Abandon Ship

I went on a trip to Camiguin Island which required us to take a ferry from Cagayan de Oro. Once on the ferry, a group of enterprising kids took turns jumping off the boat and then asking for money to be thrown to them. At the pier it was nice to watch and as the ferry pulled away, a few of the kids stayed on board to pull their last dive away from the pier.

This one kid clambered on the roof and stayed there for the longest time. One, the ferry was now going full steam, we must have been more than 100 meters away from the pier and two, the ferry must have been 3-4 storeys high. He was obviously holding out for more money but there was no way I was going to reach into my pocket and let got of the shutter. . . . . he eventually jumped. Look how far away from the pier this guy is.

Don't worry, he made it back.

Tonle Sap

Not sure what made me decide to not fly directly to Siem Reap but for some reason I ended up in Phnom Penh. I read somewhere that there was a ferry available from Cambodia's capital up the Tonle Sap river into the Tonle Sap Lake so I decided to take the scenic route.

Unfortunately, at the time of the year I decided to take this trip, the river had dried up in some areas which meant I had to take the bus some 3-4 hours to the beginning of the lake. The bus ride was interesting, between the great countryside spotted with amazingly decorated houses, halls and my comical effort in asking how much a bottle of water costs at the rest stop, the time flew by very quickly. At the rest stop, I took my camera down and just watched the locals go about their business. Lots of interesting shots either just drive or walk by you or are sitting right beside you.

At the "pier", more like a place the bus driver decided to drop us off, we waited for another hour for our ferry to arrive. Luckily the locals were entertaining and I'm sure we were entertaining to the locals.

The boat took off and after fifteen to twenty minutes of seeing the shore line and some fishermen, there was just a huge expanse of brown water. Every now and then we'd bump into other boats or lone stilt houses on the lake but for the most part it was 6 hours of watching the water drift by and looking back to see the wake of even browner water that our boat left as we traveled on. There is a covered passengers seating section but it's pretty cramped and can sometimes smell of diesel fuel (imagine taking that in for 6 hours) and so most of the people opted to brave the harsh sunlight for most of the trip. I have to say, the boat probably did not meet any international standard of safety (no lifevest were visible) which can be a worry considering this was a fresh water lake and would not provide any kind of buoyancy should we find ourselves in the water (or maybe I'm just getting too old for this kind of stuff).

When we reached our destination we were transferred to smaller boats that brought us inland. The transfer though was interesting as vendors in their own small boats "boarded" us and sold us very refreshing (we were under the sun for most of the ferry trip) drinks.

Dasvidania Mother Russia

Not sure about you guys but I'm pretty Russian'ed out. It's a great place to visit and we were lucky enough to be there during the season where it turned from comfortably cool to "where's my coat and scarf" weather so we saw the transformation. From people out enjoying the sun in the parks to being bundled up trying to get a quick snap of themselves in front of Lenin's mausoleum.

The greatest part of the trip was seeing Russians in their element, seeing the country and the places that made them the proud people that they are now. Yes, there are still a lot of the things in the country that I had envisioned before the trip, like the police and military presence in everyday scenarios but there were also a lot of eye openers, the culture, the heritage and the interaction, sometimes cold and sometimes warm that made the trip worthwhile.

For more pictures or larger shots of the trip, feel free visit my flickr site. Go to flickr and people search J A Zaballero. I got a few pictures of my other trips there too.

Also starting next week I decided to mix it up a bit, I'll be featuring snippets of different places I've been instead of doing a series. That should make it more exciting, unless of course I have a real long story to tell.

Please feel free to leave comments, suggestions and even destinations. Pris and I are always thinking of the next place to visit.

7 Sisters (Mother Russia Part VIII)

It's pretty easy to identify Moscow by its skyline. It's relatively flat if you compare it to New York or Chicago but there are 7 distinct landmarks that make it unmistakably Moscow. Known as the 7 Sisters, these 7 monolithic buildings rise up across the city reaching for the sky.

They are distinctly Soviet in design, just as Stalin had wanted them to be, big, bold, a few frills but definitely noticeable. There should have been 8 with the last one being the grandest - also to be known as the Palace of the Soviets but that plan never came to be and personally 7 sisters sounds so much better than 8 sisters doesn't it?

Am not sure what they were originally built for but they now have different functions. Moscow State University, perched high above the city is probably the grandest one of them all, then there is the Kotelnicheskaya Apartment Building (one of the pricier addresses to live in), Krasnaya Presnya (also an apartment building), Hotel Ukraina and Hotel Leningradsky, the Foreign Ministry building and the Transport Ministry.

If you get up close enough you can see the Soviet inspired statues but probably the biggest giveaway that this is inspired by the communist system is the sheer size of these buildings. Some are said to have been built by German prisoners of war. Makes you wonder how much bigger the Palace of the Soviets would have been.

Welcome to Unsmiling Russia (Mother Russia Part VII)

I think there's a little mental preparation one needs to undergo before heading off to Russia. I didn't know before I left but then I had the insight of someone who had been living there to straighten me out. It has to be said, Russians need a little getting used to.

At the immigration counter, as I was entering the country, I handed my passport to the unsmiling immigration officer. No big deal, immigration officers throughout the world seem to have the same disposition. I was however surprised that after I got out of the airport, I found that the general population carried the same unsmiling face, the taxi driver, the babushka museum usher, the militsia (police) and generally anyone you meet on the street, no one smiles. Not even people posing for a wedding picture. Good thing my traveling partner more than made up for that.

So what's the big deal, they don't smile, who cares. Well, if you are a tourist trying to find your way around, trying to ask for directions is just a little bit harder when faced with cold unsmiling faces. It's even harder when you come from a country known for its smiles . . . . or is that Thailand?

It was later explained to me that Russians deem smiling as a sign of weakness, something that must be very hard for a country known as the other superpower to stomach. And I wouldn't have it any other way, all those Rambo movies wouldn't have made any sense with smiling Spetznas in them. Also, Ivan Drago just wouldn't look right smiling.

The other explanation is that Russians think you're a little bit "off the rocker" if you keep smiling at everything.

Okay, before I paint a picture of a very drab and sad country, this is just not the case. Moscow seems to run fine without any smiling. People still interact, go about their business, mothers take their kids to the park, go shopping and meet each other but there was definitely a shortage of smiles in the country. Probably the only ones I saw smiling were the kids.





Once you get over this little quirk though, Russia and Russians are easy to like. You even start putting on a bit of a bit of a scowl when you walk around, just so that you start fitting in with the locals. The upside to this whole not smiling thing though is that when you do catch someone smiling, even though it's a hint of a smile, it just brightens your day.

Palace Square Night Life (Mother Russia Part VI)

We took off from Moscow to go to St. Petersburg for a few days. It's an overnight train ride which was exciting. St Petersburg is a beautiful city, more European than Russian.

Pris and I took a stroll around the city one night after dinner. I wanted to take some pictures at night (actually it was more of an excuse to use the tripod I had been lugging around) and since we were so close to the Winter Palace, we decided to walk in that direction.

At the square I was setting up my camera to take pictures of the column in the middle and the surrounding buildings including the Winter Palace but unfortunately I had left it too late. The sky was too dark and I didn't get the eerie blue sky I was aiming for. After packing up my gear however, I noticed what the locals used the square for, it was after all a big open space with not much traffic going through.

On the one side, we had what I call the junior Hell's Angels. Young locals making a ruckus, straddling their machines and revving the hell out of their . . . . .mopeds. A few would pull away and do wheelies and basically go around the square as fast as their little wheels would let them.

On the other side are the BMX'ers who were playing a game of tag with an empty plastic coke bottle. They even used us as shields as we walked across their turf.

And finally there were the silent ones. Inline skaters ignoring the revving and bottle throwing and just going around the square on their silent skates.

What I like about St. Petersburg is that their building code prevents them from building anything over 5 storeys and the facade of most building have to be preserved when renovating. They also like to light up their buildings at night, not very environmentally friendly but it sure makes the city pretty at night.

Moscow Afterlife (Mother Russia Part V)

One of the best places to visit in Moscow is the Novodevichy Cemetery. It may sound like a strange destination and it may not be the easiest to get to, an out of way metro station followed by a good 15 minute walk through an ordinary neighborhood, but it’s definitely worth the visit.

You see, if there is one place to see just how much the military was part of life in the Soviet Union, it’s in this place reserved for people who have moved on to the afterlife. A good percentage of the residents here were soldiers, sailors, pilots, grunts and officers buried here way back when the Soviet Union was still around. But how could I, without being able to read Cyrillic, tell? Well, every corner of the cemetery is filled with majestic tombstones decked out with missiles, anchors, pilots helmets and stars indicating the rank of the deceased.

Pris and I walked around for hours excitedly turning corner and rushing to guess which branch of the military the next resident came from. I know it sounds morbid but hey, we’re tourists and there were a lot of locals doing the same.

Some of the more famous people also buried there include Anton Chekhov, Nikita Khrushchev, and Boris Yeltsin. A map is available at the front office, opposite the place where they sell flowers but we found it more exciting going through the place trying to find them on our own.

The whole cemetery however is not reserved purely for politicians, the military or other well known Russians. Right next to Khrushchev was a family tending to their own recently departed family member. No huge gathering indicating it was someone of importance, just a small family and in the middle, a babushka directing just the right position for the pot of flowers. Another section of the cemetery, away from the curious onlookers and tourists is what I call the normal section where ordinary people are buried under ordinary tombstones.

Visiting Lenin (Mother Russia Part IV)

I’m afraid my next post has only two photos in it. There were no cameras and bags allowed in the mausoleum and so I’m afraid all I can do is describe my brief visit to the father of Russia and the most famous Russian Revolutionary - Lenin.

After queuing up for not more than 15 minutes on the outskirts of the Red Square, near Alexander Gardens, the policemen let us through in groups of 20. We walk beside the wall of the Kremlin, walk through metal detectors and after getting further patted down by the police we are finally allowed to enter the modern square structure.

Right as you enter, a soldier sternly gestures you to take your hands out of your pockets and to remove your hat, as a sign of respect. You turn the corner and see another soldier guarding nothing in particular, except the corner and when you turn that one, surprise another soldier. After that you enter the actual chamber and there he is, Comrade Lenin, lying in a thick glass case, eerily illuminated in a gold light. The rest of the chamber is dark, making his body look more like a hologram rather than an actual body.

Visitors are not allowed to loiter or at least I didn’t try. There were another three soldiers in the chamber so loitering did not seem like a good idea. The walk way goes around his body and the exit is on the other side where you have another soldier guarding the exit for some reason.

Once outside, I walked past more simple gravestones, unadorned by the tanks planes and missiles Pris and I saw in the Novodevichy cemetery. These gravestones marked the final resting places of the heroes of the Soviet Union. Of course the only one I recognized was Stalin but all were adorned with a few flowers. One afternoon I was walking past the mausoleum and noticed that some of the older folk were allowed to jump the queue, they were carrying flowers.

Underneath Moscow (Mother Russia Part III)

When people think about the subways in general they usually think of the Tube in London, or the NY Subway or maybe even the Paris Metro. Russia’s Metro however is usually overlooked which is strange considering that it traffics more people per day than any other metro system in the world, around 8 to 9 million people on weekdays.

However, this statistic is not what makes the Moscow Metro stand out. Intertwined among the miles and miles of tracks and tunnels are some of the most beautiful Metro stations in the world. True, most are Soviet inspired with scenes of soldiers, farmers, and country folk espousing productivity, cooperation and military might but maybe that’s what makes them even more beautiful.

You’ll see a few tourists taking in the beauty but for the most part, Moscovites rush through them without taking a second look (unless they notice people like me intently taking pictures). There are some stations, like Ploshad Revolutsia that has statues set inside the tunnel archways that the locals do interact with, one soldier kneeling is oblivious to the fact that his dogs' nose has been wiped shiny by people affectionately touching it as they pass by. Whether this is for good luck or for a simple “thank you for defending the motherland” is beyond me.

Also, the metro station is where you’ll find a few places where you’ll receive some courtesies that seem few and far between in the rest of the country. The heavy swinging doors leading into stations for instance, more than capable of incurring damage if it were to hit you, are held open by the people in front of you until they are sure you got it. Also, in a jampacked train, if you are near the door, people will ask if you are getting off just to make sure you are not in the way when they get off. During rush hour, me and my mother in law got ejected out of the train in a flood of people one time. No problem, you just turn around and get back on.

Some of the stations and tunnels are located deep below the city. In bustling cities like NY or London, most locals walk down escalators in a rush to get to where they were going. In Moscow however, where some of the escalators look like they lead 4 stories down, locals stand on the right and wait it out. I tried walking down the length of one but had to stop at some point to catch my breath.

Also, not all stations were decked out in the same way, Novodslobodskaya has stained glass windows, Komsomolskaya had roof murals while Kievskaya had murals on the walls and Ploshad Revolutsia had different statues hunched in the archways leading to the platforms. Other stations had paintings of Lenin on one end, others had the hammer and sickle engraved into the domed roof and yet others had statues of heroic soviet soldiers pressing onwards to victory. Whatever the decorations of the station, if you took out all the plastic signs showing you the exit or the connecting lines of the Metro, you would think you were in a lobby of a theatre or a concert hall, not hundreds of feet down with a subway train whizzing beside you.

The Reddest Square in the World (Mother Russia Part II)

Site of numerous military parades showing the world just how many guns, soldiers and missles the former Soviet Union had, the Red Square now has less of a military aura to it. The soldiers have been reduced in numbers, limited to the few guarding the Kremlin and those visiting Comrade Lenin’s final resting place. Pris and I had kind of bungled our way into the Red Square. We first saw the walls of the Kremlin through a side street and headed straight for it but as it turned out the Moskva River came between us and the Red Square so we headed off to the nearest bridge to get to it. It really doesn’t matter how you get to the Red Square, your first sight of it is always leaves you feeling that it’s a bit empty in the middle. Squares throughout the world are usually adorned with fountains, columns, or statues in the middle, but the Red Square is exactly that, an empty cobble stone square (more like a rectangle actually) with nothing in the middle. What surrounds it however, more than makes up for what’s missing. On the east side, is the Kremlin the seat of Power for the whole Russian Federation. On its west side lies the former state owned GUM department store but which has since been transformed into a very capitalistic collection of brand name stores housed inside the beautifully lit up façade. Not sure if it’s still state owned but it sure is pretty inside. I imagine twenty years ago, people lining up outside to buy a pair of socks. On its north side is the National Historical Museum and the reconstructed Resurrection gate. Undoubtedly, the most recognized structure on the Red Square, and one used as a backdrop for oh so many news feeds transmitted from Russia, is St. Basil’s Church. Your eyes are immediately drawn to it’s colorful twirly top and onion shaped domes and you kind of zone out the rest of the square. So mesmerizing is the church that I totally passed by the modern square blocks that houses Lenin on my first visit to the square, apologies Comrade Lenin. Oh yes, you must make more than one visit to the square, once during daytime and once at night when everything is lit up. It's like you've been to two different places.

The Square itself is filled with tourists like ourselves. Every now and then you have some old folk bringing flowers to the heroes of the Soviet Union (Stalin included) buried behind Lenin’s Mausoleum. And although there is the spattering of Japanese and Chinese tourists, the majority seems to be Russians themselves, visiting the capital from whatever federation state they come from. More than once, while carrying my camera gear with me I’ve been approached by them saying “skolka, skolka?” (how much?) and I had to explain to them that I myself was a tourist much like them (and not some Luneta photographer).

I forgot to mention, the "Red" in Red Square has nothing to do with the communist history of the country, rather it is tied to the word "krasnaya" which apart from meaning red, also means "beautiful" and beautiful it is. . . . . red. . . . not so much.

Turning Cold in Russia (Mother Russia Part I)

I recently went on a trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Not a typical holiday destination for Filipinos in general but we had to take advantage of an invitation given to us by a friend of my wife who had been living there for the past 4 years. Free lodging, a guy who knows his way around and a chance to visit the place that I only knew from the silver screen, who could ask for anything more. Yes, home of the KGB, the country that built the Red October, Ivan Drago and Smiert Spionem, I think it was about time to expand my undoubtedly vast knowledge of the country known formerly as “the bad guy”.

To the top (Mount Kinabalu - the end)

So we had resigned ourselves to not making it to the top of Mount Kinabalu. We were busy taking pictures of the views from where we had stopped, or maybe we were trying to make ourselves look busy while everyone else was on their way up. Up until sunrise, after we had shut down, we still could not see how far off the peak was, all we had to go on was the trail of flashlights that disappeared off into the distance (and even that could mean that they just went over the ridge and onwards for another X number of miles). Nope, our decision was sound. Sound it was until after we had taken all the pictures we could of the path we had taken up, and now, in the glorious morning light we turned around to take pictures of the path we should have been on all along. Looking up the path we saw that the peak was actually within striking distance. Jose, who earlier said he’d go “explore” the trail upwards when we decided to stop had not come down yet and so we knew he had made it to the top and it was starting to be depressing watching people come down from the top.

Suiee and I looked at each other and decided to make a go of it. Almost immediately all the aches and pain came back but this time we had gone beyond the point of quitting again. Nope this time, we played our little hopscotch game all the way to the top. It is at this point I would like to point out that I reached the top before Suiee and so with that action I hoped to deflect that little embarrassing episode before where I nearly quit and he hadn’t. The upside to being the last people up on the peak is that you have the place all to yourselves and more importantly, the sun had risen and you could see all around you. The ultra marathoners and adventure racers that practically ran their way to the top made it while it was still pitch dark and so they saw nothing of the surrounding views. The rest who did catch a little of the sunrise could only stay for a while since the peak was a small patch of level rock not capable of handling more than 10-15 people at one time. Suiee and I on the other hand could while away our time on the top and bask in our accomplishment. After a while however, our guide informed us that we had to make our way home since the daily rains would be coming in soon and so we met up with Jose and started on our way down. As if by clockwork, the rains started and by the time we reached the ranger station we were soaking wet. It didn’t matter though, by that time we had reached the top and did what we came to do. We had climbed our first (and probably our only) foreign mountain. We stepped through the gate, the ranger closed it behind us and that was that.