Tiger Time

Tiger Lady: please, Madam, this is the last call. We are boarding!

Me: alright, alright. I was just at the bar. 

Tiger Lady:... Madam, it is very important that we board the flight on time. 

Me: don't talk to me about 'important', woman!  I have been at school for a whole week!  My next holiday isn't for a week and a half!  Year 7 did drama last thing on a Friday. Do you know what that means?  I'll tell you what's important: that second glass of wine at the bar was important. Now move out of my way so that I can sit on a flight full of crying babies wishing sterilisation on everyone around me!

Yep, this child stared at me for the entire flight.

Look at the view, small child, not at me, the first white person you have ever seen this close up!

Food for Thought

So, since I am now such an international butterfly that I have contacts and friends in eight countries spanning four continents, I decided to spend the second part of my trip sweating until my peeling skin formed small balls of dirt, coating my innards and outside in a thick film of dust and pollution and observing a side of Manila that the average tourist probably doesn't get to see with my friend Saint Karin. 

Just to preface, before going to Manila, I thought I lived in a big, busy, polluted city. If you think this about your home town, then visit Manila and see if you still feel the same way afterwards. I may be remembering it inaccurately, but Saigon is a country village with a parish church and farmers markets in comparison to Manila. Obviously, with so much concrete and life and so many people comes a lot of social issues that the government of a given country either do, or do not address. For the communities that Saint Karin works in, the depressing impression is that it is up to the NGOs to battle the red tape and barriers of poor education, infrastructure, lack of employment, sanitation and malnutrition rather than the government. As a liable protector, I'm sure that everyone is doing as much as they possibly can, and that there are as many shades of grey as there are malnourished street children, but I'll let these photos speak for themselves:

Saint Karin's organisation predominantly provide community outreach in the form of educational opportunities and feeding programs, and Slender Laurel and I were fortunate enough to help out with some feeding sessions, a community visit and a visit to a partner organisation who run a children's home.  Behaviour in Watford and Birmingham classrooms prepared us well for the 2-14 year olds that we met and Slender Laurel and I were particularly proud of the success of a skipping rope that we introduced with the intention of a two-pronged attack: either we would use it to skip, or if the fighting in the line continued, we would use it to tie some of the worst offenders to the nearest lamppost. That's good British discipline for you. Luckily, the skipping worked a treat, as did giving policeman, manhandling rights to the big boys, who kept the queue in order. 

Check out yellow-basketball-vest bruiser who totally rocked the queue management, even when there were 15 small children to control. Somebody give that boy a prefect badge - he's already wearing the Watts House colours!

Clearly, there is a very serious side to this blog that I won't get into, but as a bit of a shock fact, yellow-basketball-vest boy is not 11, he is 14. The majority of the children in the queue are over 8 years old, and the kid with the red flash in his hair, I think is 10 or 11. This is what malnutrition does, which is very scary. Some of them are at school, some of them are not, and for some of them, the main reason they are not at school is because of the shame of arriving at school without lunch because their parents cannot provide them, or their six other siblings, with lunch. If you'd like to hear more ranting about social injustice, email or arrange a Skype call with Saint Karin, who feels very strongly about these things.  

If you are currently experiencing Western guilt, stop for a second and reassure yourself: what you do in your daily lives probably makes a significant positive difference to one or more people around you, and this is a good thing. If you still feel bad, please, don't book a holiday that allows you to skip with street children unless the main purpose of your visit is to buy Starbucks for an overworked friend. Instead, set up a direct debit that does something about children's education at home or abroad through a charity that you trust and believe in and educate your own children about global inequality so that they do the same. We are super fortunate to live our lives in the way we do, and everyone has a gift that they can use to improve the lives of others. If yours comes in an plastic oblong shape with a shiny gold square at one end, then do use it if you feel inclined to. 

Phew!  Altruistic rant done!  Let's get back to the normal blog stuff...

Slender Laurel and I didn't spend our whole visit enforcing skipping rules or sitting in dirt because frankly, we're not that nice. We do good deeds every day in term time when we allow very excitable year 7s to do drama rather than sit in silence and read, and smile at children before 7:55am. Allowing children to leave our rooms on time for break has already bought us our ticket into heaven. Instead, we spent some of our days being tourists and taking fun photos around the old city of Intramurus...

And climbing active volcanoes, leaving a river of sweat to run down the hill behind us...

And obviously, no trip to an Asian metropolis would be complete without a visit to the depths of hell, also known as the meat section of the wet market where skinned pig heads stare at you like the hideous thing from 'Lord of the Flies' and men sleep beside pig carcasses waiting to be butchered and bags of blood sit on the floor and everyone who is anyone wields a huge meat cleaver, and intestines sit juicily in little bowls. Yes.  Delicious.

I tried not to breathe, for fear of vomiting:

Unpleasant!

Boracay

Before I begin this post today, I'd like to state, once and for all, that for some time I have been living a Li Hi lie. You may have noticed this from my recent blogs that have featured flower arranging, cafes and GOLD lounges, but if you have been reading over the past few months and have been passing this off as a phase, whilst whispering, 'No, it's not true!  It can't be true!  I won't believe it! Remember Salkantay?  Remember Toubkal?  They can't all be lies.  We'll see the true Li Hi Shan soon enough!' then I'm afraid I'm going to have to break your hearts and remind you of Rinjani, the beginning of the end for me. Remember Rinjani, guys?  Now, here, look at these pictures and you tell me whether I'm still an intrepid explorer, or a  five star, highly strung, middle class brat with a princess delusion...

 

Not very intrepid, I'm sure you'll agree.  However, if you would still like to be my friend, even though I have retired from hard work and dirt, please read on.

So, having sat on a plane on a runway for an hour in the middle of a raging storm, I eventually managed to leave Hong Kong and had a turbulent flight that scared the life out of me. I even had a conversation with God about all the things I had achieved so far in my life and all the reasons why, I guess, death at this point wouldn't be such a terrible thing and if this was The Plan for me, then at least I'd experienced business class at least once in my life.  The pilots, however, managed to deliver me safely into the arms of my long lost friend, Saint Karin, who has also been living in the tropics for 18 months. Her Tagalog far out trumps my Vietnamese and she was pleased to see that I too spend my days inside and thus am also a shade I like to call 'pale milk' despite the consistent 30+ degree heat we live in.  

This brief stop was followed by another flight on a very small, propellor powered plane, which was also delayed by over an hour, seemingly because Philippine Airlines forgot that they had to provide planes that day. That was quite an exciting plane, though, and I didn't fear for my life, and got to descend a small set of stairs like a 1960s First Lady in order to get off in the tiny airport of Caticlan. I managed to get some photos on my way back, which was quite cool:

Other than beautiful views from hotel balconies, enforced relaxation and sunbathing on floating bamboo rafts in the middle of greeny-blue bays, the point of this trip was to do some scuba diving. I'd explained to my part time travel buddies, Slender Laurel and Captain Mathman that if they were for scuba then I was a pea, and wonderfully, they were for scuba!  Even better, they were even more for scuba than I was, and Slender Laurel, a girl after my own heart, had signed up to do learning with scuba to get a certificate. Who doesn't love a certificate?  

Her advanced skills came in handy to me when it became apparent that I could not remember how to dive and would probably have been a liability under water had she not been my dive buddy. Having been reprimanded, gently, by the dive master, Peter, for testing my mask in the wrong way, I decided to spend all my time on the boat watching Slender Laurel put her equipment together as she mouthed and demonstrated each step to me like a Blue Peter presenter on mute.  I think I got away with it: any casual observer would have thought that I was a qualified expert. 

I was feeling much more confident when my life jacket was inflated and air appeared to be coming out of the pipes attached to my breathy thing, until I realised that if Slender Laurel was my dive buddy, responsible for my underwater survival, then I too was her dive buddy, and thus, if she died or got lost in a web of seaweed or eaten by a shark or stung, fatally, by a jellyfish, it would be my fault. Considering later in this trip I managed to slice the top of my finger off when trying to change the direction of an electric fan, the task of looking after someone else seemed somewhat daunting but hoping for the best, we all unceremoniously fell over backwards into the water and floated around looking at fish. 

Luckily, everything was juuuuuuuuuust fine, and the fish were very pretty. Highlights included these guys:

Big triggerfish.

Enormous Napoleon fish. 

Red snapper, which don't actually go red until you kill them. Fun fact!  All of them were quite big and scary and I wondered if they would be able to eat us. 

There were also some of these sea cucumbers, which I thought I had invented, aged 8, because every time I told someone about them, they refused to agree that they existed. But look, they're real (and really ugly):

We also did a really cool deep dive to 31m, to see a wrecked Yak-40 that we were able  to swim through, living out our Tin Tin and Indiana Jones fantasies Doing Exploring and Looking for Sunken Treasure and stuff. Cool. 

Obviously, this was all interspersed with lots of ice cream, beer, sunbathing, reading of the depressingly epic Philippino, 'Noli Me Tangere' (will I ever finish it?!) and frolicking in the sea at sunset, which is decidedly un-Li Hi but as I said, cometh the era of no shame associated with spas, posh hotels, champagne and business class.

Also, never fly with Philippine Airlines. Every flight I have taken with them has been delayed by more than an hour. Thank goodness for airport coffee and wifi.