Tourist Tragedy

Pat Roque/AP

I know this has been on the news internationally. (Here's one account).

Last night a hostage taking went very wrong and 8 tourists from Hong Kong were killed when police stormed their tourist bus that had been seized and held for 11 hours by a former (fired) police officer, who was armed and wearing a police uniform.

This is not the first time tourists have been targeted in a major way. In 2001 a group of tourists were kidnapped from a resort island as part of a wider group of kidnappings of Filipinos that year by the group Abu Sayyef. Some of the tourists were kept in the jungle for a year. Some were killed by the kidnappers and some died during the rescue attempt.

Yesterday's hostage taking by one man was shown live on television throughout the day. I didn't see it but the maid, Rebecca, had watched it in the evening when it all went so horribly wrong and when she came to work this morning she wanted to talk about it. She was very upset and at one point while relaying the story she started to cry.

With tearful eyes she finished by saying "I'm sorry ma'am", as though she felt a need to apologize on behalf of all Filipinos to all foreign visitors.

By total coincidence, the Bank's Spousal Association was holding a previously scheduled meeting this morning where representatives of the Tourist Board and quite a few Philippine resorts were promoting themselves at booths lining the room with tables piled with glossy brochures and photo-filled CD's and off-season, local resident deals for the taking. It was well attended.

Hovering

We spent the weekend in a place called Anilao, a 3 hour drive south of Manila. This 25 km stretch of ocean front is home to many dive resorts and apparently is a popular destination for Manila divers no doubt because of the great diving but also because of the ease of access, No need to fly or take a boat to another of the 7107 islands of this country. The other benefit of going somewhere you can drive to (or somebody can drive to) is the cooler full of wine, imported beer and Diet Root Beer!

I don't dive anymore but was thrilled to see the house reef off the beach - which was really why we'd chosen the place to finally put our new snorkeling gear to good use. We haven't been to a Philippine resort in quite some time (see Getting There is Half the Fun) and I liked this one because it was fairly new and there are only 13 suites. Also, this is rainy (off) season and the place was only half full. Many levels of different structures all the way up a hill from the beach - you can recline by the pool, in the lounge, in the treehouse, by the bar, by the mid-level pavilion, on the beach, on the balcony - many and varied are the reclining opportunities. And places to watch the sunset from.

So, several times a day there I was, out on the reef, hovering, trying to take in all there was to see, which was impossible -  corals and fish and any number of other things. I don't know why, but I had some kind of NEED to name everything. I'd look at a particular fish trying to memorize its markings, to later look it up in the Indo-Pacific reef book I'd brought - only to find that somewhere between the water and the beach my mind like a steel... uh, sieve, would forget the details. But who cares in the end. The shapes and colors and variety and movement, oh it was all so wonderful.

I did, however, have a complaint - and it's pretty major. At times when I was out there, face down, I'd feel something brushing up against an arm and, fearful it was a jellyfish, I'd try to move away while turning to face it. It was garbage! Empty pancit (instant noodle) wrappers, candy wrappers, plastic bags, rubber flip flops, who knows what else, all mixed in with cracked open coconut husks. Some days were worse than others and some times of day were worse than others but it was more or less always an issue. I remember when I first went diving many years ago and found a single beer bottle on the sandy bottom so jarring. Well this was almost unbelievable in the volume of stuff, except for the fact that I believe it completely. Of course some of the plastic had sunk to the bottom amidst the coral reef but it was the stuff floating on the surface that was the worst. Sometimes you literally had to brush it aside to move through it.

Last September 19 was International Coastal Clean Up Day and over 500 volunteers took part in the event in Anilao. In a 5 km stretch of the coast, in a 9 hour day, they picked up 1800 kg of trash.

The Philippines is certainly not alone with this problem, not that that makes it any better. Even out in the middle of the Pacific, away from the shoreline,  there are several huge accumulations of trash; one is said to be as big as Texas. Ouch.

Speaking of "ouch", on the last morning we were there, on my second fairly lengthy hovering trip to the reef, I got damaged. I wore a t-shirt so my back is fine, but the backs of my legs are so burnt I've been swallowing Advil, slathering on the aloe vera and perching precariously on the edge of my chair ever since we got home. I've said this before, I'm obviously not getting older and wiser, at the very least just older, but more probably older and stupider!

Getting out of Dodge

 
Last weekend we went to the oceanside resthouse, as they call them here, of some friends of ours. The beach house was a three hour drive south of Manila.

We had been planning some snorkeling trips so this was the perfect excuse for a daring raid on the sports equipment store, which was fun to get all new equipment and see how things had changed. Or not. Our previous equipment did not survive the purge in Ottawa (Getting Ready to Leave) as it was, I'm astonished to admit this, 25 years old and furthermore had not been stored particularly well. All those years of piles of STUFF in the basement - never again!

So there we were, coolers packed, sun screen, insect repellent and brand new snorkeling equipment, notwithstanding the fact that a typhoon was passing to the north of the country and another low pressure system, whatever that is, was causing gale force winds and waves along coastal Luzon, which is where we were headed. Hope springs eternal. Once we got there we gazed at the sea waves rolling in over the offshore reef, every now and then saying, "I think those waves are getting smaller..." with that little uplifted lilt at the end of the phrase, kind of a "don't you think?", ever hopeful , if I say it it will come true kind of question.

Alas, snorkeling wasn't to be, but it was still a great weekend, getting out of the city and spending time by the ocean air. Serious hammock time. At night we had a bonfire by the beach and saw that after dark bright lights appeared offshore, groups of very bright spotlights. These were night fishing boats, about five of them.

It was also a weekend for an economics lesson. Our friends employ a number of people from the local village including the housekeeper, foreman and half a dozen construction laborers, as they have been building on the property for years and years, including currently constructing a new house. (One of the projects was to build 270 steps to take you down to the property from the road above. Took three days for calf muscles to recuperate). Late Sunday morning my friend and I decided to take a walk along the beach to the village.

The end of the road

The village is at the end of the road. Literally. 48 families live there in the woods, and even in this very basic place of houses under the trees and dirt paths, you can see a difference in affluence. Some structures are made of plywood and thatch, some are more solidly build of concrete blocks. There are not a lot of opportunities to make money. Some have found jobs at the local resorts, some in small-scale construction like those working for my friends, some fish, and four families have relatives who are overseas workers in Israel and Canada who send home money. We also saw some men on small horses who had come down from even more remote mountain villages to sell fruit that they carried in woven basket saddlebags.

If you are there during the week and the tide is low, you will see the children walking past along the beach in their school uniforms, heading for an elementary school at the next village. Primary education is supposedly free in the Philippines and yet many Filipino children still don't even attend. Here's why.

The laborers working on the house earn about 220 pesos a day. About $5. One of the men has 6 little children. In the early school years the children can walk to the next village to go to school, assuming they can afford the uniforms. But in the higher grades they have to go to the school in a more distant village and to get there they need to not only walk the distance to the next village but from there they need to take the jeepney to another school. 12 pesos one way. Do the math. 24 pesos a day times x (lots) children.

Only about half of Filipino children continue to complete secondary school.

I would have been very hesitant to walk through this village if I hadn't been with my friend who was known to the people, and as it was I wasn't completely comfortable. It reminded me of some of the hill tribe villages I'd seen in Laos, except in those cases, the residents saw many western visitors passing through, as it was on a tourism circuit. In the middle of this Filipino village there was a thatched roof open air pavilion with a pool table, where most of the men were congregated. Some women were washing clothes in the stream - I don't know what they do in the dry season - and under another small open air roofed area a woman was ironing clothes. I commented that I think ironing is a complete waste of time (although time may be something in abundance there) but my friend told me there is another reason for ironing. The heat kills insects that may be in the clothes hung out to dry in the humid jungle air. That would never have occurred to me.

There is electricity brought through to the end of the road and a village water supply pumped in from mountain streams. A couple of the concrete homes have attached sari-sari stores, a common entrepreneurial venture - "selling little things to each other" as one of our house guests once described it - probably also financed from overseas workers. Some of the construction workers have expressed a desire to move to Manila for work. Our friend has pointed out to them that workers in Manila only earn about 350 pesos a day and after having to pay for a room and transport and so on in the big city, they wouldn't really be better off financially. But perhaps the concrete is always greener on the other side. Millions and millions have left the rural villages for the Big Cough, as is so in so many other poor countries.

Kitchen

The house that the construction laborer with 6 children lives in is one of the poorest looking of the bunch. One room, about 10x10 feet with a tiny cooking shed attached. Lots of little children, very close in age plus new additions to the household, 5 puppies. The bowl of rice needs to be divided, then divided, then divided again, with every additional mouth to feed.

The family of 8 with the new puppies. That is their home in the background.

My friend over the years has let it be known that if any family in the village would like to complete their families, she will provide the funds for vasectomy or tubal ligation, something they would never be able to afford otherwise. Quite a few have taken her up on it.

Maury Chaykin

Maury Chaykin died last week on his 61st birthday.

I had been thinking about him recently, as his Whale Music character came to mind while scanning the horizon at at Ten Mile Point some weeks ago (J-Pod). 

We watched the Whale Music DVD again over the weekend and it was every bit as fine as I had remembered it many years ago. A really bold and physically courageous role.