Now, I’ve been considering training as a scuba instructor over the next year or so. It seems like a nice lifestyle, a good string to one’s bow, relatively stress-free, combines easily with other occupations, and the like.

Sure, I’m not the best diver in the world. But compared to earning the money required to spend a lot of time underwater, acquiring a profession which gives you free diving and free time in which to do other things makes a lot of sense from where I’m at now. (Z considers it a “cool job”.)

Then I met Matt…

Matt is from Hawaii by way of Minnesota and a few other places. He’s an amiable, laidback mid-Westerner with a Celtic colouring, somewhere in his mid-20s, teaching scuba by day and bartending by night.

We are in Coron Bay, the Philippines, hanging out after diving some of the monster wrecks out there, and he is running through advanced diver’s sign language (inventively obscene but still highly intuitive).

Then he says, “Of course, as an instructor, you sometimes have to punch your students.”

“Punch your students?” I say. Matt seems so sweet and laid-back, I can’t imagine him punching anyone, though he does have that bartender evil streak.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Who have you punched?” I ask.

“Well,” he says, and gestures to the German couple he taught Rescue Diving a year or so ago, with whom he is holidaying this year. “There was STEVEN.”

They nod, in shared recollection.

“Who was Steven?” Z asks. “What did he do?”

“OK,” he says. “Steven is this big, fat, gay — not that that’s a problem — Irish guy. He was on the rescue diving course where I met these guys. He had a job offer from the resort on the basis of this course. So I thought he’d pay attention.”

“OK,” I say.

“Well,” he says. “We’re doing this exercise where I’m a drowning diver, he has to get out of all his gear, get me all out of my gear, and do a swap. Like I say, he’s not been paying attention. So when he leaves me face down in the water, I’m not overly concerned. I lie there for a while, thinking, come on, I’m face down, he’s got to figure this out, he’s going to figure this out. Then, ‘Nope,’ I think, ‘He’s not,’ so I look up. Just in time to see the top of his head going below the surface.”

“Christ!” I say. “What happened?”

“Well,” says Matt. “He stripped off all my gear. Then he took off all his. Apart from his weights.”

Faces round the table begin to fall in astonishment. “Yep. He’s a big guy, too,” says Matt. “So he’s got around 18 kilos of weights on him. And he’s in panic. So he’s sinking. Flailing.”

“Can’t he take them off?” I ask.

“No,” says Matt. “He’s panicking. Blind panic. He can’t think. He’s going down. No fins. No mask, no snorkel, no regulator. Nothing. And lashing out. So I go down — and I have nothing, no fins, no snorkel, no mask, no air, no BCD — and try and get the weights off him. I can’t see, because I have no mask. And he’s flailing around, going down, down, down, pushing me off him, and I have no fins to keep him up.”

“Jesus!” I say. “How deep was the water?”

Matt turns to the German guys. “How deep was it?” They don’t know. “Let me think. It was a dropoff in Utila, Honduras. Maybe 50 metres, 60 metres, straight down.”

I try and envisage this guy sinking — like the proverbial stone. To certain death. “So I get the weights off him,” he says. “Somehow. I don’t know how I did it, still. When he surfaces, I punch him, right in the face. And, let’s put it this way, he didn’t get the job, but he listened REAL hard after that.”

There are more, as well. The guy who, twelve metres below the surface, decided he’d had enough, spat out his regulator, inhaled a big lungful of air and headed for the surface.

“There,” says Matt, reflectively, “You have to hit someone in the stomach. Basically, they surface with some water in their lungs, they’re gonna cough a bit but they’re gonna be OK. They surface with a big lungful of air expanded to double its size, and they’re toast.”

Or Matt’s buddy’s anti-star pupil. The guy who — and it’s always guys, for some reason — ran out of air at 30m down. “Using too much air and not checking his SPG,” says Matt. So he solved it in the only way he thought he could. Snatching the regulator out of his instructor’s mouth (knocking off his mask and blinding him in the process), then trying to head for the surface.

“Jesus!” I say. “What do you do in those circumstances?”

“You grab them. Fin downwards to slow their ascent, breathe from your alternate air source once you’ve found it,” says Matt. “Oh yeah. And when you get to surface, you punch them in the face.”

Full-contact management at its finest. Doc McGhee would be proud…

The post Full-Contact Management appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The battle of Coron Bay might have faded into history. Just another skirmish in the closing throes of the Second World War in Asia, where US Helldiver pilots annihilated a Japanese supply convoy hiding in the Calamian Islands.

After the raid, in September 1944, it took weeks for some of these monsters to sink. They drifted, crippled, on the currents for many miles. Others went down almost instantly, taking many of their crew with them. Some have never been found.

Z and I visited three of the ones that have.

Approaching a wreck in deeper water is very much reminiscent of the discovery scene at the opening of Titanic. You descend through water that shades from crystalline turquoise to a deep blue flecked with sediment, nothing visible below you but the abyss.

A greyish hulk emerges, edges blurred by the blue as if a charcoal sketch.

You descend further. Details become clearer. Dense steel decks ripped upwards as if by a child opening the wrapping paper on a present. Gun turrets reduced to giant studs. And all, like Ariel’s mariner, absorbed back into nature, coral and plants obscuring hatchways, sea creatures living, dying, hunting through them, iridescent indigo sea slugs winding their way across skeletal decks which dead men walked, their bones now locked below.

Most of the colours are muted by the depth: water slurps up colours, one by one, as light travels to depth. But you can hear surprising things. The ethereal whistling of shoals of small fish. The grunts of larger ones…

Z, who is, after all, only nine, is far too young to dive the first two wrecks: the Akitsushima, a warship which carried seaplanes, sat in 36 metres of water, and the Taiei Maru, an oil tanker. The third, the 40m gunship Lusong, lies at such an angle that the bow is shallow enough to snorkel, so I’d hoped that an instructor would be free to take him around.

There was no instructor free. So snorkelling it was.

Actually, I’m not sure I was technically experienced enough to dive the first two wrecks, either…

I’m a new diver. Fresh out of my Open Water course. During which I did multiple choice exams with questions such as: what is the maximum recommended depth for open water divers? 18m, 30m or 40m. (The answer is 18.) And read entire pages on the danger of what divers term “overhead environments” — caves, wrecks, and other places in which you can get stuck and die.

So. We are on the boat. Well, since it has stopped, Z is already off it, monkeying along the outriggers, adjusting the steps, and constructing elaborate diving schemes.

Everyone on the boat has more experience than me (obviously). We have several divemasters and qualified instructors here on vacation, because the wrecks are amazing. I have told everyone several million times over that it is my first proper dive and I don’t want to do anything too challenging.

I’d understood that I could just cruise along the desk of the Akitsushima, at a relatively balmy 22-24m, which seemed a nice balance of view and drama, rather than “penetrating” (as the revealingly macho jargon has it) anywhere seriously inside the ship.

Lo and behold, the Filipino divemaster doing the briefing, with whom I’m on nodding and grinning acquaintance due to Z and I spending half our lives in the dive shop, brings out a plan of the ship. “So,” he says. “First of all we descend along the reference line here to 31 metres…”

31 metres?! I think.

That wasn’t in the manual!

In fact, I think, the manual, it say no.

At 30 metres, water pressure is four times atmosphere, meaning that you use air four times as fast as you would floating face down on the surface. Newbies, of course, use more air than experienced folk. There is also, at 30 metres and below, the possibility of nitrogen narcosis, a sort of light-headed high which can make you act stupidly. I am not familiar with nitrogen narcosis, but would prefer to experience it for the first time in a space which does not involve tight turns.

“Then we penetrate the wreck through here,” he continues, pointing to a jagged rip on the plan, “Swim 120m or so through the ship, exit here, explore the crane, then reenter here and swim back through the ship, exiting here.”

“Erm,” I say, feeling like a twat. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable going into an overhead environment at 30 metres as a new diver. Is it going to be tight tunnels or is it just going to be a swim around some open cargo holds? It’s my first dive and I’m honestly not sure I’ve got the skills.”

“Not that tight,” says the chap. “Half a metre, a metre tall. You won’t have to take off your gear and tow it behind you, or pass it through to someone else. But, no, it’s not open. There are some tight turns.”

“But I thought we could just swim across the top of the ship and look at the corals, without penetrating the wreck,” I say.

“No,” he says.

“I’m just not sure I should be doing this,” I say. “I only got my Open Water two days ago, this is my first dive, and the deepest I’ve been is twenty four metres. How many exit points are there once you’re in the ship?”

From his expression it is clear that it’s pretty much back the way you came.

He starts handing out diver’s torches. Clearly, it will be dark in there. I ask how they work.

I had identified two other newish divers – folk with a mere twenty or so dives behind them since qualification – and we’d assumed we’d be together.

In fact, I am going down with a divemaster-cum-diveguide (good) and Tim, who is also a divemaster, but not a professional, is on his holidays and probably doesn’t want to be stuck behind someone who could transform into a flailing panicking muppet at any time (good from a safety perspective but rather inhibiting).

“Tim,” I say. “I’m not sure I feel comfortable with this.”

“I’ll look out for you,” he says.

“I know you will,” I say. “But that’s not the point.”

Patrick, who runs the dive shop and looks like he played running back in college, is having absolutely none of this weedy British crap. “We-ell,” he says. “You can always sit out the dive.”

“I don’t want to sit out the dive,” I say. “I want to dive the Akutsishima but I’m not sure I’m in the right group.”

“If I were you,” says Tim, “I wouldn’t do it. Not if you don’t feel comfortable. It’s really dangerous.”

He is, of course, correct. “You don’t look like a panicker to me,” says Michael, an Australian known universally as the Doctor, rather nicely.

I conclude that it would be nigh-on impossible to die or incur serious injury while one-on-one with a divemaster who has dived the wreck a hundred or so times. I trust myself to stick close to the nice man, focus on breathing slowly, keep an eye on my air supply and not panic at any point.

Anywise. The dive proves challenging in a good way, rather than a terrifying way. There is something very, very extreme about descending through a coral-encrusted shellhole into the bowels of a ship. There are a morass of companionways, chambers, holds and hatches, all warped by bomb damage, time, the angle at which the ship lies and whatever happens to something of that mass when it hits bottom, into a sort of crazy 3D maze with wildly varying amounts of light.

And there is nothing more calculated to help induce a state of Zen-like calm than finding oneself in pitch blackness, 25 metres below the sea, in what was probably once a dogleg passage but is now, as the ship lies on its side, a sort of upwards S-bend, with your tanks caught on something behind you, and not sure whether the divemaster exited above you, in front of you, or below you.

I’m not joking. It’s Zen or panic. As in childbirth, with diving the deal is to focus on your breathing.

To be rewarded, after that, by emerging from total darkness into an abyss of holds, the struts of the ship dropping away below you as if to infinity, three pennantfish lined up at a neat 45 degree angle, dorsals waving like welcome flags in the royal blue water, huge shoals of golden reef fish suspended in space, florid seaweeds flourishing on the steel ribs of the ship, is something incredible. It’s awe-inspiring.

And the wreck that Z and I snorkelled, set amid a lovely shallow coral garden in hues of purple, ochre and beige, was pretty cool too. He’s acquired the art of snaffling folks’ spare regulators and using those to descend below the surface. Tim took him down a little way, so he even got a dive in.

It’s odd to think that a couple of months ago Z could barely even swim. I lost sight of him while island-hopping, then realised he’d just swum 30 metres from the boat to the beach. Without even thinking about it…

Travel truly is a wonderful thing.

The post Full Fathom Five… appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

A little too amazing for the camera I bought in Vientiane, making that two cameras down in under four months, so you’ll have to take the ensuing purple passages on trust…

We’ve spent the last two days island-hopping, first on kayaks, then on a bangka, with Z’s new friend Dima, from the Ukraine, but based in Manila, and his ma, Natasha. It’s been absolutely idyllic.

Take Secret Beach, for example. You snorkel through a foot high crevice in a jagged grey limestone cliff, above a dramatic, turquoise underwater drop off where shoals of angelfish clog the water, into a lost world: white sand beach, shallow coral lagoon, all fringed by these surreal volcanic shards of dark grey cliffs, with crabs scuttling boldly vertical towards the swifts’ nest up above. And you, your companions and your boat, have the place all to yourself.

Or our last stop off but one on today’s magical mystery tour. You wind through a labyrinth of shallows, boxed in by sheer volcanic karsts, rocked by occasional waves, to a little palm-clad beach, fringed with gothic caves, in and around which shallow waves scatter in concert from every side.

Or the Mariloc Shine, a piece of religious practice which combines utter deranged fanaticism with an awe-inspringly laissez-faire approach in a way that only Filipinos can really manage* (though I guess Italians come close…)

Or the absolutely dazzling coral garden at about 7 metres, which we descended into using the anchor rope as a guide…

Anywise… We’ve been up close and personal with the South China Sea, thanks to our snorkels, and a boatman who likes to dive. I’ve seen silver tanigue whipping through grazing shoals of minnows, soaring and diving like underwater kestrels; lime-green parrot-fish chomping meditatively on coral, as their whippet-like cleaner fish flash like lightning at their tails; a myriad colours and shapes of coral; shells the length of my arm; lionfish, pennantfish, angelfish, emperor tang, wrasses; an entire family of clownfish protecting their anemone nest; a lionfish; needlefish; a million starfish.

Oh, and I’ve also got up close and personal with my prefrontal cortex. And am getting close to believing the feminist anthropologist Elaine Morgany (The Descent of Woman), when she theorises that early humans spent much of their waking life in water, escaping predators.

Now, it’s not unusual to see things that could, potentially, cause one serious damage underwater. But most, like lionfish, scorpionfish, stonefish, crown of thorns starfish, fire corals, jellyfish etc, are essentially not a risk if you keep your eyes open, follow underwater best practice and DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING, ESPECIALLY NOT CORALS YOU ENVIRONMENTAL VANDAL, YOU.

While it’s true that one feels (and is) more vulnerable snorkelling in a swimsuit than encased in neoprene, steel tanks, lead belt, diving jacket, flippers, respirators et al in diving mode, I have never experienced such a raw and primal reaction to perceived threat as I did the other day.

What happened was this. Z and Dima are 30-40 metres away from me, doing boyish things with the kayaks such as tying them together to form a raft and jumping off them, or playing a game called Hat of Doom.

I amble down five or six metres to take a look at some of those dazzling, iridescent vulva-type things which hang out on corals — think Georgia O’Keeffe meets Finding Nemo and Timothy Leary comes to the party — and some gorgeously coloured anemones.

I amble back up to the surface. My Western brain registers that there is a black and white stripy ribbon winding its way up in parallel with me, about two metres from me, and begins to wonder why I am finding this sinister. It looks like the most elegant piece of rhythmic gymnastics you have ever seen. A self-propelling, perfect S. Natural cheerleading.

My brain continues to ponder. This is not an eel, it thinks to itself. And why is it surfacing so suddenly? There is nothing edible at this depth, nothing to attack, apart from, err, me, and I am far too large for it. Where is it going?

Don’t be silly, says my brain to itself. This is only a little thing, narrow, slender, and under a metre in length. And most sea snakes, should it be such a thing, are not toxic.

While my brain is engaged in this rather sluggish internal dialogue, my prefrontal cortex has screamed “poisonous snake! run!!!”, produced a surge of raw adrenaline, and sent me hurtling across 30 or 40 metres of open water away from the snake and to the boys faster than I have ever swum before.

By the time I register that I am arriving, my brain has nearly caught up with the primeval instinct, and thinks the primeval instinct is extremely silly and needs a thorough slapping down.

I decide not to panic the boys unduly by forcing them out of the water since, rationally, had the creature gone in pursuit, it would have nailed me, and there is now ample distance between us.

Instead I say, with forced jollity, “Good lord! I think I just saw a sea snake over there!”

Full disclosure. I can and do scream like a girl at bugs, but that’s grossout, not fear. I can spot jellyfish, lionfish, stonefish, etc, and react appropriately. When I’ve seen land snakes, I’ve been perfectly calm.

This thing, however, set off a very, very primal reaction.

So later that evening, I decided to look up what I’d seen. A very unscientific process, AKA typing “Sea snakes” into Google images from a Filipino IP address, produced an image of the very creature I saw.

And, thank you, prefrontal cortex. The little scrawny stripey fella was indeed a banded sea krait, Laticauda colubrina. They pack, I learn, ten times the venom of a rattlesnake. They are also, the literature says remarkably docile and rarely bite. But on that, as I guess with so much else, the prefrontal cortex hasn’t read the manual.

*In brief: chap has vision of Virgin Mary in dream, directing him to heart-shaped island where he will find the heart of Christ and build a place of worship. Flash-forward twenty years or so after they located the island, and they still haven’t finished building it. And, no, it ain’t La Sagrada Familia.

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Almost, but not quite, for El Nido, in the north of Palawan, really does take your breath away. It’s named for the swifts’ nests which snuggle within the gothic cliffs that cast a shade so deep the backstreets need streetlights of an afternoon.

A little place, about three streets deep and three streets wide, El Nido sits on a shallow, deeply indented bay, dominated by jagged shards of the cliffs and studded with deep green karst islands, forced from the bay by primeval forces, whose surrealist precipices, humps and angles resemble nothing more than a child’s first sketch of islands.

The first amazing glimpse of the sea in all its glory as you wind through crazy chocolate drop hills, past lazing caribao and palm-thatch villages, is utterly gobsmacking.

I’ve posted before about the beauty of serendipity in travel. And in El Nido, serendipity has really struck. I could never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined that five hours on the top of an overloaded bus over bad roads could be a beautiful thing.

Buses, and for that matter jeepneys, function in the rural Philippines as a form of FedEx, delivering unaccompanied goods from sacks of rice and boxes of chicks through to fridges and air conditioners. The bus we took, amongst other things, was carrying furniture. Result!

Yep! We spent five hours among some of the nicest views the planet has to offer, sat in regal, albeit dusty, splendour atop some farmer’s newly purchased living-room suite. I think it may even have helped my vertigo.

We started our journey from Sabang to El Nido, a distance of about 100km as the crow flies, three days ago. After our unscheduled stop in Port Barton, we caught a super-annuated 1950s American school bus with holes in the floor to Roxas, a dusty small town on the wrong side of the island, adorned with hand-painted signs declaring it “the cashew capital of the Philippines”.

I had been assured that Roxas boasted not only a connection to El Nido, but a bank, with an ATM.

There was indeed a bank.

The Palawan Bank.

It does, indeed, have an ATM.

Which is bloody handy, I’m sure. If you’re Palaweno.

In fact, should you happen to bank with the Palawan Bank, the ATM must make market days a dream.

We were down to our last 100 pesos (plus shrapnel), or just over two dollars, when I discovered the ATM’s admirable local focus. And, concomitantly, realised it was Saturday. (Not that the Palawan Bank deals with such exotica as credit cards or foreign exchange on any day of the week.)

Anywise… Unlike the German chaps we met in Port Barton, who spent their last ten dollars on a round-trip to said ATM, and were last seen travelling eight hours south on borrowed money to get some cash to retrieve their belongings and passports from our remarkably understanding hosts, I managed to change some dollars at the local pawnshop.

Which is not always a given. Though very few towns in the Philippines are too small to have a pawnshop, many won’t accept dollars that have been folded, creased, or otherwise handled.

But back to serendipity.The young master has been keen to ride atop of something, anything, for aeons, but has generally been refused admittance.

This time, too, the conductor, looked at Z, shouted at some people, and said he had found us a seat within the bus. Seat proving imperceptible even to the practised eye, and not just because of the crowd of gentlemen hanging out of the door, we opted for the roof.

Sir does not have vertigo. So he scrambled up the ladder, round the edge of the roof and into a chair with gay abandon, his size and scarlet motorbike helmet provoking hilarity in equal measure among the amiable chaps sprawled casually with their legs dangling off the sides of the roof.

I must say that I had never realised quite how low the power cables hang here. Or, for that matter, the trees. It’s been a long, long time since I last travelled on top of a vehicle, and I don’t think I had any awareness of my own mortality back then.

Now, of course, I am aware not only of my own mortality but, more pressingly, of Z’s. So every time we passed through a village large enough to have power, I was virtually foetal with terror of infant decapitation.

The first palm frond scythed across the top of the bus about ten minutes in, with a vigorous slapping sound that drowned out the roar of the engine. “You all laughed at me for wearing a motorbike helmet!” yelled Z. “And now you’ve been hit in the faces by a palm tree and I am totally fine! Who’s laughing now?”

As we journeyed, he segued straight into the spotter role, yelling, “TREE!”, “CABLE!”, “DUCK!” with great exuberance, much to the amusement of the cockfighting promoter heading north with the latest addition to what I suppose one should call his stable.

As bus rides in Palawan go, this one passed seamlessly. No tire blowouts, thank God (we’ve had three, so far). No rolling backwards down hills while the conductor scurries after the bus with a bit of wood to put under the wheels in lieu of functional brakes. The engine (whisper it!) started first time…

Admittedly, the driver reversed into a wall while negotiating a very tight turn into the yard where the buses stop, but, from the state of the wall, the state of the bus and the general lack of any reaction to the crunch, this is not an unusual occurrence.

And, my god, the views! Not just the landscape. But the tiny slices of life you get to scavenge, from up high. The basketball matches. The boats being mended in preparation for the rains, on the banks of a stream which will soon be a river. Women washing small trousers in buckets outside a daycare centre the size of a garden shed…

Anywise, we are here. And El Nido is quite dazzlingly beautiful. One of the local dogs has just produced three phenomenally cute puppies who playfight on the beach. Z has made a new friend, Dima, aged eleven, from Manila by way of the Ukraine, and we’ve had a fantastic day out with him and his ma.

The post El Nido appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I had planned to leave Port Barton today, which, given we hadn’t planned on being here in the first place, is understandable. My pocket pyromaniac, however, had other plans. And one of the joys of extending our trip was that I was able to say yes.

It was, of course, the palm tree wot done it. Dead-centre on the flawless crescent of white beach framed by viridian hills, it offers just about the perfect gradient. The slant is sufficiently slight to clamber up with ease, yet sufficiently steep for said activity to provide a challenge, with soft, white sand below it to cushion any fall.

It offers a pirate’s lookout over the tranquil bay, a place to watch the sheet lightning which has been flashing and crashing over the hills for much of the afternoon.

And, after a slight bout of homesickness yesterday, prompted in the most Proustian of fashions by the least Proustian of items – a packet of orange-flavoured chewy sweets — Z has been as happy as, well, as happy as a small boy up a palm tree.

Homesickness, I think, goes with the territory of long-term travel, whether as an individual or as a family. And, given that the complex interaction of scent and taste within the neural system makes olfactory memories the most potent there are, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised.

But, honestly, Fruitellas of all things! They hit us both.

And they’re not even a particular favourite. Lemon bonbons, yes. Fruit Salads, yes. Pick ‘n’ mix, yes. But Fruitellas?!

We wandered to the sari sari store yesterday, in search of coffee. Buying such comestibles in packets rather than by the cup is an indicator that you have been away a long time and are planning to be away even longer. By the time you’re carrying a portable stove and cups, you’re pretty much doing time.

Anywise, in addition to the usual peso-sweets, and Z’s favourite Mentos, the store (the evocative name means “cheap cheap” in Tagalog) had Fruitellas. We bought a packet each.

So there we were, walking down a sandy backstreet towards the palms, orchids and bougainvillea of our guesthouse garden, under royal blue skies, Filipino election muzak ringing out from a fibreglass outrigger moored in the shallows, cockerels calling, the screams of pigs being unloaded, upside down, onto the beach, the town jeepney shining silver and scarlet outside its corrugated iron shed, barefoot kiddies scampering to and from the turquoise sea, the air velvety with last night’s rain…

And as we walk, we unwrap and chew Fruitellas.

The motion of ambling, chewing and unwrapping, coupled with the chemical orange flavour slowly diluting into bland sweetness, transports me. It’s an almost physical memory, walking back from nursery, by way of Mr Joshi’s dusty store on Shacklewell Lane, Z’s little feet walking besides me in Spiderman wellies and matching suit, his head barely up to my waist.

It’s a moment of sharp, sweet pain. That a baby is a baby no more and will never be again.

In its essence, in fact, the sari sari store is not dissimilar to Mr Joshi’s fine establishment. It sells coffee, cigarettes, tinned foods, cold drinks, fresh eggs, prepared meat, sweet bread, milk, sweets, plasters and peso-sweets from plastic jars on the dark wood counter, the local lonelies clustering outside its door for consolation and gossip.

As at Mr Joshi’s, the more high-ticket items, such as plastic toys (London) or antibiotics (Port Barton), are coated in a fine layer of dust. There are stores like this all over the world. But the Fruitellas make it moving.

I don’t say any of this to Z. Instead, we discuss whether the Fruitellas taste different from the ones in the UK, and conclude that the formula might include a degree of extra bitterness.

That evening, Z decides he is homesick. Not unhappy. Not tearful. Not eager to go home. Not, even, missing anyone or anything in particular. More, I would say, nostalgic.

The word “nostalgia” derives from the Ancient Greek for something close to homesickness, though, in a world where journeys, not just Odysseus’, could take many, many years, it means “the pain of homecoming”. And nostalgia for home, like nostalgia for a child’s babyhood, is a painful thing. Not a bad thing. But painful, all the same.

So we discuss his homesickness. I float the Fruitellas as a possible trigger. He concurs. “They made me think of Fruit Salads, you see,” he says. “And buying chewy sweets in Mr Joshi’s.”

It’s a funny old world.

I should say here, I guess, that Z loves travelling. There is nowhere on our itinerary he wishes to miss, nowhere we have been that he would rather not have visited. He chatters at length about the places we have seen and the people we have met.

One of the various reasons we are extending our trip, in fact, is that he is keen to return to Vietnam so that we can visit Hanoi and take a junk on Halong Bay. At the same time, he would quite like to pop home from time to time. This, sadly, is not practicable.

Anywise. We have talked through plans for the remainder of this year, in particular as regards three significant dates: Halloween, his birthday and Christmas. He spent the last two Halloweens, where a gang from school go trick-or-treating on a nearby street where every house has a pumpkin and kids can wander unescorted, with his grandparents in Greece, where they do not celebrate Halloween. His preference would be to spend this one with his cousins in Australia.

And he spent today alternating contentedly between the palm, the sea and a basket-weave hammock not dissimilar to a coracle, where he is perusing Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything, contemplating writing a book(!) about science, and getting phenomenally excited about his first wobbly tooth in getting on for a year.

But back to memory, nostalgia, and the madeleines, or, rather, Fruitellas… Is there a taste that swings you straight back to another time and place? Is it something intimate – your grandmother’s cakes, your mother’s Yorkshire puddings? Or something mundane? Has memory ever caught you by surprise?…

The post Sweet Madeleines appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Right now, sat in utter serenity on a perfect crescent of a beach (me) and scaling a coconut palm (Z), the various unpleasantnesses of the morning feel like serendipity in action.

All the same, Filipino mariners are quite the phenomenon. I’ve traveled in heading for forty countries. This is the only nation I have ever visited where boats routinely deposit one in the wrong bloody place.

It is the nature of Palawan, both the island, which stretches for 450km north to south, with some fairly impressive mountains at its midpoint, and the province, which chucks another 1500 or so islands into the equation, that getting around takes time. Which is fine.

Up to a point.

You may recall, gentle reader, that we were supposed to be in El Nido today. We were in Sabang this morning, on the west coast. El Nido is also on the west coast, about 100km north of where we started.

To get there by road, you either travel back across the island for a couple of hours on an early morning jeepney then sit on the main road waving at any large vehicle with people sat on top of it heading north, or you continue your journey back to the east coast and down south to Puerto Princesa bus station, where a chariot may or may not awaits for six or seven hours of bad road hell.

Ergo, one takes the boat.

There are, of course, no scheduled boats. That would be too easy.

As I understood it until recently, boats need a certain number of passengers to make the journey up the coast. We met a bunch of people who wanted to get to El Nido, and were up not only for chartering a 14-seater bangka, but for gathering troops to fill it.

They wanted to leave yesterday. I had promised Z a day at the pool of the upscale resort down the beach, but he was prepared to sacrifice this in the name of budget.

Enter the short chap at our beach huts. He guaranteed that he could get us to El Nido at a price of 1800 pesos for me and 600 pesos for spawn, cheaper than our previous quotes for the journey, albeit more than the cost of splitting a charter.

“No minimum passengers?” I asked.

“No minimum,” he said.

“So it leaves, even if it’s just the two of us,” I say. (It’s always good to triple-check gift horses.)

“Yes, yes,” he says. “Cash upfront.” His boat leaves at 7.30am. Everyone else’s leaves at 7, apparently at the direction of the coastguard.

But he’s a nice chap. And the child discount – again much higher than previous conversations — is a very handy sweetener.

Spawn and I discuss. I junk the charter plan, pay cash upfront, and spawn gets his day in the pool.

After a night of mysterious bug bites, cat-fights, dogfights, geckos, cockerels, thunder and rain, although, rarely for small-town Philippines, no karaoke, our alarm goes off at 6am. I awake with a start at 6.30am to find our knight in shining armour at the door.

“Are you going today?” he says.

“Yes, yes,” I say, panic and gratitude mingling as one. In between piling our laundry, which has been “drying” on our balcony for two days of tropical rain and is beginning to smell, into bags, shoving things into the pack, and chivvying spawn to dress, pack up, brush teeth, etc, I absent-mindedly take the day’s malaria tablet.

We are nearly ready when our knight in shining armour reappears with a boatman. “The boat today,” he says.

“Yes?” I say, all sweetness and light.

“The boat today, no go to El Nido. Not enough people,” he says.

“But I paid to go to El Nido,” I say. “I want to go to El Nido.”

“The boat goes to Port Barton,” he says. “Port Barton is also very nice.”

“I’m sure Port Barton is very nice,” I say. “But I wanted to go to El Nido. And you said we were going to El Nido. I paid 1800 pesos for me and 600 pesos for him to go to El Nido. You said there was no minimum fare.”

“Nobody wants to go,” says the boatman. “I am going up and down the beach, up and down the beach, and no one wants to go to El Nido, only to Port Barton.”

Spawn mutters darkly in the background. My immediate instinct is to yell at him, as a safe alternative to yelling at the chaps. “You want to take the boat?” interjects the mariner. “It is leaving now.”

“Leaving now?” I say. “But you said it left at 7.30.”

“No, no,” he says. “It leaves at seven.”

“Are there boats from Port Barton to El Nido?” I ask.

“We can take you on for [pause for mental calculation] maybe 6000,” he says. (That’s just shy of £100 or $150, AKA almost three times our daily budget.)

I brace myself. “No, thank you. If I had wanted to charter a boat, I would have done so. I was asking if there are boats from Port Barton to El Nido.”

“Port Barton is a very nice place,” repeats the chap from the beach huts, mollifyingly.

I learnt from the crew of the Blue Penguin, after a ride to Sabang, Puerto Galera, which ended in a different bit of Puerto Galera, that there is absolutely no point in arguing about such triviality as destinations with boatmen unless there is a Filipino chap who works for the government on board, and he is minded to take you under his wing and kick up merry hell with the relevant authorities on his mobile.

Any residual desire to argue the toss is replaced by a need to get the hell out of Sabang, ideally in the right direction, with the chance of a decent night’s sleep and, ideally, no more time in Puerto Princesa, or its bus station. “What is the price?” I ask.

“One thousand,” he says. “Five hundred for him.”

Some part of my brain knows that the fare is in fact 800. Still fuddled with sleep and laundry, I register that the chap from the guesthouse has given me my money back 100 pesos short.

I recall from our guide, boatman and boat owner in Quezon that to negotiate the fare back down without loss of face will require reserves of diplomacy that I do not have, and an hour or so of time which the boatman does not have. Plus I haven’t finished packing.

I hand over 1500 pesos, meaning that, with the missing 100 pesos, I have paid two full adult fares to Port Barton, which was not where we wanted to go, but does fill the boat to profitability and is, at least, in the right direction.

Like I said, neither I nor the spawn are at our best in the mornings. Duly packed, he swings his bag onto his shoulders. Unfortunately, his motorbike helmet, which is attached to the top strap, swings with it, and hits him in the face.

In an insensate fury with the evil pack, he swings it again. The consequences are entirely and painfully predictable, but neither of us are in a state to see the funny side. He bursts into tears, sits down and begins violently to detach the helmet from the pack. The boat, by my calculations, is due to leave in 20 minutes. By the boatman’s, it should have left ten minutes ago.

“What are you doing?!” I ask, rhetorically.

“I am FED UP of carrying this thing with me everywhere,” he says. “I am going to leave it behind.”

In truth, it has not been used since we reached the Philippines. As, however, we are headed back to Vietnam and Laos, it remains essential. I say as much.

It is not a happy party that trudges down the beach.

I mentioned that I had taken my malaria tablet. I know, both from the literature and from previous experience, that taking doxycycline on an empty stomach is a VERY BAD IDEA. My stomach is empty. The boat is small. The motion of the sea is, well, all too conducive.

Surveying our youthful companions in the boat, I am overcome by a desire to maintain some sort of dignity by holding back the vomit until we are, at least, moving forward, rather than simply up and down, and side to side, and up and down, and side to side…

A series of doxycycline gags and belches issue forth, followed by a preliminary doxy-yellow gush onto the white outrigger. I feel every bit as appealing as I sound.

We set off. Z, who, like the Martini advert, can sleep anytime, anyplace, anywhere (apart from in a bed, at bedtime), leans back in his lifejacket and nods off. I adopt a marginally less neck-achey vomiting position (face down over the prow), until the doxycycline has worked its extra-special magic on my innards.

It is a quite phenomenally wet journey, with notably more power in its shower than the bathroom in our hut, enlivened only by gangs of kamikaze butterflies and a close shave with a jagged promontory. Personally, I would have steered round the outside of the fish farm rather than cutting in between that and the rocks, but I guess they know the tides, or something.

Anyway, we are here. And, one of the benefits of being last on, our bags are dry. And, finally, our laundry.

There are, of course, no boats to El Nido for the foreseeable future. In fact, the whole west coast has an end-of-season feel about it, which is rather charming, except when one is trying to move around it.

I am assured, however, that the road journey from here takes only a little more time than the boat trip. It is also cheaper by a factor of ten. We are forty kilometres down, sixty kilometres to go. Wish us luck as we embark on day two of our fantastic voyage!

The post Maritime Woes appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

We walked to the Puerto Princesa underground river yesterday — supposedly the world’s longest navigable river — under heavy skies and dripping leaves.

And as we emerged from the darkness of the cathedral cave into the green of the coastal forest where the river meets the sea, the rain fell in great sheets, ruffling the waters and throwing up spray. It felt, for a moment, as if we were paddling out into a waterfall.

There was a thunderstorm last night. There is a thunderstorm now, with bugs sheltering from the raindrops and flooding the lights, the grass a vivid green, the streams swelling already, gouts of water pouring from the nipa thatch, and a blessed coolness in the air. There will be thunderstorms tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that.

Three days ago, this was the view from our beach hut.

The next evening, there was a little intense rain. Then, yesterday, the skies made their intentions beyond clear. This is Z fording a little stream which crosses the beach on the way to the underground river.

I had asked him to “take off your jeans and boots and carry them”. I had failed to specify keeping said items dry, and neglected to mention his socks.

End result? We are some way into the surprisingly strenuous but mercifully short central section of the walk to the underground river (ascending the second valley, to be precise), and Z is fetchingly attired in his long-sleeved top, hiking boots (the socks are MIA) and underpants.

“I wish humans had leathery skin,” he pipes up.

“Well,” I say. “That’s what clothes are for…”

“I feel like I’m a walking banquet for mosquitoes,” he says.

“Oh dear,” I say, examining a 3-inch square of mosquito bites on his thigh. “That looks nasty. I think you should put your jeans on.”

“How about some sympathy for once?” he says.

I was sympathetic when he got stung by a jellyfish — he hasn’t had much luck with wildlife lately — but he was appropriately clad at the time, and I hadn’t suggested he wore alternative clothing.

“Just put your jeans on,” I say. “You can’t insist on walking through the forest in your pants and expect me to have sympathy when you get bitten.”

“But they’re wet,” he says.

“Well, whose fault is that?” I say.

“I hate this trek!” he says. “I hate this trek! We haven’t seen a single animal apart from mosquitoes and there are thousands of them!”

I sympathise.

After rather too much up and down, and some monkey noises which alarm Z, still raw from our encounter with five of the local dogs two nights ago (he now has a large rock which he carries whenever we walk the beach at night), and frustrate me since I cannot locate their source, we take a walkway down through some phenomenal limestone karsts.

We meet a peacock. Then we meet the celebrated monitor lizards. These vary in size from half Z’s size to slightly longer than him. Given their serpentine waddle, flickering tongues, primevally small heads, evil eyes and generally carnivorous appearance, this is rather too large for comfort.

They do not, to put it mildly, vaut les moustiques. And I am not entirely sure we will be going out of our way to see Komodo dragons when we get to Indonesia.

The river, however, which runs through vaulted cathedrals and lowering passages of gold, cream and scarlet rock, where part-blind fish explore systems that head deep into the interior of the island, is stunning.

Weirdly, and to the discomfiture of our tour guide who is telling his unenthralled audience what stalactites are for the nth time that day, the young man’s thoughts turn to philosophy. It seems caves do that to both of us.

He decides that the earth was most likely created by aliens, wonders why people aren’t looking for the hidden civilisations which may, for all we know, be in the earth below us, then becomes wildly excited by a shoal of small fish swimming underground.

But what makes his day is coming out of the cave into intense arrows of tropical rain. “I love the rain, Mum,” he says. “I love the rain now. It reminds me of being in school, in the playground, when it’s raining, and I’ve forgotten my coat, as I almost always do.”

And, yes, he does love the rain. He casts off his clothes. Scampers down to the beach. Bounces around in the waves until our boat arrives.

He loved the bangka ride back from the river, standing and straddling the narrow deck as the outriggers lurched from side to side like stabilisers on a bike and the boatman varied his pace to catch the softer curves of the swell.

Tomorrow — coastguard permitting — we will be spending six hours on a six-man bangka on the open sea, heading up north to El Nido. I have never been seasick in my life. But there’s a first time for everything, as they say.

The post Here Comes the Rain… appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

More than 200 limestone caverns burrow deep into the rock of Lipuun Point, a protected peninsula of mangroves and scrubby dipterocarp forests half an hour’s boat ride from the little town of Quezon, Palawan. 90% or so remain unexplored, and excavations continue, apparently at random, exposing deep layers of peach, cream and dusty bronze.

In one of the largest, a tumble-down cathedral over 40 metres long and perhaps half that in height, they found the skull of Tabon “Man”, which some date to as old as 47,000 years.

It was hard not to wonder, as small modern children played noisily in the shafts of light between waterfall stalactites and tumbling vines, how different they are from the kids who played before them, almost 50,000 years ago, and the unknown man or woman whose bones miraculously survived that long.

Many of the later peoples who occupied this site buried their dead in jars. Some they placed in a dramatic arch, where their souls could choose to watch over the rich forest crater inland or the white sand atolls and limestone karsts that stud the turquoise South China Sea.

Love of their dead? Or fear of retribution? I vote for love.

Others they interred in Manunggul Cave, which winds low through the rock for 100 metres or so. There are too many fragments of burial jars to collect or count, let alone index, so we walked over scattered shards of these ceramic coffins, as bats and baby birds twittered from hollows in the rock.

Dulled by age and muted by dust, their decorations only loosely apparent, they call to mind the lines from the English Burial Service, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust”, or the Sufi phrase, “This too shall pass.”

Whoever they were, they and the people who loved them, have left more enduring traces than most of us will, and more, most likely, than the folks in Manila’s Chinese Cemetery who thought to equip their tombs with A/C and flushing toilets.

There was a wind blowing up on the South China Sea, clouding the waters. We took the boat to a little island, just a limestone rock with a sandbar tail, where fifty families live in nipa huts amid white sand and coconut palms.

At its very highest point, the sandbar is less than three metres above the level of the sea: most houses are less than half that. It’s possible it could be underwater within Z’s lifetime, gone with the coral and the marine life it sustains.

“How high does the sea come?” I asked the old lady who came here on holiday fifty years ago, met her husband, and, now a widow, runs the island’s little sari sari store.

“No higher than this,” she said, indicating the waves bobbing not halfway up the shelving white sand beach.

“Even in a typhoon?” I asked.

“Even in a typhoon.”

On Mariquit island, where flying foxes cluster in the mangrove swamp, our landing place was eerily abandoned. Ten very simple huts, some just a sleeping platform topped off with the a thatch of the spiky palm fronds known as nipa, stood amid coconut forest on a neatly swept floor.

In one, there was a pile of clothes. Outside another, cooking stones sat in insulating sand. A shell-studded path wound through the trees and sharp desert grass to the mangroves, lined with great middens of coconut and scallop shells, like a gift for future archaeologists, only a stray conditioner wrapper separating them from the neolithic past.

It felt like the desert island answer to the Marie-Celeste. An entire village, disappeared into the ether, mangroves and coconuts standing tall, and the saw-grass growing up around them.

And, just like in the cave, where, stripped of toys and technology, Z and the little boy played with the implements — voices, sticks and stones — their prehistoric predecessors might have used, Z played on the beach with nothing but what surrounded him.

A coconut shell becomes a bucket, and a mould for sand. Shells make scoops, and decoration. Driftwood and dried seaweed marks the beginning of a fire.

And — who knows? — we could come back to this sooner than we think.

The post Desert Island Caveboy appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

I’ve posted before about my spawn’s touching concern for the size of my arse. However, here in the Philippines, they use American sizes, which not only means that any shop will contain some clothes that fit you, but is particularly wonderful for Brits.

By the simple trick of switching from UK to US labels, one can, as if by magic, lose at least two sizes overnight. After my “XXL or XXXL, Madam?” trauma in Cambodia, a tense forty minutes squeezing into swimsuits in Saigon, and the horrors of knicker-shopping in Bangkok, this is all to the good.

What is less to the good, perhaps, is the preferred sizing.

I have, in fact, been meaning to buy a pair of shorts since I junked my old pair in Laos, but the size issue has deterred me until the Philippines.

The sheer profusion of clothing outlets and associated choice — not to mention the UK price points — put me off buying any in the Manila mega-malls, so I finally got around to it in Quezon, on Palawan.

A little fishing town on the west coast of the island, Quezon is hardly a haven of fashion, but we’d arranged a guide and a boat to go to some caves the next day. After the horrors of descending vertical ropes towards waiting spawn and FOUR — count’em — (un)familiar and amused gentlemen on the zipwires in Laos wearing nowt but a harness, a shortish frock and some colourful undies, I was buggered if I was doing it in a frock.

Shorts nirvana in Quezon is a small, budget store, off a market packed with cheap clothes, seafood, dried fish, root greens and tropical fruit, which reminded me, but for the live pig strapped squealing to the back of a tricycle, the golden sunshine, the sand, the chickens and the manifold varieties of livestock feed, irresistibly of Ridley Road, East London.

These shorts come, essentially, in three styles. Denim pedal-pushers and teeny hotpants, for the slender, which run from a Hollywood size zero to a UK 8. Hotpants and slightly longer for the mid-range. And bermuda type affairs for a UK 18 and up.

And up. And up.

So, the pair of shorts I settle on, for 50 pesos (somewhere between a dollar and a pound), because they fit, and are not hotpants, and, actually, I rather like them, are navy. (“Old Navy”, according to the label, but we are in Asia, after all.) And an 8! With room to spare.

A US 8, admittedly.

But still.

Throughout the trying-on process Z has been shovelling bermudas, pedalpushers, and even different pairs of shorts from the mid-range to me with desperate vigour.

At the last pair of elephantine checkered pants, something snaps. “Those don’t fit,” I say. “I like these. I’m buying them.”

I go to the till. Well, the table where you hand over cash to the pedalpusher-clad nymphets who work there.

“Mum!” he howls. “You can’t buy those! They make your bum look huge!”

I waver. Return to the changing room. The nymphets show commendable patience.

I put them on again, and turn my back to the mirror.

It looks alright. You know. A normal size and all. They will do.

He thrusts more shorts at me.

Emboldened by the fact that, for the first time since we have been travelling in Asia, I am in proximity to clothes that are visibly too big for me, rather than scrabbling through the plus-size rail in search of something with sufficient stretch to contemplate, I take a deep breath and a firm line.

“Look!” I say. “These aren’t going to fit me. These are the longest pair in my size. It’s too hot for trousers. And I’m not scrambling around caves with my arse hanging out of the back of my frock again.”

“You’ll regret it, Mum,” he says, looking mournfully into the middle distance. “You’ll really regret it. Seriously! I’m not being unkind. The vest is fine. It’s really nice, in fact.”

He pauses fractionally.

“REALLY nice,” he continues. “Very flattering. But if you could only see yourself in those shorts…”

“You’ll just have to walk ten paces behind me,” I say, hand over my 100 pesos, and leave in possession of what I consider a perfectly climate-appropriate and, I can only assume from the fact the store is full of the stuff, culturally inoffensive outfit, at least for the beach, caves, whatever.

He trails me at damn close to the teenage fifty paces, until, distracted by the torment of the pig, which is tied by two of its legs to the luggage rack on the back of the tricycle and partially covered — for reasons which must have concerned survival, not comfort — in the remains of a yellow, plastinated sack labelled “Poultry Finishing Pellets”, he is moved to an outburst of passionate animal rightsism which requires an English-speaking audience.

The next day, we are wending our way past sleeping platforms and nipa huts which are, but for the odd cooking stone and one small pile of clothing, the desert island equivalent of the Marie-Celeste, through palm forests scattered with scallop and coconut middens, in search of a local to guide us through the mangrove swamps to the flying foxes of Mariquit Island.

I recall that the last time Z was concerned about me and shorts he took a picture on my cellphone, and showed me. It worked.

So I say, “Can you take a picture of me from behind and show me?”

“There, Mum,” he says, with a note of quiet triumph. “Do you see? Do you see?”

I squint at the display. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” I say. “They’re a bit short, but it looks a perfectly normal size to me.”

“It’s the biggest part of your body apart from your shoulders, Mum,” he says.

“I think that’s normal for women,” I say. “I think that’s a perfectly normal body shape. In fact, I’m sure it’s a normal body shape.”

On a review of the evidence, it’s the cellulite that bothers me. Time to go up some hills.

As regards decency, I can confirm that they are best not worn around town without my offspring in tow. I didn’t realise until I went shopping without him that he has a prophylactic effect which is Darwinian in its impact.

Anyway. Z and I have agreed to put this to a vote. Will these shorts do? Or do I need to buy something more substantial, and appropriate to my age and status? I am planning, you see, to purchase a bikini…

The post Short Trousers… appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Does anyone know what causes this?

These flattened cones, in a very intense blue, like rays of a cartoon sun in negative, appeared from behind the islands in the bay, and scattered across the sky in an arc with the setting sun. Our host, who’s lived there for almost 30 years, was none the wiser either, but definite that it couldn’t be a light show.

Does anyone know what causes this? Is it some sort of rainbow?

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