, the Yucatan peninsula was a massive coral reef below the sea. During the last iceage this reef rose above the see a lot. Because it was limestone (thanks to the coral reef), caves formed in it, just like in Limburg or the "grotten van Han" in Belgium and the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa in Mexico.
Unlike those caves though, after the last iceage (think about rising sealevels...), they partially submerged again. Not to the old level though, else many american schoolkids wouldn't have beaches to get drunk on during spring break, and maybe equally important ;) the Mayan's wouldn't have had their nice peninsula either. But because of the porous limestone rock, all fresh water seeps through it, and forms a layer of fresh water on top of the salt water beneath.
That fresh water is what the mayans drunk (and basically we still do today), but again more importantly, it also creates a very beatiful mixture of fresh and salt water to dive in, together with other facinating geological effects. During the time the caves were dry though (a few tens of thousands of years) really beautiful stalachtites and stalachmites formed as well(amongst other things), just like in those other famous caves. So basically, you have hundreds miles of caves, many connected. Sometimes the roof of a cave get's thin though (especially with disolving limestone), and it collapes and leaves a nice round hole in the earth with water beneath. That is called a cenote. There are a whole lot of them (hundreds? thousands?) dotted around Yucatan with interconnecting tunnels, and tunnels leading to the open ocean. The largest system is over 200km long. There area plenty of open cenotes all over, for easy access, and to allow diving in caves (mainly caverns for us actually) with surface air and natural light always close by, usually in sight.

That is enough of a geology lesson (I always found this interesting as a kid), but more interesting is the "feeling I've never never never had before" as Avicii puts it. Have you ever wa(/o)ondered through those touristy caves thinking how beautiful they are but also how cool it would be to explore those caves without all the tourists? And have you ever thought about how cool it would be to be able to fly? Or have you ever driven in the countryside early in the morning or in the evening and seen the mist in the fields on the side of the road, thinking there should be a ghost standing below that single tree? Well, all of those feelings, and more, came true today.

Doing the cavern diving we did the last few days, with today as a highlight, you basically fly weightless through those caves. The formations are incredible, and because the water is so clear, you sometimes forget there is water at all and really feel like you're flying. While following a route, you see side passages opening left and right (itching to go in, but knowing you can't), you fly over a hill, around a pillar, past a gallery of stalachtites and stalachmites, and down again into the next tunnel. An air pocket at the top of a cave creates a mirror reflecting all light from your torch down, creating a lightshow on the rocks below. When the water get's shallow, you stick your head above it and there are bats flying around, and meter thick tree roots penetrate the cave top to get to the water below. And then you go down again to continue your route. To top it all, on one dive, there is a single hole (filled with water of course), going down 30m from the opening of the cenote, where sunlight really shines down in rays to the bottom. A clear blue ocean with beams of light shining all the way down. And you're halfway on the wall, seeing both the trees 20m above you around the rim of the cenote, and the beams of light on the bottom on a white cloud of hydrosulfuric acid 10m below. The cloud of hydrosulfuric acid occurs naturally in the water (waste product from plant material breakdown by bacteria) and forms a white nebula of multiple layers. Swiming through that feels like flying through the mist in a mysterious magical landscape. Branches of fallen trees stick up from the bottom of the cave through the nebula. You expect a black crow to sit on a branch and fly off, to inform the witch of that nebula you are there. Playing with your hand and torch through the nebula makes it swirl and move around. The diver next to you is broken up in slices by the thin layers of nebula between you.
When you go up again and get close to the end of the dive, you see light from other small cenotes as green aquaria in the distance, with crystal clear water, fish and plants in them, and ocasionally a snorkler (if your later, a lot of them actually, but we were early birds). And when you surface again in your cenote, their are plenty of birds around, like motmots with beautiful colors and tails or weaver birds.

Although this might sound too fantastic, and indeed it is multiple very different dives compressed, all these things we've seen and felt in just a few dives. And many more things, like frodo scrambling through mordor below mount doom, or swimming between the mangroves seeing fish(y) parents garding their young, or molly's like you see them in an aquarium compete for mates between the water lilies growing to the surface.

Chilli country

We have spend almost a week in Mexico city and surroundings and up to now it is the best big city we have seen. It is a huge city with 8 million people living in the city itself and if you add the suburbs almost 23 million people live here. Auke and Yoli live relatively close to the center and with a good network of metro and buses you can get anywhere. It has its normal big city problems of congested roads during rush hour and old buses with smelly exhausts but it is not as bad as other Latin American cities or Manilla.

The food is really nice here as well and with Yoli and Auke recommending us a lot of Mexican dishes, I'm afraid we will never like eating in a Mexican restaurant in the Netherlands because the food is very different. Chili is very important and they eat it with almost everything. You put it on your popcorn, it is in your ice, in your drink etc. Second most important is lime, which you add to a lot of things as well.

We have explored the nearby countryside and visited the small towns of Marinalco and Taxco. Mexico has very different landscapes, and this area looked a bit like Switzerland with lots of different species of pine trees.

In Malinalco a big party was going on because of the celebration of a saints day. The most festivities were in front of the church. Although the festivities were in honor of a catholic saint, it looked more like an Aztec party with people dressed as eagle or ocelot warriors with big feathery heads and dancing on old music. We also visited a small Aztec temple which was built in 1501 but never finished. Located on a hill, we had a magnificent view on the surrounding hills.
To escape the all night party and fireworks we continued on to Taxco, were we found out that there was another party with fireworks, fortunately not an all-nighter. Fireworks are not just fireworks but the whole village joins in and pays for a huge platform with a tower of fireworks in different forms and figures. Very spectacular, especially because we had a good view from the nearby roof terrace.

Taxco looked a bit Italian, a white city build against a mountain. The city became rich of the silver mining. We spend the night in an old monastery and explored the city the following morning. On our way back we visited the caves of Cacahuamilpa. Although the path in the caves was concreted and the tour group was big (only Mexican tourists), the caves itself were spectacular with a 2 km access in the caves. Our military tour guide showed us a lot of nice rock formations (of course you need some imagination and some were a bit far fetched). Some of the rooms were 70 m high.

The next three days we spent in Mexico City, walking around through the neighborhoods of Condesa and Coyoacán with its colonial houses and many small restaurants. In the city center are many nice things to do. Most impressive were the murals of the Palacio Nacional. This building used to be one of the residences of conquistador

Hernan Cortés and now the official residence of the president. The murals were painted by Diego Rivera and depict the Mexican history from the Aztecs up to 1935.

Mexico city was build on top of the old Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, which was completely destroyed because the Aztecs did not want to surrender and Cortes had to demolish the city to kill the last warriors. Fortunately, some temples have been excavated and the old Spanish buildings on top of them have been removed. A large part is still under the main cathedral, which is a pity because it is highly unlikely that we will ever see this part of history.

The cathedral is built in baroque style and therefore lavishly decorated. The floor is a bit wobbly because the cathedral is sinking (like the whole city; Tenochtitlán was actually built in the middle of a lake which has been drained of water completely by the Spanish) and 150 years ago it must have looked like the tower of Pisa with metal bands around the walls to protect it, but somehow the cathedral is more straight now than 80 years ago and it doesn't need a lot of additional protection anymore.

The most important temple of Tenochtitlán, the Templo Mayor is partially preserved. A sewage canal from the 1900's goes right through the temple (really a pity). The temple is actually 7 temples, each temple built over the other. On the top of the temple are two pyramids for the gods Tlaloc (the rain god) and Huitzilopochtli (warrior god). The different layers are still visible and some statues and decoration are well preserved, including some of the colors, either still attached at the temple or in the museum next to it. Later this week we will visit the Aztec city of Teotihuacan to get an even better view of how the Aztecs lived.

For a nice evening out you have to visit plaza Garibaldi in the weekend, where all the Mariachi bands play. The bands consists of 3-9 people with different guitars, trumpets and a varying other set of instruments ranging from harp to accordion and they wear beautiful clothing allthough it looks better when the males are still slim. The whole square is filled with different bands and if you pay them they play one or more songs for you. It was a nice evening and included a lot of mezcal, pulque (fermented milk of the agave), tequila and beer.

No more chickens!

No, Dolf did not shoot al the chickens down with the catapult. Actually, the catapult broke again a few times and is now in a garbage bag. Another solution found its way to us in the form of sleeping  dogs in our garden who love to chase the chickens away. We were adopted by three dogs who live nearby (no, not the other way around) and at some point they decided that sleeping on our front porch was more interesting then sleeping on their own porch. We were accompanied by them in every visit we made and sometimes they ran after the motor as well when appointments were at the other side of the city.

We are now in La Paz, with sniffing noses and a headache because of the height. But we are lucky. Last week it was still -5 degrees at night, but now the sun shines during the day and the breeze is warm instead of cold. At night, we sleep under two blankets and Dolf was wearing two sweaters, a shirt and a long sleeve to keep warm in the evening. Tomorrow we fly to Mexico city to visit Auke and Joli.

Sorry, it has been a while since our last post. A few weeks almost nothing happened because of the school holidays and in the last weeks we have been so busy that we hardly had time to do anything else.

Almost 300 students have been on their field practical. Of course not without the usual problems, but we managed to execute the most important part of our project: getting students into the jungle where they learn something about ecology and get enthusiastic about the local plant and animal life.

Some groups were lucky and saw capibaras, a large stork or squirrel monkeys in the wild which are difficult to encounter when you're walking with a 10+ size group of chatting people, while others flowed through the beautiful mystic morning mists in a boat to the jungle.

One of the excursions was on the other side of the river and included a short boat trip and a sometimes tricky but exciting path through secondary and a little primary forest. The other excursions was to an animal refuge with an agro forestry area and a part of primary forest with some trees over 600 years old. The animal refuge had two marimonos (slingerapen in dutch), who will climb on people as well especially if you give them some food.

The students enjoyed themselves and most of the teachers as well. One path was a bit difficult and went up and down, and unfortunately one of the teachers slipped, but no further accidents happened. We have plenty of pictures, but we will upload them in Mexico when the internet connection is better.

We have some mixed feelings about the project this year. We had planned much more, but because the teachers were busy, a change of holiday (can you believe that in the Netherlands the government would decide two weeks before the holiday starts that the holiday already starts next week) and a lot of planned meetings where people did not show up we had to cancel some activities.

We did develop website with educational material for teachers. Instead of working with the teachers to develop the material we made it for the teachers. Have a look on www.leccionesamazonicas.org. Of course it is all in Spanish.

We were a bit sad to leave Rurre after almost 4 months. We have made some good friends including dogs, which we will sorely miss, but one of them will be in the Netherlands for a meeting at the end of August because he is in Germany now, following a summer course on the university.

We will be in Mexico for three weeks, first in Mexico City and the final week on Yucatan to dive in the cenotes, fresh water basins in the middle of the jungle who connect with each other through caves (no don't worry, we are not qualified cave divers and will therefore not swim through caves for a long time because you need additional exams and equipment before you're allowed to do that).

We will fly from Cancun to the Netherlands on August 23 and spend several weeks there before we fly onwards to the Philippines for our new job as science officer at Marine Conservation Philippines.

Liesje de boskabouter and the continuation of the fight against the chickens

Unfortunately, the weather is still not as it should supposed be. When it is raining but we still need to go out, we have taken after the local dress. You put on your poncho. Since they are only available in one size, they make Annelies look a a bit like a dwarf, hence the title of the weblog and the picture.

Not an awful lot happened since our last post.

Working with the schools improves a little, we have had another teacher training and some appointments. Besides that, we have been preparing the practicals, visiting different locations and deciding which location would be best for the students. This included some nice walks in the surrounding hills and at the other side of the river. The problem is that there have been a lot of landslides and parts of the path have been been demolished or just disappeared. The hills are sometimes very steep and with the amount of rain it is a lot of slipping and sliding. Nice for us, but not for the students.

On the other side of the river are also walking paths and they are better maintained. We went to have a look by kayak. Nice idea, but it was raining the whole morning, so by the time we crossed the river we were soaking wet. The local people looked at us like we were crazy and I can imagine that, why would you go kayaking in this weather? Even with the rain it was still fun to explore the river and walk through the forest afterward. It is a nice part of rainforest, not primary forest, but with some big trees and the path is less steep. It almost felt we were back in the Netherlands when the owner of the kayaks explained to us that we had to carry the kayaks up the path so that we could lock them with a big chain and lock against a tree. Just like your Dutch bike, if you don't lock it, it is gone by the time you return. Unfortunately no pictures because of the rain.

Dolf got a little help in his fight against the chickens by the way. We have a new ally. One night we heard someone shooting a gun in our garden and it turned out it was the neighbour hunting for an animal that had caught and killed his chicken. Dolf helped him in his search and when they found the opossum, the gun was jammed so he got away. Dolf did not mind this at all of course, because a) he has help in his fight against the chickens and b) we don't like to kill animals. One chicken down, 8 to go. The opossum was sufficiently scared, because until now he has not returned. Too bad for us, we still wake up with the lovely sound of the rooster and his chickens. Our parents have acquainted themselves as well with the noises, since we only Skype at six in the morning because that's the only time the internet connection is good enough and the chickens like to join in in the conversation.

The only drawback was that the smell in our garden and at the end in our house (remember open windows) wasn't too good. It turned out that the opossum had left the chicken and it was decomposing in the yard. After a good rain the smells disappeared which solved our problem of what to do with the remains of the chicken.

Talking about bad smells, Annelies walked through the street the other day and the smell was really bad. In the Netherlands you have the saying 'it smells as bad as a corpse' which she mentioned to Dolf.  We had a look in the gutters to see if something was blocking the water and found indeed a corpse. Of a dead snake.

Todo es posible, nada es seguro

Everything is possible, but nothing is certain. One of the San Miguel guides said this often last year and I think it is a nice saying to describe the last week and a half.

We had a very busy week in which we had our first teacher training. That went pretty well. Teachers were enthusiastic and our Spanish was ok. It is much harder to give a training in a language you don't speak fluently and it improves the quality a bit as well, but we had a very interactive training in which the teachers had to practice different interactive teaching methods so it was a nice division of doing things yourself and listening to us. We are proud on ourselves that we managed to accomplish this.

The rest of the week was a bit harder. We planned a lot of meetings but they were all canceled. Some examples: The first meeting with 1 school was canceled because the teachers had another training, so we planned a second meeting for the next day which was canceled because of the amount of water in the school (it had been raining for 2 days) and the third meeting was canceled because the teachers didn't have school in the afternoon. Other canceled meetings and trainings included no electricity so no use of laptop and projector for the training, no meeting (by now the raining had almost stopped) because it was still drizzling and it was cold so the lessons were canceled, no training because the school mentioned earlier didn't show up and we had too few participants. The second attempt was canceled because the school building was also used by the morning school (2 schools share the same building) to celebrate Mother's day. This would include a lot of music and as we mentioned before, when Bolivians turn on the music, it will be on maximum volume. Not a good idea to have a training at a distance of 50 m from the music with open windows.

The good part is that teachers are used to canceled meetings and it is usually no problem to plan your next meeting very quickly after the canceled one. The movement of the teacher training from the afternoon to the evening in a different school was a suggestion of one of the teachers and everybody who was there in the afternoon, came in the evening as well.

Next week, we will try to have the same meetings and hope for better weather. It has been raining for 3 days and as soon as it starts raining, hibernation begins. Everybody stays indoors and everything is canceled without further notice. This is a national habit and there is nothing we can do but accept it. Just sit, wait and join in (or do other useful things in the meantime).

It is quite cold now, it is overcast for 4 days in a row and the temperature dropped to 18 degrees. Dutch people would think this is very normal, but we are by now so used to 30+ degrees that it feels like winter. With our open windows in our house (only mosquito netting) the wind blows through the room because our curtains are too small. We hope the sun will be out soon, both for the temperature rise and the continuation of our project. Since I forgot to post this blog and it's on my computer for 3 days, I can now mention that the weather is back to normal.

We will try to extent our visa with one month so that we can stay till the middle of August. Their winter holiday is in the first two weeks of July and interferes with our program. With extending our time here we can continue with our program after their holiday. This includes a little break to go back and forth to La Paz which also gives us the opportunity to visit the library of Conservation International. This organization has done a lot of environmental education project in the surroundings of Rurre in the past, so maybe we can find some useful educational material. We already noticed that a lot of educational material has been made by different organizations, but everybody tends to forget this and the materials end up in a library and nobody knows it exists. We gave ourselves the tasks to put interesting educational material on a website so at least the schools in Rurre have access to it.

The water quality improved by the way. We now have water when it rains and there is only very little sand in it so I guess they fixed something.

We end with this nice picture. The municipality is changing part of the electricity. In the Netherlands they would replace the old wiring. Here, they just build poles and wires on the other side of the road. They are now putting the wires in place and sometimes the trees are in the way. So what do you do: you just put up your ladder against the leaves of the tree and hope it will be stable enough. In this case, it was.