not exactly trademark infringement

so my new favourite chain store in the entire world is "orange brutus", serving very orange juliusesque drinks in the philippines and possibly elsewhere. using the murderer of the namesake of your competition's chain as the name for your own is fantastic.

i'm thinking of having kenny rogers taken out so i can open my own "roasters".

Superferry

The ticket said we had to be at the dock at 4:30am to board, so we got up at 5 and ambled off. Had a bizarre cab driver who told us how sad he was Sarah Palin didn't get voted in and then gave us handfuls of mini bananas from a pile in the the trunk.

The ticket office we needed to go to to pick up our e-tickets didn't even open until 6, so we got to stand around while tiny children stared up at us with their mouths open swatting bugs and watching tiny bats flutter around our heads. The ferry itself is exactly like a budget cruise. A very very budget cruise. We had a tv, but only 3 fuzzy channels (sounds from next door suggested that might have been our own problem), there was an internet cafe onboard, which was a room full of empty desks, and a store that sold hats says "SuperFerry!" on them. I was tempted by those hats. I wonder if anyone here gets why white people think the name Superferry is so comical.

Most of the people onboard slept in large rooms in the middle of the ferry full of bunkbeds. We got the stateroom because we are princesses, and it cost about the same as the only other option available at the time (room with four beds). It wasn't that stately, the tap wouldn't stop running and there was a lot of dirt and hair on piled in the corners. We slept poorly because I can't lie still now without thinking of all the tiny bugs feasting on me so I kept turning lights on and bumping into Derek.

Cebu seems much calmer and friendlier then Manila already, and my bites have all faded away. Our reservation to Coral Cay was confirmed and things are looking up.

Leaving Manila

We haven't been able to find a decent internet connection, so I apologize for not e-mailing/skyping people.

We have to get up at 4am tomorrow to catch our ferry ride to Cebu, it's an overnight so we'll be on it for a while. I imagine it'll be like a cruise, only without the delicious buffet or anything to do. I'm just glad to be leaving Manila. Derek says not to write a negative post about the place, but it's impossible not to. Our laundry was held inside a closed down laundro-mat for 4 days when we were supposed to be able to pick it up the next day. I've been wearing the same outfit the entire time. My feet itch. There's really not much to do here, which all the guidebooks warned us about. People are pushy about taking our money and trying to rip us off. It's funny when you step out of a cab and another one starts hollering at you asking if you need a cab, but when the fruit stand charges you three times as much and then makes sure to give you all the rotten fruit, it's somewhat grating. I think the last straw is how someone will say "Merry Christmas" and when you turn to say it back they are giving you a real hateful grin. And that happens a lot. Apparently a bunch of white people stormed through Manila before we got here and pissed in everyone's cornflakes. Bah.

I won't be coming back.

The food was really good though.

Humbug

So Manila is a bad place to celebrate Christmas. Or spend any time in really. It's like Edmonton, only instead of snow it's carpeted with street kids. It does have the largest mall in Asia, but they don't sell anything of interest. It's basically the same 4 stores repeated through four large buildings. I thought one saving grace for this would be I'd be able to pick up a waterproof case for my camera, but no one sells them. We went to another giant mall today to check, and the only store in the entire building that wasn't open was the one we wanted to go to. Bah.

Yesterday we stopped at 7-11 on the way home and there were some scruffy kids outside, so I thought, it's Christmas, let's give them some cookies. It was a horrible idea. Suddenly I was surrounded by screaming kids, pushing and shoving at each other and snatching cookies out of the hands of the tiny ones, and when I ran out of cookies their eyes bugged out and they started screeching for money in rage. It is not an endearing holiday memory.

It was very similar to when I thought I'd take a cracker out into the water while snorkeling and suddenly I was in a cloud of fish, most of whom were trying to eat my arm. I am full of increasingly bad ideas.

At least the food here is good. The food in KK was awful. And we didn't get food poisoning from the raw oysters we ate. Merry Christmas! We have a reservation for Coral Cay on the 30th, so as long as that doesn't fall through at least things can only get better.

Merry Christmas

We are spending Christmas in Manila, which we hadn't wanted to, but trying to book planes or ferries out of Manila wasn't possible until the 28th. So we are here for 6 days. Manila is not a place you need to spend 6 days in. Maybe 2 at the most. It's dirty and covered in naked street children. Derek had this thought that we should spend Christmas in a country that actually celebrates it, which seems like a good idea until execution, because everything is CLOSED. We will spending tomorrow in our hostel room watching Nickelodeon and drinking 50 cent rum.

New Years will be spent at a resort on a small Island covered in white sands so hopefully that will make up for this.

Also I got eaten by bedbugs right before we left KK and I just need to whine about that for a bit. I can't even count the bites I have so many, and until I found some antihistamines I was very whiny indeed. I expected this to happen at some point in our travels, but I don't understand why I'm overdosing on antihistamines and Derek doesn't appear to have a single bite on him. His sympathy is zero. I should probably go back to glaring at him.

We'll try to skype people tomorrow if we can find a working wifi connection, hope all is less itchy on your end.

Scuba Certified!

Derek and I got our SSI Scuba certification a few days ago at Sabah Divers in KK. I'm thrilled by this, it's one of those things you want to do, but don't really think about because you grow up on the prairies. It's far less expensive in the tropics, and also you get to do it in the ocean instead of a pool, there's just something more exciting about watching the instructor demonstrate how to drain your mask under water with a school of fish swimming around us.

I was a little worried about being scared because having no visibility underwater was one of my biggest phobias as a kid, but I was doing pretty good until the end of the second dive. We had about 3 meters visibility and were 12 meters below, sitting on a sandy patch with nothing to look at. My nervousness was easy to deal with, it was the realization that if i did panic I could be in some serious shit that freaked me out. I decided I'd go back up and started waving at the instructor (Russ) frantically, but he wasn't looking at me, so I started trying to get Derek's attention as he was close enough to reach over and poke Russ. Derek saw me and waved back before going back to watching Russ. My hero. Jen, another student saw me freaking out and got someone's attention and a friend of the instructor's who came along for the dive came over and managed to calm me down enough to get through it. If he'd let me go to the surface I don't know if I'd have made it back down. Then Russ comes over and I need to demonstrate taking my mask off and spitting out my regulator and all that, which was only moderately terrifying.

The second day was better, even with visibility being just as bad. We were above some coral and having something to look at was easier. Derek did great, he was worried he'd be kicked out for being a bad swimmer, but apparently they make sure to tell you they'll do that because some people sign up and get 2 meters from the boat before sinking. My mask had a leak on the last dive and I was able to clear it every 5 minutes without being nervous. It feels like a real accomplishment.

There's actually more life closer to the surface, where there's more light. We made it down 18 meters, which is how far we're certified to go with the first course, and it was mainly sand. I did get to see an orangutan crab (it's covered in orange fur), a large red puffer fish, a large conch shell with the animal still inside, a bat fish, and a blue velvet nudibranch, none of which I saw while snorkeling, and Derek almost sat on a mantis shrimp (which would have been disastrous). I'm hoping we find some good shallow dive sites in the Philippines, where we are now, the visibility is supposed to be 30 meters here, which is much better then 4. Also, there's a shipwreck at 16 meters we can check out.

I don't have any photos of us in our scuba gear, and I wasn't able to find an underwater case for my camera (there was much sulking), but here's a photo of a hermit crab. I named him Scrambles.

Climbing Mount Kinabalu

So we didn't climb Mount Kinabalu. Derek wanted to, but I was indifferent. Then he became indifferent and then it didn't happen. He decided for the same price we could get our scuba certificates, so that was that. We planned a night in the park at the start of the climb to check out the rainforest and maybe see some pitcher plants, which we did see, encased in plastic at the souvenir shop. Once we got to the park below the mountain I think we're both glad we didn't climb it. It was cold and wet and just gets colder and wetter as you go up.

We spent some time hiking in the rain around the trails, which was as fun as it sounds, but became even more entertaining when we got lost. They were very clearly labeled at the start, but that turned out to be something of a trap because the further you got the more the signs were just posts with the label having long ago rotted away. It would have been less harrowing if so many people and guide books hadn't warned us of the leeches that can burrow through your socks.

We didn't really see any animals. Well, we might have seen something in our hostel, but it might have been a cat. In Canada I would say cat, but we were in a rainforest, so who knows. However, and this is a big however, we saw LOTS of bugs. And not ordinary bugs. Enormous bugs. This photo didn't turn out great, the colours were a very pretty green, but it shows how big that moth is.

This beetle was clinging to a wall about 8 feet up. Each of those tiles is about 3/4 of an inch.

This moth was the size of my fist. I've seen bats smaller then this moth.

I have no idea what this is, but he was about 4 or 5 inches long.

And this guy was just pretty.

And this guy too. He looks like mold! We saw a crazy bug that I can't begin to identify that was even fluffier, but the photos didn't turn out and he ran away.

Oh, and we saw a snake! Sort of.

Snorkelling in Kota Kinabalu

I have other things to write about, but we went snorkelling today and that’s just more exciting then how Derek wouldn’t let me sleep in Kuching and I spent the entire day being mad at him.

We were planning to catch the ferry at around 8 or 9am, but we slept in (you only have to make that mistake once), so around noon we’re trying to figure out what to do and I finally snapped. We haven’t DONE anything. We went to the worst museum I have ever seen yesterday, and almost got heatstroke walking there. It was like someone found a boring coffee table book and a dead whale and turned it into a maze of blurry black and white photographs and a hanging skeleton that still smelled like fish. Okay the whale that stunk was kind of cool. The rest was so bad it was actually funny. Most of the English translations ended half sentence, I assume the curator doesn’t speak it and didn’t realize they missed a section.

Anyway, snorkelling. I figured we’d just go and check it out, the boat back was at 5 and we got there at 1, so we had four hours. The first thing we saw was this:


We then spent three hours swimming in that. It was all clouds of fish and dirty looking coral. It was awesome. The blue striped fish you can see there were super brave and would come right up to my face and stare at me. There were neon coloured parrot fish eating coral, you could hear them crunching it, we saw a ray of some kind, some brown puffers, white and yellow angel looking fish, and tons of sea cucumbers. I found a few patches of anemones full of clown fish, I dove down to get a closer look at one and a black clownfish swam right at me. I thought maybe it was a coincidence, so I stuck my foot at him and he attacked it. He was maybe two inches long. I saw a lot of tiny fish chasing off large two or so foot fish actually. Mini bullies of the sea.


I was following a group of 5 or 8 really big white fish with yellow fins, some reaching 2 feet in length, when suddenly I was following a group of black fish with yellow fins. They changed colour if they were over the darker coral or the white sand. It was amazing. I also saw a brown and white fish lean in sideways at the sand and fan it with his one fin blowing the sand off and checking for hidden clams. He found a little one and when he swam off I saw two broken bits of clam fall out of his mouth.

If I don’t find a waterproof case for my camera tomorrow I am throwing the biggest privileged white person tantrum this place has ever seen.

Singapore

I think of all the places we’ve been, Singapore is the one I would recommend you go. It’s extremely safe, clean, everything is written in English and some people speak it, and the national sport is shopping. This way when you go you won’t have some catastrophe you blame on me for recommending it, and to be honest most of you are princesses who would whine about the lack of hot water and AC in most places, like I do constantly.

Derek and I met up with a friend of Pat’s, Pete, who moved to Singapore a few months ago with his wife Kaodi. We swam in their enormous pool and went bar hopping, stopping in a jazz bar where Pete ‘jammed’ on guitar with a straggly group of characters who eventually turned it into a 70’s lounge music party, causing much eye rolling with Pete and Derek, but I thought it was hysterical. Kaodi made us two pizzas from scratch, and they were absolutely delicious. I hope one day Derek and I live somewhere interesting enough to visit so we can return the favour.


We ended up staying a week, partly because I was sick for a few days (damn you Derek! And Matthew! And whomever originally gave it to Matthew!). The highlights were Dr. Fish (which earned its own post) and the Night Safari, which is a nocturnal animal zoo. I would have killed to go there as a child, you run around a rainforest at night lit with tiki torches. You can walk right into the giant flying squirrel (GFS) AND the fruit bat enclosure. The GFS’s were huge, larger then most cats, and just adorable. We got to see three of them gliding a few feet above our heads. The bats were even better, mainly because I love me some fruit bats. They had flying foxes and some little species, and the fruit was hanging right by the walkway so they were fluttering around our heads, brushing us with their wings. If you think bats are ugly you have never seen a fruit bat, they are just adorable with little teddy bear or fox faces. They don’t do the sonar thing like the bug eating ones so they have large eyes to see at night with.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos, obviously it was night out, they spent about 10 minutes telling us in 8 different languages to NEVER USE FLASH, but I did get a decent video of the serval cat jumping 10 feet into the air:

Dr Fish!

Pete and Kaodi originally wanted to go to the Ben and Jerry ice cream festival, but when we got there the line-up for ice cream was epic. I don’t think I have ever seen such a line. B&J have apparently won over the S’pore market. (btw, a pint of B&J’s in Singapore is $15 CAD. Le gasp!)

So plan B was Dr Fish! It’s so far been the highlight of the trip (for me at least). It’s fish! And they eat your dead skin! But first we had to detoxify. As you can see, Derek is a dirty man.


I’d heard about these fish, they opened up some in the states but they were shut down for hygienic reasons (you can’t sterilize a fish), which filled me with such disappointment. When I was a kid I learned about the cleaner fish in the ocean and I always wanted to find them and see how that worked.



They had two tanks, big fish and little fish, two different breeds of toothless freshwater fish that will scrape away at you when they are hungry enough. The little fish are ticklish and when they swarm on you it almost feeling like a pulsing electrical current. The big fish feel like a herd of cats licking you and ticklish doesn’t even begin to describe it. I could not handle the big fish.



It doesn’t have much more of an effect on your skin then exfoliating with a poof does, but it’s far more entertaining and if they had it in Canada I would do it everyday.

museums

note to malaysia: good museums have dinosaurs. yours did not. i want erin's five dollars back.

Borneo

We are now in Borneo! (Kuching, Malaysia.) I will write about Singapore soon, it was lovely. You should go there. The Night Zoo has bats you can get hit in the head with.

Our current hostel is nicer then my house and costs less then $15 a night.

Singapore!

We're in Singapore now. We have had some trouble finding wi-fi and haven't been able to update for a while so the blog is a bit behind, but Singapore has free wi-fi throughout the city. And the food is awesome. And everyone is really nice, everytime we got lost some stranger would appear and tell us what to do. But the beer is like ten dollars a pint. I don't care though. I'm still going to move here.

We're sitting in a hostel/pub called Prince of Wales listening to music and nursing our pricey drinks. It's apparently a festival weekend so we had some trouble finding a room after our red-eye flight and ended up going to a more expensive hotel ($75 singaporean dollars), but it was worth it as since the room has no windows we could sleep during the day and I could not get sick and die.

Post about India coming soon, we spent a day in Chennai, it was lovely. Derek is impatient with my internet use.

Qatar Airlines

Our original plan was to take Qatar Airlines to Mumbai, with a 5 hour layover in Qatar. After the attack, we decided we’d go to Singapore instead. Thus began many hours of futile attempts to do so. Qatar Airlines is not available to discuss changes in tickets on Sundays. As a privileged westerner I have to say I did not appreciate that. We delayed purchasing tickets until we could talk to them at the airport on Monday, only to find out that the agents working there couldn’t do anything, we had to phone the number that only became available at 9am. Lame. We ended up keeping our tickets and purchasing a flight out of Mumbai separately since Qatar could only offer us a refund and last minute tickets are painful.

Beyond that though, they were awesome. It was a 4 and a half hour flight and we were served a full meal. It was good, I had beef and Derek had cheesy gnocchi, the chocolate mousse dessert in mine was fabulous. Also, free beer! And a large serving of brandy! We watched Wall-e and an episode of the Simpson’s in English and got mildly toasted. When we disembarked we were not allowed down the stairs and onto the waiting bus until the bus carrying first class had left.

We couldn’t leave the Doha airport, which was small and boring, so I can’t say much about the place. Attempts to get a 1 or 2 day layover to see what it was like were foiled. I am surprised at how much English there was. Every sign is written in both Arabic and English and all announcements repeated with a proper British accent. Not as many people wearing pyjamas as I would have thought, really if you have the option why on earth would you wear western clothes.

The flight to Mumbai was epic. We were standing in line and a man came over and asked to see our tickets and told us we were being bumped to business class. Considering how coach was, we got really excited, expectations that were exceeded. Derek had thought the first bus had left because it was full, but no, we got our own bus. We had a wine list. The meal was four courses and they gave us a menu.

(the appetizer. We had tablecloths)

The seats had a control bar that adjusted each part separately and you could lie down. Large personal TVs with 120 movies and even more sitcoms. I had port with my cheesecake. Derek got some drink that involved drops of liqueur on a sugar cube being dropped into champagne. The worst part about it was the flight was that it was only three hours.

Turkey: Drink Post

The famous Turkish coffee! It is as good as its reputation has lent us to believe. Ben was so kind as to take us to a quality place (read: no tourists) down a small alley. It’s thick and rich, almost like hot chocolate. You don’t drink the last quarter of it, they grind the beans down into a paste and they don’t filter it, so the last bit is a bitter sludge. Apart from that, they do have some Starbucks and other chains, but if you want coffee outside of Istanbul it’s Nescafe.


Strangely, Turks don’t seems to be big coffee drinkers. They are tea-aholics. Everywhere you see people drinking tea, or a tea man carrying a hanging style tray held by three chains or wires of Turkish style glasses handing them out to store owners and workers. And they love their suger. We drank a lot of strong tea.


The national beer of Turkey is Efes. You go to a bar, they serve Efes. You go to buy beer at the local store, it's a fridge full of Efes, with the bottom shelf being Tuborg... the poor man's beer in Turkey. They found the beer they like and feel no need to explore further. It's a good thing it tastes good.


The wines we had were all fabulous. Turkey has a lot of wineries, I tried two reds and they were both soft sweet tannins, but not sugery, very smooth. One had a hint of port. We bought a few bottles for our kind hosts Pat and Ben, and one bottle for the lender of the life-saving coat, so we'll hear soon hopefully how those went. They might taste like we bought them from a convenience store. Because we did. If you ask someone in Turkey where to buy something inevitably they say why my cousin's place of course! Yes it's a laundromat, but he sells wine! Of course it is the best wine in the country, why would you ask such a thing? It's hard to find stores is what I'm saying.

Turkey: Food Post

One aspect we’re hoping to explore of each region is its food. Or at least the poor travellers’ version of it. Turkish food is alright. It’s like Greek food crossed with Indian food, kabobs and curries, but I found it to be more on the heavy side. I find it to depend on breads, meat, and cheese a bit much, like western foods.* However, I love a good Turkish breakfast. They slice up some tomatoes, cucumber and cheese as well as a small handful of olives, an egg (usually hard boiled, but we have also had it arrive sunny side up as well as mostly raw, which was gross) and single servings of butter, jam, and honey. There is of course the obligatory basket of bread (or bucket).



It appears a meal that would be easy to do well, but we’ve had some real stinkers. The raw egg is a low point, as well as squishy bad tasting olives, jam that was more of a soup, and sometimes they leave out one or several options.

The best meal we had the entire trip was at the hostel in Pummakale. The lady of the establishment cooks all the meals and it was a roasted eggplant curry thing and it was amazing. Even the other two travellers that were sucked in at the bus stop agreed it was the best meal they had had in Turkey.

We did some wandering around markets and food stalls and the price of produce in Istanbul is very cheap. And the pomegranates are astounding. They make the ones we get in Canada taste like grime. For 1.50 YTL (about a dollar twelve Canadian) we bought a pint of pomegranate seeds and they had such a ripe berry flavour that I regret not going back and buying the rest of them. Derek also bought a kilo of cheese, not realizing how much cheese that would be. It was salty string cheese. It lasted a long time.



As for street food, there are vendors littering the sidewalks of Istanbul. You can get simit (bread rolls, sort of like bagels), roasted chestnuts, some sort of tube shaped donut, roasted corn, a wet square pastry of some kind, pickles, and mussels. Mussels on the street. So tempting.

What could possibly go wrong?

*Derek disagrees with the term Western food, since technically Turkey is in both the east and west, and that the term North American food would be more appropriate. Personally I think he smells. So there.