April 25. Hong Kong is beautiful from far away; highrises straddle the line between shore front and mountain. The city burns with people, noise, lights, and movement. So far I’ve seen pushers with their guesthouses, massage shops, and watches, I’ve seen crystal clean shopping malls, and I’ve seen blocks of restaurants with chickens hanging in the window. April 26. I spent the day walking, passing by the markets, the vistas, and the city itself. There were monkeys in the middle of a city park, there was a street lined with goldfish and baby turtles, another with ginseng roots and medicinal bird’s nests, another with dried marine products. The food was great in the cheap restaurants, the service quick and gruff. There were businessmen of all countries, but just a few blocks from the banking district you could see men in dirty clothes handling boxes and spitting frequently. In the apartment building of the hostel there was a woman in a bathrobe, she was on the balcony talking on a cell phone. She must have been there more than two hours.
Looking back now, this was one of my clearest memories of the beginning of my travel; there was something memorable about seeing people living their lives, similar to a life that I knew but different in a way. After six months of this, I have come to think that this is just exactly how the world is: everything is different, but only in little ways; there are only slight differences that set our cultures apart.
Compared to Japan, Hong Kong is more diverse, has of course more skyscrapers, wider streets and sidewalks, and is much louder. Kissing in public, wrinkled veterans dancing taichi in the dawn light of the parks, and Indians and Chinese struggling to comprehend each other in accented English are but a few lucid memories of this city. I met two Koreans who were traveling through here, one had just finished his military service, and the other was just entering.
April 27. I’m in Cebu, in the Philippines: after many years, back in the tropics. Its warm even at night time, people move slowly, the beer is a little warm, and geckos saunter up the restaurant walls. I’m overcome with a feeling of warmth and ease. I’m sating at perhaps the 7th hotel that I have stopped at this night; after continuous rejection from full hotels, I’m still only paying $9 for a decent room, and I don’t even have to share it with anyone. So far I’ve seen motor tricycles, jeepneys, and all other kinds of internal combustion engines packing the streets; in Manila I had to take a bus from the international airport ot the domestic one, somehow I feel that that is about all I need to see of the capital. It looked like, well, Manila. How else can you describe something that completely fills up to your expectations? Back here in Cebu, just about the whole citizenry seems to be loitering on the sidewalk, waiting for something to happen, and both of the taxi drivers asked me if I wanted to meet a girl that “they knew.”
April 27. I found my friend Ethan at Moalboal, diving with his monitoring team, and I joined them in the afternoon. It was the first time in two years, and a long time since I had seen a coral reed with brightly colored fish. They monitor the protected areas; he says that mot of the fish are bought for a luxury item. We looked at the beach and had a beer, his group of six are all young Philippinos, in addition to one Australian girl. Then we went to a dinner feast of a local dive shop owner who’s running for Congress; they brought out a roasted pig on an oar. When they drink, they drink a small glass of beer, in turn, out of a big bottle.
April 28. We rode eight people on a motor trike to breakfast, which we ate on someone’s patio. We dove in the morning and I saw a sea turtle in the wild for the first time. (After this I was to see one on just about every dive in southeast Asia). We ate lunch at someone’s house again, it was fiesta weekend of the town’s patron saint Vincente, as well as being the local election. People were waiting in shifts to get seats in the kitchen and eat lunch, continuously being schlepped out be a large woman standing next to the stove. We took a minibus back to Cebu, it was swerving around jeepneys, buses, motor trikes, bicycles, and pedestrians the whole way. We ate dinner at a pizza restauraunt in a shopping mall, it was about ten times the price of anywhere else I had eaten in the country. From the sidewalk tables all you could see was a parking lot full of clean cars; no people waiting around, no trikes.
May 1. I’ve stayed at Ethan’s place in Cebu for a couple days now, we went snorkeling and diving nearby, we also spent a day in the city with his friends getting tattoos and drinking beer in the afternoon; I got a haircut in a little hut on the side of the road; there were several people watching and the man said that he was shocked that he was getting business. We went to a dinner for Philippine Peace Corps volunteers, they had some interesting and varied experiences doing community work and teaching, some of them were jaded from difficulties with local customs, others with lack of direction from the Peace Corps office. One woman reminded me that its always better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. After diving in Cebu today, we went to the town market and saw a lot of the same fish, this time lying on a table for sale. They were all extremely small. Today I ate green fringed mussels and snails so tiny you had to pick out the meat with a toothpick. Ethan said they were called poor man’s fish; we had seen people collecting them at low tide earlier in the day. We had walked down to the beach at sunset and were followed by some kids who sprinted out in front of me every time I took my camera out; it became a challenge to take a photo of anything but their faces, close up. We were also given a few drinks of coconut moonshine from a group of mostly women. Expecting the worst, I was not let down.
May 2. It took a very long time to arrive at Apo Island, and I will dive tomorrow. I started on an aircon bus that was cool and quiet but still crowded, next to me were a mother and two girls, all in one seat. The bus dropped me off at a dive resort of mostly Japanese tourists, after this I took a boat across to another island, and took another bus, this one the most crowded I have even been on in my life. One last boat across the choppy water and I’ve finally arrived at the dive island, it is known throughout the world as one of the best examples of a community run marine sanctuary. After seeing it for just a few days, I would guess to agree: the reef is in good shape, there are large fish, it seems to get support from the community, and the community seems to be prospering. There’s even a guard on duty against illegal fishing 24 hours a day. I walked down the beach at sunset and saw two men skinning a chicken on the shore, I am now quite sure that I have seen everything. This is one of the most beautiful island I have ever seen. The sun sets and gives way to a warm, starry night; videoke music drifts quietly in the background.
May 6. Diving at Apo Island was amazing, coral and fish were everywhere, I saw turtles on every dive, even on a night dive I saw a turtle sleeping; it was so peaceful and beautiful it made me think about how nature really exists. On Friday
I watched the sun rise from an old lighthouse on top of the island, I watched the sun set from the ferry returning to Cebu. Both times the sun came or went over a tiny island in the vast distance of the ocean. Riding the ferry is quite nice, there’s a little more space than a bus and it doesn’t stop every five minutes and honk at something. Yesterday Ethan and I went to the site of Magellan’s death and did a minor re-enactment.
May 8. I went diving in Bohol at Panglao, now I’m staying in the jungle at Nuts Huts on the Loboc River. The divers and dive staff were mostly German, and their safety standards were extremely lax. They didn’t seem to interested in the fish either. Why do they come (and stay) there? The rest of the beach was populated by numerous leathery elder Europeans. But the beach was redeemed by a great selection of books in the hostel and a few superb beers on the beach. I ran into some of the Peace Corps volunteers that I had met with Ethan.
Taking a jeepney to get to the jungle river, we roll out of town cruising 10 mph down a straight, broad road nearly devoid of traffic, while the radio is blaring out only the worst sets of pop music. And there is nothing I can do about it. On the next bus, a very friendly man helped me find the jungle lodge, walking down the bumpy road to the entrance, everyone waved and said hello to me. Nuts Huts is full of backpackers fascinatingly traveled yet tortuously pretentious. They speak in vocabulary quite extensive and none are from North America. I fall asleep to the sounds of insects and frogs this time, rather than waves.
May 9: spent the day riding around the hills on a motorbike with a German guy named Neils. We stopped at a man’s house to duck out of a downpour, gazed into a 300 year old Catholic Church, walked straight up to handfuls of Tarsiers (a rare primate found only in the Philippines), and cruised through the Chocolate Hills.
May 10: hiked through jungle villages and huts up to an enormous cave, swam across the Loboc River coming while floating karaoke restaurant boats passed by. Heading out, I rode in the front seat of the jeepney back through Taglibaran out towards Cabilao, where I met Ethan and friends once more. His directions were to take a boat out to an island and ask for Peetey’s house. I wasn’t worried, and rightly so; getting there was a breeze. We spent the night at his friends house singing old folk songs to the sound of a old guitar and slept on mats in the living room.
May 11. Woke up at sunrise and dove at Cabilao, there were millions of fish and a few pygmy seahorses. Took a slow boat that smelled like a farm back to Cebu. Cabilao was truly amazing, just as nice as Apo and much better than Panglao, although you have to work a little harder to get there. A lot of the dive sites in the Philippines depend more on what they got on land than what’s in the water: you’re going to find pretty amazing stuff wherever you look, your experience as a whole will depend more on the lodge and the atmosphere surrounding it. Panglao and Moalboal are much more developed and you get what comes along with that: restaurants, bars, and souvenirs. Apo and Cabilao are isolated islands, diving is about all that’s going on and you will find much quieter if any nightlife and a welcome respite from commercialism and things touristy.
May 13. Batad, Philippines, the last village on Earth. OK, of course this superlative gets thrown around, but this place deserves it. From the tourist rice terrace village of Banaue, a jeep runs infrequently the 10 km route to the end of the dirt highway on the top of a mountain; from here it’s a 2 kmk hike down a proper trail into the village of Batad. I ran into some local kids who are college students on vacation, returning from voting in the town; they shared their lunch with me and we hiked together into the valley while each of them took turns holding the chicken that was to be their dinner. Talk about an amazing life; they lived weekdays in Banaue for high school, returning home only on weekends, now they attend university in the next town further. We stopped at their house on the way into the village, a an aluminum roofed structure of decent size; they pointed to the thatched hut where they all lived as children and called it “the native hut.” It was about four square meters raised on stilts, and now was a mere grain storage.
Sitting on the porch of one of the lodges, sipping coffee and peering across the endless expanse of damp green terraces, its hard to get more perfect. In the background a girl named Maya strums beautifully on the guitar. The lodge serves a suprising variety of Israeli dishes, thanks to a wave of their tourists from the 80’s. Locals ask me if I am Isreali (almost as funny as all the times in China when locals ask me if I am French). Folks here talk on cell phones but also skin chickens and live in huts without electricity or running water. Pick and choose technologies.
May 15. I walked around Batad and the rice terraces today; I saw a man sitting in a hut wearing complete traditional garb and obviously not posing for any photo; he looked as if he hadn’t moved all day. At a waterfall a woman asked me to sing a song, then she proceeded to sing “Country Road” and told me that it was a song by Elvis. So many Filipinos that I’ve met have amazing language skills, they often speak one or two local dialects, the national language, and often English as well, even in the rural areas. I hear conversations where one person speaks a local dialect to another person who responds in English. I met some French folks on vacation from their grad school in Singapore; we played boggle and talked about travel and the new French president Sarkozy. I hired a guide to walk around the rice terraces in Banaue, he showed me how they plant the rice in seedlots and then transport it to the main field, in order to keep them from washing away; he also showed me how the irrigation drips down from one terrace to another. They only plant once a year and its basically organic so the yield is very low, the rice that they produce can’t even sustain the small town. The villages were only really entered from the outside about a hundred years ago; the Spanish had effectively left the interior mountain areas alone.
May 18: Singapore. A city apart from the rest- fast, clean, high tech; international- Chinese, whites, Indian sailors, Muslims, Vietnamese hookers, Singaporean kids in military service. British influence is easily noticeable with whitewashed hotels, Indian bellhops, Anglican steeples, grassy lawns, and afternoon tea. A street corner food court will hold between five and ten counters dishing cheap Chinese food; people are eating all day. Markets sell coconuts, pineapples, and any kind of juice imaginable. 
Indian restaurants pack in middle aged women in saris, while young Muslim women in head scarves return from work on the city buses. The Arab neighborhood sports entire blocks full of silk shops, I meet a friendly man trying to sell me a carpet. But I don’t have a house, what can I do with a carpet, counter, sure that this salesman has nowhere to go with me. You gotta start somewhere, he responds, and realizing hopelessness, starts asking me where I from. You can’t be American, all the Americans have big muscles, he laughs, grabbing my biceps. Meanwhile, the Indian neighborhood sports entire blocks full of jewelry shops, and I fill the rest of the afternoon passing Hindu temples, mosques, and a Chinese Buddhist temple where patrons are packed together raising incense above their heads and depositing stalks of lotus by the hundreds. At the hostel, the enjoyable Betel Box, a met a guy from San Francisco who travels around the world as a freelance nano-technologist, a Canadian living in Bali who came to Singapore for his birthday (37), and two Danish girls on the way home from New Zealand as WWOOF volunteers.
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