It’s Sunday, the first of October 2006… We are 9 days in the Philippines now, where we stay in Cebu with the brother of Georgia. The first days were only for recovering. On the trip from Amsterdam, via Hong Kong, via Manilla, to Cebu, Georgia and I got sick from the airco’s from the airplanes and the jetlag. I believe it took 4 days to recover. During the day it’s like 36 degrees and the humidity is very high. You’ll sweat all day long and during night time the same thing… The couple past days we went out a lot in Cebu City and of course hit the nightlife. Didn’t see too much of the country, flora and fauna yet, until yesterday… We were in the office of my brother in law and suddenly the phone rings … it’s Panny, I could see him through the window sitting in an other office across, he said: “Huib, do you have your camera with you”…”No, why”…”The employees have found a snake and the’re trying to catch it, come out and see”... so we did. And there it was; a big fat brown snake of at least 1,30 meter. The locals said it’s a very poisonous snake, and he looked very aggressive too. We couldn’t scare it away, so the only option was to kill it. Otherwise it could kill an employee the next day or something. I’m sorry for the animal lovers among us, but the decision was final. Unbelievable how fast he was. He started attacking when the locals were trying to catch it with a broomstick. I’ll save the details for you, let’s say the snake didn’t survived it…
OK, finally we went home for a quick rest before we would go out. And just when you think you’ve had it all, I saw a tick chilling on my t-shirt while I was pulling it on! What the F…?! What a damn animals those things are, almost as worse as cockroaches! I flushed it through the toilet. I thought, let’s check the room… Unbelievable, I thought that I was in a new Alfred Hitchcock movie. In stead of “The Birds”…”The Ticks”! Without joking, I caught around 20 and flushed them all through the toilet, I alarmed Panny and the maids to check their rooms also. We went nuts from itching all over (all psychological imagination of course) and left in a hurry (escaped actually) and left a mission for the maids; disinfect the whole place!
After going out I did an extra check and caught another 4, and the maids caught 6 while we were out. And all of them only in our room!! If you think about it, we slept for about 7 days between +/- 35 ticks, but gladly we weren’t bitten. Georgia and I had therefore a good reason to hang up the mosquito net, and I assure you…it sleeps much better after an experience like that. Even though how many snakes and ticks you have to deal and process, I only dreamed of going surfing in Siargao since the day I got here. And that’s exactly what our next adventure is going to be. We are looking forward to it! Today, Sunday the 1st of October 2006 we have our last preparations and finally we’ll fly tomorrow morning at 09:30 hours to Siargao. I believe it’s an one hour flight and Andreas from Patrick’s on the Beach arranged an airport transfer pick up. I talked to him yesterday and he told me that the waves are fantastic!! Of course we just had a typhoon (Milenyo) running over the Philippines that terrorized Manila badly. Cebu stayed OK, although it rained a lot those days. The next typhoon is coming already, we understood from the locals. So we have to check the weather conditions on the internet for the next days. When we come back from Siargao (for the surfers among us, check: www.wannasurf.com) we shall post the first surfing pictures and stories and that will also be the beginning of Trip Turquoise…
See you soon!
The Travelflavours Crew…
