Journey to Basuanga Island, and the Coron Bay Wrecks

Warning: in a few paragraphs, this will turn into another dive nerd post.

Our journey from the Gili Islands, Indonesia, to Palawan province in the Philippines was, to put it politely, hellish.

Our transport company put the wrong airport code on our ticket, so we nearly ended up stranded at the Lombok airport (not useful when your tickets are for Bali Denpasar!). We lost a SECOND bank card to a hungry ATM (and have been forced to rely on credit advances ever since). We spent the night on a blanket on the Kuala Lumpur airport floor (to be woken up by the guy who collects the carts... we were in his space. He did not look impressed. As we shuffled off, I suppose neither did we). We had a moment of horrible clarity in which we put the facts together and figured out that our flight was landing at the Clarke Airfield, which is sixty kilometres north of Manila... and our connecting flight was out of Manila's city airport because we'd each booked one flight (and so we stayed in a massively overpriced hotel in dirty, dirty Manila).

So, lessons: 1) Pay very close attention to your tickets. We normally would have caught this one, but the writing was so scribbled I had no idea what it said to begin with. 2) Hold on to your bank cards!! You can get them back, but you have to wait until the bank is open, and at 8 pm at the Bali airport waiting for an outbound flight, that isn't an option. 3) Don't mess with the cart guy's cart system. 4) CHECK THE AIRPORT CODES.

Oops.

But finally, finally, we landed on Basuanga Island in the west of the Philippines, just north of the long, ocean-bound finger that is Palawan. Coron Town is the biggest population centre. It's a dirty, compact little town on a bay that was once lined of mangrove trees.

We ended up at the Krystal Lodge, a little guesthouse that, like the surrounding neighbourhood, is to be found down a narrow, rickety pier, perched on stilts some six feet above the bay, which serves as both garbage disposal and sewage repository (The locals poop right into the water. I don't know exactly what was happening with our sewage, but I hope it wasn't going into the ocean. I am not sure I want to know the truth).

Beyond the sludgy waters (teeming with little fishies), our pier-hotel had a glorious view of Coron Bay and its mountainous islands, especially at sunset. One evening, in an unusual moment of motivation, Dan convinced me to climb the 720 steps up to the top of the local hill, to see the sunset.

I was glad once we'd reached the summit and watched the blazing sun sink into the distant limestone cliffs. But we definitely haven't been keeping in shape lately and it hurt my thighs!

The whole reason we'd started our Palawan adventure in Coron was to try out some wreck diving. In September of 1944, the US launched an air attack on a Japanese fleet that was sheltering in the bay, sinking a number of them. Today the site is known to be some of the best wreck diving in the world - the sites are both historically interesting and beautiful, covered in coral growth and home to millions of fish. And it is just the coolest thing to be descending into the murky depths when suddenly, you're confronted by the spectral silhouette of a smokestack and the enormous curve of a ship's bow, covered with waving sea fans and bobbing lion fish.

We did six dives in the bay about an hour's boat ride from Coron Town, three a day for two days, with a newer company called Amphibiko. The dive master, Christian, was professional and helpful. The crew were fantastic, equipment was new and worked perfectly. On the first day, we dove the wrecks of two auxiliary cargo ships, the Olympia Maru and a wreck now known as 'Tangat,' and one small gunboat, known as 'East Tangat.' On the second day, we dove on Irako, a refrigerator ship, and another auxiliary cargo ship, the Kogyo Maru, and finished up with a dive in nearby Barracuda Lake, a volcanic lake that grows hotter in distinct levels as you venture deeper. The hottest temperature registered by Christian's dive computer was 37 degrees Celsius!

After discussing the options, we decided to take Christian up on his offer to enter the wrecks. Before anyone leaves a lecturing comment - besides of course my mother, who is entitled - I know we aren't supposed to go in without specific training, but we decided that as we're both comfortable with our buoyancy (that is, staying level and swimming straight) and we wouldn't really be going beyond the open cargo holds, that the small risk was worth the chance to see these incredible wrecks. We're not likely to be back in Palawan anytime soon. We peeked into Irako, but didn't go beyond the first hold - it's known as a highly advanced, dangerous wreck, deeper than we'd been before and full of intact corridors to explore. Probably extremely cool, but certainly beyond our skill level to go inside.

The decks of the ships were truly as interesting as the interiors. Nearly seventy years of coral growth has transformed these man-made monsters into thriving ecosystems. We saw some enormous fish, and big shoals of smaller ones, circling the smokestacks and slipping in and out of the holds.

And for $25 a dive each, they give you lunch halfway through the day, and then beers on the return journey to Coron... it must be some of the cheapest diving in the world. Well worth a visit!

S.

Kuala Lumpur: the Asian Adventure Begins.

Our flight from Rome to Kuala Lumpur via Kuwait City was a long ordeal, but went smoothly. We settled into our Chinatown guesthouse and discovered that, for the first time in six months, we were really and truly jet-lagged. For four nights, we were up until 5 am, rising at 1 or 2 pm and patronizing a conveniently located Seven-Eleven for our 3 am snack runs.

Jet lag SUCKS.

So our four nights in KL turned into six, and even then we didn't do much sightseeing outside of Chinatown and the malls we were scouring for new trekking shoes.

We DID spend an afternoon at the Batu Caves, a Hindu shrine set in an enormous limestone cavern just north of the city. After scaling two hundred-some-odd steps and evading the dirty-looking monkeys perched on the railings, we emerged into the cavern. We spent a half hour exploring the temples and the little shrines tucked into the corners of the cave, followed by a keening, clarinet-esque music and a funky drum-beat courtesy of a pair of musicians in the main temple.

At the base of the cliff are more caves, these with an admission fee, containing sculpted depictions of Hindu stories and more shrines, all painted in bright (sometimes psychedelic  colours. To the side is a reptile sanctuary housing a huge monitor lizard, a turtle and all sorts of creepy and slithery things. Super cool, but not where you'd want to be caught in an earthquake!

S.

Sun and Ruins - Fethiye and Pamukkale

We're flat out on the wide stones of Turkey's Oludeniz beach, on the Western Mediterranean shore. The sun beats down, still hot in the late afternoon. Above us, paragliders swirl in the thermals, spinning up and then float down to land up the beach behind us. The fishy-salt smell of the ocean blows over us, the waves, white-foamed in the brilliant azure water, smash again and again against the cove.

Eventually we overheat and speed-limp across the scalding stones to plunge into the ocean, just cool enough to refresh us, but so salty that I surface with teary eyes every time I put my head under water.

When we get out, I consider: should I reapply the waterproof SPF 50 sunscreen on my face when it's already four o'clock?

Yes. Yes I should. Ginger kids burn fast. And I'm not alone with my pale skin - this corner of the coast is practically one big British resort town.

That evening, on our way back to our hotel in Fethiye, we stopped at one of the many tour boats in the harbour to arrange a Twelve Islands tour. Fortunately for us, Ramadan meant a lull in domestic tourism, so an eight hour boat trip with swimming stops and provided lunch was running at twenty-five lira - thirteen bucks. Yes please!

So we spent a whole day lounging aboard the Princes Serap with about fifty other people - not bad on a boat with two levels and 150 person capacity. Drinks are expensive on-board, and outside drinks are forbidden (we were able to sneak some water on), but even with the drink tab, the day was cheap.

We swam in five little coves, some with other tour boats, some alone, and the Captain lent us his diving mask for free so that we could explore underwater.

The next day, we grabbed a dolmus from Fethiye to the Saklikkent Gorge, where we spent the afternoon wading along the polished, white canyon floor.

Dolmuses are driver-owner minibuses but the fares and routes are predetermined by the regional authorities. So a driver will linger as long as he can before leaving to get as many fares as he can, and then troll slowly along the route, honking at prospective customers because more people means more money.

So it takes a while to get anywhere.

Dolmuses are decorated with everything the drivers can think of: evil eye pendants and stickers, Turkish flags (Turks are a very patriotic bunch), photos and business cards taped to the windows. In one, we saw a shag dashboard cover. It was magnificent.

We moved north a few days later to the little town of Pamukkale, which sits at the foot of two impressive attractions.

Visible from across the wide valley are travertines, a shiny, white hill that to our Canadian eyes looked strangely like snow. Rather, the hill is a series of calcium terraces deposited by thermal springs. The mineral-rich water runs down the hillside, forming pools and painting a thick crust as it flows.

There's no shoes allowed for the hike up the hill, just bare feet on the little ridges and in the slimy calcium mud that builds up in the pools.

At the top of the hill is the partially preserved ruin of Hieropolis, built as a health resort when the Romans found the mineral springs. The steep theatre has been partially reconstructed, the necropolis is in impressive shape, and you can pay to use the baths near the white cliffs. We visited at sunset, when there aren't many people, so we wandered the site without the crowds, examining columns and fountains and tombs until the night-time call to prayer rolled over the hills and it was too dark to see properly.

But just one ancient city is never enough, so the next day we packed into a hired car and drove two hours into the dry hills to see Aphrodisias.

The Temple of Aphrodite, to whom the city is dedicated, stands partially reconstructed, and a few of the other major buildings have been excavated and somewhat restored - a hilltop theatre, the massive house of an evidently important man and the baths are in decent shape. The city gate stands tall and glorious in the middle of a field. But just to the north, the stadium reigns king of the ruins.

It's set into a hillside so that you approach from the top of the seating - you pass a line of trees and the enormous oval stretches suddenly before you. It could hold thousands and thousands of people and is in remarkably great shape. The rows of stone seats are warped and crunched, but some are still usable. The ground-level, where I can imagine chariots racing before a roaring crowd, has been excavated and re-established.

Best of all, because Aphrodisias is so far from any major towns, there were only a few small tour groups and a few independent travelers around. We sat alone in the carved seats of the two-thousand-year-old stadium, contemplating chariots, awed by the enormity of it.

We ran into difficulty leaving Pamukkale. Whereas earlier in the week, Ramadan had proved to be a cost-saver, now it was ruining our plans to head up the coast. Ramadan had given way to Beyram, the festival celebrating the end of the fasting. Which is when everyone in Turkey goes on holiday, and the buses are booked.

So we ended up heading right back to Istanbul, because the night bus wasn't full. We spent two days doing nothing but wandering the crowded streets and eating kebab, and then loaded onto another night bus, destined now for the Bulgarian border and the Balkans.

S.

Cambridge

We passed an uneventful night on the ferry and disembarked in Harwich after a jarring 5:30 wake-up call. After a sleepy morning wandering around the cute and very old town of Colchester, with its Norman keep and Roman ruins, we boarded the train to Cambridge.

Now, I don't know if Cambridge is normally the Bermuda Triangle of British intercity transport, but on the journey in, we spent three hours in Bury St Edmunds because of a blockage on the train track (kudos to the frantic young National Express employee who was simultaneously attempting to explain and re-explain the situation to thirty annoyed and confused passengers who swarmed him incessantly, call cabs to placate said passengers and figure out what the eff was even going on). On the trip from Cambridge to London, our bus dropped all of its oil onto the road two turns into the journey, causing chaos for cycling students and once again leaving us waiting patiently (as we have nowhere to be for nine months) for the next vehicle.

Bit of a shock coming from the slick precision of German and Dutch rail. But maybe we're bad luck. After all, one of our trains in Germany WAS one-and-a-half minutes late.

Either way, we eventually made it to a campsite 5 miles outside Cambridge and set ourselves up. We were in need of a rest, so three nights turned into five and even so, we never did manage to tour the inside of any of the colleges.


We wandered Cambridge's winding streets, lined by quaint black-gabled houses and shops, and walked along the 'Backs,' the long and woodsy park running along the backside of the elaborate colleges. We took a look at the tiny but history-rich Round Church, built as a prayer-stop for medieval pilgrims, and we spent Sunday hiding from the heat, holed up in a pub to watch F1 (Dan) and to devour cheese toasties and use the wifi (me).

We spent a day at yet another war museum, the Duxford Imperial this time, located on the Duxford Airfield, which was a major base in both world wars. As you have probably guessed, it is mostly about airplanes, which thankfully weren't a major feature in Overloon the week before. I will give them this: airplanes are pretty cool.

The highlight of the day came when someone flew their restored Spitfire in loops over the airfield, the droning roar chasing behind the little gray plane as it buzzed down along the grass and then up to flip and fly back down, again and again, loop after loop. We have no idea who owns the plane - the museum can't afford the expense of keeping most of the planes fully functional, but does allow private collectors/pilots to keep historical aircraft in the hangars.

On our final day in Cambridge, we set out on a long hike across the fens - reclaimed marsh land - to Ely, 17 miles or 30 some-odd kilometres away. A long, but very flat walk between the River Cam and the train line, past long, thin house boats covered in windows and plants, families of swans and herds of cows that only begrudgingly moved off of the thick dikes to let us by, sidestepping splatted cow patties as we went.

And then it began to rain, hard and angled in the wind that whipped across the fenlands. We donned our brand-new, ultra-stylish rain pants and tromped on through the muck. Our waterproof shoes began to leak a couple hours later, but there wasn't much to do but sploosh, sploosh, (squish! Cow patty?) along, squinting against the wind and the sharp rain.

Our moment of redemption came when, five hours into the walk and three into the rain, suddenly the massive octagonal stone tower of the Ely Cathedral came into view, beckoning like a lighthouse in a sea of swampy fields. Tragically, we were still five soggy miles off - but now we had a goal in sight.

At least we know the rain pants work?

S.

You Don't Speak German!

I was playing with the Google Translator app on the tablet at some point between Berlin and Hamburg when I made an alarming discovery.

When traveling in a country where we are unfamiliar with the language, which would be most of them, we had tried to ensure that we could at least manage a botched version of the basics: hello, yes, no, thank you, two beers please, can I use your toilet, and the ever-necessary I'm sorry, I don't speak German/Portugese/Spanish/Italian.

It is on this final point we were having difficulty, although we had no idea. For weeks now, when someone addressed us in German we would shake our heads and say, apologetically but with moderate confidence, some of the few German words we had mastered:

"Sorry, nein sprechensie Deutsch." "Sorry, I don't speak German". We had heard and understood this somewhere in our travels and now used it many times a day.

But nearly every time, there would be a pause, and then the Germans would cock their heads and say, "Bitte?" rather quizzically. Which means, "excuse me?"

We would repeat ourselves, assuming poor pronounciation, at which point they would either give up entirely or recommence in English.

What I discovered with the translator was that in fact to say, "I don't speak German," you say, "Keine spreche Deutsch."

It turns out that for weeks we had been saying, "YOU don't speak German!" with bad grammar, to boot. Which explains all the "bitte" nonsense.

Sorry, Germany. Anyway, on with the story.

After our flurry of touristing in Berlin, on reaching Hamburg, we were ready for a change. So our first evening in town, exploring the waterfront (street beers in hand, of course) accidentally turned into racous night out.

We managed to make it cost-effective by buying beers from kiosks. Hamburg's notorious red light district, just north of the river in St. Pauli, is entertaining enough to just wander. Tragically I lost my dollar store sunglasses, although why I wore them in the first place is still unknown. We left the hostel after dark. I blame the tequila-beer. Always blame the tequila-beer.

Half drunk and peckish, we stumbled into the Portugese quarter (surprise!) and delighted, feasted on shrimp and olives and bread. Good lord do I miss Portugese food.

Jan, who we'd visited in Frankfurt, was in Hamburg for work, so we met up and had a fantastic breakfast at a café near our hostel. Afterwards we got transit passes for the day - in Hamburg, an all day pass is also valid for the ferries, so we spent most of our final afternoon taking various ferry lines across the river and into the interior of the port.

We weren't quite ready to leave Germany, so we decided to spend the weekend camping in Bremen, near the Dutch border.




A massive park stretches five kilometres north from the centre of town, full of paths and canals and forest. Our campsite was on the north end of the park, so we rented bikes and enjoyed our commutes, rather than busing back and forth.

Bremen's medieval centre is preserved, largely because during the second world war, there was a port just north on which the air raids were focused. The two churches at the centre are twelve and eight hundred years old, respectively. Under the larger of the two, there is a display of bodies that were mummified by the extremely dry conditions in the church's crypt. Cool, albeit slightly creepy.

We ate 'goodbye Germany' currywurst in the main station on Sunday morning (yes, morning.) and then we were off to new adventures in a new and even more confusing language: time to break out the Dutch!

S.

Schengen Woes

As we left our beloved Portugal for Spain, we made two major discoveries.

Rainy hikes near Constantina

The first was that Seville is a great place to go for Easter... if you are not on a budget or if you booked WELL ahead. We did neither and were consequently out of luck. The Easter holy week, Semana Santa, is a huge deal in Seville - it's the biggest celebration in Spain and involves numerous processions  and special events. The hostels that were available were far too expensive, so we put our heads together and decided on a new plan - we would head north and hike in the Andalucian mountains for a few days and come back to Seville when Semana Santa had quieted down. So we grabbed a bus straight out of Seville and north to the Sierra Norte National Park, to the town of Constantina.

We were in Constantina from Thursday til Sunday. It stopped raining briefly after dinner on Friday. We did manage to get a couple good walks in, through the hills with their herds of sheep and goats and through olive groves. It was gorgeous... then it started to rain again.

The sunshine we waited three days to see!

Easter Sunday we caught the bus back to Seville, because in Spain the big hullabulloo all happens on Good Friday rather than Sunday. We had a quiet night at the hostel, indulging in homemade paella and all the sangria we could drink.

On Monday afternoon we went for the hostel`s free walking tour, where courtesy of some new friends, we made shocking discovery number two:

If you are not a European citizen, you are only allowed to be in a certain portion of the EU for 3 months out of any 6. Which, considering we were hoping to spend roughly 5 months in the countries that constitute this zone, is a little frustrating. This is called the Schengen Agreement. Somehow we missed it in our Euro-research!

So the next night we went out for a long dinner, sat down with a map of the EU and a list of Schengen countries, and made a new plan... rather than blow off our plans to meet Dan`s parents in Italy in late September, we just need to exit the zone by late June and not re-enter until our three months are up. This is helped enormously by the fact that Britain, Ireland, Romania and most of the Balkans are not involved.

So despite the wrench in the plan, I am actually now very excited to have the opportunity to explore more of Eastern Europe than we`d originally planned.

S