Nature's powerful forces

Manila bay walk has been my 'front yard' for the two years I've lived in charming Malate, or the 'Old Manila' which some voices claim to be a despicable red like district while others call it the home of the art scene.

Two days after typhoon Pedring paid a visit to Manila's bay side I paid my visit. I almost didn't recognize it. It's beat up, torn up, fractured in every meter of its roughly 1 kilometer long leg, stretching from Manila Yacht Club to the US Embassy.

Like a battered body with gaping wounds it's lying there lifelessly. Sandbags fill the gaps in the sea wall which looks like its front teeth got knocked out. Manila bay walk an open corpse exposing broken bright orange water pipes, like disconnected veins and arteries.

I feel like a voyeur, attracted to the crime scene by a youtube video, which shows the beating, the merciless pounding of an angry sea.

The city of Manila started collecting the skeletal remains, wipe off the blood, and catalog the damage. It's gonna take a few months in plaster bed before Manila bay walk will be able to walk again.

A stormy visit

It's not the calm before the storm, it's the rain which announces the soon arrival of a typhoon.

After non-stop rain on Monday, typhoon "Pedring", with the international code name "Nesat", made landfall on the Eastern coast of Luzon yesterday. Although north-east of Metro Manila, Pedring made its presence felt in the Metro with incredible wind gusts, uprooting trees, and flooding homes and streets. Today, the sky is gray. Scattered rain showers mark Pedring's exit from the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR), lowering the Public Storm Warning Signal (PSWS) in Manila from yesterday's #2 to #1.

I did not learn about office suspension until I was already on my way to work... (I'm not discussing the effectiveness of late-night e-mail announcements or 8am text message to inform workers of office suspension...). Bravely, I was making my way to the walled city of Intramuros, home of my local office. At 7:45am, Roxas Boulevard was already impassible. I watched the water flow away from the bay, forcing its way "upstream" along Quirino Avenue. It was not until later that I learned Manila Bay's sea wall partially collapsed under the pounding waves! The US embassy, nestled right at the bay, as well as luxurious hotels such as the Sofitel flooded later on.

I thought it a smart move to detour to the Makati office. Sheltered at the 10th floor I watched Makati being devastated during the four hours of peak winds. The ceiling-to-floor windows uttered weird noises as the wind pounded them mercilessly.

Most parts of Metro Manila were (and still are) without electricity. Either because of broken power lines due to falling trees or due to safety reasons. Usually power companies disconnect flooded areas to avoid accidental electrocution.

After rain and storm come floods and landslides. It will take a while for Metro Manila to regain its normal face and pace.

Plan, built, enjoy!

I think one of mankind's greatest assets is the ability to create. We design, plan, and execute hence shape our environment so we can make use of it.

Our latest project to prove human's superiority over machine and material was to make a desk! Challenged to transform a 4-foot by 8-foot plywood board into a table, Glenn, the design genius, drew up the master plan.

Just as we were ready to show the plywood who is boss we learned there is more than just design principles to consider...

Our plan almost faltered at the very first step: buying appropriate plywood and have it cut according to our measurements.

Immediately we faced two problems: First, to find a Home Depot staff who can measure properly. Second, to machine cut the board.

We solved the first problem by “coaching” the Home Depot staff on how to measure, and to draw a straight line. The second problem was “solved” by buying a hand saw to hand over to the staff who then went on to hand-cut our plywood. Skillfully propped on paint pots, our table-to-be was chopped into three pieces in the middle of isle number 12. At peak time, the staff to customer ratio was 11 to 2... One guy working while 10 stood around volunteering good advice.

After almost an hour, we had overcome the first hurdle of 'semi-processing' our plywood. The next step was to buy wood stain (which turned out to be paint rather than stain and doesn't look anything like light maple), coating, brackets, screws, a wood-file and sandpaper.

3,000 Pesos (50 Euro) later we were back at the house, transforming our garage into a wood working area.

Despite the lack of proper tools to measure right angles, (even the walls or tiles in the house are not suited for any reference to straightness...), after 5 hours of sanding, coating, and semi-assembling, we had produced a square desk!

Three after-work shifts of sanding and coating later, we now have a huge workstation in our office! The product of love, patience, and perseverance!

Underwater Love!

After an exhausting travel to Southern Leyte, we were once more rewarded with a priceless dive experience!

Just like during our first trip to Padre Burgos we were fortunate to meet a marine biologist cum dive master who turned out to be our dive buddy for the weekend. Formerly working for Coral Conservation Cay, Hew was back to Southern Leyte to reminisce his days with the foundation.

Having the eye of a dive master and vast local knowledge of the dive sites he spotted the most remarkable micro life, which Southern Leyte dive spots are famous for! The most fascinating for me was—without doubt—to see mating nudibranchs! Some of those “sea slugs” are so tiny it’s rather hard to spot them in the first place. To see them mate was an absolute highlight! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an underwater sea-slug-sex-pervert! The act of reproduction is, for (almost all) animals and plants, purely to sustain the species – the very essence of nature. It was such a life-defining yet intimate act to witness that I feel truly grateful to have seen it! I mean, how many times do we have the opportunity to peep into nature's bedroom?

Another highlight was to see the manta ray which we were told “hangs out” at a certain spot but has not been seen regularly. Expecting little we got the most: he hovered around our small dive group twice!

The school of dolphins jumping in front of our dive boat and chasing us on the way back to shore was an unexpected add-on to our dive experience we gladly would have paid for.

After each dive we tried to identify the creatures we saw by going through various dive books along with our underwater pictures… sometimes we were so engrossed our dinner got cold. It’s amazing how little we know about the world beneath sea level!

Call it knowledge or trivia (I guess that depends on the eye of the beholder) but did you know that:

• Tiger nudibranchs eat each other? Unbelievable! Those little, colorful, and cute creatures!
• Some nudibranchs grow as big as 30 centimeters (bigger than a man’s hand!)? And we’ve seen two of them, almost choking on our regulators!
• Tunicates have a spine-like structure, thus are “closely related to vertebrates, which include fish and all land animals with bone”? Crazy!
• The area around Sogod Dive Resort lost three dive sites in the last two years due to inappropriate fishing techniques (mainly net fishing which destroys the corals by dragging a net on the bottom of the ocean)?
• I love to see more MPAs (Marine Protected Areas, not to be confused with the Motion Picture Association!), which in Padre Burgos three of the operating dive resort set up to rehabilitate the underwater life and educate local fisher folk?
• The local government does little to nothing to support (dive) tourism in the area but instead makes life hard for the existing or interested investors? Local politics!

The tourism experience in the Philippines is really a mixed bag, a box of chocolates where you never really know what you’ll get. Stunning natural beauty goes along with the most devastating and ignorant fishing, farming, and waste-burning practices.

I like to think that well educated local dive masters take back to their communities the knowledge, which will slowly but truly convert ignorance into competence.