Saturday 5th September 2015
Only a few days
ago I was blissfully swimming with turtles and colourful fish…
or sailing past
glorious volcanoes…
but today we have
spent the day in a big noisy city surrounded by traffic
and being
bedazzled by shopping malls displaying all manner of esoteric things…
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| Big paper eagles flying above the shoppers |
From beautiful
Pulau Kawio we had a very long slow trip back into the Philippines and into a
safe and comfortable berth at Ocean View marina on Samal Island. The sea was with us,; there was hardly any
wind; but for a very long twelve hours or so we hardly managed to go more than
3.5 knots. We could have walked, or even
swum, faster, and that was with both sails up!
It was only AFTER we had lowered the sails that we picked up any
speed…too sad, the big mainsail was actually slowing us down rather than being
of any use at all. There must have been
a very big strong current running against us.
About twenty miles
out of Kawio we crossed paths with a couple of boats heading for Raja Ampat on
the rally. We could hear them on the
radio, sounding quite perturbed about what looked like along straight line of
white-capped reef on the horizon. There
isn’t a reef on our charts… We joined in the chat and exchanged pleasantries
and then idly watched the “reef” as it came closer…and closer…Soon we were in a
short sharp chop. It was a bit like being in a washing machine. Nothing to do but sit back and watch in
amazement and some awe…We aren’t sure what it was – a bit of an earthquake
under the sea?? After it had passed we were
back to sedate water and s-l-o-w travels.
We arrived at the
marina in time for me to go into the nearby little township of Babac in the
marina van to buy a bit of food – Friday is potluck BBQ night at the marina… I
managed to marinate some chicken and make a big potato salad to share but I
don’t know if I managed to speak coherently around the dinner table at all…in
fact maybe I fell asleep with my face pressed into my salad…Overnighters are
exhausting!
We had two reasons
for going into town today. Two – to book
our airfares. And Number # One Most
Important – for Pete to go to the doctor.
We found a clinic in one of the hospitals near a shopping mall and after
quite a pleasant, if long, wait in a small stuffy ante room where we watched a
rather bewildering Philippine dance competition on a small TV set on the wall
at an angle where all us had to sit with our necks painfully twisted. I wandered off to the toilet and found a sign
on the door, in Tagalog which amused me no end.
My Tagalog is (sadly) non-existent but I think I got the gist… Actually
I looked up all of the words in my iPhone English/Tagalog dictionary and none
of it made any sense at all but I think the basic concept was – flush the
toilet and don’t put any extraneous crapola in the bowl! (NB – I may not speak Tagalog but my iPhone
is very proficient in all languages.)
Eventually Pete
was ushered into see his lovely doctor.
Dr Mary-Ann Burgos was very capable, and very kind, and just a bit
funny. Exactly what you want from a doctor!
She prescribed new
antibiotics for Pete’s leg, and some soothing ointment to use instead of
betadine (which is killing all the new tissue – betadine, she said, very
sensibly, should only be used in the first few days of treating a wound.)
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| Pete does keep his leg UP as directed. Mostly... |
I loved her
knick-knacks –many Mary and Baby Jesus statuettes. The best one involved a rather unlikely
perching of Mary and baby Jesus on the Eiffel Tower…
Oh and as for
Number # Two on our list – we couldn’t accomplish this because Pete didn’t have
his passport card with him. Never mind;
we have to go back into Big City and ShoppingMall World on Monday anyway, to go
to Immigration, Customs Harbour Master - the whole rigmarole begins again…(Yes
we could book our own tickets online but this is so fraught with difficulty and
provides so much opportunity for frustration and annoyance that it really is
easier to do it through an agent. The
internet ALWYS conks out JUST as you are about to press confirm at the end of
the whole process and…foul language has been known to fly about 2XS at these
moments…)
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