SiDive

Friday was the first day of my scuba license program and it consisted of 6 hours of theory... So I won't bore you with that, but it did turn out that most almost everyone in my class were danish students doing internships. Except James a local Philippine guy that ended up as my diving buddy!

I passed the written test and was ready for next days confined and open water exercises. So we started the day in the pool training how to clear your mask under water, procedures for decent and ascent and how to control your buoyancy using only your breathing. Then in the afternoon we were off to our first real dive, starting from the shore of Kontiki on the island Mactan.

Everything went fine, we got to feed fish at the bottom and were now ready for the final 3 dives the next day. 

We again headed out to Mactan but this time to our proud vessel Mayabang that would take us out to the island Oblang

We performed a lot of the exercises from the pool, now just much deeper and in current. Again everything went fine and fast so there was lots of time to make dives along the bottom. Here I noticed one of our local instructors Ed, were picking up big mussels, clamps and snails. I thought they were just pretty things, but when we submerged and the crew started up the barbeque I noticed they were thrown on the grill. 

Ed and the crew in his SiDive t-shirt cocking big clamps on the BBQ

So I asked if I could have a taste and I was more than welcome, so I ended up having lunch with the crew eating mussels cooked in their own salt water and sea snails, that had to have their shell cracked open. A bit chewy but delicious and very very fresh! In addtion there was also the usual meat on sticks and rice in banana leaves buso. 

  

My buddy James and I were flying through the course and while almost everyone else were using the lunch break for a nap we were snorkeling and I was doing flips and swan dives from the ramp at the front of the boat, the worlds best playground :)

Me, James and Simon

James brought his lovely wife Cherry, daughter Cee and cousin Cherise 

Certified PADI open water buddies!

My instructor friend "Longfinger" Ed

A big thank you to Simon! I had a very nice course, living at Simons house was a treat and his family was wonderfull! I can highly recommend him to anybody considering taking a course near Cebu City. Check out his homepage at www.SiDive.com or google him to find his blog with pictures of all the people he has tought the last 10 years. 

Now to celebrate my succesfull completion of the course I had been invited to visit my friend Jessie and his family in the town of Lapu Lapu out on Mactan. I met up with Jessie at Ayala mall and we took a taxi out to Lapu Lapu.  The taxi driver was an engineer and diver himself working an extra taxi shift to earn extra money for his coming son. He gave me some good tips on diving equipment and we talked about his dream to visit LEGO land with his son sometime in the future. I wish him all the best and he was another example of how open, friendly and very well english speaking the Philipines are. If I was impressed with the taxi driver then I was about to be blown away when I met Jessies family! Jessie has a big family, his parents, 5 brothers and sisters, sons and daughter inlaws and tons of little kids! So I was almost overwhelmed meeting them all and I apologize sincerely for those of you who I can't remember the name of. I was instantly treated as family, I was served a  very nice dinner, we chatted about diving, shipyards and world economy. In the beginning the little fellas and gals were a tiny bit shy if this strange person coming their home as you can see in the pictures. But this would all soon change..

 Jessies sister Jenelyn and one of the shy little boys 

Jenelyns daughter, not so happy being passed into strangers hands 

Fresh fish, prawns, seaweed/fishegg salat Lato and course mango. 

After dinner we went to Jessies sister Janes house for mandatory kareoke, guests go first of course :) Philipinos love music and dancing and you could see the change in everybody going from happy to party mode! Once the music started all brakes were released and within seconds there were kids and adults dancing everywhere! This was truly one big happy family and I found myself fortunate to be carried away in the festivities!

P

 Kids are warming up to me. Look at the little shy boy now doing V signs as I tought him :) Dancing Queen Jane sitting on the right

This quickly evolved into a mad photo session!

I cannot thank you guys enough for a wonderfull evening and I'm sure I will have to make another stop in Lapu Lapu before I leave the Philipines!

For now I leave the area around Cebu City and head down south. First stop is Moalboal, a little diving community, where I will try my fins for the first time outside school!   

  

Cebu City

The Philipines consists of 7107 islands of which one is Cebu, the island holding the capital of the Visayas district:

I flew into the island of Mactan where I was met by my Philipino friend Jessie and his sister Jenelyn. They took me in a taxi from the airport across the bridge and into Cebu City. 

Cebu city has about 3 million citizens and sometimes it can seem like they are all out in the streets at the same time! According to my plan, there was no plan for my stay in the Philipines, there were only guidelines such as get a diving license, met some nice people and see beautifull places! So as a start I camped out in the center of Cebu City and spend the first couple of days while Jessie showed me what the city had to offer. This included lots of food :), a visit to the very old Basilica Minore del Santa Niño, Fort San Pedro and a nighttime view of the city from the mountain lookout. 

A big open BBQ place with lots of little stalls selling meat on sticks

BBQ'ed Calamari with herbs and vegetables!

Rice steamed in weaved packages of banana leaves giving them some extra flavor 

Fort San Pedro, originally established in 1565 as a wooden palisade fort. 

I also spend the first couple of days researching for a diving school where I could take my license. I then fell over a one man company called SiDive run by Simon Timmons an English guy living out here for 14 years. Simon had excellent reviews and even offered accomodation for his students in his own home, so I thought this a great opportunity to get some tips on where to go next and meet some fellow minded travelers. I got in contact with Simon and he set me up with a 3 day course the coming friday and in the meantime he asked if I wanted to go snorkeling with some whale sharks... HELL YEAH I would!!!

Upside down shark hunter

I was picked up by Simon 6.30 at McDonalds in the city center and was immediately introduced to the backseat characters of his toyota pickup truck. There was Moo, Megan, Msee and his own son Matt. Moo or Young as he preferred was from USA, but ethnically from Korea. Megan and Msee were identical twins from Singapore and Matt was Simons 12 year old son. Within a minute I was asked if I wanted to put some music on and I replied "I'm not sure you all will like it cause all I have is house and dance music.." To which Simon replied "Don't worry, that is all I have as well!"  At that point I knew that this was going to a a special day! 

We gunned it out of Cebu City to hard pumping house music, weaving in and out of traffic, blasting the horn as is good customs out here, because people navigate traffic through sound and not visuals... 

It was a 2.5 hour drive down south to the town of Oslob where we received a short safety briefing, which was basically, don't touch the sharks and you will be okay.

Now whale sharks are not dangerous to humans, they filter water for tiny pieces of plankton and krill, but could probably give you one hell of a kiss! The sea was quite rough for snorkeling and there were lots of people and boats in the water but I managed to get some decent pictures and videos with the help of Young. I have always done a lot of snorkeling so I felt very comfortable in the water, doing lots of dives around the sharks, so on many of the pictures I'm actually on the way down, which then immediately earned me the now immortal nickname upside down shark hunter!

This experience will definitely be on the top 5 for the Philippines, being so close to these huge graceful slow moving fish standing almost vertical feeding and then seeing them suddenly switch to horizontal and be gone in a few seconds! 

I think we were all pretty high after this experience, chilling out with mango shakes and looking at pictures, so our expectations for the rest of the day were probably quite low, but Simon suggested we visited a waterfall not far from there, so we thought why not, could be pretty... Little did we know that we were up for another euphoric experience!

So we went on a waterfall chase in the back of Simons truck going up the mountain, reliving a particular scene from the movie Meet the Millers, that were shown at Simons house the night before. 

At this point Young pretty much took over as director of the show, filming left and right with my camera, while rambling about going back to Thailand and use his newly acquired scuba license to find his gopro camera and precious memory stick, that he lost in a cliff diving experiment!

Now coming up to the Tumalog waterfall we had to walk through a bit of jungle so the entire waterfall was a bit obscured until we were almost standing right in it, so it wasn't until I started walking into the pool at the bottom and the clouds suddenly parted that we saw this sight!

We caught our waterfall!

While there we met a group of students, celebrating summer break with a big picnic. When we asked them if they wanted to take a picture with us on the makeshift bamboo raft they were playing with, a big cheer went up and people came running from everywhere, going crazy like a group of wild animals and naturally we fell in :) The lens on my camera unfortunately was a bit foggy so the pictures turned out a bit psychedelic!

 

Next thing we know, they are inviting us for drinks and lunch in the jungle, an invitation I have rarely been known to turn down!

Driving back to Cebu City most were sleeping, but I got a history lesson from Simon in funk soul jazz music, the forefather of disco and house music, which was quite entertaining and very groovy :) 

Arriving back in Cebu City none us seemed willing to accept that this amazing day was going to be over anytime soon so even if Young, Megan and Msee had airplanes to catch in the morning we decided to go out and have a look at the nightlife! Starting at a nice cocktail place called Gilt and later hitting the clubs around infamous Mango Square! 

Gilt cocktail bar playing some Jenga!

     

After an almost 22 hour day, packed with fantastic experiences and lots of new really good friends I collapsed with a smile on my lips knowing that in only 8 hours I would be starting my 3 day scuba diving certificate program.. Life was looking pretty good right there :)

To Young, Megan and Msee, I'm sad we didn't get more time together, you were awesome! But I have a feeling that this quartet has not chased its last waterfall..

 

   

 

Farewell Singapore!

So my stay in Singapore has come to an end and I'm so happy I decided to spend almost a week here! It has been a week of many flavors, lots of new friends, seeing a very old friend again and impressive architecture!

We sailed to Ubin island or Pulau Ubin, rented a couple of bikes and went around the island. My friend Neo had "voluntered" to show me around as he knew the island intricately from several visits over the years. This meant we kinda went a little off track here and there to find some hidden gems, but it also cost me several mosquito and ant bites, but I guess if you play with jungle and mangroves you get stung :) 

 

Pulau Ubin is full of old stone queries now flooded with water making some impressive lakes on the island. At the high vantage points you could even see over to Malaysia and it was quite a contrast looking to the south seeing almost a wall of residential towers filling the horizon and then looking north and seeing nothing but jungle. 

I want to say a special thanks to my biking buddy Neo for putting up with my obsession for going up hill all the time, he put up a good fight, but in the end I think I wore him down a little or maybe it was the sun that was streaking down from a blue sky!

Funny story about the above picture. Standing on an elevated platform 15 meters above the mangroves, we wanted to take a picture and I heard a family speaking danish so I asked them for a photo. While taking the photo they recognise my name on the shirt that I traded with Neo back in 2012 and funnily enough their family name was also Hammer :) To top it off they live in the same city that I normally work in so that was quite a coincidence!

Coming back from the island there was of course a reward for our hard work 

Some funky desserts consisting of crushed ice, fruit, jelly and sirups! The evening I spend visiting an old friend from my time in the army, barbecuing some aussie steaks, drinking cold danish beer, learning a lot about the shipping business  and of course telling old "war" stories :)

Going out there I accidentially ended up in a fancy executive taxi as nobody else seemed to be able to find their way to the "suburbs" of Singapore so I rolled up in style jumping out of my Chrysler wearing knickers and T-shirt :) 

The next day I hung out with the guys playing some games and of course had even more interesting food. This time it was bak kut teh a very popular pork ribs soup with assorted side dishes. This stuff is so good they have dedicated restaurants for it!

After lunch we went to a gaming place called Titan Games where the whole crowd was gathered, Nico, Neo, Dawei, Lee, Lam, ... And a very friendly and well travelled bloke named Akhter with like 4 different passports so I gave up figuring out if he was currently a citizen of Singapore, UK or Australia :) After games we went out for dinner, this time quite spicy indian food, including the fish that killed Steve Irvin, formerly known as stingray. Eating in Singapore sometimes makes you feel like you are part of the tv show The Big Bang Theory where every day is dedicated to a very specific regional cuisine! 

The morning after I was up early as I wanted to take a walk along the southern ridge overlooking Sentosa Island and which takes you across some creative footpath bridges and through treetops on walkways elevated high above the ground. I needed to complete this walk before meeting up with Lam at 2 pm for a very special and most generous gift of a one night stay at the Marina Bay Sands hotel, complimentary of Team Singapore!

But as always no pain no gain so I ventured out in the already baking sun and started to climb mount Faber, taking me up on the ridge and to the gondola station servicing visitors going to and from Sentosa island. 

 

Coming back I checked out of "beary good hostel", grapped my backpack and headed for downtown Singapore and the Marina Bay area. The area around Marina Bay is covered by towering skyscrapers, funky looking buildings of various sizes and a floating football field. But they all fade in comparison to the Marina Bay Sands hotel that consists of three towers more than 50 stories high and on top of that they have put an elevated skypark that houses the famous infinity pool, approximately 200 meters above the ground! It is in other words simply breathtaking and mind blowing. 

After a quick bag drop it was of course straight to the top to have a look at the view..

The pool is made to give the impression of swimming basically at the edge of the building and it is quite effective! 

As the sun sets on Marina Bay the entire area turns into a light show resembling a spaceport from a science fiction movie. 

I strolled through it all on my way to dinner..

Getting back down to earth for a minute I thought it would be nice with a bit of european cuisine for a change and what better than an old favorite from the bavarian kitchen, Prosst! 

Having been to Munich a couple of times I was fearing that the Paulaner Brauhaus would not live up to the high standards set there but the interior and the food was quite authentic and so was the german tuba music playing in the background, just the way we like it :)

Coming back to the hotel I went and investigated some huge odd glowing trees I had spotted from my balcony. This was a bit like walking into the movie Avatar and you half expected a couple of 3 meter tall blue indians to come out and greet you!

After this I simply collapsed in my room as Im sure you dear reader are about to as well if you have stayed with me so far. 

Some long days and nights in Singapore now gives way for another island adventure in the Phillipines where I look forward to doing scuba diving at the many beautiful reefs, sipping drinks on white sandy beaches, swim with sharks and possibly do a bit of surfing! 

A million thanks to everyone I met in Singapore, you made it an unforgettable visit and I hope to one day be able to repay your heartfelt hospitality!