Rainy morning ...

Sooo stoked about not submitting to peer pressure and not going out with everyone else! I had a good night sleep and woke up fresh and ready for the day. Pity, that the weather isn’t that great. It’s been raining since yesterday evening and stopped only for a little while. Anyways, what I wanted to share now, were my impressions of hostel life. It’s the life on max speed – you meet people, make friends and then they’re gone the next day. It’s worse than exchange - if you decide to take a day off, you’re out. Here it’s the same, but then every day comes a new bunch of backpackers and you can start from the beginning and make even more friends. So, the bad impression of the first day is gone after I met some truly amazing people. There is this couple – Canadians, who teach English in Seoul. They’ve been travelling on and off for 5 years now – amazing people! And the stories I heard from them, wow! They made Tibet sound like a heaven on earth, an “India light” as they put it. Which made me really want to go there. An amazing thing is, that the guy is a financier by education and he took a simple English teaching job just to be in Asia and be able to travel. And, he doesn’t miss the finance job!

Beach bound!

Hm…Kitesurfing didn’t work out today. Tomorrow it will…hopefully :P Today was beach time and working hard on the tan. It is funny how cultures are different in Asia and in the West when it comes to the skin color. Being white is worshipped, since if you have tan, it means that you are a simple worker, whereas in the West, if you have nice tan, it projects the image of prosperity – the fact that you can pay for holidays in a sunny place, especially in winter.

So yeah, just lazy relax and swimming in the sea, which really is gorgeous. During the day the water is really shallow for a long time, but when you finally reach a point where your toes can’t touch the seabed, you can still see it clearly – just watch out for the boats that far away. Floating is amazing, just gazing into the bright blue sky or observing the boats…Pure procrastination. Oh, I did proceed on reading “The girl who played with fire” and I think it’s not as good of a book. There is tons of unnecessary description of shopping in IKEA that drags on what seems like forever. The dialogues don’t have any depth and the characters are shallow. The first book of the series, “The girl with the dragon tattoo” was a bit better, but for the same reasons it was a torment to go through the first half until the actual action begun. So I’m going to break the principle of finishing the books and just give it away. By the way, I wish somebody came up with a thing, that would register my thoughts during the day and that I wouldn’t have to carry around and remember about. I forget so many things I want to put in writing!

Another day in paradise?

Well...so much for my enthusiasm. The guys I met were cool, one Brit, two Canadians and one American to start with. I found it a bit difficult to keep up with them since they treated me like a native speaker and went on talking in their jargon. I also had my freezing water splash in the face. I am not that cool. Haha. Those guys have been all over the place! Like literary everywhere!

Anyways, the first glow wore off and after taking a stroll along the beach where all the life concentrates I am… well… disgusted to be blunt. The whole island consists of restaurants, massage places and diving centers. And tourist shops. The place is swarmed with families with fat children, packs of girls in their perfect make up and brand bags. Such a shallow and superficial society… one could definitely make a series about life in hostels; or on exchange. They would both be equally interesting. Those American and Canadian kids are here just to drink to oblivion, do drugs and throw out money. That is definitely not my thing and I just dream of having wifi at the beach so I can just research where to escape this place to while relaxing in a hammock. Anyways, since I am very flexible I might not stay here for New Year’s after all. We’ll see. I still want to learn kitesurfing though, so if I do stay, that will be the reason. But at the moment I am very open to suggestions to alternate my plans? Dear Pilipino friends, where can I kitesurf and spend NY at?

EDIT: So I gave it another shot and it seems there is a person I can have an actual conversation on a decent intellectual level. So, let’s check out the kitesurf schools today and be positive!

Bora Bora...Boracay!!! Mabuhay!

Dear dad, please don’t worry, I got here safe. Please stop reading here haha. No, to be serious, I’m at the hostel drinking my welcome San Miguel at the moment. The ride here was wow….how to describe it… let’s say adventurous. Took a flight with a propeller plane, very small and shaky and looking um…second-hand lol. The flight attendant’s voice sounded like she’s been drinking for the past week. My boarding pass was handwritten; there was no luggage belt, so they handled my backpack as if it was a coat in the theater – over the counter. Then came the additional fees – and they seem to charge for everything here: the environmental fee, the airport fee, the ferry terminal fee,…… So I took a tricycle to the jetty port and just followed the crowd to the very unstable looking boat. A few months back I probably wouldn’t dare board it, but now – what the hell! I had a mate that entertained me through this a bit scary journey – a retired Pilipino physics teacher. By the way, on the airport in Cebu, guess what I heard – polish language!! I will never get away from the Poles haha – they are currently undergoing a silent invasion of the world :P Anyways, than another tricycle to the hostel. The welcome drink and I just met 2 guys travelling alone. Love hostels! It took me what – 30 min to meet other travellers !

Bohol

Bohol. Wow, where do I start? Bohol is one of the Spice Islands, located not far from Cebu in the Visayas. When you see the pictures in travel agencies advertising for beach destinations, do you (like me) think they’re all retouched? Well guess what! I’ve just been to this paradise place and what I saw is exactly like those pics: white sand, palm trees, hammocks, straw huts, exotic animals etc etc. … So let’s start from the beginning.

Early morning when we were about to wake up it appeared that tickets for the morning ferry to Bohol were sold out so we had to shorten our stay and left finally at 12. During the trip I finally got some time to read my Lonely Planet and FINALLY decided on the further destinations. Seems that 2 months is less time than I thought – but what could I expect wanting to see the whole SEA:P I decided to skip the beaches of Thailand and jump from Laos straight to Jakarta (or Kuala Lumpur – we’ll see). Anyways, back to Bohol: we got to Tagbilaran around 14.30 - just in time for a tour around the island! Our first stop was the monument to commemorate the “Blood Pact” – the peace pact between a Spanish explorer Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, who came to Bohol looking for spices and gold, and the local chief in command. Apparently the Spaniards had a lot of trouble convincing the locals, that they weren’t Portuguese, who left bad memories after a massacre of the locals some time before. So to seal the deal the two guys made a blood pack - how cool is that :P Second stop on the route was the second oldest church in the Philippines – pretty, but I liked more the high school band rehearsing outside... Meeting the Tarsier was our next stop. Those smallest primates with huge eyes are incredibly cute. Since they were kept in captivity for the amusement of tourists I can suspect they were drugged in order not to escape at the sight of a white girl. Poor little creatures… maybe at least they won’t die out so fast if they’re in captivity. Plus, they have a significant input into the local economy; their cartoon image is on all T-shirts, they’re on key chains, pouches and whatever else you can think of. On the way to the Chocolate Hills we drove past a man-made forest, which I still don’t know why it is a tourist attraction, but apparently every tour stopped there to take pictures with the trees. The Chocolate Hills provided spectacular scenery. They are peculiar in shape, more like green blisters than chocolate, but apparently in autumn when they turn brown, they really do look like chocolate). The final stopover was the hanging bridge. Lots of fun seeing how terrified the girls were. Myself, I lost my confidence when I suddenly slipped :P Another attraction of that place was a guy who could open a coconut with his teeth – a performance I was unlucky to miss. On the way to the Beach Resort Hotel, we could see the sunset (well not exactly but we caught a glimpse of it). It was beautiful when the sky was changing colors from rosy pink, through orange to fiery red, just to turn pitch black. The hotel was very pretty at night, but much overpriced for the room quality. The highlight of the evening was a nighttime Jacuzzi – 6 girls photo shooting and splashing each other…lol. Next day, I was too lazy to get up for the sunrise unfortunately. But when I finally did, we went to the beach to try out the sea. I was like a child seeing a beach for the first time in my life. The white sand looked like powdered cement (lol) and the sun was just too bright for my eyes to handle. I watched my steps carefully not to step on a starfish –believe me there were tons of them in different colors and sizes, sea urchins and other unknown to me sea creatures, which I had never dealt with before and had no idea whether they were deadly or only dangerous. See I was brought up with this idea in my mind that sea creatures especially exotic ones are dangerous. They are not. At least starfish are not. And with sea urchins you just need to watch out where you step. I could admire more of the underwater world when we took the glass-bottom boat ride. I loved the indigo blue fish, the underwater cliffs and the super clear water where you can see all the corals, Nemos, more colorful starfishes etc. I felt like jumping off the boat and just playing with them :P Later we went swimming in the pool – I know, a sin in such paradise; then checked out and had a lovely lunch that Included the crab that looked like it was cooked alive – meaning it still had eyes, legs and clamps. Now, I’m back in Kim’s bedroom getting ready for another Pilipino paradise – Boracay, here I come!

Island hopping

Some things I forgot yesterday. While on the Skywalk, the guy who took care that we don’t fall or hurt ourselves asked for my nationality. When I said Polish, someone from the crowd was saying: “Polish? As in nail polish?”… Later the same guy when talking to me about the Big Trip, he commented that I must be looking for something, something that I am missing… so, what am I missing?

Day 5: Islands…somewhere near Lapu-Lapu island

Some people spend their first day of Christmas in front of the TV, eating into obesity or going skiing. My day was a little bit different :)

So, today we woke up very early, to my surprise without bigger problems, we had breakfast at Jollibee and then departed from Mactan island on a fishing boat that looked kind of like a dragonfly to me, on an island hopping day trip. It was awesome. We swam with the fish – finding Nemo, sunbaked on the deck, dared to sit on the bow with feet in the water and breeze splashing in the face. Despite the weather forecasts of rain we had sun, a lot of sun actually (I even managed to get some color!). Good that Kim’s family isn’t so sun-phobic as most Asians (like the girls on the beach in Kenting – south of Taiwan, clad from toes to tips of hair). The water was warm and very clear, of my favorite turquoise color. The currents weren’t very strong but the some of us had problems swimming back to the boat, so there was a quick rescue mission – our steersman jumping in with a rope. We made a short stopover at one of the little islands and took a tricycle ride around the island. Hilarious part was trying to figure out how many people can fit into one. We were 9, and managed to fit into only two tricycles. The island was very pretty but poor, had a lot of little restaurants and small shops. My guess is that the people living there must be mostly fishermen. We also had delicious lunch in a “Live seafood” floating restaurant, which is exactly what it says it is. It’s away from the shore, the staff helps you dock and get up to the restaurant by crooked, unsafe looking stairs (ladder?). The floor is made of bamboo, it was funny walking around on it, seeing how thin it is (you could see the water and seabed clearly) and imagining what would happen if it broke. Well, nothing would happen, you’d probably just land in the sea – big deal! Menu was interesting, namely several bowls with scary looking sea creatures – yeas they were still alive! There were lobsters imprisoned in coke bottles that looked like giant bees, huge sea snails, Lapu-Lapu fish, and a lot of shell creatures. So you basically came up to the bowls and said what you wanted, the lady packed the still living to-be-food on a basket and after 20 min or so it came back edible :P I loved the calamari and mussels, but I’m not going to be a huge fan of the things in big shells (?). On the way back we all just chilled, sat on the bow and enjoyed the wavy ride.

Sorry folks, no drama or deep thoughts today. Only one observation: polish jokes ain’t funny around here :P