Kayabang Crabs

The local kayabang crabs come out of their burrows among the near-shore coconut trees every full moon, and set out on a determined march to the beach, where they get up to ... well, I really don't know what.

On the way, they go straight through anything passable, including of course, houses.

I found this one yesterday, sitting amongst my pots and pans.

They're not particularly friendly, because the local people go out with coconut frond torches, to catch them as they cross the beach.


They're quite delicious, cooked in coconut milk, as ginaatan. This is a very well-known soup in the Philippines, and the base can be used for almost anything.

Here's the base, stolen from Filipino Vegetarian Recipes - actually their recipe is for cooking saba bananas, but it's the same as used by every Filipina the length and breadth of the islands.

1 tsp salt
1/4 c oil (can cut down on this)
2 c coconut milk
3-5 cloves of garlic (to your taste), chopped finely
1 small onion, finely sliced
2 fresh chillis, sliced (optional)
2 tsp dried shrimp, soaking in 2 tsp hot water
1/2 c sili leaves (or other greens that might go with this, like spinach, for example)

(If you don't understand US recipe cups and teaspoons as measures, then just use your common sense, get it right the second time, and go on from there).

The result's delicious, and when you've just caught the crab in the pan he's going to be cooked in, somehow even more so.

Tsunami Notice

Strange thing, you know; since the Big Tsunami in the Indian Ocean on December 27 2006 (my birthday, as it happened) everyone has got all concerned.

It's fairly obvious that, on an island like Siargao, where most of the flat ground is only 1 or 2 metres above high-tide mark, that, if a tsunami happened, we'd all be done for.

A tsunami's not something you can plan ahead for.

We're only a few miles from the Philippine Deep (some 10km down), and if, say, a huge submarine landslide or something similar happened there, we wouldn't have much time to run.

So there's not much point in putting up notices like this, especially when it's distinctly ambiguous about whether you have to run 14 kilometres or just a mile.

So, it may happen at any time, and since I can't run much any more, I'll just plod along, and pray (even though I'm an atheist).

Why Can't General Luna Make Real Money From Surfing?

Well, GL can, and it does, but not terribly well.

Newquay is a cold, nasty place, but has the only good surfing waves in England.

Read on:
Building bonanza for Cornwall's capital of surf
· Improved transport links make Newquay a hotspot · Well-to-do young invest in apartments and lifestyle

Steven Morris - The Guardian - Saturday January 5 2008
There are two sounds associated with the Cornish resort of Newquay at the moment - the crashing of surf and the clang and clatter of heavy machinery.
While developers in other parts of the UK are gloomily wondering what 2008 holds, their counterparts in the country's surf capital are enjoying boom times. The ever-increasing popularity of surfing, coupled with much-improved transport links to north Cornwall, have created a race to build new and ever more swish apartments.
Chintzy hotels are being turned into trendy apart-hotels - flats with hotel services - while tired guest houses are being converted into studio flats, or surf-pods, as the developers call them.
Two penthouse apartments have just sold for more than £1m, amid rumours that David Beckham was thinking of investing.
All this in a town which until recently had a reputation of a tatty, kiss-me-quick sort of place and is still a favourite haunt of drink-sodden stag parties.
Such is the speed of developments that no one seems sure just how many new homes are being built. But the best guess seems to be that some 1,400 properties are either under construction or going through the planning process.
Stuart Brereton, land director for the south-west with the Acorn Property Group, said young, well-to-do people were keen to invest not just in mortar and bricks but in the surf lifestyle, which generates £42m a year for Cornwall's economy.
[£42m a year - about 3.5 billion pesos - might be a bit much for Siargao to handle, but about a tenth of that might make the island a very rich place indeed - the politicians and foreign investors would take most of it, but some would filter down to the people, and they are the ones who matter]
"It's all about the sea, the surf, the buzz of surfing. A few years ago Newquay seemed a long way from London. Now there are good links to the airport and the roads are much better too."
Acorn has a cluster of developments close to Fistral beach, one of Europe's best for surfing. From its glass and aluminium sales zone overlooking the beach, it has already sold half of the 52 apartments in its Zinc complex, though they will not be ready for more than a year. Ten of the 14 properties in its Pearl development are sold, including £2m-plus penthouses.
The boom is giving established hotels a helping hand. Will Hatfield, owner of the Carnmarth, said that three years ago his customers were almost all pensioners who arrived on a coach. Now he sells his rooms mainly to professionals aged 25-45 at double the rate. "The modern-day surfer isn't a hippy in a VW van," he said. "He's a doctor, a surgeon, a solicitor, a banker. He's flying down into the airport at the weekend or flying down the A30 in his BMW."
The boom is great news for builders. "It's never been like this," said Peter Anstey, who is working on the Ocean Gate development. "There's loads of work for us." But Anstey, who was born and bred in Cornwall, also sees a downside. "Newquay is getting a makeover but the problem is very few Newquay people can afford it."
--------------------------------
...very few Newquay people can afford it.".

That's true of GL too, if local people get cut out of the profitable developments by foreigners who set up their own exclusive enclaves.

(see: Patricks On The Beach for a perfect example of a greedy foreigner who even puts up barbed wire fences to keep the people of Siargao out of his 'exclusive' resort. Follow his link http://www.mojf.org/ to see what his real scam is).

Of course, General Luna people cannot even think about buying some of the new buildings put up by foreigners. But neither can the people of Newquay. They are both restricted to their own old ways of life, but they'll manage.
If a foreigner pours a million pesos into his new luxury house, a Siargeño can build something just as good (and probably better for his lifestyle) for just P100,000. Or, not quite as good, but still very adequate, for P10,000.

Access to Newquay has turned the place around - all it had, until recently, was fishing and a few waves. Now it has good road access from London and other parts of the UK, so you no longer have to spend two days getting there.

Fishing and a few waves is all that General Luna has.

But access to Siargao and GL is extremely difficult

Minimum time from Cebu, the nearest international airport is 24 hours, including one overnight boat trip, a six-hour wait in Surigao City, and a 3-4 hour trip to Siargao. If you mis-time it, it can take a day longer. Don't forget, also, that the visitor may have already been travelling, by air, for 6-18 hours.
If the Island's politicians had any brains at all the very first thing they could do to help tourism along would be to organise the boat schedules.
Why do all the boats leave at about the same time?
(6am from Siargao, 12 noon from Surigao City to Siargao? No alternatives).
Does whoever gives them the license to run have no control at all over their schedules?
(Or is it, as most island residents think, a conspiracy to concentrate all the work of coastguards, customs, pilots, etc into as short a time as possible so they can rest for the remaining day?)

The boat services treat people like cattle. Why are they allowed to do so?

Then, when visitors arrive in General Luna, they face a horrendous road trip to Cloud 9. It's only about 4km but it can take a good hour of bumpy road travel. In the wet season, the road is almost impassable due to flooding.

This is the most important road for General Luna's prosperity, but it has been entirely neglected.

Our bright new mayor could have saved half the money he spent on fireworks to celebrate his inauguration and for 'his people' at Christmas (that was a total waste of money, because he destroyed the Boulevard where 'his people' could have sat and enjoyed the show).

Perhaps P20000 ($500) could have been spent just on dumping loads of coral rock and sand to fill the potholes between General Luna and Cloud 9

I've driven over most of the island's roads, and although some of them can be said to be bad, this stretch is definitely the worst.

The ever-increasing popularity of surfing, coupled with much-improved transport links have brought prosperity to Newquay, that cold, chilly place in England

but, here in GL, a tropical island paradise, our politicians don't seem to have given any real thought about how their town could make some real money from surfing, and no thought whatever about what they could do to help.

I like fireworks, very much, but I'd prefer to do without them and have a decent road.

Voyage To the Big City - Coin Divers

I haven't been to Cebu City since my last court hearings in July, and that wasn't much fun, although I had great pleasure in accepting the resignation of my lawyer; he was totally useless.

I decided to go at the penultimate hour; I had to go to Surigao City for some itsy-bitsies, and I hate the place so much that at 5pm I decided to take the 7pm boat to Cebu to get out of there.

The trip is overnight; it gets into Cebu about dawn, plus or minus a bit. So we don't get to see very much of the intervening trip. It follows Magellan's route to Cebu, from Limasawa Island on, and about dawn we pass Punta Enggaño (Enchanted Point) on Mactan Island.

Punta Enggaño is the prime shell-collector's source; everyone in the village is involved in the shell business somehow. Some specialise in rare shells, others in regular, pretty stuff for tourists and bathroom decorations, and others make some of the best fakes I've ever been taken in by. (If you've ever greedily bought a very rare shell at a bargain price, you can imagine your chagrin when you look at it again next day in daylight, and see that a tuppenny shell has been 'adjusted' with a hand file and some spray paint into a very great rarity. So you swallow your great pride in your infallible 'expertise', and endeavour to find the next sucker in line.)

You pass through the strait between Cebu City and Mactan Island a bit after dawn, and pass through the channel to Pier 1, in the heart of the city. With a bit of manoeuvring (hurling of anchor lines, etc) we end up with the bow pointing towards the dockside. But not before we've been visited by the local coin divers. They come out after every incoming ship, hoping for a few pesos.

The wife holds the coin collecting net, and the husband nonchalantly paddles, using only one hand and his ankle, to twist-paddle the boat along. If his wife misses the thrown coins, he dives in and gets them.

They have a classical bangka; long slim hull, two outriggers, and no motor, and he drives it like an extension of his own body, with consummate skill, just as you might ride a familiar bicycle.

A few days later, arriving in Surigao City, we are met by the local coin-divers, but they've gone all hi-tech. Their boats are rice sacks, stuffed with polyethylene foam chunks from broken fish-boxes, and each one wears a single or two ping-pong bat shaped paddles strapped to his feet.

But the little buggers still catch every coin I toss over the side, no matter how I try to obstruct them, by throwing coins out of reach.

Oh! What a Lovely Neighbour!

Would you rent a used seaside cottage from this man?

He is my friendly and cooperative neighbour., the owner of Patrick's-On-The-Beach, which surrounds me on three sides.

We haven't spoken to each other in over two years, ever since I went round to introduce myself, and he told me that he was just about to take over the quiet garden of the house I had just rented from Dado, demolish my thatched barn that I was about to use as a bead-craft sweatshop, and leave me with just the mere concrete shell of a house that goes with those two invaluable assets.

Next day, I used the back gate from my garden, for a swim. It leads about 10 metres through the cottages that Andreas rents from my landlord, Dado, to the sea. I was confronted by this fellow, who told me he was concerned about security for his 'resort' - Patrick's On The Beach, and unless I kept the gate padlocked, he would padlock it himself.
If he did, I said, I would effing cut off the effing padlock.
Next day, he marched up my garden to my bead works, where the girls were working away industriously, accompanied by the town's Chief of Police, and accused me of 'threatening' him.
Nothing came of that, of course; it was typical bluster.
But that summer, while I was away in Spain flogging beads to punters in the local markets, he reinforced the closure by boarding up 'his' side of the gate.

More on the lovely Andreas in later posts, including the intriguing tale of the source of the above smug self-portrait.

By the way, if you feel like you would like to donate to his orphanage scam, send a blank cheque to:

Messenger Of Joy Foundation
14721 S. Biscayne River Drive
Miami, FL 33168
Tel (305) 687-4107
Fax (305) 769-9924
andreas@mojf.org

Expensive Birds

I always knew there was one small tiny problem involved with keeping a pretty woman; decoration, maintenance and upkeep costs.
The town Fiesta is due on Friday, so there is a travelling fair of ukay-ukay stalls set up on the foreshore next to my neighbouring village of squatting fishermen, Mabua, between me and the creek. Ukay-ukay is basically second-hand clothes (yes - you know the ones you dutifully collect for the poor of the world? Well, they get bought up on arrival by Chinese traders, and farmed out to the local equivalent of Gypsies, who travel from town to town at fiesta time. They sell sheeting by the kilo, T shirts for 50p ($1),shorts for 100p, and so on.
On Monday night, I took Shedney out for our usual pub-crawl from Lalay's at the end of the Boulevard, to Nine Bar just up the road from me.
Only then did I notice that the short-short-shorts she was wearing had a broken zip, so when the tails of her shirt opened, everyone could see her her sweet little cotton-clad pussy.
So I blew up; just quietly exploded, thrust a 500p ($5) note into her hand and growled that she'd better get to the bulanon (ukay-ukay market) first thing in the morning, and get herself some new (and longer) shorts.

So what did the little minx do? She went straight up to Larry's Reef Break Shop (good website), where he has an enticing show of beachwear, and bought herself a grand new ensemble, plus a T-shirt and pair of short-short-shorts. The short-short-shorts have a hand-embroidered motto: "I AM A SIARGAO ISLAND SURF BITCH", and she blew the whole goddam' $5!

But she does look good in it, I must say.

And so thought Harry the Canadian Real Estate Millionaire, as he gazed, tongue lolling out, at that little area just below her collar bone.

Cloud 9

Siargao Island is best known by surfers, although a few other discriminating types are beginning to come here. This the famous wave, Cloud 9.

Starting Out

This weblog will be an irregular notebook about my life (and occasional thoughts) on a small Pacific island, at the far right hand side of the Philippines. You can see what the place looks like at my website:
http://www.coconutstudio.com/GENERALLUNAfinX.htm

I change my obsessions with the seasons, and my current one is number systems in the Austronesian languages, of all things. I've been working on it for about four months now.

I thought, originally, that my findings would upset the entire current paradigm about the history of the people around me (the Austronesians), who managed to settle all the South East Asian islands, including the Philippines (where I live), Indonesia, and then went on to Easter Island, Hawaii, New Zealand, and west to Madagascar, just off the coast of East Africa.

Of course, I was wrong, but not all that wrong.

The Austronesian migrations were the widest spread of a distinctive human culture and anguage before the European expansions following the Age of Exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The people who undertook this quite amazing migration share that culture and language with my island neighbours. Some of that culture is good; some very good, and some bad. (For a bit of the bad, see: http://www.coconutstudio.com/fishing%20expedition.htm).

I'll be writing a little about bits of that culture and language from time to time in this weblog. It will include random jottings that don't merit a full web page.