For the last few days I’ve been working on my application for the Glimpse Correspondent Program. I’ve gone through all of my old photos, picked out my favorites, and touched them up. I now have a total of thirty-three pictures. The problem is, I need to narrow my submission down to twenty. If you have a minute, it would be a great help if you could look through the photos and leave a comment telling me which photos you think I should keep, and which I should trash, and why.
Don’t worry about my feelings. Be ruthless. Telling me which ones you hate will help more than telling me which ones you like. But, of course, I hope you like them all.
Ranking travel blogs is a tricky business. There is no way of knowing exactly how much traffic a blog gets, and how long visitors stay for, unless you’re the administrator of the blog. There are several tools you can use to rank other peoples’ blogs, but none are completely accurate. However, whenever I read a travel blog toplist, search on Google, or compare blogs using any of the afore-mentioned ranking tools, one is almost always on top: Everything-Everywhere.com. Gary Arndt is, by my best estimate, the most popular solo travel blogger in the world.
After interviewing Gary for my column at TransitionsAbroad.com I asked him a few more questions about social networking, travel gear, and unique trips he’s taken. Here’s what he told me.
Matt Gibson: You’ve been traveling and blogging for about three years. Did you start Everything-Everywhere.com with the intention of making money? Or did that occur to you later?
Gary Arndt: Technically, I’m still not making money on my site. I have no doubt I could if I made it my priority, but my priority is building an audience. My goal isn’t to get rich, it is to be able to continue what I’m doing indefinitely. So long as I can cover my costs, I’m happy.
MG: What single change to your website had the biggest affect on it?
GA: There were two things: 1) introducing the photo of the day feature in November 2007, 2) investing in a professional custom WordPress theme in March 2009.
MG: You document the progress of your Everything-Everywhere.com in detail on your second blog, Garaphernalia. What are your current goals with regards to traffic?
GA: I try to set goals every year that are above and beyond what I think I would achieve via natural growth. I have no idea how I’m going to achieve them. In 2009 I set a goal of getting 100,000 visitors over a 30 day period. I was doing about 20,000 per month when I set that goal. I really had no idea how I’d increase my traffic 5x. I didn’t achieve that goal until December. For 2010 I set a goal of 250,000 visits in 30 days. I achieved that in February. I’m not resting on my laurels, however. I have goals for RSS/email subscribers and Facebook fans as well that are very important. Those will take much more effort.
MG: How do you plan to achieve those goals?
GA: I wish I could say I have some sort of master plan to achieve every goal, but I don’t. One goal I have is 2,000 daily visits from Google. That is really just a matter of creating more content and getting more links. It is possible I could write one killer article that ranks well and that could get the entire 2,000 visits per day. That probably isn’t going to happen. Realistically, I’ll get a few visits every day from a bunch of articles. Achieving that goal will just be grinding away at normal blogging activities. Another goal I have is getting 10,000 Facebook Fans. That has required me to experiment with several things including widget placement on my site and marketing on Facebook.
MG: Do you ever have guest bloggers post on your blog? How do you feel about guest bloggers?
GA: I have a few times in the past, but as of now I usually do not allow guest posts. My new rule is that if you want to do a guest post on my site, you have to meet me in person and share some adventure with me. My site is a travelogue and that is the only thing which really fits. Almost 100% of the requests people send me to guest blog are just companies that are just looking for links for SEO. I’m very, very fussy about keeping types of links off my site.
MG: About how much, on average, does it cost you to spend a month on the road? Does your blog cover your expenses?
GA: Costs are totally dependent on where you travel. Costs in SE Asia or Central American can be anywhere from 1/3 to 1/5 of your daily costs of being in Europe. My overall goal when I started my trip was to have a budget of $100 per day. That has gone down since I’m slowing my rate of travel and don’t have to buy as many plane tickets. My blog isn’t currently covering my expenses, but I am only now starting to monetize my site. My focus until now has been building an audience. I’m quite confident I’ll be able to cover my costs with my current audience once I focus more on monetization.
MG: What equipment do you carry for working on the road?
GA: I have a 15″ MacBook Pro, bluetooth mouse. Nikon D200 with three lenses, three USB external hard drives for backing up photos, and a Manfroto tripod. I have a bunch of wires and other small things as well.
MG: Does blogging make you want to read contemporary or even classical literature more or less? Is there a sense that living in the moment supersedes any study of traditional forms of writing?
GA: To be honest, I hardly ever read fiction. I read a lot, but it is almost always non-fiction. Usually books on history, economics or current events. That is just a personal thing with me.
MG: Is the old distinction between the “tourist” and the” traveler” completely moot at this point? Do you ever find yourself annoyed by the actions or behaviors of tourists?
GA: We’re all tourists. I have never, ever seen a local who thinks of me as a traveler. Traveler is a word that people use to describe themselves because they don’t want to be lumped in the same group as the guy wearing the Hawaiian shirt with dark socks and sandals. I totally understand the desire to separate yourself from people like that, but the fact is if you are visiting a place, you are a tourist. I have no problem calling myself a tourist. It doesn’t bug me and I hope I am not so pretentious that I need to come up with new terms to describe myself. If I did, I’d like to call myself a “voyager”, just so I can lord over people who call themselves “travelers”.
Have I found myself annoyed by other tourists, of course. Especially when it comes to taking photos. It is just one of those things like the weather you learn to deal with.
MG: Do you consider yourself an outsider wherever you go no matter how long you stay and participate in the life and cultures about which you write? Is this reflected in your blog posts?
MG: Social networking is a great tool for increasing blog traffic, but many people don’t know how to use it. Take me, for example. I have 40 followers on Twitter. You have 80,000. How on earth did you get so many?
GA: I made a decision back in January of 2009 to focus on Twitter as a marketing tool instead of just a communication tool. It was a good move. Since then I’ve soured a bit on Twitter. There are a LOT of garbage Twitter accounts. Accounts that were activated but never used, spammers, etc. I’d say that easily more than half of the accounts that follow me are garbage accounts like that. Most people with large numbers of Twitter followers have large numbers of garbage accounts following them. Twitter is great for communicating with other bloggers and industry people. It is horrible for reaching the general public. Facebook is proving to be a much better platform for that. There are 400,000,000 Facebook accounts, half of which are active every week. It is much harder to market on Facebook than Twitter, but that is just part of the challenge.
MG: Do you consider yourself an outsider wherever you go no matter how long you stay and participate in the life and cultures about which you write? Is this reflected in your blog posts?
GA: Of course I’m an outsider. I anywhere I go I come with my background and baggage. Thinking you can become a local somewhere is a fantasy. You can observe and participate in certain cultural things, but don’t ever for a moment think you are a local, because they sure as hell don’t consider you one. You could move to Japan, learn fluent Japanese, marry someone Japanese, but you will never really be Japanese. That’s just the way it is.
When I write, I write from the perspective of an American who has lived most of his life in the midwest…because that is what I am. I can’t be anything else. I try to learn and understand, and to some extent I can be influenced by the people I meet, but I am under no illusion that I am always an outsider. That is not a bad thing, either. Most of the places I travel to, many people have never left their own country. Meeting tourists is their best opportunity to learn about other people.
MG: We all have certain expectations when we visit places. It’s easy for a place not to live up to what we imagine it to be. What was your most disappointing trip?
GA: My most disappointing trips have been due to weather. I cut my trip to South Korea short because of cold weather and my entire time in Vanuatu it rained, causing me to cancel my trip to Tana Island.
MG: What trip was the nicest surprise?
GA: Probably Mulu National Park in Borneo, Malaysia. I hadn’t heard much about the park but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. I also was pleased by my experience in Oman. I wasn’t planning to go to Oman originally, but really enjoyed the experience.
MG: What’s the strangest thing that has happened to you on the road?
GA: Probably when I stumbled across the moon rock in the Solomon Islands.
MG: The growth of backpacking has resulted in an increase in rave-type parties in travel hubs and destinations worldwide. Along with this has come an increase in drug use among travelers. How do you feel about drugs and backpacker culture?
GA: I have never done any illicit drug in my life. I haven’t even smoked a cigarette. However, if people want to do that, it is their business. I’ll be honest, there is much about the backpacker culture I’m not that clued into. I’m much older than most backpackers so I don’t go to raves, I don’t go to nightclubs and I’m really not interested in partying. It doesn’t appeal to me. If I was younger I still wouldn’t be into that scene. If 20-somethings want to go and sow their wild oats, that’s fine, but it isn’t something I’m interested in.
MG: Does your constant travel cause problems for long-term romantic relationships? How do you deal with the issues that inevitably arise from your work?
GA: You are the first person who has ever asked me that question. Yes, it is very hard if not impossible to have any sort of relationship with people you meet while traveling. The only way I can see doing it is if you travel with someone you met before you began traveling. As much as people fantasize about traveling like I do, it is not a lifestyle for most people.
MG: Is there a particularly good book, article, or author that you read recently you’d like to recommend?
GA: What I read is usually associated with a place I’m visiting or about to visit. I’d suggest people read recent non-fictions books about the culture, history, and economy about the places they are planning to visit.
MG: What is the most popular post on Everything-Everywhere.com? Why do you think that is?
GA: I haven’t actually looked at the stats. It would probably be the one I wrote on the Solomon Islands moon rock. It was an oddball story that resonated with people. I’ve actually had people from NASA follow up with me and other people who have visited the Solomons have followed up on the status of the moon rock.
MG: What’s your favorite post on Everything-Everywhere.com? Why?
GA: Probably my posts on visiting Preah Vihear in Cambodia. I like it just because of everything I had to go through to get there.
MG: Which travel blogs, if any, do you read?
GA: I have about 50 travel blogs in my RSS reader. I have add sites to that whenever I find one that I like.
MG: What do you look for in a travel blog?
GA: The best ones are usually by people actually traveling or people with an interesting personality. Things like top 10 lists might get some traffic, but it isn’t going to really define someone’s personality. There is this mantra out there that, “content is king”. I don’t think that is true. Most people who read blogs can probably name the bloggers they follow more easily than they can list articles written by those bloggers. Content isn’t king, personalities are king. For the most part (and there are some exceptions to this) people follow bloggers, not blogs.
Rolf Potts
Rolf Potts is my favorite travel writer, not just because he’s a great writer, but because he managed to do what I had thought to be impossible: he legitimized backpacker-style travel writing in big-time mainstream travel magazines. It used to seem that in order to be published in a high-end (and therefore high-paying) travel publication you had to travel to exotic destinations, stay in a luxury hotels, eat in five-star restaurants, and take elaborate tours–things that I’ve never been able to afford to do. Since I couldn’t afford to go on the trips that these magazines published stories about, I thought I would never have a chance to write for them. But then came Rolf. He’s an unapologetic budget traveler. In his first book, Vagaboding, he communicated the richness of the backpacking experience and the philosophy behind it so well that the editors couldn’t deny his talent–or refuse his stories. Literature is full of incredible backpacking books–On The Road changed my life like it did everyone elses–but it took Rolf to bring that kind of travel writing to mainstream travel periodicals (check out two of his most popular stories here and here). Now, thanks to Rolf, and his writing (the best of which can be found in his second book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There) backpacking travel writers like me can travel the way we want to and still feel justified submitting our stories to magazines that pay more than the price backpack that we carry.
After finishing an interview with Rolf for TransitionsAbroad.com (you can read that interview here), I asked him a few more questions–things I was personally curious about–for my blog. Here are his responses.
Matt Gibson: You’ve said that, after all of your globetrotting, you’re a sucker for a good ‘ol fashioned American road trip. What’s your best road trippin’ memory? What road trip would you like to take next?
Rolf Potts: My best road-trip memory was the 8-month North American journey I took in 1994. In that instance, it was a case of road-trip as lifestyle, since I was basically living out of a van and driving the States for upwards of a year. I was particularly enamored of driving through the America West, which is one of the world’s most classic road-trip landscapes. I don’t have my next road-trip planned just yet, but I’d love to revisit the American West for a couple of months and just camp and hike (and drive) my way through the region.
MG: You’ve been called the “Jack Kerouac for the Internet age”. Although the comparison has merit with regards to your respective philosophies about travel, it seems to me that Jack may have been a tad bit more eccentric than you are. What do you think about this comparison?
RP: I think the comparison to Kerouac was more metaphorical than practical or literal. Kerouac introduced a generation of Americans to the joys of open-ended travel, and I’m trying to do the same. Past that, it’s difficult to make applied comparisons, because travel — and society in general — has changed a lot in 50 years. Biographically and philosophically I don’t always follow in Kerouac’s footsteps, but I share his belief that travel anywhere carries this amazing, potentially life-changing hum of possibility: that there is so much to be gained by just mustering up the courage and hitting the road.
MG: The growth of backpacking has resulted in an increase in rave-type parties in travel hubs and destinations worldwide. Along with this has come an increase in drug use among travelers. How do you feel about drugs and backpacker culture?
RP: I would disagree that we’ve seen a rise in drug use among travelers, since backpackers have always hit the road in search of more permissive attitudes toward things like drugs. This includes the Asian “Hippie Trail” of the 1960s and 1970s, of course, but you saw similar motivations in travel during the Victorian Era and before. So whatever kind of drug use you see in backpacker hubs these days is nothing new.
That said, I like to discourage drug use among vagabonders — not only because it is often illegal and hence risky, but also because there are more interesting things to do on the road. To my mind, drugs are something you do at home when you’re bored of workaday life, whereas on the road you’re constantly encountering these new and amazing experiences simply by going outside and walking around. In this way, sinking time into backpacker drug scenes is the equivalent of watching TV when you’re on the road: It’s a passive and contained experience that’s not really connected to the more life-affecting experiences that travel offers. I have no moral issue with casual drug use; I just think that an unmediated experience of reality has more to offer on the road.
MG: Hemingway wrote standing up. Kerouac wrote like Usain Bolt runs. Vonnegut wouldn’t start a new sentence until he was sure the one preceding it was perfect. How do you write?
RP: I’m more like Vonnegut, and in fact I often quote his observation from Timequake about “swoopers” and “bashers”:
“Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgeldy-piggeldy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done, they’re done.”
Like Vonnegut, I go one sentence at a time, and when I’m done I’m done.
On Febrary 27, 2010 a Chinese New Year fireworks celebration in the Guangdong province went awry and killed 19 villagers.
On February 28th, 2010 I was in Yenshuei Township in southern Taiwan facing a several hives containing tens of thousands of fireworks set to fire into the hundreds of people that were crowded around it–on purpose.
If one thing can be said for Chinese people, it’s that they love fireworks.
I climbed atop a concrete wall about 25 meters away to get a better view. I knew that I would be more exposed than if I were in the crowd on the street, but this was a much better place from which to photograph and record the eruption of fire. The only barrier between me and the the enormous hives of firworks, which combined were about the size of a semi-trailer cut in half, was a telephone pole. I heard a crackling and fireworks began to shoot up into the air. Then there were several ear-popping booms, like cannons going off, and with each boom a pair of large yellow fireworks rocketed into the night sky like anti-aircraft shells. Then, the noise faded away. There was a short silence, and the crowd began bouncing. Everyone was hopping from one foot to the other. There was a loud screech and fireworks began firing in all directions–including into the crowd. I pushed my body against the telephone pole my iPhone in one hand recording the spectacle on video, my Nikon D80 in the other snapping pictures as fast as possible. I could feel the fireworks glancing off of my hands and arms. This is the video that I shot.
The Yenshuei Fireworks Festival, also known as the Beehive Fireworks Festival, is an annual celebration commemorating the end of a 17th century cholera plague. During the celebration, which takes place on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar year in the Yenshuei township, sedans carrying Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war, are paraded through the streets from temple to temple where enormous hives, which contain up to 60,000 fireworks each, are set off, shooting fireworks rapidly in all directions. Festival goers clad in heavy clothing and full-face motorcycle helmets crowd around the hives to stand in the barrage of firworks. When the hives are ignited everyone jumps up and down to prevent fireworks from becoming lodged in their clothes and burning through them. Despite the precautions, people are hurt every year. The worst injuries occur when a firework enters a reveler’s helmet from below and explodes inside. Many people wrap a towel around their neck to cover the gap between the helmet and their neck, but many still do not.
Probably the most common problem, though, is the one from which several of my friends suffered. They began vomiting after inhaling too much of the acrid smoke given off by the firecrackers.
The Yensuei Fireworks Festival is Taiwan’s answer to the running of the bulls. It’s very popular in Taiwan and getting more popular every year. To bring in more tourist dollars officials have been making the festival bigger and bigger. The strategy has paid off. An estimated 350,000 people attended last year, a huge increase over an estimated 50,000 just a few years ago, and a huge tourism boost for a township with a population of just 28,000.
A friend once told me a story about how the festival was conceived. I can’t guarantee its veracity, but it’s an interesting story nevertheless. Sometime in the 17th century Yenshuei was stricken by a cholera epidemic that lasted 20 years. That part of the story is widely accepted to be true. Desperate and frustrated, the mayor of the town enlisted the help of a spirit medium. The medium told the mayor that ghosts inhabiting the city were responsible for the epidemic (ghosts causing disease and misfortune is common in Chinese folklore). The medium suggested that the city invoke the help of Guan Yu, the war god, and set off massive numbers of fireworks to scare the troublesome spirits out of town (using firecrackers to scare ghosts is also common practice). The plan worked, and now the Yenshuei township celebrates every year by shooting millions of fireworks and deliberately at spectators. I’m don’t quite understand the logical connection between scaring ghosts and shooting fireworks into crowds of people, but there are many facets of Chinese culture that confuse me even more. Take for example pickled chicken feet.
This year was my third visit to the festival, and I noticed some differences from years previous. First, I noticed many men in the streets who would wait until several revelers in protective gear were standing nearby. Then the men would hold one end of a string of fireworks several meters long, light the other end, and then run down the street towards the crowd dragging the exploding string behind them. When they neared the crowd they would start swinging the increasingly short exploding string around over their head.
I saw one man finish this display by bolting into a nearby doorway with the last of the firecrackers, scaring the bejeezuz out of everyone in the house. He came out bellowing laughter, his face bright red.
The second new display I noticed was mainly performed by teenagers. They would wrap themselves up in strings of fireworks and then set them off. Below is a video of a young guy I met lighting himself up. Please be patient watching the video. He had to abort his first two attempts and move out of the street when firetrucks with their sirens on came roaring by. The third time, though, was a charm.
Here is a picture of two friends wrapped in fireworks, just before they light themselves up, and as the fireworks exploded.
Although the Yenshuei Fireworks Festival is still relatively unknown, it’s destined to become a famous cultural attraction. It is, as far as I know, the only festival of its kind in the world. It is completely unique. It’s loud, destructive, wasteful, and dangerous. It’s Taiwan’s running of the bulls and it deserves the same international attention, and I hope to make sure that it receives it. I hope to popularize it in my first novel about expatriates in Taiwan the same way Hemingway brought attention to the running of the bulls in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.
If you like this article, be sure to check out my Yenshuei Fireworks Festival 2010 Photo Gallery.
Photograph courtesy of fishtail@taipei on Flickr
When I woke up around nine that Sunday morning my cell phone showed that I had 33 missed calls. It rang again in my hand. It was the head teacher from the school I worked at. “We’re at the hospital.” She told me. “Jana was hit by a bus.” On the way to the hospital I zipped and dodged through the heavy Sunday traffic on my motorcycle. The scents of sewage, fried food, and exhaust alternately wafted into my helmet. Westerners find driving in Taiwan, like in most Asian countries, to be lawless and chaotic. Cars pull slowly out in front of you without looking. Taxicabs whip by just inches from your shoulder. People drive without helmets, run red lights, and do u-turns on crowded thoroughfares as a matter of course. Driving in Taiwan, however, is not lawless; the laws are just different. There are two unspoken rules of the road: first, you’re responsible for not hitting the vehicles in front of you no matter what they do. Second, you can drive in front of anyone as long as you can force him to stop and let you by; driving in Taiwan is basically a game of chicken. The larger your vehicle is, the greater your advantage in the game.
Had Jana, driving her scooter, played chicken with a bus?
* * *
Taiwan is a sub-tropical island that straddles the tropic of Cancer. When Spanish explorers first visited Taiwan they named it Isla Formosa, the Beautiful Island. That doesn’t begin to describe it. The mountains are steep and foreboding and crisscrossed with smooth narrow gorges carved out by rivers. The mostly uninhabited East coast is a visual splendor where the mountains plunge into the Pacific Ocean, the last land until Mexico. The beaches in the West are fine white or beige sand and often flanked by coral. Most of the country, however, is covered with dense jungle.
Western lore, from Heart of Darkness to Lost, has portrayed the jungle as a mystical force, and the cultures around them as haunted and bloodthirsty. It’s worth noting that several Taiwanese aboriginal tribes were fearsome tattoo covered headhunters. I’ve even heard rumors of tombs of skulls still hidden in the jungle, their location known only to a few elderly aboriginals.
Most Taiwanese people now, though, are of Chinese descent and adhere to a unique polytheistic mixture of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and local superstition. Colorful temples can be found on most city blocks and are dedicated to one of the many Confucian gods. Almost everybody in Taiwan believes in ghosts. Taiwanese people regularly burn ghost money and set out offerings marked by incense to provide for the ghosts of their dead ancestors in the afterlife. A religious medium called Ji Tom in Chinese (or, more commonly, Tang Ki in the Taiwanese dialect) will enter a trance during a religious procession, become possessed by a god, and flagellate himself with long knives and maces until he’s dripping with blood. There are also higher-level mediums that don’t flagellate themselves. They channel gods and ghosts so that the living may speak with them. Most of the older generation believes strongly in this system and well-known mediums are paid exorbitant sums for their services.
* * *
I’ve never been religious. The opposite in fact; I have a degree in sociology. One event in Taiwan, however, made me question my skepticism. My girlfriend, Christine, had broken her toe very badly in a scooter accident. Her foot was swollen to nearly twice its normal size. We were walking (she on crutches) past a liquor store when the owner called us in. He told me in Chinese that he had seen a ghost following Christine. He wanted to help her. He didn’t want any money. He was a traditional doctor and was concerned about the ghost.
He took us to the back of his shop. There the walls there were lined with clear jars of dried herbs and roots. The doctor motioned for Christine to sit down on a stool. He waved his arms in the air making various Tai Chi-like motions for several minutes and then, suddenly, grabbed the back of Christine’s head with one hand, and pushed his other palm forcefully into her forehead letting out a sharp yell. He repeated this action several times.
Afterwards we thanked him. He told me that Christine needed to come back two more times before the end of ghost month (the month of the year when the fabric dividing our world and the ghosts’ is the most permeable) to complete the treatment. He also told me that the swelling in her foot would go down. We drove home joking about the doctor’s antics. However, within two hours Christine’s foot returned to it’s normal size. The swelling subsided so quickly that her skin was left loose and wrinkled like an oversized sock.
* * *
Jana died.
Jana had only worked at my school for about six months, yet my employer, a Taiwanese man named Daniel, and his niece Sarah who supervised the teachers, took responsibility for her. Daniel had Jana’s parents sign a form authorizing him to make legal decisions in Taiwan regarding the body. He oversaw her body’s removal from the hospital and subsequent storage. When he found out that Jana’s parents couldn’t afford to ship her body back to Eastern Canada for the funeral, rather than have it cremated, Daniel paid the very substantial cost of a refrigerated medical flight halfway around the world so that Jana’s parents could see their daughter one last time.
Taiwanese people believe very strongly in the sanctity of family.
Two weeks later Sarah confided in me. She’d been having strange dreams in which Jana had appeared. She thought that Jana’s ghost was lost in limbo, confused and unable find her way to the next world. I had known Jana much better than she. Sarah wanted to know, did I think this was possible?
Jana was often indecisive, I told her. Frightened and alone Jana could very possibly have gotten lost.
Sarah visited a medium. The medium helped Sarah to speak to Jana’s ghost. She told Jana’s ghost to follow her and vowed to visit Jana’s home in Nova Scotia to return her to her final resting place.
That was four years ago. Sarah hasn’t visited Canada yet because she hasn’t yet been able to afford the trip, but she hasn’t forgotten her promise. Sarah is going to be married this year. She and her husband will honeymoon in Ireland. But before they arrive in Ireland they’re going to fly 2,500 miles out of their way so that Sarah can shepherd Jana home.
This story is not a strange one. Every expatriate who has lived in Taiwan tells stories about the extreme kindness of the Taiwanese people. Although the Beautiful Island may be inhabited by ghosts, I’ve never been to a country where the national character was nearer to that of an angel.
To escape the suffocating traffic and staccato of firecrackers that besiege Taiwan every Chinese New Year, several friends and I booked tickets on a budget carrier, Spirit of Manila, to the city of Coron on Busuanga Island in the Philippines for five days of snorkeling, island hopping, and rum drinking. The tickets were very cheap, about USD$200 round-trip. In the end the trip only cost me about $USD650, including a shopping trip in Manila on the way home. For further travel information and great accommodation deals visit Manila hotels.
It’s worth noting that Busuanga wasn’t the only highlight of the trip. During a layover in Manila on the first night I was fortunate enough to referee a midget boxing match in a local strip bar.
Day 1
We arrived and found our room, a stick and thatched grass cottage on stilts over the water with a bar and sunset view. Five of us split it for about USD$30 per night. Our arrival celebration that night resulted in several scrapes and bruises from wrestling, one very large angry Swede with a broken cell phone, and several empty bottles of Tanduay (the cheap local rum).
The first supper
The walkway to our hotel
The view from our room
Our living room and bar
Day 2
We went island hopping for the day on a traditional banca boat, a slender vessel with bamboo pontoons. The seas and islands around Busuanga contain some of the finest dive sites in the world, partially because of numerous wrecks from a Japanese supply fleet sunk during WWII. There are 12 diveable wrecks within a day’s boat ride from Busuanga in addition to the famous Barracuda Lake and Cathedral Cave dive sites. On Day 2 we snorkeled the Skeleton Wreck which was just 5m deep—shallow enough for me to dive down and swim through it.
A banca boat
Boat boy surveying the sea
My dream house
Day 3
Most of us took the day off. I worked on an article about blogging for TransitionsAbroad.com. That evening we planned a two-day island-hopping trip we would take with a local guide.
Downtown Coron
A tuk tuk in downtown Coron
A Filipino boy giving me a present
Day 4
We woke up to a breakfast of fruit shakes, Tanduay, and Extra Joss (a Philipino energy booster illegal in most Western countries) and found our way to the docks to hop on our banca boat where we started drinking the beer because, well, drinking straight rum all day long just plain excessive, and also a mild safety hazard when you’re planning to swim.
All aboard
bottoms up
The rum ninja in repose
Day 4 (cont’d)
The first site we snorkeled was a reef around a jagged limestone rock rising about 20m out of the narrows between islands. The reef was lush and colorful and swarming with fish. The current, however, was very strong and many of us returned to the boat after just 20 or 30 minutes.
Afterwards we moved on to Cayangan Lake on Coron Island. The cove where we docked was spectacular (pictures below). A short steep hike over a small pass lead us to the freshwater lake where we spent the afternoon swimming and taking goofy pictures.
The dock on Coron Island
The second stop
Myself, Christine, Sarah, and an enormous yellow hat
Filipino cave dwellers can be dangerous, but these two were very friendly and appeared to be intoxicated
Tim and Lauren by Cayuga Lake
Day 4 (cont’d)
That evening we headed for a small private beach where would camp. As we approached the beach we were overtaken by another banca boat with foreigners on it. It landed on the beach a few minutes ahead of us. We were upset that these tourists had spoiled our private paradise; we decided that the most appropriate course of action would be to consume large quantities of rum, talk loudly, and wrestle each other in the sand until the invaders either joined us or fled in fear.
As the banca pulled up to the shore I heard somebody shout, “Matt”. On the beach I saw Rose, a friend from Tainan. All of the foreigners on the beach were our friends, English teachers, from the city where we lived in Taiwan.
That night we drank rum on the beach and talked by candlelight under a shimmering dome of stars. The ocean glittered with phosphorescence. When we swam we were adrift in a symphony of light.
Kayak boy
A dog on the beach
Postcard sunset
Day 5
Day 5 was quiet. We visited the famous Barracuda Lake, where the limestone rock formations flicker up from the earth in sharp spiny formations. The rocks are impossible to walk on without shoes and look enormous cathedrals of stone flames. Underwater the walls of the lake look like vast intricate underwater cities.
That evening we ate our last supper in Coron, and the next morning flew home.
The last supper
The children that lived along the pathway to our hotel
Postcard Sunset
The letter from the editor that I wrote for Bunk Magazine issue 5, an art and photography magazine that I made for a business in Tainan, Taiwan.
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