Travel Logbook

Manila, Barrio Barretto & Banaue, Philippines: 14th-21st August.

I didn't spend too long in Manila, a dirty, polluted, overcrowded city with nothing to see once you've been to the old Spanish quarter of Intramuros. After three days there I decided to head to the old American Naval base at Subic Bay to dive some of the wrecks there. In a bout of temporary (some would say permanent) insanity, I looked on a map, found a place called Subic in Subic Bay and decided that was obviously where I needed to go. It wasn't until I was half way to Olongapo, a big town on the way to Subic, that it occurred to me that Subic Bay is a large piece of water and the wrecks weren't necessarily near Subic. I got off the bus at Olongapo to see if I could find any dive shops there. There was clearly something wrong with me that day; I asked a motorcycle taxi driver where the dive shops were and he told me Barrio Baretto. I knew this was a tourist area so I stupidly believed him. I asked if there were any jeepneys (public transport) going there and of course he said there wasn't. So I paid way over the odds for him to bring to Barrio. Anyway, I got there and walked the length of the village but there were no dive shops. What there were was lots of fat, ageing American serviceman who hadn't wanted to leave when the Naval base shut down back in 1992. Next day I left and resolved to come back to Subic Bay once I'd researched where the dive shops were.

From Olongapo I headed north, bound for the rice terraces of Banaue. So far, after a week in the Philippines I had met no fellow travellers at all; there just seemed to be none around. The first stage of the journey to Banaue took me to the town of Baguio, which at an altitude of 1500m in the north Luzon mountains was pleasantly cool and dotted with fir trees. It felt like I was back in Europe. But again no travellers. Next day I continued on to Bontoc and met an Israeli guy; someone to talk to at last. It started raining that night and didn't stop for 24 hours. All the way on the bus from Bontoc to Banaue it rained. It rained all morning as I wandered around Banaue village. The rice terraces here are 3000 years old, stretch vertically for 1500m and if placed end to end would extend 20,000km. At least that what it said in the guidebook, I couldn't see them because they were hidden in the rain clouds.

I went to my room at noon for a quick siesta. When I went for lunch at two in the afternoon, the guesthouse was suddenly full of travellers! I don't know where they all appeared from, but I was happy. Oh, and it was still raining. There were a couple of Dutch girls there and they told how they had fallen victim to the Atavan gang in Manila. The Atavan gang are an amazingly sincere-seeming group of men, women and children who win your confidence, get you into a taxi, offer you a drink - then you wake up in your hotel room with a sore head and no money. Luckily the girls had only had their travellers' cheques stolen so got off lightly - the Manila papers had the story of a Finnish businessman who got relieved of US$400,000 and his Rolex. There was also an English guy called Nick there, and he told the story of a Danish bloke he met in Manila who'd flown from Europe to Delhi with his wallet and money belt stashed in his backpack. When his bag came out of the reclaim at Delhi both had been taken and he'd lost everything.

Back in Manila that evening, Nick and I went back to the main travellers' hostel, a place called the Malate Pensionne. They had two dormitories but the cheaper one was full so we had to take beds in the more expensive one. Too many bloody travellers now!! During our previous stays in Manila, Nick and I had independently arrived at the same conclusion that the air-conditioned Robinson's Place shopping mall had everything the traveller needed to pass the days in Manila; an internet cafe, a big bookshop, a 7-screen cinema, a food court for Filipino food and a MaccyD's for real food. What more could anyone want? I suggested to Nick that we check out another mall called Harrison's Place. "Pah!" said Nick. "Who needs Harrison's when you've got Robinson's?"

Subic Bay, Lake Taal and Coron, Philippines; 22nd August - 3rd September.

On the internet I found out that there was a dive shop inside the old US Naval base at Olongapo. I headed back there and did three dives on the wrecks in the bay. The visibility in Subic Bay is terrible but the wrecks were fascinating. The USS New York was a battle cruiser built in 1898 and scuttled in the bay in 1941 to prevent the Japanese from getting hold of her. The visibility on the dive was under a metre but it didn't matter so much because most of our time was spent inside the ship, swimming through the tight 3 dimensional maze of jagged metal.

Next I went down to Lake Taal, a couple of hours south of Manila. The tourist blurb tells you that Taal is the most dangerous volcano on Earth. I seriously doubt that it is, but why that would make people want to go there anyway I'm not sure. To get to the volcano it's necessary to charter a boat to cross the lake, but I was the only tourist in town so decided against chartering one by myself. People throughout the Philippines are fond of shouting "Hey Joe!" and laughing at passing white people. As I walked along the lakeside road and through the villages I was nearly driven mad by the incessant shouts of "Hey Joe".

Next morning I returned to Manila and from there took an overnight ferry to Coron in Palawan. Coron is perhaps one of the best wreck diving locations in the world. The Americans caught a camouflaged Japanese supply convoy moving through Coron Bay in September 1944 and sank the lot of them. There are now a dozen diveable wrecks in the bay. My first dive though was in a semi-freshwater lake on Coron Island. The lake is fed by hot springs and is nearly 30 degrees at the surface; it gets hotter the deeper you go. As you go down you pass through layers of sediment hanging on the thermoclines. There's also a passage to the sea and the lake is home to a solitary barracuda. We found him halfway through and he followed me and the divemaster for the rest of the dive. Next day I dived two of the wrecks; on the Irako we went to 40m down into the engine room. On the Olympia Maru you swim into a tight space below the bridge that turns out to be a shower room, still tiled.

Boracay, and the Visayan Islands, Philippines; 3rd September-23rd September

From Coron I took a flight back to Manila and immediately got on a boat to Boracay. Boracay is the Philippines' most popular resort; it's a small island with a beautiful, long white sand beach, lots of bars & restaurants and 28 dive shops that take beginner divers on some not-so-special reefs. I spent 10 days on Boracay, including my birthday. I met up with my friend Jim, who'd been making his own way through SE Asia since we parted in Bangkok three months earlier. There is one good dive on Boracay, a site called Yapak which is a wall that starts at 35 metres and drops deep. It's swept by strong currents that bring the big fish and sharks in. You cling to the top of the wall and let the current bring everything to you.

On the night of my birthday Jim & I went to the Moondog Shooters Bar and took the "15 and still standing - do it for your country" challenge. There was a big scoreboard in the bar that kept track of how many people had completed the 15 shooters while still standing. If you ignore the Filipinos, then the English were well ahead of the competition, and Jim & I added two to the total. Jim's mosquito coils burning in our room made me sick that night, and I spent most of the next day in bed. It must have been the mozzie coils, because it's not like me to suffer from hangovers...

From Boracay, Jim headed to Manila to return home and I headed south. I meandered through the islands of Panay, Negros, Bohol and Cebu without doing very much of interest and meeting nobody. On Bohol I visited the Chocolate Hills, a series of odd, teardrop shaped limestone hills that are supposed to look like chocolate drops. Maybe. Nearby was a place that had a few tarsiers living in a tree. The tarsier is the world's smallest primate; just 20cm tall, they can jump an astonishing three metres. That's a bit like the world long jump record being 30m! It was possible to have your photo taken with the tarsier sitting on your shoulder, but I arrived just after a group of Japanese tourists and by the time they'd finished with him he was so sick of having his photo taken he just wanted to hide in his tree.

From Cebu City I wanted to take a ferry to Zamboanga on Mindanao Island; from there I could get a ferry back to Sabah in Malaysia. In Cebu I went to the ferry office to get the ticket to Zamboanga. The woman at the counter asked me if I wanted a bunk in the White Room, for 615 pesos, or the Yellow Room, for 335. I asked what the difference was, and she said no difference, only the White Room is a deck above the Yellow Room. I didn't see the significance until the lady behind me in the queue helpfully pointed it out. If the ship sinks, you have a slight chance of escaping from the White Room... I took the Yellow Room.

The boat arrived in Zamboanga early in the morning of the 22nd September, and the ferry to Sandakan in Sabah left that afternoon. I spent the day wandering around the town, but the degree of "Hey Joe"ing was unbelievable. I suppose if you were some kind of masochistic extrovert you might enjoy it, but it drove me mad, and made me glad I was leaving the Philippines. Which was a shame.

Sipadan, Sabah, Malaysia: 24th-26th September.

Back in Sabah, I had to pass right by Semporna to get to the Indonesian border, so I thought what the hell, I'll give North Borneo one final chance, and booked a day trip to Sipadan via e-mail for the 24th. I arrived in Semporna for the final time in the evening of the 23rd. Next morning I walked down to the office on the jetty. The conversation went something like this;

"How's the weather today?"

"Fine, yeah, really calm today."

"And the boat's OK?"

"Yep, no problems there."

"So I can go to Sipadan then???"

"Erm.. well, you're the only customer we have today and we can't really justify taking you by yourself."

What do you say to that? I was too prepared for failure to be angry or disappointed. It was like this was the way it was meant to be... But then Vicki, the lady who worked there, asked if I wanted to stay on the island. She suggested I go speak to Abdillah Sipadan Paradise; I did, they had a space and I got a great deal on a 3 day/2 night package, leaving immediately. I was going to Sipadan at last!

Pulau Sipadan is a small island about 30 miles off the Borneo coast. It is basically a sheer pinnacle rising from the sea bed 600m below, and this means that it is surrounded by bottomless vertical walls. Because it sits alone in such deep water it is a focus for much marine life, including lots of big pelagic fish such as barracuda, jacks and sharks. It is also overrun with turtles. It's not uncommon to see more than 20 big turtles on a single dive. In fact I didn't have a dive on Sipadan where I didn't lose count of how many turtles I'd seen. I had 8 dives over my 3 days on the island, passing 100 dives in the process. They were all great dives, but I'll just recount the two highlights of my stay.

On my second night on the island two turtles hauled themselves up the beach right in front of the resort to lay their eggs. I watched the first one as it finished digging its egg pit, which was about a foot deep and as perfect as if it had been dug with a spade. It then laid several dozen ping-pong ball eggs before filling the pit up and starting the slow journey back to the sea. Later on I followed the second turtle as it made its way slowly back down the beach to the sea; it would pull itself along with its flippers for a minute, then lay its head down, let out a big sigh and rest for a minute before continuing. I watched this heart-rending struggle for an hour before the turtle reached the water's edge.

Next morning we were in the water at 6.00am for a dawn dive. As usual the visibility was well over 30m. We descended the wall and swam out into the blue to look for big fish. We didn't find any but back on the wall we came across a huge shoal of barracuda hanging in the gentle current. I watched them for a few minutes before moving on. We then came to a flat sandy area full of sleeping whitetip reef sharks. One particular shark wasn't bothered by us divers at all and he let me lay down on the sand next to him, just a few feet away. After this we swam back towards the barracudas - by now the shoal seemed to have got even bigger and was a huge, spiralling mass of several hundred metre-long fish. They spiralled above us, below us, beside us and even around us - a truly memorable experience!

Derawan & Sangalaki, Kalimantan, Indonesia: 27th September - 1st October.

I left Sipadan after lunch that day and from Semporna took a bus to Tawau, from where the next morning I crossed over to Tarakan in Indonesia. I had arranged for some more diving and the following day met my contact, Mr Alfato from the Derawan Dive Resort and we set off for Pulau Derawan along with a Japanese man and woman.

Our first dive that afternoon was meant to be a gentle warm-up-and-check-out dive for me and the two Japanese. The boat dropped the three of us and the divemaster on the reef just in front of the dive resort. Immediately we were picked up by a very strong current and swept along at an impressive speed. We flew across the reef, past an old rotting wooden shipwreck, and then over a sharp drop-off. At this point the visibility dropped to less than 10m, and the current started dragging us downwards. I filled my lungs and finned upwards as hard as I could but my depth gauge read a steady 30m. After several minutes as the current subsided a bit we realised we'd become separated from the Japanese bloke. We looked around for a minute and then ascended as quickly as we could from 30m. The divemaster looked pretty worried as we went up; the current had been pulling us strongly down and if the Japanese guy hadn't checked his depth gauge he would have been very deep very quickly. I had a bad feeling as we surfaced but thankfully as the boat came over we saw that he'd got to the surface OK by himself.

Next day I joined four English divers on a trip to Sangalaki island. We were here to look for something special, the reason I'd come to Derawan. We were looking for manta rays. We patrolled the east side of the island, cruising up and down for 15 minutes looking for disturbances that would indicate a ray, but there was no sign of any so we kitted up and began the first dive. The visibility was superb and the reef, although kind of spread out and patchy with lots of sandy areas, was in perfect condition and very pretty. We saw a whitetip reef shark and a couple of turtles, and after 45 minutes one buddy pair ascended. No sooner had they done so than the first manta appeared, a 2m ray which cruised slowly past us and out of sight. Straight away a second, slightly bigger manta appeared overhead; he swam over us, turned around then went back the way he'd come.

After lunch on the beach we again patrolled the island for mantas but still none at the surface. So we donned scuba gear and jumped in. Immediately we saw the first manta and over the course of the dive saw a total of 8. All were between 2 & 3m across, most were black with white undersides but a few were all black. We found our last manta right at the end of the dive, sitting at a cleaning station being picked over by the cleaner wrasse. We watched the large all-black for 5 minutes before it slowly moved away. As we surfaced there were mantas everywhere. We could see their tiny dorsal fins sticking above the water, and occasionally their wing tips would break the surface. I swam from one to the other, each one swimming towards me before diving down at the last second and passing underneath. I saw one manta doing a little loop-the-loop just under the surface as he gathered up the plankton.

Next day I went back to Sangalaki and although they weren't present in such numbers, we still saw 4 mantas and a couple of big leopard sharks. Diving with the mantas of Sangalaki was an unforgettable experience.

From Derawan I was dropped off in Berau back on the Borneo mainland. From there I took a flight south across the equator to Samarinda, then a bus to Balikpapan and from there a Pelni ferry to Ujung Pandang in Sulawesi.