Don't Go Down to the Swamps Today...

...because the Nipa Palm flower may get you.

The nipa flower's the nearest thing to a space monster that I've ever seen. They look as if they're about to come bursting and bubbling out like distinctly unfriendly extra-terrestrials. Just like Day of the Triffids. And they're big.

The flower usually grows more than a metre high, and in the fetid darkness of the brackish swamps that nipa palms inhabit, they stand out like, well, aliens.

Later, a seed head will grow, with about 40 large seeds, each enclosed in a strong husk, the whole about the size of a basketball. The seeds themselves are often called 'vegetable ivory' and are reputed to be carved by native tribesmen somewhere or other.

I tried carving them myself, but they didn't live up to their advance billing.

The nipa palm (Nypa frutescens) itself is quite innocuous, as are the flowers, of course.

The leaves are used as roofing material , widely available as roughly 4ft x 15" 'tiles', at about 8ç each. They don't last a lifetime, but they are waterproof, and a lot cooler than the corrugated iron sheets that are nowadays replacing them.

They don't need to be 'farmed' as such, but nipa stands do have owners, so be careful to ask if you want a nipa seed head as a souvenir.

The flowers, when they have grown seed heads, are tapped, like coconut flowers, for their sweet sap, which is then distilled to make pa-oroi, a strong-tasting liquor which, thankfully, is very cheap. (It's the local hooch that I mention in my blog title; I usually buy it by the 5-gallon jerry can).

I keep my hooch in a plastic water dispenser with a tap. It is half-filled with coconut-shell charcoal, that filters out the fairly awful natural taste of the pa-oroi.

My original intention was to make fruit-flavoured liquors of the stuff, by macerating some of the local fruits in it, but each time I tried that, I took to tasting it frequently, and none of my efforts ever matured, as they should have done, for more than a month.

Cheers!

PS 1 I just found I did this same story about a year ago at: http://smallislandnotes.blogspot.com/2007/10/pa-oroi.html Shows how forgetful pa-oroi makes you.

PS 2 A wonderful photo-essay on the making of pa oroi, or laksoy, as the Butuanons call it (about 3 hours drive from Surigao City is at EatingAsia:
http://eatingasia.typepad.com/eatingasia/2008/04/sago-isnt-the-o.html

King of the Gossip

A few weeks ago, I received a strange e-mail:
------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 04:50:35 -0800 (PST)
From: "roy" (bernhard@yahoo.com) Add to Address Book
To: richardparker01@yahoo.com
Subject: Notes From a Small Island : GL's Public Park Killed
roy has sent you a link to a blog:

Richard Parker the king of the gossip in siargao island

Blog: Notes From a Small Island
Post: GL's Public Park Killed
-------------------------------------------------
Which I thought was a compliment.

If, after all, I'm gossiping about island life, what's better than to be King of it?

Well, bernhard@yahoo.com doesn't exist as an email address. "Roy" is a Belgian resident of the town, who feels much as I do about a certain Andreas.
So, it was a bit of clever computer hackery, used very stupidly.
Then, this week, I was out swimming in the sea just opposite my back garden (which I have to reach by a 200 yard detour because Andreas has closed off my right of way to the sea) and I heard and saw his young son, the eponymous Patrick, standing on the high tide mark, shouting:
"Richard - Hari nan Chismis" - "Richard - The King of Gossip!"
I ignored him completely, and that certainly riled his mother, who used to be such a nice young lady.

So now I know where my mysterious emails come from.

Rain

The rainy season has begun.

A few years ago, I claimed that Siargao was the wettest place in Asia, based on a highly unscientific experiment.

Last night we had a shower, one of many over the past few days, so, this time, I set up a rigourously-controlled scientific measuring device, at about 9:45pm.
- A bucket, placed in the middle of the lawn.

This morning, the bucket was nearly full, so I measured the depth of water in it - 25cm.

Then I did various abstruse calculations to correct for the sectional conical shape of the bucket, but the difference was minimal.

That's right; about 10 inches of rain - overnight

Added - 14/12/07 - a bit later:

1 inch rain = 6.25 inches snow

This is an average value though. Colder areas will have a lower number while warmer areas will have a higher number.
http://forum.onlineconversion.com/showthread.php?t=225

But, earlier on, in the same discussion, someone wrote that his grandfather reckoned 10 inches of snow for every inch of rain.

Either way, you will get our equivalent:-
10" * 6.25" = 5 feet 2 inches of snow
or 10" * 10" = 8.3 feet of snow

Thank God it doesn't snow here. Five feet of the damned stuff would entirely cover Shedney, my 'companion'.

------------------------------
W Somerset Maugham wrote a classical story Rain
which starts out:
"It was nearly bed-time and when they awoke next morning land would be in sight. Dr. Macphail lit his pipe and...."

But even before that, Rudyard Kipling wrote: Mandalay:
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!

I really don't think, now, that Kipling ever went to Mandalay, in the very middle of the country, or to the old Moulmein Pagoda, about 400 miles away. China was near, but never 'crost the Bay. It was, and still is, due north where the dawn is unlikely to come up, let alone noisily.

But the bit that really got me (although "There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm-trees..." does ring certain sentimental bells) was:

I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and --
Law! wot do they understand?

I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

And that got me into this mess, where I came to avoid the world-famous English climate .

Cebu Ethnic Jewellery Market

If you ever decide to go hippy, and start selling ethnic jewellery to tourist punters in some exotic holiday location, as I did, for five long years, then Cebu's little 'bead street' is the place.

It's a cul-de-sac, along JC Briones St, near the port, beside the San Miguel warehouse, the Bodega San Miguel. The twenty or so stalls are lined up along the left hand side. On the right, the traders assemble to play tongit, or dama, or just to drink and chat. Right at the end is a little carinderia, run by the delicious Daisy, with good food, and sometimes an enjoyable karaoke session.

And it's incredibly good value. Some items are remainders of production lines, others are rejects, some are special productions, and others are, frankly, stolen property.

My two favourite stalls are right at the end. Whenever I'm in town, I go and meet Ernesto, and have a couple of beers and a chat. He also sells the very best cheap beads, and good lines in dream-catchers and mother-of-pearl lockets.

Thalia, next door, has an amazing selection of wooden beads (and others, of all kinds of materials), and she's a lovely lady. (I'm jealous of her boyfriend, pictured here).

Elsewhere, you can find specialist stalls dealing with shell necklaces, coral (red and blue), pearls, boars' tusks, sharks' teeth, strange minerals, and so on. Halfway down, visit Martha and Miguel; they teamed up together a couple of years ago, and do very well indeed; a Filipina-Hispano (Catalan, actually) dream team.

You might take a bit of time to understand the trade jargon; measurements sometimes in millimetres, other times in inches (typical of the Philippines, with its mixed-up Americo-Spanish culture imposition), and a whole host of descriptions of woods, bead types and sizes, etc.

Expensive Birds

I always knew there was one small tiny problem involved with keeping a pretty woman; decoration, maintenance and upkeep costs.
The town Fiesta is due on Friday, so there is a travelling fair of ukay-ukay stalls set up on the foreshore next to my neighbouring village of squatting fishermen, Mabua, between me and the creek. Ukay-ukay is basically second-hand clothes (yes - you know the ones you dutifully collect for the poor of the world? Well, they get bought up on arrival by Chinese traders, and farmed out to the local equivalent of Gypsies, who travel from town to town at fiesta time. They sell sheeting by the kilo, T shirts for 50p ($1),shorts for 100p, and so on.
On Monday night, I took Shedney out for our usual pub-crawl from Lalay's at the end of the Boulevard, to Nine Bar just up the road from me.
Only then did I notice that the short-short-shorts she was wearing had a broken zip, so when the tails of her shirt opened, everyone could see her her sweet little cotton-clad pussy.
So I blew up; just quietly exploded, thrust a 500p ($5) note into her hand and growled that she'd better get to the bulanon (ukay-ukay market) first thing in the morning, and get herself some new (and longer) shorts.

So what did the little minx do? She went straight up to Larry's Reef Break Shop (good website), where he has an enticing show of beachwear, and bought herself a grand new ensemble, plus a T-shirt and pair of short-short-shorts. The short-short-shorts have a hand-embroidered motto: "I AM A SIARGAO ISLAND SURF BITCH", and she blew the whole goddam' $5!

But she does look good in it, I must say.

And so thought Harry the Canadian Real Estate Millionaire, as he gazed, tongue lolling out, at that little area just below her collar bone.