Anyway, after a rather uncomfortable 2 hours in a people-carrier we arrived in Cebu, the trip was 100 pesos, around £1. To compare, the very scary trip on the back of a motorcycle out to the beach I’m staying near to is 150 pesos. I’m not completely sure how the maths work, but hey.

Filipinos are crazy about shopping, easily the biggest shopping malls I’ve ever seen and there’s something like three or four of them in Cebu! My main reason for going, apart from getting cash, was to buy a helmet. There’s only like one other guy in Moalboal that wear a helmet and he’s obviously also a foreigner. I do feel like a dork when I wear it, but I’m also a bit more certain that I’m going to live to tell the story of the dog/kid/chicken/whatever jumped out in front of the bike in middle of the night in the rain. I might be limping or nursing my blackened foot while I tell the story, but I’ll be able to tell it.

To stick to the topic I can say that the weather here is a-ok. It’s a bit cloudy at the moment and it does rain every now and then. The clouds mean that I’m only partially burnt from the sun and the rain means that it gets a tiny, tiny bit cooler at night. And it shuts the cats up as well.

I do have one problem though, and it’s a big problem for me, not so big on the world-problem scale perhaps; It’s so damn noisy at night! There’s something like five cats living outside my door, and they must have some kind of rota of the insane meowing and screaming and jumping past my window in middle of the night to scare me senseless. But when I told some people around here about it they just said I was lucky, at least I didn’t have any cockerels around… Sorry, what?!

Cock fighting is a big national thing, people here live on breeding them. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve been told, they strap razors and stuff to the cock’s legs and then pitch them at each other and so on. Lots of money involved.

So obviously there’s lots of them around. And if you happen to live in a cockerel-rich area you certainly wouldn’t mind the cats. Or so they say anyway.

And then there’s videoke. Yes, it’s just plain regular karaoke but they’ve changed the name. This is also a big national thing, they all do it all the time. Bigger resorts and restaurants and places that cater for foreigners have rules about what time you’re allowed to screech away to Wind of Change at night.

At the moment I’ve only got cats to worry about, when I move I will certainly update you what my latest night-time annoyance will be. Because apparently, there will be one.

PS. Yes, I have just seen the movie Tropic Thunder and I stole the title.

Anyway, so we jump on the bikes and drive the 20km over there only to find it empty of water and under some light repair! Ok, change of plans! Jump back on the bikes and go to Mantayupan Falls, another 15km or so away. We were promised cool fresh water and some caves and similar, what I personally wasn’t completely prepared for was the intial hike up the bastard mountain to check out the waterfall from above!

So, it’s about 800 steps straight up, initially quite promising nice solid concrete steps that quickly got downgraded to crumbling natual rock steps. I was leaving a trail of sweat behind me! Once we got to 500 steps we checked out the waterfall, I’m not sure the view was worth 500 steps but hey. Then we proceeded the last 300 steps to… err… check out the view? And we couldn’t even jump down into foamy cold water, no, we had to walk all the way down again. Another 800 steps, in case you had forgotten how many there were.

But when we got to the actual waterfall it was all forgiven, very cool! Very silty water, absolutely no visibilty at all, but cool and fresh! We climbed up in some caves, you can see it as some kind of door on the photos, and then we kept going in and up into the hillside, quite scary and several places to bump your head against sharp rocks. Also very unsuitable to keep remembering The Descent the whole time…

Today we’ve been doing some regular freediving and my legs are absolutely killing me.

Check out the photos here.

So transportation methods are as follows: Either you sit on the back of a small motorbike screaming your head off going around corners, dogs and tricycles, or you get on a tricycle! They are basically a motorbike (or bicycle actullay) of any kind with a massive sidecar strapped onto it, but built up a bit more, like a thai tuktuk almost, but on the side instead of on the back. They’re quite slow, and they’re usually carrying a whole family of 10 or so. Either way you decide to go you will always have a small issue with the price, it’s always different! Oh, it’s higher because it’s early in the morning. Or it’s higher because it’s late. Or some other silly reason. And they will never really tell you how much it is, they’re very reluctant to name prices here. So you pay perhaps what you paid last time and he was expecting more… well, then he’ll go away and sulk and he wont offer you a ride again! How are you supposed to know?!

So I’ve bought my own motorcycle instead.

I’m now a proud owner of a 2006 Honda XR200 Enduro! Wooop!

I’ve had my bathroom refurbished over the last few weeks, I finally managed to get back into my flat yesterday, and oh-mama, what a mess… a thick layer of plaster dust is absolutely everywhere. Don’t get me wrong here, the bathroom is top-notch and I couldn’t be happier with it. But come on, this dust is ridiculous! I’d already booked a professional cleaning of the flat before my new tenants move in, and that’s scheduled for Monday, so there’s little chance that I’m going to clean it up before then… So I’m walking around in the dunes of dust and muttering to myself. In slippers. Covered in dust.

I’ve got a party tomorrow night, and somehow this other party appeared on Sunday night, and I’m going out for a last dinner on Monday evening. Sunday day will be mysteriously lost to the hangover fairies, and I think Monday will go the same route… Which leaves me with… ONE DAY to get all the things sorted, as in tomorrow before the main party. Nice one.

One thing I have sorted is my scuba bag, got to prioritise, eh? I’ve cleared out all the junk that I can, and packed all other bits nicely. The main problem here is weight, I’ll have to pay £25 per kg over 30kg… I know that my previous setup weighed in the region of 25kg, and now I’ve added some new bits as well… To add misery to madness the 30kg is the total of ALL my checked bags, so I have to skip a whole load of unnecesary stuff in my ‘clothes bag’ as well. I was planning on bringing some books; fish recognition and scuba textbooks and similar… but if I have to pay £25 to bring two books then I think they’re going to stay home.

Obviously the process of figuring out if I’m over the limit would be massively easier if I had some scales… which I don’t. ‘Hmmm, this feels like 27kg!’

So with this new project I was stuck a bit on what language to pick, go modern with RoR or go plain and simple with PHP. I actually started quite eagerly with RoR but quickly got very stuck and realised I know way too little about the language and methodology to be able to produce anything this side of xmas… so PHP it is.

I think what we’re going to do is create a site that could ported to a more efficient language without any userbase noticing any real difference. Probably I’m going to develop phase 1 and possibly phase 2 and then get someone else to create the real masterpiece this site will be in the future.

I’m going to develop this site on my shiny Macbook Pro, which is also a very new experience, from a stationary PC with dual 19″ screens to a 15″ Apple laptop! ‘Shit creek’, ‘no paddle’ and so on.

So this project will basically be:

• written in a new language
• developed on a new platform
• while living in a new continent

Should be nice challenge!

Well! I had a brilliant idea a few weeks ago, a website that hasn’t been built yet! It’s actually a pretty damn good idea, a very simple basic usage and several lucrative layers to add on top… I shared the plan with my close friend Damian and we’re absolutely sure that we have to at least try to build this site.

But I was going to lie on the beach! Not hunkered in front of my shiny laptop! Damn!

So now I’m setting up a brand new site, reading up on basic PHP and several different API’s that might very well be very useful… I really do think this site will be worth building, and it might actually be worth the time spent trying not to sweat into the keyboard… I think I have to invent some kind of wearable napkin to prevent dribbling into the keyboard.

But I was going to just relax on the beach!

I’ve got a pretty big bunch of cousins around here but there’s two that I have more contact with than the others who’ve also visited me in London over the years. It’s extra fun to meet up with them and get updates on their lifes.

The race is also on in the whole family on who will visit me first in the Philippines! Great fun!

Anyway, my bro found a new love in his life a few years ago; sailing. He stumbled upon it and fell all the way, right away. Since then, bringing sailing into the conversation has been the best way to not have to say anything again for a good while! I’m exactly the same about diving…

My view on boats is that they bring me to a divesite, and supply comfort on the way back to shore. You’re not supposed to have to really do much with the boat during the journey. Of course, there has to be someone driving it, or whatever it is you do with a boat with an engine in it… I don’t get seasick on a diveboats, not anymore anyway, when I first started getting into diving I was a bit wary of them, as much as anyone.

My view on sailboats was confirmed and set in stone yesterday; I don’t particularly like them. My bro’s got a rather small sailing vessel, about 7 meters long, 21 feet for you imperialists. Not very big. But it’s his first one, something to learn on. He’s had it for three years and finally managed to coax me out on it earlier this week. The outwards journey was a rather calm and only mildly nauseaous affair, but the return was a completely different story alltogether.

We had pretty much full on headwind and had to sail towards a completely different target to get into calmer seas to then put the small motor into play, that doesn’t sound like much at the moment but just believe me; those few hours during the first part of the return qualifies as somewhere on the top five of my least liked moments in my life. It wasn’t a scared of death situation at all, I was 100% sure that we were going to be just fine, I just didn’t want to be there! I was just sitting there waiting for it to be over.

That’s when my bro announced ‘hmm, this is just taking us even further from home, this trip will take a looooong while’. Great. Thanks. Just what I wanted to hear.

Well, we finally reached calmer seas and started the engine, and instantly it became a diveboat again, engine powered, going against the waves, no problems at all. I ‘drove’ pretty much the whole way home and everything was fine. We even put the sails up again on the last stretch, mainly to dry them a bit but also because we were going the right direction with regards to the wind again, and with perfectly calm sea. That was all fine, no problems there.

So we’ve figured out that I’m an in-shore kind of sailor, the sissy kind, the ones that stay in confined waters, I would probably enjoy sailing on a lake. Pah. I think I’d rather be no sailor at all than a sissy one.

Sorry bro, you get to keep the sailing for yourself, I’ll stick to my diving and surfing instead.

Right now I should be busy sorting stuff out, packing my bag, calling loads of people to change my address and generally upset people. Instead I’m goofing off in bed, doing sweet FA.

Baby steps.

I’ve handed over as well as I can, which isn’t really that well, I don’t write things down, everything is kept in my head as I go along. Well, I’ve had a few sessions with the people that are left behind and they know they’re very welcome to email me any questions along the way.

Everything is getting very real now, I’ve got a grand total of seven days left in the UK! I’m not sleeping very well, mulling things over in my head every night… I just really want to get going. Still got some fairly scary things to get sorted, like finalizing the re-mortgage, pray that the bathroom work goes well, pray that the rental of the flat goes well. And so on.

But hey, from the end of today I no longer have job!