Wreck diving in the Philippines

We had a wonderful 10 day diving in Coron, Busuanga Island in the Philippines. We were diving with the only local dive operator (always nice to sponsor local people instead of foreigners). There are 8 Japanese wrecks around Coron. They were bombed by the Americans in September 1944. Most of the wrecks were partly salvaged after WW2 by the Japanese, so the rudders, cannons and bodies have been removed on all but one of the wrecks. Most of them have been beautifully preserved and you can still see the prints of the bombs and bullets in the hole. Part of the wrecks broke when sunk or have large holes in them because of the salvaging.

We were lucky that we were diving with a small group of very experienced divers most of the time, consisting of two instructors, one dive master and us. That meant that we were able to penetrate the wrecks through tiny openings and take the more difficult routes. It is important that your buoyancy is really good, because a lot of silt has accumulated of the years in the wrecks and if you stir it all up the visibility can become very bad.

We have been diving on some of the wrecks for 2-4 times, each time with a different route through the ship. Because the ships have been lying on the bottom, some of them are quiet deep, at 38m. This means that your bottom time is very short and you can be on that specific depth for only 10 minutes. The more you ascend, the more bottom time you have. That 's why we have also done our Nitrox course here. When you dive with Nitrox you increase your bottom time because it contains less nitrogen and more oxygen.

Penetrating wrecks is quite exciting. The light is different around every corner and at different times of the day. Some wrecks lay on their side, but others are still in the right position and it is a weird idea to swim through a hallway or climb the same ladder hundreds have done before you when the ship was still active. Nature has taken over each wreck. Coral grows on the outside of each wreck but also in the inside. The fish have made it their home and sometimes get confused, they don't know what is up or down and left or right. It is quite common to see a fish swim upside down or sideways because they think they swim along the bottom.

Each wreck has it's own characteristics. Some of them still have cargo in the cargo areas. We have seen hundreds of cement bags and camouflage nets, a kitchen with pots, a cement mixer, a bulldozer on its side. The steam engines were still visible in most of them. With some of the wrecks it was possible to swim through the long corridors for 150 m, in other wrecks we went up and down through small holes and door openings to visit different rooms. Most of the wrecks have so many holes that there is always some light penetrating in the wreck. One of them is very dark because it is almost still intact.

Two days we had to help out the instructor because he had too many customers with different courses. Dolf did a buoyancy and 2 navigation dives and Annelies took two Open water students out on a dive. That was nice to do to get some additional experience as assistant instructor and we were diving for free because of the help.

The wrecks were the main attraction, but we have also been diving in a fresh water lake and a cave which is called Cathedral. The lake was interesting, because there is a volcano underneath it and the water temperature increases on your descend, from 30 to 38 degrees. There are thermoclines (temperature differences) and haloclines (salinity differences) in the water which make the visibility weird and the water gets more brackish. When other divers are in the thermocline you can only see blurry outlines, but once you're in there yourself the visibility gets better.

The lake had nice limestone cliffs.

The Cathedral cave was of a different category. We had to swim through a small tunnel in order to come in a large cave with beautiful rock formations. Hard to put on picture, but beautiful to see. We surfaced in the cave itself (half of it is above water with an opening at the top) to have a good view. The crystal in the stones made the rocks look like a starry sky and the water was perfectly clear.

The visibility was always a lot better than in Cambodia anyway, most of the time you could see more than 10 m.

The sea life not as abundant here as in other places in the Philippines. We have seen one turtle coming out of a wreck and Dolf has seen the tail of a whale shark. Unfortunately the whale shark moved away quickly and did not come back. We planned a trip to Apo reef, for the coral and the sharks and rays but there were very few trips to that area so we skipped that plan.

Philippinos are very friendly people. Their English is pretty good and it is not as poor as Cambodia. Yes they chopped a lot of forest, but there is quite still some left and they have beautiful rough coast lines, with most of the mangroves still there.

Manila is a very busy big city and the traffic is a nightmare. The American influence is clear, with a Mac Donald's and Dunkin' Donuts around every corner, but the Americans took also great care in building a good school system which means the illiteracy rate is very low. A lot of youngsters work in call centers, which means Manila is turning in a 24 hour economy, because they work at night in order to help American or European customers (that guy you talk to on the helpdesk really isn't called Jan, Klaas or John).

Environmental wise, the Philippines are much farther than Cambodia with Marine protected areas and no fishing zones where there is really only small fishing. Dynamite fishing does occur as we noticed several times while in a wreck. You hear a loud bang and the whole wreck and yourself start resonating. But this can be very far away since sound travels very far and fast under water, so it is far out of the Marine Protected Area. We saw only an occasional local with a hook on a line out of the back from his boat, but no commercial fishing going on. We have been eating some tropical fish for lunch.

We definitely enjoyed diving here, and are leaving here with a lot of regret. The last day Dolf started making a website for the diveshop to help them out, and incidentally was asked by a hotel how much it would cost to build their website. So between diving, marine conservation and IT, maybe there could be a life for us here :)

Cambodians temples and Manila

We spent our final days in Cambodia at the temples of Angkor Wat. We started with a sunset at 5.30 am. Unfortunately, it was a bit cloudy, but the view was still beautiful. We stood with several hundred people at the same pond to see Angkor Wat reflected in the water ,but were early enough to stand at the front row. After that, most tourist in tour groups went back to the city for breakfast which meant the temples of Angkor Wat were relatively quiet. The next lines are also a reminder for ourselves and might be of less interest for people who have not visited Angkor Wat.

Most are surrounded by a moat temples and are accessed by a bridge. The bridges are nagas, snakes with 5-7 heads with their body as balustrade. They bring rain and and symbolise the rainbow, the connection between earth and sky. The temples have two guardians standing in front, an evil and a good one. They are followed by a gopura, or entrance tower. The gopuras often have beautifully carved pediments and lintels, with representations of several gods, like Shiva, Vishnu or Indra. Shiva is the protector of the universe and his wife is Lakshmi, goddess of fertility and abundance, while Vishnu created the universe. Indra is king of the gods.

We have severeal pictures of Indra on the 3-headed elephant Airavata and Shiva on Nandi the bull.Each temple has multiple prasats, or temple towers. They reproduce the sacred mountain Meru.

The temples are made of sandstone, bricks and laterite. The first material is reasonably preserved, the laterite has a lot of small holes, but the brick structures often partially collapsed.

A lot of the buildings have murals of devatas which are dancing women deities. Unfortunately, a lot of Buddhas were destroyed or removed because of a short revival of Brahmanism.

King Jayavarman 7 has built a lot of the temples at Angkor Wat and is responsible for making Buddhism the state religion.

Angkor Wat was built in 1113 and is dedicated to Vishnu. It is also the mausoleum of the builder, Suryavarman 2. In the 13^th century it became a Buddhist wat (temple). It has a lot of beautifully preserved murals and devatas. It is a huge temple and has several elevated terraces. We spent almost the whole morning discovering the temple.

Banteay Kdei has beautiful entrances with 4 heads on the entrance tower. It was build in 1181 by Jayavarman 7 and was probably dedicated to Buddha. The heads represent the bodhisattva ( a person who has forgone Nirvana to help humanity to reach enlightenment) Lokeshvara, with whom Jayavarman 7 identified himself as god of infinite compassion. As background info: the dalai lama is seen as the human representation of Lokeshvara on earth.

After lunch, it was time for Ta Prohm. This temple was build as well by Jayavarman 7 in 1186 and was dedicated to his mother. The decoration is of the Bayon period. This temple is known by a lot people, because it was used as a film setting in the movie Tumb Raider with Angelina Jolie. The temple is beautifully overgrown with trees who have only been partially removed. The entrance gopura has 4 heads of Lokeshvara as well. The temple was a bit confusing and we lost the route described in the guide book, but we made a lot of nice pictures.

We ended the day at the complex of Angkor Thom. We run out of time so we missed part of the big complex. We did however visit the best part, the Bayon and the Terraces of the elephants and leper king. Around 1 million people lived within the walls of Angkor Thom .

The function of the Bayon is unclear, but is was dedicated to Buddha. Again there are several towers with Lokeshvaras, 216 faces in total. The Terrace of the Elephants has, of course, a lot of elephants and is over 300 m long. After 10 hours of visiting, we were getting a bit tired but still noticed the sunset over the Royal palace. The Terrace of the Leper King provided us with some nice murals since they were only recently discovered and therefore almost intact.

Our second day started with one of the other temples near Angkor Wat, Pre Rup. Build already in 961, it was dedicated to Nandi, the bull of Shiva. Only a small temple, but with the nice early morning light and hardly any tourists a delight to visit.

The next temple was a tuk-tuk drive a bit further out, Banteay Srei. Unfortunately, it was also the starting point of many Japanese tour groups. Worming ourselves through the tourists and waiting them to get out of the way for pictures, we still enjoyed this temple because of the many statues, colors and general lay-out. A lot of the temple is still intact and was built by two brahmans in 968 who were landowners in the area. The local name, translated in The citadel of the women, was given because of the voluptuous devatas.

After lunch, we visited some smaller temples. East Mebon was built in 952 and dedicated to Shiva. The temple has some well preserved elephants at the corners of the temple. Ta Som is also partially overgrown but is build much later at the end of the 12^th century. Again it has two entrances with Lokeshvara on them. Neak Pean was not particularly interesting, but the nice part was a big moat surrounding the temple divided in four parts with walkways to the entrances. The temple is in the middle of a pond but because of restorations work we could not get close.

The final temple of this day was Preah Kahn. Built by Jayavarman 7 in 1184 and dedicated to his father was a city in itself and a famous center for learning. We did not have enough time to explore the entire complex because Angkor Wat closes after sunset and the tuk-tuk driver decided earlier in the afternoon to drive of to Siem Reap and let us wait for an hour, but the half we saw was pretty impressive with several walk troughs and side temples.

Day 3 was spent at 3 temples much further away. The ruins of Beng Mealea, the jungle temple of Koh Ker and the much disputed temple on the border of Cambodia and Thailand and Unesco World heritage Preah Vihear. I will update this part later.

After three long days we moved to Bangkok, Thailand. The easy bus ride proved to be less comfortable in a minivan instead of a normal bus and took much longer than expected, mainly because of the border crossing and change of vans. All the minivans drive on lpg, but it takes a long time to get in the fuel, so and extra hour was spent on the gas station waiting to continue. Instead of 3.30 pm it was 8.00 pm, but we made it to Bangkok were we had dinner in a wonderful restaurant with a nice view on a well lighted bridge.

A last minute flight brought us to Clark Airport near Manilla the next day. It was a small disaster to get in Manila. The promised two hour bus trip turned in a late arrival because of the rush hour (Sunday was no exception). Instead of 5.30 pm it was 8.30 pm before we arrived at the hotel. We weren't in the best state of mood at that time but after a good night sleep we were ready to explore Manila. Hotel rooms without window are quite common here, since the cars, buses and jeepneys are really testing your hearing. After a morning walking next to roads it is nice to sit inside with only the noise of the airco.

Besides the horrible traffic Manila is not particularly interesting. We still had to find out what the best places to dive are in the Philippines and unfortunately the flight we wanted to take was a bit too expensive which I meant we spent more time in Manila than we wanted to. We did have an interesting conversation with the Department of Environmental resources for the possibility of volunteering in their ongoing biodiversity, marine and coastal research and walked around at the wildlife center compound, looking at all the confiscated animals who cannot be released in the wild because they are exotic/ maimed/ earlier maltreated. Unfortunately, part of the cages were way too small for the animals. Seeing two tigers together in a 4 by 5 m cage did not make us happy but they do the best they can.

The old center of Manila was mostly destroyed at WW 2 and most buildings have been rebuild. The most interesting location was the Asian mall, which was huge. A lot of electronics are definitely a lot cheaper than back home. The amount of fast food chains are incredible, which show the ties with the USA. Tomorrow we fly to our diving destination.

New adventures

I wrote this web log almost a week ago, but because of failing internet connections and a murdering travel schedule with days from 5.00 am – 20.00 pm we were not able to post it up to now.

We have said the island farewell and are now in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. We have had a nice last week in which we finished our exercises for assistant instructor and spent a wonderful weekend diving with the volunteers on Koh Tang, a small island 3,5 hours by boat from our own island. The visibility was incredible. During our deep dive, which started at 32 m, we were still able to see the surface. That's a slight difference compared to our normal visibility of 5 m, or 8 m on a good day. We saw a lot of different coral patches and some small fish, but unfortunately the overfishing seems as bad as on our own island which means no big fish. Wonderful Christmas tree worms in 20 different colors though (it is a worm which attaches itself to a rock and looks like a garland in the form of a triangle, hence the name).

We did see a school of small barracuda and some fish we rarely see near our island. We will upload the pictures later. For the night, we put up 15 hammocks on the boat and mattresses on all elevated areas which turned the boat into a nice jungle of hammocks. It was a good way to finish our dive time in Cambodia. After we have send in the paperwork we're official assistant instructors!

We have started out travels with looking at the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, by paying a visit to one of the killings fields. Because Pol Pot's regime ended in 1979, there are still survivors left and they told their own stories on the audio guide which made it even more horrid. In almost four years the regime managed to kill 3 million people out of a population of 8 million. After that we visited Tuol Sleng, or S-21; a school converted in torture and killing center in Phnom Penh. Most of the 20.000 people who died here have there own picture on a board. It was good to see this bad part of history in Cambodia, but we ended our day with much happier seeings; a visit the the Royal Palace and the silver pagoda. Built only in 1866, the buildings still looked beautiful as you will be able to see in the pictures later on. In the twilight we paid a visit to the Wat Ouna Lom, the epi centre of Cambodian Buddhism. In a nearby temple, the monks were so happy that we visited that the flashing lights went on immediately and he insisted that he took our picture in front of it.

Cambodians love flashy lights, so you see them everywhere were they can afford them. On billboards, buildings, as part of their karaoke show (yes, they love karaoke as does the rest of Asia) and apparently on their Buddhist shrines. But the thing they love most is our purpose of the next few days: Angkor Wat. We already noticed on our island that Angkor Wat is part of your everyday life: one of the 2 beer brands you could buy is called Angkor and the cutlery we used had Angkor Wat engraved in its design, and of course Angkor Wat is on the Cambodian flag which every small fishing boat has.

Next blog will be from Siem Reap and after that, diving in the Philippines!

Visit to Kampot and Kep

We uploaded the pictures of our visit to Kampot and Kep a few weeks ago, but didn't get to the part of telling what we did. 

We had a wonderful long weekend and started visiting Bokor National park by moped. A lot of Cambodians use mopeds, so we thought it would be nice to follow the local custom and explore the park on our own. We did not have enough time to walk a lot in the park, but the long ride to the top of the mountain was beautiful. Unfortunately, Chinese developers build a big hotel and casino on the top of the hill, in the middle of the park. The pictures of the remains of the concrete building was the old casino. Apparently it has been popular for a long time to build casino's in protected nature areas. Kampot is a lovely small city with a lot of old French colonial houses. The atmosphere was much more relaxed compared to the buzz in Sihanoukville.

Next day we drove with the mopeds to Kep. A second project site of Marine Conservation Cambodia will start here in March. The owner of the project has build an aquarium and wants to see if he can increase the seahorse population by breeding them. It gave us a nice opportunity to take some good pictures of the different seahorses living in the aquarium. On a small island 1 hour from the mainland, the new project site is build. The water is more shallow here, which prevents trawlers to come in and the municipality wants to be a green and sustainable municipality which makes protecting the reef much easier than on our island. There is even a marine police who patrols the area for illegal fishing. The aquarium offers a nice opportunity for environmental education, although it is yet the early stage of the project.

Both Dolf and me are training at the moment to become an assistant instructor and we are one of the few people who are experienced enough to take other volunteers out for diving. This results in 3-4 dives each day and a nice mix in doing a survey, learn volunteers about the seahorses and the substrates they live on, learning them the different fish species and invertebrates (like sea stars, sea cucumbers and sea urchins), helping the dive instructor with training volunteers in their open water dive certification and doing course dives. This means we only focus on diving and reading the course books for becoming assistant instructor at the moment. Dolf has also taken an interest in repairing dive equipment and by now he has learned himself to repair regulators and dive tanks. We are enjoying ourselves, but still miss the conservation part of the project a bit.

By now we have seen a lot of seahorses. Annelies had her lucky day last week and spotted 10 seahorses in 3 dives on one day. Apparently we are in the right season at the moment, because we see more seahorses than 2 months ago, including a lot of juveniles (or just have been better in spotting them).  

Happy new year!

Happy new year to everybody! We hope you all have had wonderful Christmas days and have eaten a lot of nice things. For us it was very strange to celebrate Christmas in 30 degrees. No rain, no snow and no real Christmas tree. Of course we tried to simulate Christmas a litle bit. We had pancakes for breakfast with fresh fruits and prepared our own meal. Usually we have the Khmer cooking staff, but this is the one day in the year that we cook our own European meal. It was simple, but delicious, especially because we are used to eating rice three times a day. We bought cheese (very expensive) and made our own mashed potatoes. On only a charcoal stove and no fridge it was a bit of improvising.

Some volunteers found a tropical tree with a slight resemblance to a Christmas tree and painted the tree because we did not have any decorations. Another volunteer had brought an inflatable Rudolf the rednosed reindeer. We even had a present for everybody and played secret Santa (you had a buy a present for 1 person and he didn't know who got him the present). I got a new shirt and Dolf some coffee.

We celebrated new years eve with a dinner in a new restaurant on the island. The food was good with crab, swordfish and mushroom risotto, but after dinner was finally served after two hours everybody run of to finish the evening somewhere else. Not the best start of the restaurant. We ended the evening in our standard bar with a lot of alcohol. They serve a teapot, which consists of a bottle of Khmer whiskey, a few cans of Thai red bull (apparently red bull originated in Thailand and this version is even sweeter and stronger in caffeine) and a few can of cokes. This is all mixed in a teapot and served in small glasses. If you drink this in between your beers your evening improves considerably, even with bad music. Psi (the Korean dude with gangnam style) is very popular here...

The weather has improved and we have had a flat sea for the last few days. That means the seahorse surveys can continue and we do 2 seahorse surveys a day. Unfortunately, there is a lot of current in the afternoon on the bottom which makes it impossible to continue the research, but then you can do nice drift dives. You drift along with the current without doing anything, or drift upside down and do some acrobatic tricks. The weather improvements also means no wind and an increase in temperature. It can be very hot when you are not diving as we noticed yesterday. We made a nice boat trip through a mangrove forest and a small walk through the jungle to a small fishing village where we had lunch consisting of fresh fish caught in the river earlier in the morning. We will add some extra pictures on line next time we are on the mainland.

The village on our island

Rudolf, the prsents and our Christmas tree

Christmas breakfast with pancakes and champagne

The dog felt vey wet and lonely since he was not allowed to swim to mainland in the territory of our dogs

Our trip through the mangroves

Working days

The seahorse research consists of getting to know the substrates the seahorses live on, like sponges, sea urchins, hydrozoans and sea pens. Since sea horses are only a couple of cm, you have to look well to see one. Because of the fishing activities, the number of seahorses have greatly diminished and so far we have not even seen one. Others have, so it's just a question of continuing and being lucky.

Six years ago you would see several sea horses during one survey, now we see 1 sea horse on every 2-3 surveys. The survey consists of a transect in the water of 50 m. With a group of 5 people you put two ropes of 50 in the water and 2 people zigzag along one rope looking for seahorses and substrates, 2 people zigzag a transect along the second rope and the fifth person reels in the rope again.

In a morning or afternoon we do transects on 2 different locations. The other part of the day you can join in on some land based activities. These activities are mostly beach cleanings. In Sihanoukville and the surrounding islands the sewers lead directly into the sea (you can even see the sand getting dark brown in some spots of all the nutrients of the excrements) and garbage is thrown everywhere on the ground and in the see. That means that, depending on the wind, the coast can be full with plastic, rope, bottles, etc. Other activities include a snorkel survey were we look for invertebrates and snorkeling to clean garbage in the sea like fishing nets which are attached to rocks or coral.

As ecologists we do have some issues concerning the land based activities. We are only cleaning other peoples garbage, which is fine, but unfortunately the organisation we work for does not do anything to protect the reef or take preventive measures against the garbage thrown everywhere, also because the municipality and the people are not very cooperative. Because the project might move to another place in a couple of months (where the municipality is making an effort to be a clean city), we are a bit reluctant to set up our own activities because they will probably not carried out for long. Dolf is going to try to build a weather station which will measure wind direction, and force, temperature, air pressure and humidity. We have bought some equipment and downloaded some articles to start building.

The village has 1 small school, but 3 Dutch teachers just arrived and are going to teach the school children and teachers for 1 year, so Annelies still has to see if she can do something with environmental education. Khmer is a difficult language to learn so that will be a challenge. At the moment we have 1 Cambodian general manager who speaks English and 1 English manager who speaks Khmer, so communication is sometimes interesting.

On Friday you can choose to go to the mainland or to Koh Rong. If you stay on the island, you do a fun dive in the afternoon, while the others take the bout to their destinations. The visibility is not really great and because of the overfishing there are not always much fish swimming around. The interesting part of this is that you look at the smaller things you normally overlook, like invertebrates and nudibranches.

The Cambodians are very friendly people, but because we are with so many volunteers and do not speak Khmer, we mostly hang out with the volunteers. The temperature is increasing and each day is over 30 degrees, rising to 40 in April. Because we live next to the see, we almost always have a cool breeze. That means we will probably adjust our travel plans and make some short trips in extended weekends. Cambodia is not a really big country which makes it relatively easy to travel around. There are more than enough busses to each destination. Visiting Angkor Wat in over 40 degrees might not be a good idea. We will probably spend Christmas on the island, since everybody is travelling at that time.

Living on Koh Rong Samlem

Finally a message from us. The internet connection is not good enough to post blogs.  Last weekend we were on neighbouring island Koh Rong,  but the internet connection of the whole island was off.
We have had a good time up to now.  Dolf is in training to become a dive master and Annelies has joined the survey team to investigate seahorses and their habitat. The first week the weather was sometimes too bad for diving, with high waves, wind and choppy water but it has definitely improved by now. The climate change is noticed here as well, because from November onwards the sea is supposed to be flat.
We live in very basic conditions. We share a small two room bungalow with four people in bunk beds. The second room is our shower which consists of a big ton of cold water. The living room is under a big roof with big tarps as walls.  They are usually open to let the breeze in.We will add some pictures in our next blog to give you a better idea.
We live together with a group of volunteers that varies in size. We started with 30 and are now down to 20.
Some volunteers stay two weeks, while others stay for several months. Most are European but there are also people from the states, Canada and Australia. The food is actually pretty good, but is of course always accompanied with rice. On the mainland you can buy lots of different fruits and there are many western restaurants. In sihanoukville you can find food from every European country because a lot of Western people started their own restaurant. We just bought a kilo of rambutans, comparable with lychee. Dragonflies are also really good. Search for a picture on the internet, both inside and outside, because they look pretty weird.

We live next to a small village of fisherman. Unfortunately, bigger trawlers from Thailand and Vietnam have largely depleted the local fish population, which means we are mainly measuring the recovery of the reef. The local kids catch squid using lines from their small foam boats and the village fishermen have only long boats. There is a 300m sustainable fishing zone around the island but unfortunately the patrol team is undermanned and paid extra by the big companies to close their eyes when a trawler comes along. However, the marine life is still abundant and interesting to discover. Tomorrow we will post a blog which describes our work more in detail.