Andy Moreno

We usually try to go out to have breakfast on Sundays and have so far been trying out different places in search for the best bread in the area. We still haven’t found a perfect place but the one we went to yesterday came pretty close.

There was just the slight issue with the dead person lying next to the pool that brought down the score a bit.

About 20 minutes before we arrived a few of the guests were swimming in the pool, one guy (apparently, no-one was really sure) dived into the pool, hit the bottom and, well… died. The information was a bit unclear, someone said he drowned, but when they tried to give him first aid blood was coming out of his nose and mouth and we were all pretty sure that doesn’t usually happen on a ‘regular’ drowning.

The body was lying on a sun-lounger with a sheet over it and his friend being consoled by the side. A pretty somber start of the day…

A schoolmate of my girlfriend’s younger sister (about 12 yo) was recently bitten by a dog, she went home and rested, got worse, and died in her bed a few days later. It feels wrong to accuse her parents of being ignorant when their daughter just passed away, but isn’t it fairly common knowledge that people with dog-bites should be checked for tetanus?

Now, don’t bad things usually come in three’s?!

I’m now back in Moalboal, nicely settling into a life that could easily become routine. When I left the area last year I really didn’t think I would be coming back here this soon, or possibly at all; I was planning to travel around Asia and dive everyplace I could find. How foolish of me to even attempt to make such a grand plan!

Instead my fantastic girlfriend Christy invaded my life and took over the show. So I’m now living with her and her two kids; four-year-old Yvonne and six-year-old CJ. Not at all what I was expecting, or could even imagine, but here I am, and very happy about it!

There are some teething problems, of course, the kids are mostly ok with me storming into their lives, but we do have some minor difficulties with attention seeking and whatnot. Which is to be expected, I think, and will surely sort itself out in due time.

Christy did a stellar job in finding our house, it’s a three-bedroom, all three rooms with small en-suite wet-rooms, very close to the school and just the right distance to her parents; close enough to easily to swing the kids over that way but far away enough to not have them on the doorstep all the time. One room for the kids, one for us and one for my ‘office’. Also a great outside area with a lovely breeze where we spend most of the time.

But I haven’t completely killed off my ‘travelling around Asia to dive’-plan, I’m way to stubborn to just forget about that, so once Christy is certified we will be going around the neighbouring islands to start with and then possibly further away. So I will basically be doing the same thing as planned, but now with a nice base and my constant buddy coming with me!

In the pool where I’m swimming there’s an old chap working in the locker rooms. His job is to mop up water. See, he’s got this squeegee mop, but randomly he also uses a broom and dustpan to scoop up bigger, more evil puddles of water!

Before you swim you have a shower, right, and drop water on his floors, then you return from the pool, dripping again, then have another shower, drip-drip, go sit in the steam room, shower, more dripping, and then finally you leave… The whole time he keeps shooting angry glances at you and follows you around with his mop/dustpan.

I think he really hates me, and all the other people who daily come and drip water on his floors. Or maybe he’s just a modern-day Sisyphus…

About six months ago I invested in a Patima housing for my Canon G10 together with an Inon Z-240 strobe, a major step up after my Canon Ixus with on-board flash. I’ve taken a few thousand shots with it now and have actually managed to get one or two decent pictures!

The camera itself is a beauty and the housing is nothing if not solid, possibly you could say that one of the draw-backs of the housing is the weight. A general problem with the camera is the scroll-wheel on the back, it’s used for a lot of menu settings but more importantly for pretty much all manual controls. I’ve seen several different solutions for scroll-wheels on underwater housings and I think the Patima is pretty sensible.

That is, when it’s not used with the supplied strap! The camera is delivered with a soft strap that you slide your hand in to and grip the camera in firing position, with your index finger on the shutter-lever. Like I said earlier the housing is pretty heavy and your hand does get tired after a while, and there’s an odd screw-pin-thing that digs quite heavily into your thumb. Also, with your hand in the strap it’s pretty complicated to turn the control for the scroll-wheel! Fine-tuning manual focus and then get your finger back on the shutter is not something I found to be completely easy.

I also got the Patima tray and single handle and as a complete contrast to the housing itself it’s quite flimsy and actually flexes from the weight of the housing when on land. Also I have to mention that the three supplied screws to attach the tray to the housing were too short and two of them came off during the first dive! So the whole handle situation has been something I haven’t been completely happy with and something I’ve been keeping constant look-out for to solve.

At the moment I’m staying a few months in Hong Kong, the haven of attachments and modifications! I’ve been trawling through the multiple dive-shops in search for the perfect replacement handles and even had a plan to manufacture my own. It’s also been my plan to visit the 10 Bar shop and earlier today I finally managed to get around to it. And my oh my, why didn’t I go there before?! I guess it isn’t quite right to call it a ‘shop’, it’s very much a warehouse and definitely a wet-dream-come-true for any underwater photographer, they have shelves upon shelves of every piece of kit you could imagine.

We had a little chat and looked at a few different options and I accidentally spotted this tray and baseplate and figured if there was any chance of drilling a few holes that it would work quite well… Now, I can’t claim to travel around the world with a power-drill and since I’d seen a very impressive-looking work-shop in the back I asked if there was any chance they could sort something out for me… Well, an hour and some pretty impressive modifications later I now present you with the ideal tray and handles for a Patima G10 housing! They even modified three screws to perfectly fit the newly modified base, no chance of these coming off.

As you can see it’s now fired with the thumb instead of index finger, and if you don’t happen to have ginormous thumbs you need to modify the shutter-lever, and look there, a slightly modified shutter-lever from some other housing perfectly attached! Another mega-win is that the scroll-wheel is now about 2cm away from your thumb when in firing position!

Altogether it came to around US$100 including work which I know is slightly more than the original Patima double tray but just trust me, this is quite a bit more sturdy. I can’t thank the fantastic staff at 10 Bar enough, solved all my issues in one sweet move!

Click on any of the photos above to see a few more shots of the housing and modifications.

I’m now starting to get into a good routine here; wake up around 10, faff around for a few hours, possibly start working, go swimming and then have lunch, start working properly around 3, dinner sometime around 8 and keep working until midnight. It suits me perfectly and I feel that I deliver my most efficient 8 hour day; I usually have a pretty hard time getting things done in the morning when I’m ‘at home’.

There’s a pretty nice pool and gym for our building and I go swimming pretty much every day. I got really excited about the outdoors 50m pool when I first arrived but luckily they closed it for winter during the first week I was here since it’s freezing cold in the water! Indoors if fine with me. Except that it does get a bit crowded sometimes, and most of the times it’s slightly older, slightly larger, ladies swimming in very un-straight lines. Think old car, can still be beautiful but takes some time to turn around. You have to keep an eye out all the time to avoid embarrassing collisions.

I’m on the 29th floor, there’s a total of 55. Well, minus any number that ends on 4, since that’s an unlucky number, obviously… And for some reason there’s two 27th…

We’ve got a few shopping malls in the base of the estate, then a big garden and swimming pools and stuff and the flats start counting on level 5.

The unlucky anything with 4th floor is interesting, some people take great care and count the actual floors in the building to make sure they don’t get a flat on the 44th floor! I guess the 47th floor in our building is actually the 44th, depending on how you count the mall and podium and whatnot… It’s a science!

There’s 8 flats per floor in our tower and 3 elevators and I’ve already ridden with other people from my floor several times, both up and down! I mean, the chance of coming or going at the same time as just 8 other flats is pretty small, no?

Or maybe the people living on our floor share a very basic… ehhh… whatever.

I’ve been in Hong Kong for just over a week now and I’m still grinning like a silly monkey every time I get outside. After living in London I thought I was ready for ‘just another big city’. Well, London is pretty big, but it’s not TALL! And I mean MONSTER TALL! I’ve never been in a city with skyscrapers everywhere before, and it sure is different.

Travelling around the city is not that tricky, the metro is properly translated everywhere, the buses are ok as long as you have a general clue as to which direction you’re supposed to go. Err, obviously I don’t, yet, but my flatmate and guide, Jussi, has a handy compass in his watch. Buying stuff in shops are also not too hard, point at something, give them your wallet and hope you don’t get scammed. Now, eating is bit harder! You go into a likely looking restaurant, you sit down and get a whole pile of menus, and if you’re lucky one of them will have a translated part. Lunch is usually taken care of around 2pm onwards and most places have a special tea-menu, a choice of a few dishes, maybe a soup and drink included. The tea-menu is certainly the cheapest option, but most of the time that one is not translated! Jussi is quite a bit braver than me, I’m particularly picky when it comes to lunch, the most important meal of the day! Anyway, Jussi just points at option 1 and smiles. And then you wait and see what you get. We call this game the Lunch Roulette. I haven’t played yet.

I have to confess that I’m loving the food here though, soup noodles, fried rice/noodles, lots of lovely vegetables, seafood, dumplings and what-have-you, fantastic! And tomorrow we’re going for proper dim sum for the first time, I can’t wait! Sorry Philippines, you haven’t got a finger on HK in the food department, you certainly win in the diving department though, so don’t cry.

One of the reasons I decided to come here was that Jussi is pretty active in this big group of adventurous people that go climbing, diving, hiking and similar things every week. The day after I arrived here I bought some climbing gear and shakily got back on a climbing wall again, around 17 years since I did it last time… I didn’t quite make it to the top that day but getting all the way up is my number one priority for tomorrow morning!

Last weekend we also went pretty far out in the HK archipelago and went camping! Jussi bought a whole load of camping gear and somehow I ended up with the only tent in the whole group… aaaaaand it started raining halfway through the night! I did get some looks when I climbed out of the tent next morning, all dry and comfortable. We also went diving out there, no the most amazing dives I’ve done but we still saw some pretty cool stuff down there in the murk. Some of the divers are going to do a few tech courses over winter and I’m going to join in, more mixed gases and additional tanks, very exciting! Deeper and longer!

I’m back in Moalboal, back working a few days in Kasai before I start my next mini-adventure; I’m going to stay with my friend Jussi in Hong Kong for three months! He’s been living there for a while now and has a spare bedroom, I needed somewhere to stay with a good internet connection to do some work, perfect!

Once again I’ve been lucky and managed to get a three-month freelance contract, if I behave and don’t spend all the money in HK I should be able to make the earnings last for quite some time in Indonesia or Philippines just goofing around. I seriously need to figure out what I want to do in the long run now, and I can’t see a better way to do that than by doing sweet FA for a nice long time…

About a month ago I went back to Sweden to attend my cousins wedding, it was an absolutely stunning event in the Stockholm archipelago, something I would happily base my own wedding upon if I ever get to that day… A beautiful setting by a lake and perfect weather, perfect. Also a good opportunity to meet all the family again! The only problem I could see was the great selection of alcohol offered, it was impossible to chose! My brother went over to make a drink but came back after 10 minutes with a beer instead… All in all a very nice day. And a big thank you to Annika and Pelle for letting me stay at your place!

I also spent some time with my brother which we haven’t done for a while, always something I look forward to! He’s slowly restoring his house to a level it has never seen before, and it’s looking great. He just needs to speed things up a bit so he can come and visit me soon!

I also managed to go and visit some old and new friends during my brief time in Sweden… Linn, say hi to your dad and Eva from me. Hanna, scratch Signe’s tummy from me! Roland and the rest of the ‘punks’, just keep doing what you’re doing.

After my brief visit to Sweden I managed to swing past London as well to visit even more friends and sort out some bits and pieces to do with my flat and meet up with IG to arrange this contract. Thank you to Liz and Damian for your very comfortable naughty room, Damian, I hope you’re happy with your new 3GS! Also big thank you to the Curry Crew; Sarah & Jon, Charlie & Allan, Ben & Lucy (in spirit), always true to the Standard!

The strangest thing with this Euro-trip was coming back to Cebu, it was like I hadn’t been away at all, but my brain was going ‘Hold on, we were in Europe just now, right?’. I arrived back at Kasai around ten past two and 20 minutes later I was on the diveboat going out for the afternoon dive. I backrolled into the water with an empty bcd and luckily I had remembered to stick my reg in my mouth! Just a touch too confident perhaps…

Life is slow here in Siargao, way slower than it ever was in Moalboal, the obvious difference is of course that I was working in Moalboal, but still, the pace of life here is just not the same. I also find it very hard to get anything done! I had all these plans on organizing my photos, developing some more on the secret website project I’m working on with Damian, perhaps redo my own site as well, lots of plans. Progress report so far? Zilch. Nada. Zero. I did have this slightly random translation job that I picked up a few months ago that I’m hoping will lead to some more regular webwork in the future that I was freaking out about for a while but that’s thankfully done now. Or rather, it’s done now thanks to my dear mother who helped me sound less like a robot-translator and more like a human! That will bring in a little bit of cash that will at least pay for my massage sessions here…

See, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, and lately it’s been a laptop on not so userfriendly and ergonomic tables and chairs, so I’ve developed an amazing array of knots and other bad things in my back that I decided to get rid of once and for all. I also managed to slip on a wet floor and smack my left elbow hard which messed up my shoulder a bit so I’m now getting a pretty serious massage two-three times a week. That also helps for the seriously knackered arms and shoulders you get from surfing…

And I just can’t get enough of the surfing, it’s just so insanely pleasing to catch a nice break! Surfing is weird though, I only have the energy to surf for like two hours at a time, and most days only once per day. You want to catch the middle-to-high tide for the best surf and thus have to schedule your day around whenever that happens. Like going up at 4.30am and hobbling out to the breaks while rubbing the salt from your eyes… and going out at 4.30pm and enjoying some night surfing trying to catch that very last break before it goes completely dark and you can’t even the sea the whitewater of the waves… Today it’s a more decent 11am high-tide and the second high-tide happens after sunset. But the afternoon low-tide is a very high one so you can surf all afternoon! It’s all very complicated and there’s a lot of science behind all this to do with the moon and tides and out-at-sea-weather and all that jazz, so of course instead we use a website like Magicseaweed to keep track of it all for us.

Back on track, surfing VS work schedule. So you know you have to get up early tomorrow to surf so you lock yourself in your room and turn the lights off so no-one will come and drag you down to the bar. Get up really early, surf until you basically can’t lift your arms over waist-height and go get breakfast. Now, this is the point where I should be starting to work. What do you think happens? I go back to bed, read my book and fall asleep again. Wake up mid-afternoon and wonder what happened. Rest of the day is a write-off of course and then the beer-drinking starts again to forget that nothing has been done today either.

Cheers!

I’m now back in Siargao to hopefully get a little bit less sucky at surfing. But I tell you, it’s a hard task when you’ve have ten-yearolds handing you your ass back after you’ve completely wiped out AGAIN… And we’ve not even started talking about the teenagers and older, it truly is a humbling sensation. But it’s doing nothing at all to darken my intense passion for this silly pastime.

Sitting just outside of the point where the waves start breaking, looking out over the sea for the next wave that will either carry you gracefully, albeit with a silly grin on your face, all the way to the shore, or plant said face under the surface of the water and roll it around like the deathroll of a giant croc. One of those two things. In my case, mostly the latter. But the count is swinging, ever so slowly, but swinging it is.

Today I caught my ever first proper wave, not just riding in the whitewater after the wave has broken but actually on the top of the wave, even doing small turns back and forth!

Anyway, the topic for today isn’t really supposed to be about surfing at all, instead we’ll be talking about my journey to get here. For some odd reason I decided to bring my motorbike with me which meant that I would travel by ferry instead of flying. The journey itself was not really that tricky; ride the bike to Cebu City, catch a ferry to Surigao del Norte and then another ferry to Siargao Island. No biggie.

To start with I’m not really that keen on riding the motorbike longer stretches in ‘high’ speed, I’m very much aware that I’m wearing WAY less protection than needed and also very much aware that the added surprise factor caused by chickens/dogs/goats/pigs/children running across the roads in this country is not a great combination with low protection. Mother, just to confirm, top speed around here is around 60-70km/h due to bad roads and your son being very sensible. Pretty much never higher than 80. Ok, maybe 90 sometimes but it’s very rare! Still, fall off the bike at 60 and you almost certainly wont die, you probably wont break anything, but you will for sure lose a remarkable portion of skin since you’re only wearing shorts and flip-flops. Which is why I was wearing hiking shoes. For that extra 2% protection.

Anyway! The ride was actually quite pleasant, it had been raining a lot just before my planned departure, a typhoon named Jolina was passing by in the vicinity, and in the morning of my actual departure it was literally tipping it down but an hour or so before I left the rain stopped! Luckily the chickens/dogs/goats/pigs/children were not convinced about the drought and mostly stayed indoors. Fine with me.

I had been in touch with the resort where I’m now staying, Ocean 101, and they had given me all the ferry info I needed and it was now time to get my tickets for the first crossing. I knew the name of the company and a rough timetable; leaving 7pm and arriving around 5am next morning. Off I went to their main offices and it turns out to be a proper shipping company, not really a ferry dealio at all. So I had to stand in line to have the all the paperwork for the motorbike to be shipped and during the continued almost comical conversation the staff behind the counter took pity on my non-knowledge about these matters and also sorted my personal ticket for me so I didn’t have to stand in line for that as well.

And now we start with the real topic; paper. I left that office with one ticket in four copies for the motorbike, and one ticket in 3 copies for me. And receipts and gate-passes and taxes and whatnot for each set of tickets.

Then I went to the actual port and had to go to two different windows to pay several odd port-related fees, I have no clue what they were, maybe rope-wear-and-tear… or water-displacement tax… and received two or three receipts and copies from each window. I think one of them also kept back one of the ticket copies but all this was already getting quite complicated…

Now on to get the motorbike and myself onto the actual ship, where several bits of paper were passed back and forth and I think they kept a few pieces again and I was given a confirmation about said transfer.

Ok, do you all remember I mentioned a typhoon a bit earlier? Scroll up to the section about the actual departure and you’ll find it, don’t worry, I’ll be right here until you’re back. Well, as I was getting on the ship I texted my mate Lee to say that this ship was pretty crazy and he quickly managed to slip in that he’d checked the weather and something about me being a braver man… Denial is not only a river in Egypt, it’s also a very strong feature in my personality.

The crossing was no problems at all, I did wake up a few times in my impressively small bunk and at first not really remembering where I was and what the hell I was doing there, but I guess the several beers had something to do with that. A trick my dear brother taught me to make flying that much more enjoyable; get pissed before take-off. Also works for rough ferry-crossings.

Upon arrival in Surigao I knew I’d have a good few hours to slay before the next ferry took off so I was in no hurry at all but I still managed to get quite fed up with the incredibly lazy people working in that port! First they neglected to tell me that I had to go and pay some bogus fee, then they informed me that I had to actually pay two separate bogus fees in two separate windows that just happened to be quite far between. Many many bits of paper ensued. After finally managing to convince the porters to release my motorbike the guard at the exit of the port almost managed to make me upset when he said that the very first window I’d been to pay the first bogus fee had completely forgotten to let me pay a third bogus fee that would let me leave the premises! After I had a minor explosion the guard realised that I was actually just leaving to go buy a new ticket to leave just a few hours and let me get out without paying. Nice man. Saved him from being assaulted.

More tickets, more receipts, more bogus fees and then I was on the ferry to Siargao, a four hour crossing. All in all I must have held on to at least 30 pieces of paper for this journey, most of which I’ve handed back to different officials, I only have two or three left! The total cost for this one way travel is just under the return fare for the flight. A flight that takes about 50 minutes compared to a total of about 22 hours of rough seas and uncompromising handlers of small bits of paper.

At least I’m sure a whole bunch of unlucky office-workers will have to sort through all these bits of paper and have to arrange them and then re-arrange them, staple them together, remove staples and arrange again to finally be filed in a folder somewhere. A good few days work all in all! So I’ve been helping the economy along the way! Or maybe they just burn the lot and really couldn’t care less…

Next time I’m flying, damn it.