Last year while I was waiting for our Tunisian landlord to get air conditioning installed in our apartment, I did a couple of posts on cooking for hot weather. When we are not having hurricanes and tornados here in Florida, the weather here is also very hot. And unlike Tunisia, where the sweltering wind off the Sahara desert kept things pretty dry even by the coast, Florida is more of a tropical place. In fact, I’m convinced that if we let our lawn go for, say, six months, we’d probably end up with not a knee-high grassy field, but a full-out jungle. Seriously. You can almost see the grass growing.

It reminds me a lot of the Philippines, where it was so hot and humid (sticky is how I would describe it, really) that I would walk outside and be soaking wet in five minutes, from a combination of sweat and water from the air. While we were there, we stayed for several weeks at a little hotel in Manila. Actually, “hotel” is a little grand. It was called “Pension Natividad,” and it was more like a hostel with a few private rooms, a communal pot of something that they cooked up every night, and a little improvised basketball court where the locals and Peace Corps types would shoot hoops in the evenings.

Pension Natividad had a little refrigerator in the lobby with cold drinks in it. And one of the drinks (by far the best) was the homemade lassi yoghurt.  My favorite flavor was the mango lassi, and to this day, whenever it is sticky hot outside, I am transported back in front of that refrigerator, trying to make up my mind if I need another mango lassi today. One evening a week or so ago it occurred to me that maybe I could make my own lassi. I put equal parts of milk, yoghurt, and mango pulp in the blender, along with a squirt of raw Florida wildflower honey. Heaven.

If it’s too hot to even push blender buttons, tied for best cool drink in the Philippines is coconut water fresh out of the coconut. To. Die. For. Here I am after a long, hot, marital-problem-inducing hike, enjoying one immensely. Axa, not so much.

Green coconut water has become quite the thing these days. It’s full of electrolytes, and is touted as a sort of natural form of Gatorade. You can now get it at Wal-Mart packaged a little more conveniently (i.e. bypassing the need for a machete) in a carton. I keep one in my refrigerator for when I need a healthy, natural, but certifiably mood-altering pick-me-up.

It’s also the season for six-for-a-dollar plantains (you know, those huge green bananas that you can’t eat raw). I saw them on sale at the Latino market where I shop, so I bought them and figured I’d look up how to cook them later. Fortunately, my brother Samuel went on a mission to Puerto Rico, and is a great cook. He sent me recipes for authentic Puerto Rican Mofongo and Garlic Shrimp. With his blessing, I substituted bacon for the pork rinds and chicken for the shrimp, so I can’t claim to have honestly tried the recipes as written. But they were good! My only problem was that I didn’t have the baseball-bat-sized mortar and pestle he informed me the recipe was actually talking about. I managed to mash my plantains anyway, but it was a lot of work. Still, it was worth it. Yum!

Yesterday I had a crazy craving for canned oysters. So I ate some. A lot, actually. As in, two cans full of oysters, right out of the tin with a fork. Before anyone jumps to conclusions, I am not pregnant. But I was having my period, and the craving made a lot more sense to me when I looked at the Nutrition Facts on the side of the can and realized that it was by far the most concentrated source of iron available in my house at the time.

I try to make a point to eat lots of iron-rich foods when I’m having my period, because one time at college I went to donate blood while having my period, and they told me I was too anemic. Another time I managed to give blood, but promptly fainted in the middle of my philosophy class, disrupting a lecture on Aristotle and the golden mean. Waking up on the floor in the hallway of the Smith Family Living Center with several anxious fellow-students peering down at me has got to rank as my most embarrassing college moment ever. Or at least second most embarrassing.

What I usually do to celebrate the monthly occurrence is to make liver for dinner. I typically chicken out and buy chicken livers to make pâté. If you’ve never tried it, you should. It is superb. Just don’t be put off by the greyish color. This month, though, I decided to go for it and make liver and onions. I’ve tried this before, with less than palatable results, so I was a little choosy about a recipe. I finally settled on one that touted itself as “Absolute Best Liver and Onions.” I followed the instructions religiously, and it turned out delicious. My kids even complimented it for the entire first half of dinner, until they finally clued in to the fact that it was liver.

What do you like drinking and cooking when it’s summertime?

photo credit: mango lassi

Last night we had the good fortune to be invited to dinner by Estela, a friend of ours who is Filipina. There was a Filipino restaurant we used to eat at occasionally in Utah, but it’s been a long time since we had real Filipino food. Estela is an amazing cook, and she prepared several classic Filipino dishes for us. We started out with two kinds of lumpia, or egg rolls. The first ones were “fresh” (i.e. unfried) lumpia, which are like a very thin, light crepe wrapped around julienne carrots, palm hearts, and curly lettuce.

Fresh lumpia usually have peanuts in them, but Estela’s were peanut-free, so my enjoyment of them was multiplied by all the peanut-laced lumpia that I had drooled over in the Philippines and been unable to eat. They were even better than I’d ever imagined, especially with the accompanying garlic/chicken broth sauce.

Possibly even yummier were the fried lumpia with tangy sweet/sour sauce.

I had to try several of both kinds in an effort to make up my mind as to which lumpia I preferred. In the end, I was unsuccessful at choosing between them, but I enjoyed the trial immensely.

Estela had also, of course, cooked quantities of that delightful, fluffy rice–every grain separate and perfect–that is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce for the uninitiated (i.e. me). No meal in the Philippines (even breakfast) is complete without rice. In fact, they have this funny word, ulam, that means “what you eat with rice.” Supposedly, the corresponding English term is “viand,” a word I’d vaguely associated with meat (in a Norman, Robin Hoodish sort of way), but certainly never uttered myself before my introduction to Filipino cuisine. If you look up viand, you’ll find it defined unhelpfully as “an article of food,” sometimes with the appellation “of a choice or delicate kind.” We just haven’t got the ulam concept in English.

In this case, the ulam was adobo, chicken braised in a savory sauce, which is a sort of national dish in the Philippines. Just like with the rest of the meal, Estela’s version was delicious.

To round it all out, Estela created a dramatic pancit, silky translucent rice noodles with vegetables and meat. So yummy.

Dessert was “sticky rice,” which is made out of exactly what it sounds like, but turns out to look something like cake. The rice is mashed into a pulp and mixed with sugar and coconut milk, and then baked (I think). Estela’s had a bonus of actual strips of buko (green coconut), like the kind they put in your buko juice (green coconut water) when you buy it off the street in the Philippines. I couldn’t find a picture, so you’ll have to imagine it.

Even more distressing, I didn’t get a picture of Tony singing Karaoke afterward. Karaoke is a sort of national pastime in the Philippines. It is ubiquitous and indulged in by young and old alike. Tony crooning schmaltzy love songs in Tagalog (to the rapturous delight of Estela and her Filipina friend), was one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a long time.

We’re all a little homesick for the Philippines today!

photo credits: fresh lumpia, fried lumpia, adobo, pancit

So, do houses not need lightning rods anymore?

I have been wondering this for a few weeks, ever since thunderstorm season (I don’t use the word “hurricane,” because I think it’s bad luck) began in earnest. I distinctly remember that in Ray Bradbury’s creepy masterpiece, Something Wicked This Way Comes, it was of utmost importance to get a lightning rod installed on one’s house before the big storm arrived. And then when the lightning hit the rod, I think that was when the army of spiders started to invade the house. Or was that just some bad dream I had after reading it? Was Ray Bradbury living in Florida when he wrote the book?

I usually adore thunderstorms, but I just had to run for earplugs, since I’m typing this out in Tony’s garage office, and this is the loudest thunder I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s coming right on the heels of the lightning too (did you know that Florida is the lightning strike capital of the world, by the way?). My kids are doing fine, but I just might have to start singing to myself about raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.

Or maybe I’ll just reminisce about some fun stormy times during our previous life in the tropics.

I had a lovely thunderstorm experience in the Philippines, the weekend that we stayed at a resort and went scuba diving. The whole wall of our hut-on-stilts opened up, and we stayed up late getting massages and watching a spectacular storm dancing over the bay.

It was also a novelty seeing the streets in Manila fill up and flood during the rainy season. This happened on my mission in Chile too. The street kids thought it was great fun, but it made navigating the already treacherous sidewalks the equivalent of a mud bath, especially once you added in the crazy-driving  jeepneys that would speed down the narrow roads regardless of the foot-and-a-half-deep filthy water. Yech.

My favorite thunderstorm, though, might have been in Hong Kong. We had been fruitlessly searching the city for the LDS temple, and were overtaken by a positively melodramatic tropical storm just as we finally spotted it. I had heard the phrase “sheets of rain,” and even used it myself before, but this was the first time I had ever realized that it could be literal. During a brief break from the clouds, we snapped this photo, and then rushed our baby (and our camera) to the safety of a dry doorway. Fun times!

Well, it worked. the rain has stopped, and the thunder seems to be moving away too. Thanks for waiting out the storm with me!

Well, I finally got around to taking pictures of another room in our house. And I do have another decorating problem to share with you. But first, a few photos.

Here’s our dining room:

Isn’t our bar-height table fun? I feel like a little kid sitting at it with my feet dangling. We got it when Axa was a toddler, partly because we loved the fact that she couldn’t reach onto the table and pull the dishes off. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good photo of the picture behind it, which is one of my favorite pictures ever. In fact, I tried to convince Tony that we should recreate it for our engagement picture. I still don’t know why he wouldn’t agree. Don’t you think it’s just about the most romantic photo you’ve ever seen? It pretty much encapsulates my philosophy of life.

The dining room is not a formal dining room, but it’s a little more formal than a breakfast nook. That’s a good fit for us, because I like eating outside the kitchen but right next to it. It’s the other half of the same room as the living room, actually. Here’s a not very good picture of how they fit together:

You can see the bookcases and couch on the left, and the table on the right. And actually, right there in the middle in the small frame is our real (and slightly less unconventional) engagement picture. At least he humored me and made it black and white. Here it is in a larger version:

And now we come to the decorating problem of the dining room. Actually, it’s the decorating problem of quite a good portion of this house, but it also happens to be one of my favorite things about it: the soaring cathedral ceilings.

High ceilings are virtually taken for granted in Italy, and I love the feeling of proportion and grace they give to a room. And it’s not just how they look. There’s about twice as much air to breathe in a typical Italian room, and acoustics, including conversations, sound different; less stifled, richer and more musical (this also has to do with the fact that Italians don’t really go for wall-to-wall carpeting). I guess maybe it’s the indoor equivalent of a piazza.

So here’s my decorating question: the ceilings are great, but what should I do with all that extra wall?

Here’s the other side of the dining room:

This is the only thing hanging on one of those tall walls in our house that even goes up halfway. It’s our bulul, who sits with his arms crossed over his knees and guards our house. And here’s a closeup of the actual little wooden bululs from the Philippines:

The one in the middle is in the usual pose, which is the same as the little old men in Northern Luzon who sit in the doorways of houses. The others are doing various other traditional tasks. My favorite is the second from the left.

Not only (unlike the other four) is she obviously female, but she’s also wearing a baby on her back. I love it!

When Tony and I lived on BYU campus as newlyweds, we pretty much walked straight out our front door into the Mormon chapel, which was also on campus. Forgot an extra diaper? No problem (please tell me I’m not the only mother who’s ever done this). There was no hassle if one of us needed to be at Church early. And home/visiting teaching was a piece of cake. Tony still loves to tell about his Elder’s Quorum President, who stood up in opening exercises one morning to recount a conversation in which his father (also Elder’s Quorum President in his own ward) begged to know his secret for achieving 100% home teaching. Our Elder’s Quorum President (in all seriousness) launched into an exposition of his plan, which included things like accountability, positive motivation, and setting a good example. I had to laugh. Um, how about the fact that everyone lives next door to each other, and if they go inactive they’ll get kicked out of school, and hence out of the ward?

I don’t think I appreciated living close to the church building enough at the time. Even after we graduated and left campus for the big world, we just hopped into our minivan to drive the few minutes to Church on Sundays. During our adventures abroad, though, we’ve taken all sorts of interesting forms of transportation to Church.

One Sunday in the Philippines we were lost walking to Church, and decided to hire a bicycle-powered conveyance. We squished all three of us onto a seat that had been built onto the side of the bicycle frame. The poor driver. I can’t imagine chugging along carrying three extra people on your bicycle. I don’t think we got there any faster than we would have walking, but at least it was our bicycle rider and not we who ended up tired and sweaty at the church door. On another memorable Sunday there, Tony and I spent the entire hour ride to Church arguing. I don’t remember what the argument was about, but it’s possible that our feelings were aggravated by the fact that we were riding in a motorcycle sidecar, and the attached motorcycle was so loud we couldn’t even hear one another.

In Chiusa Pesio, Italy (before we got a car), getting to Church involved a 30-minute long bus ride, and then a 20-minute walk. I can’t count the times I ran ahead with Dominique to the bus stop at 7:00 in the morning so I could stall the bus driver while Tony came puffing up behind with Axa. We were usually the only ones on the bus, and we liked to sit in the very back seat, because then we could all sit together on the same long row. Once we got on, first we would feed our children the breakfast we had packed, and then pull out their Sunday clothes and dress them too. Pathetic or brilliant? I still haven’t decided.

The bus ride in Florence was shorter, but it was one of those awful city busses with the flexible hinge in the middle. I don’t know about you, but flying through narrow cobblestone streets as the part of the bus you’re on sways dizzily back and forth, about to tip over into the river at any moment, is not my idea of a restful Sabbath activity. It was often cold on those spring mornings in Florence, so I always made cinnamon rolls that rose overnight in the refrigerator and baked on Sunday morning as we got ready for Church. The smell of warm cinnamon rolls still takes me back to that heart-stopping bus ride. Our very first Sunday in Florence, we accidentally rode the bus to the end of the line, not realizing that you had to notify the driver if you wanted him to stop before. We got out and wandered around for an hour looking for the Church building before finally giving up. The next Sunday, it was raining cats and dogs. We managed to get off at the right stop (or near it), but we still weren’t sure how to get to the Church building from the bus stop. (Let’s just say that google maps directions don’t always take into account things like parking lots you’re supposed to cut through, pedestrian walkways not meant for double strollers, the fact that Italian streets have no signs and change names every few blocks, etc.) We ran from doorway to doorway, managing to keep our children, but not ourselves, dry under what we realized were pitifully inadequate umbrellas, and asking directions from quizzical shopkeepers every few minutes. Finally, a passer-by took pity on us, loaded us into his car, and drove us around until we found the Church.

In some ways, Ireland was a welcome relief. There was no bus to Church. Unfortunately, that meant we had to walk 45 minutes to get there. We managed O.K., since we lived there in the summer. It did sometimes still rain on us, but by that time we had wisened up and availed ourselves of the large sturdy umbrellas found in nearly every shop in Ireland. My only disaster was the week I wore a long silk crinkle skirt to Church. By the time we got there after the cloudburst, the bottom of my skirt had dried out, but all the pleats had fallen out too.

And then there is Tunisia. First, we take a taxi to the louage station. It’s pronounced loo-AAHHHJ (with the French “J” without the little “d” before it), and it’s a lovely word to say. It’s a less than lovely conveyance, but not as bad as a jeepney. The Tunisian louage is sort of a cross between a taxi and a bus. Physically, it is a little van that has been fitted with lots of uncomfortable seats. Usually there are grimy curtains on the windows, which my children would love to play with if they could get away with it. Often there is a distinct smell of gasoline coming up from the patched metal floor. There is no regular timetable. They just leave when they’re full. Each louage travels a certain route, but there are no scheduled stops. They are used mostly for inter-city travel. The driver will let you off wherever you want, as long as it’s somewhere on the prescribed route. Most people ride all the way to the louage station in Tunis, which resembles a gigantic, impossibly crowded and chaotic valet parking lot full of dirty white vans and people yelling. They’re not angry, they’re just calling out names of destinations so they can get a tip from the driver when they direct a passenger his way.

Once we get out at the station, we find another taxi, which takes us to our friends’ house in La Marsa, a northern suburb of Tunis. Technically, there is a train that goes to Tunis from Hammamet, which is an alternative way we could explore to get to Church. I usually prefer trains. However, lately there have been some instances of people blocking the rails and then when the train stops asking for money. We haven’t ridden a train here for months, so I’m not sure if it is more like a grand Wild West railway holdup, or just a clever strategy for creating a captive audience for begging. Either way, I think we’ll stick to the louage until the security situation in Tunisia gets a little more straightened out.

And this week our ferry arrives in Palermo, Sicily on Sunday morning, just in time for us to catch some Church meetings. I guess we can say it’s the first time we’ve taken an overnight ferry to get to Church.

I just can’t stop writing about this trip. As promised, here is the exciting final conclusion to our Philippines trip: our layover in Hong Kong. (If you missed any episodes in the Philippines series, you can find them all together here.)

As the vintage double-decker bus wound up the wooded peak, we considered our state of affairs with a mixture of dismay and wild anticipation. We were on our way to the top of Victoria Peak, number one on every list of Hong Kong Island’s numerous attractions. That we had no money to get back down to the airport for our flight home, which left in a mere three hours, had not concerned us much when we boarded the bus. We’d gotten out of scrapes like this before, hadn’t we?

On our first day in the Philippines, only four long months before, we had committed the egregious error of arriving in a foreign country with a bank card that did not function internationally. We had our credit cards, but they were of little use in the

remote villages and budget pension houses, both of which figured prominently in our itinerary. We got around our unfortunate indiscretion by wiring ourselves money in $1000 increments, using a lovely little service called XOOM. By the end of our stay in the Philippines, we realized we were short on cash. Unfortunately, we were also too cheap to wire ourselves more Filipino pesos, to be converted at less-than-ideal exchange rates into first Hong Kong dollars and then American ones. We half considered following the local example and spreading out our belongings on blankets to sell to passersby in the metro. Until an even more brilliant scheme occurred to us.

On the Saturday evening before we left Manila, we went to the grocery store at the popular local mall (yes in the Philippines grocery stores are located inside of malls), which we knew to be always overflowing at that hour. Walking up and down the lines of people waiting for checkout, we began asking if we could pay the bill with a credit card and be reimbursed with cash. To be fair to us, it is standard practice in the Philippines if you have only one or two items to walk up and down the checkout lines, looking for someone who will let you cut at the front of the line. We didn’t consider our request too much stranger or more annoying. The rest of the shoppers did, however, and they eyed us doubtfully. As we passed back through the lines, we became acutely aware that the entire store was staring at the two Americans with the little white baby, begging for money in the grocery store. They were almost sure we were up to something shady. Finally, a kind (and courageous) shopper consented to our plan. We paid for her groceries with our credit card, and she presented us with enough cash to barely make it through a day and a night in Hong Kong. Thinking back on it now, I wonder if this is somehow illegal, like a form of money laundering. At the time, it didn’t even occur to me to consider.

To our dismay, upon our arrival in the Hong Kong airport, we were informed of an exit tax of $20 each, which we would need to pay when we left the next day. I know $40 is not an onerous sum, but we’re talking about two cheapskate students with a baby here. $40 just happened to be a considerable percentage of our total budget for a night on the town in Hong Kong. But what could we do? We shrugged our shoulders and decided we’d just do a lot of walking.

Geography-wise, Hong Kong is a little bump off of Mainland China. The two major destinations for in-and-out tourists like us are Kowloon Peninsula and Hong Kong Island. We spent the rest of our arrival day exploring the fascinating and historical Kowloon. For people who come to Hong Kong with money, Kowloon’s markets are paradise. Specific streets specialize in everything from electronics to jade to goldfish. The ladies’ market sells expensive brand-name merchandise (sometimes fake, but often surplus from the genuine factories in China proper) at bargain prices. Our favorite was the Temple Street Night Market, a bewildering affair of colorful pearls, leatherwork, clothing, and every kind of exotic souvenir, vended by still more colorful people.

Hong Kong Island, across Victoria Bay and reachable from Kowloon in moments by either underwater subway or picturesque ferry, is the splendid metropolis that embodies the island nation’s formidable economy. In Hong Kong, one doesn’t see many advertisements for restaurants or cell phones or normal commodities. Most billboards in the city are after bigger fish. They advertise “wealth management,” apparently one of the principal preoccupations of the city’s well-heeled inhabitants.

Every night, along the “Avenue of Stars” boardwalk on the Kowloon side of Victoria Bay, visitors can watch a spectacular light show that incorporates the eclectic skyscrapers of the other side in a dazzling Coruscant-meets-Vegas light display. This is a city with plenty of pizzazz, and the money and P.R. department to show it all off.

Even so, Hong Kong is not without its spiritual side. Rumor has it that the commercial district was laid out according to the strict rules of Feng Shui. We visited the Wong Tai Sin Temple, a gorgeous complex complete with small stone statues of animals, a lovely collection of bonsai, and two massive hand prints from a sumo champion who visited a few years ago. The complex also contains two separate temples, dedicated to the Buddha and Confucius respectively. We were nearly asphyxiated in the temple itself by a crowd of people telling their fortunes with great bundles of lighted incense.

Our final (and for us sentimental Mormons, most exciting) destination was the Mormon Temple. Yes, like a growing number of cities worldwide, Hong Kong is home to its very own architectural symbol of my faith. This temple, though, wasn’t on any of the tourist maps. We had only the sketchiest of directions to follow. A helpful employee at the airport had circled the subway stop where we should exit to find the Temple. She went on to tell us that we would need to walk “very far” to reach it. As we left the subway and started out on our search, it began sprinkling.

Having spent the last month enjoying the rainy season in the Philippines, we knew enough to be suitably wary of tropical storms. We asked a few people on the street if they knew where the Mormon Temple was. They shook their heads, either because they didn’t understand us or because they actually didn’t know the location of the temple. Finally, a young man pointed us in the opposite direction of the way we had been going. He did not sound at all certain that he really knew where it was, or even what we were talking about. The only thing he seemed certain of, like our helper at the airport, was that we would need to walk a long way. We had already walked a long way. It was raining harder now, and we were beginning to doubt the wisdom of our quest. How were we to find the Temple when we were so surrounded by large, important buildings and nobody seemed even aware of its existence? Had we just dreamed that there was a Mormon Temple in Hong Kong? We turned dispiritedly in the direction our guide had indicated, and began retracing our steps.

Just then, we looked up, and over the rooftops and trees, backed by a cloudy grey sky, was the unmistakable image of a golden Moroni. We laughed and hugged as if we had received unexpectedly wonderful news. Then we threaded our way back through the streets, this time with our goal hovering always in sight. We reached the street where the Temple stands just as the clouds finally burst open in earnest, dumping down quite a bit more rain on us than our little, decrepit umbrella could really handle. We wanted to go across the street to take a picture in front of the Temple, but we also wanted to keep our baby reasonably dry. Just when we thought we would have to be content with looking from across the street, we saw the rain blow down the street away from us, like a moving curtain. For a little while, we were standing in a block of sunlight across from the Temple. It was a moment of pure magic. We quickly set up the camera, took a picture, and ran across the street to peer through the bars on the fence. Then it started pouring rain again, and we dashed for shelter in a nearby doorway.

Oh, and in case you were wondering . . . we did manage to find a charitable tourist at the top of Victoria Peak, who gave us enough change to get back down again. And then when we left the Hong Kong Airport, they ended up not exacting an exit tax from us after all. So somewhere in the catacombs of our San Diego storage unit, I believe we still have that $40 of Hong Kong money. Maybe we’ll make it back sometime to spend it on a wild shopping spree at the Kowloon markets.

Here is the long-awaited ending to the story of the summer we spent traveling in the Philippines, baby in tow. If you are just joining us, or have missed a previous episode, you can find them all right here:

Philippines, Part 1: Have Baby, Will Travel
Philippines, Part 2: Do You Know How to XOOM?
Philippines, Part 3: Confessions of a Carseatless Baby (Vigan)
Philippines, Part 4: Strawberries and Cotton Candy (Baguio)
Philippines, Part 5: Hanging Coffins! (Sagada)
Philippines, Part 6: Voyage of the Icebox (Banauae & Batad)
Philippines, Part 7: Revenge of the Cockroaches (Manila)
Philippines, Part 8: Please Don’t Feed the Sharks (Anilao)
Philippines, Part 9: “Sexy Chic” at the Playboy Fashion Show (Field Study Research)
Philippines, Part 10: Luxury Travel, Filipino Style (Cebu)
Philippines, Part 11: Nuts to the Huts (Bohol)
Philippines, Part 12: If You Were Stranded on a Desert Island . . . (Panglao)
Philippines, Part 13: The Chocolate Hills (Bohol Again)
Philippines, Part 14: Trouble in Paradise (Malapascua)

At the end of last post, we had just escaped from the masseuses, mosquitos, and German disco on paradisiacal Malapascua. After a good air-conditioned night’s rest, we decided since we were back in Cebu we might as well hit a few other attractions. We turned up at one of the best-preserved old Spanish houses in the Philippines around noon, and were informed by the staff that it was closed for restoration and fortification for the next few months. Tony spun a yarn (only slightly exaggerated) about how the only thing we had come to the Philippines to see were old Spanish houses, and we had already been to Vigan, and I speak Spanish, and my mom went on a mission to Spain and we gave our daughter a Spanish name, and we came all the way from America, and dropped some names like the curator of the museum in Baguio who is an expert on Ifugao mummification, and said we would be so, so, so disappointed if we couldn’t at least take a tiny peek at the house. The architect who was overseeing the renovation happened to be there, and thought he had found some kindred spirits. He ended up taking us upstairs (where everything was in fact covered in sheets and disarranged) and telling us a little about the house, while we did our best to remember everything we knew about Spanish architecture (admittedly not much) and sound intelligent. It really was a beautiful old house, and we were inspired to go home and learn more about period architecture.

Rumor had it that the local university had a museum with a six-legged carabao (water-buffalo). So we popped in at the museum, where we were treated to a jumbled and dusty collection of butterflies, old stone coffins, pottery, seashells, and amateur taxidermy, but were unable to locate the six-legged carabao. When we asked the curator, she informed us that it was displayed at the other campus on the other side of the city. Undaunted, we took an hour-long jeepney ride up to the second campus, where after wandering for a while, we located an even smaller and dingier museum run by a formaldehyde-drunk student. Although photography was forbidden, Tony felt he had earned the right to one photo. He sureptitiously captured the six-legged carabao on film for all posterity. Poor little thing, it had more wrong with it than just the extra legs. And since everyone is always asking, I will give you the link to the photo. We have a family blog, which Tony maintains to preserve a visual account of our adventures just as I preserve a literary account. Here’s the six-legged carabao. And here are photos for the rest of the travelogues, complete with the original text from the emails upon which I have based this blog series (and you thought I just remembered it all from six years ago).

The next night Axa came down with a fever and Mommy and Daddy panicked. Two X-Rays, several expensive cell phone calls to Grandpa (Doctor) Bringhurst, and three visits to the hospital later (during which Axa feigned contented smiley, healthy babyness to all the medical personnel who examined her) the exhausted parents were finally convinced that she was not at death’s door. We all slept much better the next few nights, and our Superferry ride back to Manila was uneventful.

Back in Manila, we checked into the same pension house we’d stayed at twice before (we chose them because they were the only ones whose phone was not disconnected or manned by people who hung up when we spoke English to them). But we did like it  at Pension Natividad. They gave us a discount for staying three weeks and a table in our room, so it almost felt like home. Since they also served food, if we had wanted to (and we almost did) we could theoretically have never left the hotel. And often we didn’t. We’d just go sit down in the lobby while they cleaned our room. Pathetic, I know. But we were burnt out on travel, and content to live off of BLT sandwiches and the communal pasta dish. By this time, the days were kind of running together. Monsoon season had begun in force. Some days it rained continuously day and night. Other days it would stop for an hour or so before resuming. The amount of flooding in various sections of Manila depended purely on their respective infrastructures, and the infrastructure in our neighborhood was evidently not that great.

When we ventured out at all, it was only to eat at at cheap nearby restaurants and check our email. The highlight of one week was our sushi date, since we knew the price of sushi would become suddenly prohibitive when we returned to the States. One day we went down to Baywalk and got tatoos (henna, of course). Another day Tony got so bored he shaved off his goatee. The most interesting thing in our lives at the time (besides reading the latest on “Gloriagate” and the “Cha-Cha” (Filipino politics at its best)) was watching the other guests at the pension house. Most stayed a few days and then moved on from Manila. It was really mostly a stopover for backpackers and Peace Corps types. The only other long-term guest at the pension house was a very decrepit-looking Oregonian who shuffled around with a back-scratcher and smelled, shall we say, earthy. Crazy Ralph (not his real name. Actually, I don’t know that he ever got around to telling us his real name. But he told us plenty of other things) was a character. We made his acquaintance one day when he took advantage of a captive audience to tell us a long and involved story about a run-in with muggers and security guards, in which he claims he shot and killed two Filipinos. To this day, I don’t know if his story was true, but during the short time we were neighbors, we saw representatives from the U.S. embassy visiting him on two occasions and offering to fly him back to the States for medical treatment (we don’t know if they were referring to physical or psychological treatment). Crazy Ralph had informed us that he was a general in the U.S. military, so perhaps that explains the V.I.P. treatment. We were so sick of hanging around Manila that we were tempted to ask them if the U.S. embassy would fly us home in a special jet, but we knew we weren’t as important as Crazy Ralph, so we just waited around for our normal commercial flight

In the end, I guess you could say that our trip to the Philippines went out with more of a whimper than a bang. And we haven’t been back since, although we consider it the beginning of all our international adventures together. Hopefully I’m not dampening the spirits of anyone who’s bought plane tickets to the Philippines on the strength of previous posts. The Philippines is a beautiful country, and as you can tell, we had a wonderful time during most of our time there. It’s just that four months of roughing it through a tropical country with a baby that gets heavier every day can really take it out of a person.

And now that I think of it, I think I actually might have one more post on this topic left in me. On our way home from the Philippines, we had an action-packed layover in Hong Kong. So if you stay tuned next week, I just might psych myself up to tell you about it.

Good morning, and welcome back to our Friday in the Philippines. I hope you’ve enjoyed the new header photos, which come from the Philippines. I’ve noticed a lot of extra pageviews, and I suspect my faithful readers of refreshing the page to look at the pictures rather than to read my clever words. Shame! Last week we kissed neither tarsiers nor bats during the Bohol Choco Tour. If you missed that episode (or any others), links can be found here:

Philippines, Part 1: Have Baby, Will Travel
Philippines, Part 2: Do You Know How to XOOM?
Philippines, Part 3: Confessions of a Carseatless Baby (Vigan)
Philippines, Part 4: Strawberries and Cotton Candy (Baguio)
Philippines, Part 5: Hanging Coffins! (Sagada)
Philippines, Part 6: Voyage of the Icebox (Banauae & Batad)
Philippines, Part 7: Revenge of the Cockroaches (Manila)
Philippines, Part 8: Please Don’t Feed the Sharks (Anilao)
Philippines, Part 9: “Sexy Chic” at the Playboy Fashion Show (Field Study Research)
Philippines, Part 10: Luxury Travel, Filipino Style (Cebu)
Philippines, Part 11: Nuts to the Huts (Bohol)
Philippines, Part 12: If You Were Stranded on a Desert Island . . . (Panglao)
Philippines, Part 13: The Chocolate Hills (Bohol Again)
Philippines, Part 14: Trouble in Paradise (Malapascua)

Perhaps you manage things better, and unlike us, have never needed a vacation from your vacation. After three months of sticky, hot weather, various bumpy, loud, and sometimes heart-stopping forms of transportation, and a crash course in large insects, we were ready to just relax on some faraway, sandy beach. And we definitely intended that there would be no more adventures during our last few weeks in the Philippines. We had saved the best for last, and nothing was going to thwart our plans this time.

The most renowned island paradise on the Philippines is a little island named Boracay. Described by our (somewhat) trusty Lonely Planet guidebook as “The Pearl of the Archipelago,” Boracay is world-famous for its white-sand beaches, having been twice voted best beach destination in the world by Conde Nast. No trip to the Philippines, we were told, would be complete without a trip to Boracay. Unfortunately, the best beach destination in the world was incompatible with our student budget. Sadly, the wonders of Boracay were not for us.

Luckily, Lonely Planet had a solution for us: Malapascua, the latest of a long list of islands dubbed “the next Boracay.” In fact, Lonely Planet rhapsodized that Malapascua would be just as beautiful as famous Boracay, but even better, because it was still undiscovered by the common hordes of tourists. After everything we’d been through, from cockroaches to karaoke, two and a half weeks relaxing on a white sand beach and staying in a picturesque little nipa hut at fabulous off-season prices, promised to be the very pinnacle of our vacation to the Philippines.

So we set off on the ferry from Bohol back to Cebu. This time the movie was the comic book comedy “HellBoy,” and we were treated to several even more bizarre movie choices during the long bus ride up to the very northern tip of Cebu Island. There, at the end of civilization, is a little dock where boats leave every hour or so (whenever they’re full) for the sugary white sand beaches of Malapascua, which Lonely Planet went on to promise us was an undiscovered paradise that we would never want to leave. This had been the treat we’d reminded ourselves of countless times during the previous three months at sometimes less paradisiacal places, and we were excited that our troubles had finally come to an end.

It is true that the beaches were long, white, and deserted, and the water was warm, blue, and sparkling. But rumblings of disaster were in the air. I sat with my baby in the blistering heat that threatened rain as Tony went into the nearest resort to inquire about prices. He learned that the island has electricity (and thus, air conditioning, or even fans) for only about five hours a day. The more expensive resorts on the island own generators, but don’t really like to run them because they’re so expensive. That means that if you’re the only customer staying and for some odd reason want electricity, the price of running the generator for the whole resort is effectively added to your bill. So, bizzarely, during off-season (which by the way is called off-season because one of the frequent monsoons may cause you to be trapped in your room or delayed for five days or swept of your tiny boat and drowned) rates are tripled or quadrupled. Somehow, Lonely Planet had forgotten to mention this.

Still, we decided to make the best of it, so we settled down, rather unhappily, in a little hut with two small beds enclosed in much-needed mosquito nets. The windows, after all, didn’t close completely, and even if they had, we would have left them open to avoid being stifled in the heat. Even at one of the most expensive resorts on the island, the electricity still went off for a few hours every day. If it happened when you were in your hotel room in the evening, you had a choice between sitting and sweating in the dark with only an occasional mosquito bite, or opening the window for light and a bit of a breeze, and being eaten alive. But more indignities (also left as surprises by Lonely Planet) were yet to come. Later on, we discovered that the trickle of water that could be coaxed out of the shower and faucet was more than brackish. It was downright briny. If you have ever taken a shower in sea-water, you know that afterward you feel a little as though you’d been pickled and then rubbed with sandpaper. And brushing your teeth is a whole new experience.

Whenever we ventured out of our hut (even just to sit on the front porch), we were assailed by a flock of masseuses, desperate for off-season business. Tony took one up on the offer, but an average massage was rendered downright tortuous by the many mosquitos, who were also evidently desperate for off-season business. As soon as the massage was over, the masseuse tried to schedule another, but Tony politely declined, retreating hastily into our hut.

However, the real fun began after we went to bed. Some eight inches from our back window was a noisy disco that pumped out the same three chords and beat until two in the morning for a group of drunken Germans, whose cigarette smoke drifted into our window all night. Sweaty, tired, and disheartened, we got up the next morning to the crushing realization that we still had an entire month left in the Philippines. Our reasearch was finished, and so was any remaining desire to vacation. As I was reading about Malapascua before we came, I had wondered idly why such an idyllic place would be christened with such an inauspicious name (in Spanish it means “bad Easter”). I no longer wondered. At that moment, the glorious climax of our trip seemed like the worst letdown of our lives.

I am sorry to say that we barely glanced at the beautiful, long, empty beaches as we set off the next morning to trek around the island in search of an internet cafe, in the desperate hope that we might be able to change our super-discounted nonrefundable airline tickets and go home early. But the local village didn’t have much in the way of electricity either, and an internet cafe was out of the question. We finally tracked down a resort that let us pay an arm and a leg to use their one computer. Three phone calls later, our airline failed to take pity on us, and we realized that we were going to have to somehow survive another month. But we just couldn’t do that surviving on Malapascua. We took the next boat in to the mainland, rode the four-hour bus back to Cebu City, managed to change our superferry tickets for Manila, and then checked into a pension house, where we almost cried when we turned on the air conditioning.

Stay tuned next week as we meet Crazy Ralph and the six-legged carabao in Philippines, Part 15: All’s Well that Ends Well.

Last week we had our first monsoon and were almost marooned on a desert island. Check out that and other past adventures here:

Philippines, Part 1: Have Baby, Will Travel
Philippines, Part 2: Do You Know How to XOOM?
Philippines, Part 3: Confessions of a Carseatless Baby (Vigan)
Philippines, Part 4: Strawberries and Cotton Candy (Baguio)
Philippines, Part 5: Hanging Coffins! (Sagada)
Philippines, Part 6: Voyage of the Icebox (Banauae & Batad)
Philippines, Part 7: Revenge of the Cockroaches (Manila)
Philippines, Part 8: Please Don’t Feed the Sharks (Anilao)
Philippines, Part 9: “Sexy Chic” at the Playboy Fashion Show (Field Study Research)
Philippines, Part 10: Luxury Travel, Filipino Style (Cebu)
Philippines, Part 11: Nuts to the Huts (Bohol)
Philippines, Part 12: If You Were Stranded on a Desert Island . . . (Panglao)

As our last fling on the island of Bohol, we decided to take the “Choco Tour.” When people outside the Philippines picture tourist destinations there, they mostly involve white sand beaches and warm water. But one of the most popular tourist destinations for the Filipinos themselves is the island of Bohol’s most famous attraction: the Chocolate Hills. During our stay at Alona beach, we had been persistently proselyted about those wonderful Chocolate Hills by a gregarious driver named Jojo. On our last day there, we finally set off with him, in a car with windows tinted like a limo all the way round, even the windshield.

Although it was called the “Choco Tour,” Jojo’s extravaganza turned out to be a whole-day tour of the entire island of Bohol. Fortunately, it’s a small island. Our first stop on was the Hinagdanon Cave, a spooky, somewhat brackish pool housed by a cavern filled with swallows nests and bats. Sunbeams let in through multiple outlets to the sky lend the cave a mystic quality and help to illuminate the dramatic stalactites dripping from the ceiling. We oohed and ahed and were glad to get back up to the sunlight.

The historical portion of the tour covered the “Sandugo,” which marks the place where Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (Spanish conquistador extraordinaire) and Rajah Sikatuna (chieftan of Bohol) reputedly each drank a cup of each other’s blood to cement an early Hispano-Filipino peace accord. Whether it was a barbaric native practice or a barbaric Spanish practice was not explained or known by Jojo. Any guesses?

Next we visited the massive stone church in Baclayon, built in 1596 and covered all over in fine green lichen. There is a museum attached, full of garb worn by the priests, massive old latin hymnals, and assorted religious relics. Everything is buried in several millimeters of dust, but it’s still amazingly well-preserved, especially after four-hundred-odd years on a tropical island.

The road we were taking then left the coast and dived into the lush interior of Bohol. Along our first ill-fated Bohol haunt, the Loboc River, we reached the site we were most looking forward to seeing: Bohol’s tiny mascot, the tarsier. Although the tarsier is the world’s smallest primate, he is probably not among the more intelligent, since each of his eyes is larger than his entire brain. Nevertheless, intellectual prowess aside, words are inadequate to describe the sheer cuteness of the tarsier. However, his cuteness to intelligence ratio may have something to do with his status as an endangered species. Needless to say, the tarsier’s meeting with our own little 3-month-old tarsier involved a lot of staring on both sides.

One of the delightful surprises of travel in developing countries is that you can often get a lot closer to interesting stuff than you can in more punctilious places. One of my favorite sites in Syria, the Krak des Chevaliers, is a gigantic Crusader castle, so conspicuously devoid of guardrails that you could have easily walked off dozens of dizzying drops, or ended up precipitously in the dungeon if you weren’t careful. We felt much more like fearless knights than we otherwise would have. Here on Bohol, our charmed discovery was that we were allowed to get within inches of the tarsiers, who were perched on various tree trunks, earnestly doing what they always do, which is staring. If you’ve never been contemplated at close range by a creature that’s ten times cuter than a Star Trek tribble, well, you’ve never lived. As instructed, I managed to resist the overwhelming urge to pick one up and cover it in kisses (possibly aided by my extreme aversion to tropical diseases).

When we had stared our fill at the tarsiers, we continued on our way, pausing to cross the Indiana Jonesesque hanging bridge to the accompaniment of a typical sappy Filipino rendering of “Yesterday” by a young guitarist. An almost surreal twist in the road led us into a man-made forest, a large planting of mahogany trees that for a few hundred meters turns the tropical jungle into what looks like a carbon copy of the California coastal forest. As we continued inland, we came upon rice fields just at planting time. The planters, wearing traditional wide hats, were happy to show us their work. The rice is first seeded in a small area. When it has filled that area with a beautiful lush green carpet, it is pulled up and separated into clumps. Each clump is then painstakingly replanted far enough apart to allow the rice to grow. The result is an entire rich field of rice from just a few seeds.  Who knew?

By this time it was late afternoon, and we were finally approaching the famous Chocolate Hills. With pomp and ceremony, Jojo explained to us how they had been formed. Two giants had loved the same woman (we can only hope she was also a giantess). They fought a fantastic battle all over Bohol, until one was finally vanquished. The winner went off with the girl, and the loser’s tears fell on the ground and calcified into the startlingly shaped hills. We were told that in summertime the foliage on them dies, making them look like huge chocolate kisses. They were still green when we arrived, but did make a startling piece of scenery. To me they looked almost like a collection of somewhat conical hobbit houses in a tropical Shire. We had planned to reach them just before sunset, when our guidebook had assured us they would be at their prettiest, but evidently we had not stared long enough at the tarsiers, because we arrived a good two or three hours early. We climbed to the lookout point, took some pictures, and sat down to wait it out. Too bad we hadn’t foresightedly brought some chocolate to fortify ourselves. We eventually decided it wasn’t worth the wait, so we never did end up seeing the chocolate hills at sunset.

Stay tuned next week as our vacation from our vacation turns disastrous in Philippines, Part 14: Trouble in Paradise (Malapascua).

Last time we destroyed Tony’s personal luggage and discovered a serious case of Travel Guide fraud in Philippines, Part 11: Nuts to the Huts (Bohol). If you’ve missed a previous episode, you can find them here:

Philippines, Part 1: Have Baby, Will Travel
Philippines, Part 2: Do You Know How to XOOM?
Philippines, Part 3: Confessions of a Carseatless Baby (Vigan)
Philippines, Part 4: Strawberries and Cotton Candy (Baguio)
Philippines, Part 5: Hanging Coffins! (Sagada)
Philippines, Part 6: Voyage of the Icebox (Banauae & Batad)
Philippines, Part 7: Revenge of the Cockroaches (Manila)
Philippines, Part 8: Please Don’t Feed the Sharks (Anilao)
Philippines, Part 9: “Sexy Chic” at the Playboy Fashion Show (Field Study Research)
Philippines, Part 10: Luxury Travel, Filipino Style (Cebu)

From Bohol’s capital of Tagbilaran, we took a long, hot, slow, noisy, bumpy ride on a motorcycle sidecar to little Panglao Island, which is connected to the main island of Bohol by a land bridge. Once on the island, we continued through the mostly uninhabited jungle-like interior. We finally arrived at our coveted destination, Alona Beach, in the midafternoon, and the sun came out over the white sand and the sparkling ocean.

As soon as we gratefully debarked from our noisy conveyance, we were met by a stranger who greeted us like a long-lost friend. She was so insistently helpful that we could hardly help allowing her to lead us to to a resort called “Charlotte’s Divers.” Master negotiator Tony haggled the price down so far that the bemused staff decided they needed to confirm it with the absent manager. They sent him a text message and told us it was fine, so we moved in with our bags (which yes, we had dragged over several meters of sand to get there) and went to get some lunch at a beachside restaurant. However, a few minutes later, the eminently helpful person who had shown us the resort in the first place came up and sheepishly told us that the manager had arrived and was very upset.

We went back to the resort to find him, hands on hips, lecturing the staff and confiscating their tips. He was a very irate Korean who spoke almost no English and seemed to be angry at the whole world, but especially at us and his staff. He looked ready to throw us all out, and insisted at the top of his voice that there would be no discount. His interpreter and the two hotel staff were standing around looking mortally embarrassed (this was all an extreme breach of normal Filipino etiquette, which always treads on eggshells around anything that could in any conceivable way embarrass anyone). We were more amused than anything at the way he was carrying on. With a little judicious diplomacy on Tony’s part, he eventually calmed down and agreed to let us stay there at something between the normal rate and Tony’s discount. Still, we elected to find another place, reasoning that at least we wouldn’t lie awake at night wondering if our volatile host would come pounding on our door in the middle of the night and demand that we leave or pay exorbitant fees.

Although we didn’t relish the thought of dragging our dilapidated bags back over all that sand, we were soon glad that we had left. We were cordially welcomed at Isis Bungalows, which turned out to be the only accommodations where we stayed during our four-month Philippines trip that I would even consider labeling “luxury” (besides the dubious Superferry, of course). I mean, this place had a refrigerator and a real, king-sized bed with a mattress that wasn’t two single mattresses pushed together. Our room was a hexagon with three sides of big sliding glass windows right on the lovely beach. Off-season being what it was, we netted the whole thing (including air conditioning and the privilege of actually turning on the refrigerator, thank you) for the equivalent of $20. It was a splurge, but it was worth it. I immediately went out and bought two fresh coconuts to stock my fridge.

Thus it was, that when Grandma Familia called as Tony and Axa were playing in the sand on the beach and Sarah was swimming in the crystal clear water, and asked if we could possibly come home early, she was doomed to disappointment. Most of our time on Alona was consumed in romantic walks along the beach, swimming, and eating at our favorite beachside restaurant, Trudy’s Place. We liked it because of the excellent food, reasonable prices, and waitresses who didn’t mind at all when our baby fussed, and in fact entertained her whenever she seemed less than content. We still dream about the seafood curry at Trudy’s Place, which made coconut milk seem like the natural habitat of calamari and shrimp. And their British and American breakfasts were a welcome change from an endless succession of Filipino -silog breakfasts (greasy rice, greasy egg, and greasy miscellaneous strange meats).

While staying on Alona Beach, we traveled inland that Sunday (on another noisy sidecar) to go to church on the main island of Bohol. Not even Tony could understand much of church, since the southern islands of the Philippines speak Cebuano rather than Tagalog.

Much to my dismay, Tony actually did find one Filipino to talk to. He was a young, idealistic Boholan who later visited us in our Alona Beach refuge and spent several hours one night describing what he thought was an incredible business opportunity. He had a friend who had discovered an island with some great nickel deposits. Now I guess in a pinch, nickel is great if you can’t get gold or diamonds or something. The crowning excitement, though, was that the Chinese government had agreed to buy the entire island. If it could be systematically dismantled and carted off to China by barge, that is. The only catch was that he needed someone to finance it, and whoever financed it could own the whole operation! (whatever that meant. He was a little hazy about the details of the actual financial return. Mostly he thought we were or knew rich Americans who would fork over a lot of cash in return for the excitement of owning the whole operation.) Oh yes, and the only other catch was that he wanted Tony to visit the island with him and see it for himself. And it was only a two-day journey by boat through whirlpool-infested waters. Needless to say, I was neither excited nor amused. It took me quite a long time to detail the negatives of the plan, including the imminent danger to the environment and Tony’s personal safety, as well as the dubiousness of any actual financial return. In the end, I managed to rain on the party long enough to diffuse all the excitement. The young, idealistic Boholan was no longer welcome at my house. Nor was I in the least interested in going to his house to watch his snake devour a pig the next Sunday.

However, we did have another somewhat more agreeable meeting at church. We had expected to be the only Americans there, and instead were surprised to find that half the congregation that week turned out to be Caucasian and from Utah. They were in the Philippines as members of a foundation called “Vaccines for the Philippines.” It was a health clinic organized by some BYU and U of U students who had raised $30,000 selling rubberband bracelets at U of U games to buy medicine for the people of Bohol, and then came over with their families and friends to distribute it. That week we traveled to the mainland again to help with the clinic. It was funny appearing on the scene of a vaccination clinic with my unabashedly unvaccinated baby, but we weren’t there to discuss the philosophy of vaccination.

By this time, though, I thought we had spent plenty of time on the mainland. So the next Saturday we got up at 5:30 a.m. to go out on that indispensable tropical outing, island hopping. As a bonus, our guides told us we were also going dolphin watching, but sadly, no dolphins were forthcoming. We did, however, visit the island of Balicasag, where we went snorkeling and took pictures with our disposable underwater camera. We even saw the inimitable dog-faced puffer, over whose picture we had giggled when we were getting scuba certified, and who really does resemble nothing more than a busy little canine sniffing around underwater. There was also an abundance of those funny starfish that look like chocolate chip cookies.

Our next stop was Virgin Island, which looks like a tiny little desert island straight out of a movie. After circling the whole island in our boat, we landed to pace the beach, feeling like the first explorers of an undiscovered country. The island is almost wholly composed of beach, and inhabited only by ghost crabs and a few coconut palms. When we had had our fill of pristine island solitude, we boarded the boat to return to Panglao. Storm clouds were gathering in the sky, and we were seriously doubting the wisdom of bringing our three-month-old baby out in a rickety little boat where we might get caught on an unprotected beach in a tropical monsoon (I promise, I haven’t done it since).  Unfortunately, the engine made only ominous sputtering sounds when the boatman tried to start it. After several tries, he said, “sira” which Tony translated to me as “broken.” Starkly confronted by the hopelessly cliche-ish probability of being stranded on a desert island, we looked at each other and shrugged. But the boatman gave one last mighty pull, and the engine roared to life, so our trip concluded relatively uneventfully.

When we arrived back on the island, we had some urgent business to attend to in an internet cafe. We had ordered some basketball uniform samples from one of the companies we had interviewed in Manila, hoping to take them back to the United States and start a business marketing them to high schools. If we wanted them finished before we returned to the U.S., we needed to confirm the final prototype specs immediately. It looked a bit like rain, so Tony went by himself, and I stayed in our cozy bungalow with the baby. Unfortunately, a cozy bungalow seems a little less cozy when you are alone in it on a tropical island with your baby and no husband, three sides of it are plate glass facing the beach, and there is a monsoon going on outside. I had never seen palm trees bending all the way to the ground before, nor had I ever seen rain coming down literally in sheets. But I didn’t really get worried until I discovered that the rain was coming in the seams of the windows and quickly pooling on the floor inside. The ocean was coming pretty far up the beach too, and our bungalow was only yards from the water on a calm day. Fortunately, though violent, the monsoon was short-lived, and Tony had waited it out in the internet cafe. We were soon reunited, and spent our last night on Alona Beach together again.

Having given ourselves some distance, we decided that Bohol was not so bad, and were contemplating going back. A taxi driver on the beach kept tempting us with offers of a “Choco tour.” It sounded like something out of Willy Wonka. Stay tuned next week for Philippines, Part 13: The Chocolate Hills (Bohol Again)