Off to the Philippines - any advice please?

[Supay]

I am off to the Philippines soon for a nearly 3 week holiday.  I did consider a quick travel scope purchase but with a 13 month old baby and her associated stuff in tow I decided that might be a bit much to lug over there.  Plus my wife might have killed me if I bought it!  I have opted instead for a considerably more portable and lightweight pair of new 10x50 binoculars as my old pair died horribly last year.  Might not be as effective, but it will be fantastic to see a different sky as I will be closer to the equator than I have ever been before.

We are staying with family in Manila and I am expecting a hideously light polluted mess, though we are to the east of Manila in Pasig City with some nature reserves and rural areas past there so I am hoping for some observing possibility.  We will also be spending a short break on the island of Coron, which looks as if it will be significantly darker and good to observe from.

I have been looking online to see what information there is for observing in the Philippines and have emailed a couple of local groups, but it has been a struggle to find much information, with what little there is being extremely out of date.  I have seen an events listing for a National Astronomy Week during 14-22 February and we will be there then, but I cannot find much else out about what is going on.

Does anyone have any experience with observing in the Philippines please?  Anywhere near Manila I can go to if the family home is too light polluted?  Any recommendations about particular southern objects to observe with my binoculars?  Any local contacts or current groups I can speak with?  Any events I can go to, particularly public observing so I can snag a go on a scope?  Any advice at all really!

[kalasinman]

Take Stellarium or similar with, and reset location to Philippines??

[Supay]

Take Stellarium or similar with, and reset location to Philippines??

Already have my smartphone loaded with various apps and have that done.

[kirkster501]

Some nice parts to the Phillippines but also grinding poverty, especially around Manilla and Metro Manilla (financial district).  I was there 10 years ago for about three months doing some contract work.  Do not stop your car for kids begging at junctions.  You'll get donw over by their "minders".  Do not, at all costs eat street food or Ice Cream that is clearly not from a sealed carton.  That's the way to dysentry like I had and ended up in a Philippine Hospital.

Try to get to Corregidor Island off the Batan peninsular if you can to see where Douglas MacCarthur had his last stand against the Japanese in WW2 and try to go to the huge cross on the hill.

[Supay]

Some nice parts to the Phillippines but also grinding poverty, especially around Manilla and Metro Manilla (financial district).  I was there 10 years ago for about three months doing some contract work.  Do not stop your car for kids begging at junctions.  You'll get donw over by their "minders".  Do not, at all costs eat street food or Ice Cream that is clearly not from a sealed carton.  That's the way to dysentry like I had and ended up in a Philippine Hospital.

Try to get to Corregidor Island off the Batan peninsular if you can to see where Douglas MacCarthur had his last stand against the Japanese in WW2 and try to go to the huge cross on the hill.

The family have given me dire warnings that gangs of street kids will likely hound me everywhere.  I'm open to eating lots of different food, but I'm equally paranoid about stuff like dodgy street vendors, so I hope I don't suffer dysentry, sounds like you had an awful experience!

I am going to go out to Corregidor Island, it's one of the highlights I have listed on my things to do list.  Amazingly, my wife, her mother and most of their family had no idea what I was talking about when I was going on about various sights such as Corregidor Island or sites related to the Rizal revolution.  They knew they were there, they just didn't really know what they were or their significance.  Looks like local history will be coming from my own research!

I have been contacted by the Philippine Astronomical Society who confirm the National Astronomy Week and that there are events on, so I am hoping to meet up with them and make use of their equipment.  Can't wait!

[kirkster501]

The family have given me dire warnings that gangs of street kids will likely hound me everywhere.  I'm open to eating lots of different food, but I'm equally paranoid about stuff like dodgy street vendors, so I hope I don't suffer dysentry, sounds like you had an awful experience!

I am going to go out to Corregidor Island, it's one of the highlights I have listed on my things to do list.  Amazingly, my wife, her mother and most of their family had no idea what I was talking about when I was going on about various sights such as Corregidor Island or sites related to the Rizal revolution.  They knew they were there, they just didn't really know what they were or their significance.  Looks like local history will be coming from my own research!

I have been contacted by the Philippine Astronomical Society who confirm the National Astronomy Week and that there are events on, so I am hoping to meet up with them and make use of their equipment.  Can't wait!

Good have fun mate.  Head to the Batan Cross if you can as well. 

[Carina Lass]

God, I hope you are careful.

I was in Subic Bay in the 70s and it was like an apocolypse movie.

[hobsey]

The Philippines can't be that bad nowadays.

My dad lived there for a bit a couple of years ago.

I'm off to see him in Macau for a couple of weeks next year and will be going over to the Philippines for a weekend while over there.

Don't think my dad would take me if it was terrible.

Look forward to hearing back from your visit.

[Supay]

I certainly will, hobsey.  We'll be with family, so shouldn't have too many problems anyway.  We've had a slight change of plan though, we're going to Boracay instead of Coron now.  It's a much small island and seems to have a lt of bars and clubs, but I hope I'll get some decent skies out there.  I'll give an update when we get back, only a few days now.  Just need to get through an 18.5 hour trip across with a 13 month old child!

[Supay]

I'm back!  My observing intentions didn't work out too well though.  I came down sick even before I got there and spent a delightful 18 hour flight having dizziness and nausea.  The first couple of days consisted of me unable to eat and either throwing up or sitting in the loo for long periods.  Think it may have been the malaria medication though as I had been taking it since the day before the flight and then wasn't able to take it after the D+V started and the symptoms went within about 24 hours after the last tablet.

The first two nights there were clear and pretty good seeing for such a humid country.  Unfortunately I was out of action!  Following this, our family contacted the Philippine Astronomical Society and arranged for us to join an observing night at their observatory, but it was cancelled due to constant cloud overnight for a few days.  We checked a few times but seems the cloud was just too bad.  Our family's home has a top floor roof terrace and I kepy popping up but it was pretty awful conditions, almost entirely cloud covered all of the time overnight.

About a week into the trip we flew out to the island of Boracay, off Panay in the Visayas, which is about 11 degrees N, compared to 14 N in Manila.  Lots of resorts, bars and lights, especially as we were staying on the main strip on the White Beach.  However, our hotel was one of the last few on the beach at the northern end and was relatively peaceful with slightly darker conditions.  I did manage to successfully do some observations from here but due to the timings most of the southern objects I really wanted to see did not rise until the early hours of the morning, around 0300 and onwards.  I set my alarm and got up multiple nights but guess what........cloud!  And frustratingly, each time the cloud was only covering exactly over the southern view region.  Very annoying!

We returned to Manila but the issues with heavy cloud overnight continued.  Considering it is the dry season we also saw quite a lot of rain in the last week.  It was often clear during the day but the humidity and cloud cover kept building overnight.  Manila's not the best seeing conditions anyway due to the huge amount of light pollution there, but I would have been happy for any kind of clear sky!

Next time we go (in about two years), there are plans to visit some family on the island of Mindoro, which is one of the least developed islands in the archipelago and should have some significantly better dark sky conditions.  I may see if I can convince my wife that a travel scope is a great investment, for use at home for our growing children of course, or at least a larger pair of binoculars and a tripod.  What I did see on Boracay was excellent, it was just unfortunately more of the stuff I can usually see from the UK, though higher in the sky and looking a bit better than I am used to.

As to the trip itself, it was great.  I've mainly travelled in Europe and the US till now, also including areas such as Cyprus and Turkey.  I've seen quite a range of places across there, as I've covered most of the European area itself from France and Spain in the west to the southeastern Balkans, backpacking through Bosnia and surrounding countries.

But the Philippines was quite a different experience.  Manila was massively overcrowded, dirty, polluted, noisy and had the most bizarre mix of rich/poor divide I have ever seen.  Financial and shopping districts that are clean, planned out and have towering buildings with quality and prices that would compete with most major European capital cities.  Then right next door whole areas full of shacks and thrown together concrete buildings in haphazard layouts.  Even in the residential areas the mix was bizarre.  Walled/fenced gated suburb communities classed as "villages" with security checkpoints at their entrances staffed either by residents themselves or private security firms.  These could be the poorest shack dominated areas up to residences that would outclass some of the most expensive housing here in the UK, almost all of them were setup in this way, with the expensive ones just better fenced and guarded.  These areas could be right next to each other and you could drive from one to the other in minutes, going from the poorest slum to the most exclusive private community.  And even in each area the mix got stranger.  Areas of hastily built shacks, then in the middle of them would be some random massive, well built house with gates and walls surrounding it and flashy cars in the driveway.  At first I thought the shacks just appeared around the home, but we saw many examples of areas already packed with shacks, then someone building an enormous private residence of the same scale and quality in the middle of them.  Maybe they owned the land around and wanted to stay close to it, maybe they had grown up there and had come into money somehow but didn't want to leave the community, I don't know, but it was odd.

Going outside Manila, the country is lush and green.  Fields of rice, pineapples, mangos, cocunuts all around.  Flat plains for miles with hills and mountains rising out suddenly, mostly volcanic.  Such a beautiful place and so different to the capital though the same poverty divide is evident everywhere.  Express toll roads connect everything, so costs to move around on top of the fuel prices.  We visited Subic Bay, which is now a Freeport Zone with tax exempt status, so it has become a playground for the rich and corporations.  Big residences, golf courses, casinos, hotels and more all over the place.  Good beaches and lots of diving.  Evidence of the old US naval base is everywhere though, with abandoned military buildings all around.  Even the Subic safari park is based in the old base with the munitions bunkers forming their storage and animal housing areas.  There's another Freeport Zone at Clark, where the old US airforce base was located.

The people are really friendly and they love children so will bend over backwards to help you when they see you have a baby.  When visting someone you're constantly hounded to eat even if you tell them you have just had a massive meal.  The food isn't great either.  For an island so ideally suited to growing fresh produce, they adore fast food and go crazy for anything fried or found in an all-you-can-eat buffet.  As we were staying with family we did mostly eat home cooked food, which I preferred, but even that was almost entirely rice and meat, usually pork or chicken fried in a pan.  Vegetables other than rice are a rariety in the cooking and, for someone used to growing most of his own vegetables at home and eating fresh from the ground, I had a serious salad craving withdrawal partway through and had to beg for us to go somewhere I could actually get something like it.  That ended up being an Italian themed pizza restaurant chain, where I was given a lettuce and tomato salad drenched in dressing.  I'd have rather not had the dressing but it was salad anyway and I gobbled the lot, to their amusement.  There is good food there and I recommend trying all the local dishes.  I really enjoyed the Bulalo (a beef marrow stew/soup), Sisig (minced pork with diced onion and liver fried with chilli) and Bicol Express (pork cooked in cocunut milk with shrimp paste and chillis).  We also ate a LOT of Adobo (pork and/or chicken stewed in a soy sauce) and Sinigang (fish, usually Bangus, stewed in a sour soup sauce with pak choi and other vegetables), but we eat a lot of those two at home anyway.

I think one of the most amusing parts of the holiday was my sitting with a couple of the guys from the family and chatting with them into the night about all kinds of things, accompanied with some local beer.  In the conversation it came up that I was an atheist and I have never seen such curious puzzlement on two people's faces at the same time.  One of them loudly exclaimed "Atheist?!" while the other said in a surprised and confused tone "You have no god?" at the same time.  They were really interested but found it a very strange concept.  I was even asked "What do you talk about?" when they realised that I was an atheist married to my Catholic wife and they were very impressed that I had married my wife in a Catholic church and felt that I must deeply love her to have done that.  It's something I've run into before, though their reaction was even more extreme, that many people with religious beliefs who don't have much involvement with others outside their belief group are sometimes especially confused by atheists as they confuse non-belief for a dislike or hatred of beliefs.  I had to reassure them that I simply had no belief in gods but respected the freedom of others to have that belief.

Sadly, even having 2.5 weeks there, we had so much to do that we didn't get to Corregidor.  We did go to Bataan briefly but we were only passing so although we saw part of the death march route and some of the memorial statues and markers we also did not get to Mount Samat.  The family were constantly terrified that we would be mugged, kidnapped or worse so wanted us driven everywhere and as we often went out for day trips with them I struggled to get into my usual holiday swing of running around on every form of public transport available in order to visit place after place.  It is a very different experience to my previous travel though and it gave me a good introduction to the country.  I had a great time and when we go back in two years I'm hoping to get out more and hopefully the weather will cooperate better!  Sorry it's such a long post, and I know this particular post probably belongs more in the general lounge but I didn't want to split the topic.  All I have to add is that if anyone reading this has ever played the Shadowrun RPG or read the books, the Philippines really reminded me of a post-Awakening world in the game.  Throw in magic, the Awakened Races and the cybernetics/bio-enhancements of Shadowrun and you wouldn't need to change much else to fit it into the Shadowrun world.

[Carina Lass]

Odd that I described it as apocalyptic in the 70s and you describe it as post awakening 40 years later.

Thanks for the essay, I enjoyed the read.

In reality not much has changed.

[RichM63]

Good report, I enjoyed reading it.

[Shelster1973]

Just be carful there.....especially as some of the ladies are infact boys.....

[kirkster501]

Sounds like you had a great time!  Shame you did not get to Samat and Corregidor - they are fascinating for the historically and military minded.  It is quite astonishing how brutal man can be to man.  

Yes indeed about the rain.  I never thought it possible that it could rain as hard as it does in the tropics.  Sure, after years in this country terms like "throwing it down" and "bucketing down" are part of our lexicon.  But in the tropics when is says bucketing down the term is spot on - the sky and air is just full of water!!!.  From getting out of a car and running three metres into a building I have been utterly saturated - if I dived in a swimming pool I would not have been any wetter!

[recceranger]

Wear body armour!

[kalasinman]

I measured a hard rain in hawaii once=4"/hour. Drops rebounding off the pavement over a meter.

[Carina Lass]

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some of the ladies are infact boys.....

unquote

Not the only place that happens Shelster, at least the ones there look pretty.