I’ve been a very quick reader my whole life, mainly because of the fact that I don’t actually read all the words but skim quite a bit when the upcoming block of text looks too dense and lacking in the interesting department. (I think that is also one reason why I always write in relatively short paragraphs, to not let anyone else skim whatever I’ve written!) Whenever the storyline just doesn’t make sense anymore I just go back and reread the too heavily skimmed parts… This also means that I can read a book several times and still enjoy it every time!

One of my favorite childhood authors was Roald Dahl, I read several of his fantastic books but todays entry is obviously about the BFG, the Big Friendly Giant. So I’m 184 centimeters tall, I would say that’s kind of average northern European. Well, I’m absolutely freaking huge here in the Philippines! And sometimes it really feels like being the monkey in the cage with people looking as you wander past.

But the people here are absolutely lovely, and I feel very relaxed and comfortable here, so I’m usually walking around with a big silly grin on my face, thus the connection to todays entry.

So my time in Kasai Village is drawing to an end, I’m working until the end of this month and then I’m going surfing in Siargao for six weeks. To top things off we are going to have a pretty full house here the last two weeks before I leave, one group of 12 divers for one week followed by a group of 9 divers the week after.

It turned out that Rolieta, another staff here in Kasai, had the same birthday as me so we managed to shake up most of the staff here and roll down to White Beach for some beers and music. Obviously it was raining but still quite enjoyable!

I’m typing this entry, together with all other online activities over the last few days on my iPod Touch, possibly the best gadget I’ve ever owned. The basic music playing features on it are the best I’ve come across but what really makes clever little piece of gadgetry a master in it’s class is when you start adding small additional applications to it that you can download from the Internet, most of the great ones you have to pay a dollar or so for but there’s loads of fun and practical ones for free as well. All this isn’t really new but as usual I’m a rather slow starter with all this and this little excursion is the first time I’ve really used it to it’s full potential. I guess the fact I usually have my laptop with me has a lot to do with it…

So I’ve now got Facebook and, more importantly for this entry, Wordpress installed on it. Wordpress is the software I use to write this blog… So I’m in this hammock, tapping away, and when I wander over to the restaurant, where there’s wifi Internet, it will upload the entry to my blog. Ta-daa!

In the beginning I wasn’t sure about the rather small keyboard, which is a bit fiddly to use even for my rather normal-sized fingers, but with the very clever auto-correction and just a bit of practice you’re soon up to comfortable typing speed again.

So I’ve got the iPod version and Apple has just announced the new iPhone 3GS, which apart from the obvious phone functionality has quite a few more useful features that makes it very interesting for me, specially being able to use it to make Skype calls for free whenever I’m connected to the Internet. As long as I don’t need to do any actual development work I can do everything I need to do online on it!

iPhone here I come!

Almost all the breaks here are reef breaks and previously I’ve only surfed beach breaks, which is sandy bottom. This place has several nicknames; The Cheesegrater, Madness and so on, so of course we were a touch apprehensive when we first went out but it was actually not that bad. I guess the fact that the waves were fairly small and coming at a relatively slow interval had quite a bit to do with it!

There’s a long wooden jetty with a observation deck on the end that serves as judges lookout for the annual international surfing competition that’s held in late September each year. So you walk out this jetty, down some really flimsy steps into the water and then paddle a few hundred meters out to where the breaks start. You spend a lot of time lying down on your board paddling, and already this morning the bottom of my ribs were absolutely killing me , and that was after just an hour of surfing yesterday! Right now I’ve actually got bruises over my ribs…

Quite a bit of time is also spent sitting on your board on the outside of the breaking point gazing out at sea looking for that promising swell. When you see a wave you like the look of you quickly, ahem, turn your board around, lie down and start paddling as hard as you can, let the wave catch you and then push yourself up and then try to stand up. If you manage to get up and ride it you’ll be grinning from ear to ear, otherwise you just try to hide your shame, get back on your board and paddle out again.

On the subject of ‘quickly turning’ your board, and also about getting out of the way when someone else is hurtling towards you at rather high speed on top of a wave, well, let’s just say I’m learning, and saying sorry a lot to the more experienced guys whose ride I just screwed up…

If you manage to get out really early you can beat the crowd but at around 10 it’s starting to get rather crowded, easily 30 or more people hassling each other for the same wave. The area with decent waves is only about a hundred meters or so wide so sometimes it gets a bit hectic. This morning some guy just managed to dive under this little kid who didn’t manage or possibly wasn’t trying to get out of the way.

During the next two days I’m going out there as many hours as I can manage, aching ribs or not!

The journey out here couldn’t really have been much easier; a cheap 50 minute flight from Cebu, a thoroughly ass-numbing 25 kilometer taxi-motorbike ride and we’re sitting down in a really nice laidback resort with our first beer.

Fun fact about flying with one of your best mates; he will not wake you up before the anticipated rough landing but instead sit back and enjoy your terrified facial expression whilst you’re almost shouting out ‘Shit we’re crashing!’ Wanker.

Well, karma pays back; he’s got a lilac colored board and I’ve got a sweet white one. We’re now ready to head out to Cloud 9 and catch some waves. One thing to point out is that it’s all reef breaks here, we’ve only been surfing beach breaks before and we’re slightly concerned about crashing face first into one of the toombstone razorblades that litter the reef. Will get back to you with an update later. If I can still type that is.

Hey, surf’s up!

Well, on Wednesday I went out for a check-up dive with two new guests, and we were following up with two boat dives in the afternoon, departing at 1PM… When we got back to shore I positively skipped to my bag, innocently ‘just checking’ my messages, like I always do, and lo and behold! There was message! From my all-time favorite people at Moalboal Post Office, letting me know I had a package to pick up from Taiwan! Woop!

Just to make sure I checked the web service and, yes, it was still in transit, not even arrived in the country. Just to point something out, it’s now Sunday, and the package still hasn’t registered as arrived in the country… Wankers.

Not really knowing how large this package would be and not being sure if I would be able to carry it on my own on the bike I recruited Tata to come with me and gain the attractive position as package-holder. As it happens we didn’t really get far, I got a rear-wheel puncture after only five minutes on the way! So we push the bike a few hundred meters to this place where you’re supposed to be able to fix all things mechanical, and similar, but to no avail, no-one home.

Tata, who by the way was easily as excited as me, quickly got a ride back to Kasai to collect his bike and then picked me up and we went into Moalboal to collect the package.

Now, on the subject of customs, and taxing, I never asked, but the company who sent the package to me said that they were going to put a ‘friendly’ total on the package, basically to not get the customs officials too excited, nothing more than that. They also advised me not to buy the actual camera from them, because writing Canon on the slip would send mentioned officials straight into orgasmic territories. So I happily bought the camera in Cebu and got everything else from this very clever company. In the end? Well, they did tax me, but it was in the grand sum of 35 Pesos, something I’m happy to part with for the time they took to glance at my shipment information.

When we finally got back to Kasai and tore the box up and opened up all individual boxes it was already time to go out for the afternoon dives, and I just managed to fit all the parts together, stick the batteries on charge and pack it all up again.

On the way back from the dive Tata asked me what I was doing when we got back to shore and I started talking about the camera stuff and computers and drinking beer and playing pool and all that jazz and he looked me in the eyes and said ‘What about your motorbike then?!’ Ah, yes, of course, that thing. That we left on the side of the road. Right, of course, right you are sir.

When we got there, Tata being local and all, he quickly managed to find this ‘place’ where we could borrow tools and bits needed to get the tyre off. Which must have been all of ten meters from where I left the bike initially… When they heard the story they were all wondering why we didn’t get the bike there straight away and let them fix it? Ah, we must have been in a hurry somewhere else or something!

At least 15 people, kids and stray pets quickly gathered around to give helpful advice or generally try to sell their sisters or daughters, and the puncture-fixing session could begin, and it finished successfully with the tyre being put back on by some dude with his bare feet and then pumping it with a hand pump. As you do.

Mission complete and properly dirty we then finished the afternoon with beer and pool, just like I had been planning all along.

Stay tuned for review and comments of the actual gear!

So obviously I didn’t read it. Or any of the other books I bought… And of course I didn’t bring it with me either since I had some serious weight issues with my luggage and several kg of paper didn’t seem like the right thing to pay rip-off overweight fines for.

But as I arrived here at Kasai I quickly found out that Martin Edge recently did a photo workshop here and left a copy of his book behind! I’ve just finished reading the whole thing and I’m barely able to contain the anger I hold towards the site that should show me the progress of the package holding all my new uw photo toys! No, it’s yet not changed, I just checked, again.

The book is fantastic, you can use it as a reference point, you can read it from cover to cover just because you feel like it, and it covers everything from the very beginners instructions to some quite advanced methods using very expensive gadgetry.

While properly fueling all my pent-up eagerness it’s also sowing some doubt upon the choices I’ve made with my purchase; I’ve decided to go for a higher-end compact camera instead of ‘proper’ digital SLR camera… The main reason for this is obviously the $10k price difference but also the size of gear to bring on dive-travels, I’ve seen the luggage of some of the serious photographers we’ve had here and I don’t fancy it at all.

Another thing I’ve come to realise is that uw photography will most probably only be a hobby for me, possibly I’ll get some nice shots that I can print up and hang on my walls (if I ever stay in place long enough to get ‘my walls’ again), and definitely get some shots to impress my family and friends with. But will I enter competitions? Will I try to sell my photos? I doubt it, there’s just too many people out there doing this and I’m way too lazy!

If you have any aspirations at all to take photographs under the surface, even just with the most basic compact camera,  then definitely pick up this book and read the whole thing, it’s great!

Our next scheduled guests will arrive tomorrow and I’m looking forward to some regular diving again. We had a bunch of Koreans here last week, of which only one could speak English, actually, none of them could speak English but one of them was slightly less shit than the others. It took me a full hour to sort out the prices and events that would let them do some snorkelling and a discover scuba dive, usually that conversation takes way less than five minutes. We had a memorable moment with their little palm translator and me starting to speed-talk English just because I was fully fed up with anything Korean. They also tried to sweeten their deal by offering a kiss from the only girl in the group. Which was the English-speaking lads girlfriend, that earned him a cuff over the ears, quite funny! In the end they were very happy with their stay here and we were happy to see them leave.

At the moment Jussi is here visiting from HK and over the weekend we went up to Cebu City to meet up with Wolfgang, Ken and Dawn for a drunken night out to see off Lee who’s now back in the UK. I’m sure he’s already regretting the decision to go there but he should be back here in a few weeks.

Anyway, people have previously been able to see the seahorses on our house reef so today Tata and me went out to look for them. A simple plan; swim out, drop down and look in this first location, then swim south for 15 minutes and look there. We swam out, dropped down, I was thinking about my new camera housing, and things on the house reef that I want to start using it on when I heard Tata signaling rather frantic and pointing down…

WHALE SHARK! Literally just below us! We’re guessing it was around six meters long, slowly cruising north along the bottom of the house reef wall… We started swimming after it, and since we were mid-descent and negatively buoyant when Tata spotted it I quickly got way too deep for our Nitrox mix and I was frantically trying to take photos of it. Let me tell you, when I say that it was ‘cruising slowly’, what I mean is that it’s not moving it’s fins a lot, but it’s moving ahead, against the current, in a good steady pace.

Obviously I was soon completely wasted, way too deep, heart hammering on, hyperventilating a slightly dangerous mix with my head spinning like crazy. I think it was the first time in my diving life that I was actually a little bit worried about what I was doing. We stopped, went up a bit, looked at each other and grinned. And then went on with our intended plan to go look for the pygmy seahorses. Which we obviously didn’t find.

And I didn’t even get a decent shot of it…

It’s truly amazing to swim around and into, they obviously stream all around you and I’ve managed to be completely enclosed with fish all around me a few times, you can only see fish in any direction you look; a big silvery womb.

We’ve got a pretty serious UW photographer here at the moment, and we had one of the top five here a few weeks ago, and they were both pretty keen to try to capture the action, obviously I’ve also tried and have been feeling quite silly with my little bit of plastic with on-board flash when them lot turn up with big metal housings and strobes sticking a meter out on each side. You can see some of pro shots here, just click on the two arrows.

But still! As long as I use the sun to light up the scene I can sometimes pull off something worth showing, so I’ll of course show it off here… I’ve also included some other recent shots, and as a special gift to Carro there’s a few orangutang crabs.