Coconut trees make pretty pictures, but they make money too.
On Marinduque, coconut trees grow up the sides and over mountains, in valleys and in flat areas that have been cleared of brush to make orchards, rows of the trees standing like sailors at morning muster, in a line, Irish pennants clipped and shoes spit shined.
All the land on this island is owned and coconuts are harvested every two to three months, those that survive typhoons,rainy seasons, and wind storms.The coconuts are harvested by hand and families supplement their income by working in the groves when the time is right, bringing down coconuts for sale to local agents to ship to Manilla, and, from there, around the world.
Uncle Estoy works on the first step in the harvest process, using a long stick with a hooked curved blade on one end to cut the neck that attaches the coconut to its tree. The coconuts look like clusters of grapes from the ground but when they fall you need to stand back because they feel like a bag of rocks if they hit your head.
The rest of the team, once the coconuts fall to the ground, carry or toss them to a burning station where the skin is burned off.
These guys work most of the day, and, when they walk home, the colorful T shirts wrapped around their heads make them look like tired but happy pirates.
By the end of the day, they harvest over a hundred coconuts ready to go to Manilla. Everyone is tired, but all are safe, and it is a job well done.
You wouldn’t want to do this every day.
Then, it would really be work.
It is easier to describe this place by telling what isn’t here.
There are no condos, resorts, blue water swimming pools, water slides, fancy cabanas with fully loaded bars. There aren’t people wearing sunglasses and expensive thongs. There isn’t a paved road to get here, or fountains, or water features.There aren’t staff moving from room to room cleaning, maintaining grounds, loading luggage into taxis.
Ulong Bay is where locals go to cool off on hot days.
It is a fifteen minute bumpy ride in a tricycle from Mogpog, and, for a moment, you wonder if the sea is really out there. You walk over a rickety bamboo bridge, down a small path, and then you see water to the horizon, as flat as a surfboard.
This evening kids ride pieces of plywood on the slippery beach, dogs swim, families play in the sea as the sun goes down. Fires have been lit and our sun begins it’s swan dive into the sea.
There are better beaches and clearer water in the Philippines, but those cost one hundred to two hundred a night and come with tourists, high prices, and New World extravagances.
Ulong Bay is attractive for what it isn’t, and what it is isn’t bad.
There are fires burning in Mogpog.
They are kept simmering all day and into the night, started with the skins of coconuts peeled and shredded to make tinder, reinforced with dead coconut tree trunks, branches too small to be used for anything else.
You see smoke as you stroll,smell it as you take a shortcut through a back yard with a pen full of chickens, stop to see what your Uncle Fernando has been drinking last night.
There is never a straight line here anywhere. Point A and B are connected by a wavy line that leads you through the brambles like a pirate’s map.
All family and friends here are tied on a charm bracelet wrapped safely around your wrist, and you visit them as often as possible.
Smoke from these fires keeps mosquitoes at bay.
Insects are at the bottom of the natural world, simple, basic, enduring, omnipresent. We take them into account wherever we travel.. Small, out of sight, insects live close to mankind, largely invisible till they bite.
Mosquito’s have much to do about giving pests a bad reputation.
Typhoid fever isn’t something anyone wants to dance with and keeping a fire going is a small price to pay.
Mosquito’s may be small, but they pack a big punch.
Rock colored birds face the wind so their bodies aren’t scattered like bowling pins.
Pelicans circle us above, dive like missiles, their pointed beaks becoming spears, surfacing with wiggling fish.
Sea colors, shades of green and blue, modulate.
Waves move as far onto land as they can go, then recede from our toes..
Fitting into nature, seamlessly, was what was lost in our Fall from paradise.
Now, we are observers of nature, on the outside, looking in.
At dinnertime, a pelican begins his dive.
He circles his target, turns himself into a projectile by tucking his wings to his body,and disappears head first into the surf. When he comes back to the water’s surface, he shakes his wings and recomposes, a fish struggling in his enormous beak.
Not long after, a fisherman wades into the pelican’s same fishing hole, net in hand, and the pelican takes off like a seaplane from an Alaskan lake.
The fisherman moves slowly, studies the waves, the light, the wind.
Positioning himself, he casts his handheld net with both hands,lets his net fall to the bottom, then draws it back towards him with a rope line, hand over hand. When he drags his net onto the beach it holds silvery fish twisting in the bright sunlight.
He and his friend transfer fish from the net into a plastic bag, then lift up and climb back on their bicycles and pedal home, the net draped over a bike’s handle bars to drip dry.
If you live simply, how much of the day needs to be used up working?
What is so important to us that we work sixty hours a week?
Tides are capricious.
Some places on this beach you find no nasty presents from high tide. There is white sand, pools of trapped sea water, an occasional shell. Other places you find a narrow strip of seaweed, like Christmas tinsel on a living room floor. In the worst places you find piles of seaweed drying in the sun, an obstacle to beachcombers and an offense to noses.
Early morning, hotels hire men with shovels and rakes to move the unwanted seaweed and beach debris. Sometimes they cart it away in wheelbarrows, dig holes and bury it, cover it up with sand, or,best yet, haul it off in a wagon pulled by a tractor.
Each morning there is a new batch to be disposed of.
Even in paradise there are menial chores that wash up on our beaches. For every happy tourist, in a beach chair, there are two or three locals working behind the scene to make the place postcard perfect.
It doesn’t take more than a whiff to know that shoveling seaweed is a job waiting for Mike Rowe to put on his television show..
This is a job that makes me appreciate roofing, concrete work, painting, digging swimming pools, having to assign student grades and facing an overflowing class of maniac eighth graders.
Today, I’ve met a job worse than most of those I have had to do.
The sea changes like a model’s face.
One moment it is smooth as glass all the way to the horizon, the meeting of water and sky straight as a pencil line drawn by laying a ruler down. The horizon is so straight that you believe the world is flat like old explorers believed and imagine their fear as superstitious sailors neared the edge of their world, as they knew it.
On good days, the water is turquoise, clear, and you can see white sand twenty feet underneath blue waves.
Palm trees move in the wind like a sea of jungle ants scavenging on the jungle floor. Leaves in the canopy move all directions and it is difficult to see what direction the wind comes until you look at the slant of the tree trunks.
It is no lucky accident Mayan royalty built their retreat here but they had no idea it would become a tourist zone for foreigners looking for paradise outside their own urban concrete and steel jungles.
The Mayan’s couldn’t totally duplicate, in their culture ,the richness of what they saw around them, but they could and did pay homage to the God’s that led them here.
There is water wherever you look, but it tastes salty and won’t take away your thirst.
Water falls from the sky, but, on land flatter than a tabletop, it doesn’t run into rivers and down into the sea. Water seeps into the ground and collects in cenotes, underground caverns with stalactites and stalagmites, blue blue water, fish and turtles. There are rumors that ancient Mayans dropped their sacrifices into these cenotes weighted with heavy stones.
This history doesn’t deter us tourists from donning brightly colored snorkels and masks, showering, slipping into the cool waters, following rope lines into underground caverns lit from underneath with lights, over thirty feet deep.
This particular Gran Cenote is written up in guide books as having colorful fish, but, for the record – the fish are small, not in a multitude, and not at all colorful.
On this morning tour buses out front of the attraction are already unloaded, overweight men and women parading in swimming attire to the pools, Mayan descendants renting them towels and equipment.
There are a few scuba divers who can swim far underwater in the caverns, holding underwater lights, that swim farther than we can and see what the rest of us can only imagine.,
When they surface, they look exhilerated,
Places where the insides of the Earth open up have always attracted the curious.
I don’t see dead bodies but my shivers remind me there is much more we don’t see, than what we do.
The best way to understand the Sonoran desert is to drive to the end of a dirt road, take no water or matches, leave your phone in the car, don’t tell anyone where you are, wear light clothes and no hat, and hike till you get lost.
The second best way to understand the Sonoran desert is go to a museum and go through its exhibits.
The Sonoran desert starts in Arizona, spills into California and reaches down the entire Mexican Baja peninsula. It has multiple ecosystems and a variety of plants,animals, insects and minerals. Water is scarce but prospectors donkey’s know where to find it, the biggest discovery of all.
This morning, walking through paths notated on visitor maps, Alan and I see coyotes, a caged mountain lion, skunks, saquaros, desert springs,scorpions, barn owls, sun shades fashioned out of rope and netting, a boojam tree, aviary birds,flourescent minerals and underground bats, all part of nature’s bouquet.
We also get to see live wildlife in an auditorium where a skunk, porcupine, macaw, and bull snake are brought out for us to admire while a museum employee answers audience questions and gives nature lectures.
Our macaw is released from one handler’s grasp and flies from the front stage to an attendant’s arm at the back of our auditorium. His wings make a shoo shoo shooing sound as he flies over us and I can hear his beak cracking the peanut his handler gives him after he has completed his task.
This live presentation is a highlight of our morning expedition but two horned toads, embedded in a stuccoed wall at the front of the venue, are also memorable..
They are sharing a quiet moment before the sun goes down, like two brothers remembering baseball home runs in the intersection of Bellamah and Aspen street in Albuquerque, New Mexico in June 1955.
Tennis balls fly a long way when you hit them solid with an authentic Kentucky Slugger hickory bat.
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