What we did in the Philippines, part 1: Bicol

Dori and I arrived safely at the second Bring Me Hope camp in Zheng Zhou late last night, after 20 hours of traveling from Manila. We are settling in for the week, and the weather here is much more merciful than in Nanchang. Plus, the swimming pool is great--nice and cold, very clean, and indoor. I'll have more on that in a later post, but for now I wanted to rehash some of our adventures in the Philippines.

There's too much to fit into one post, so I'll split them up into our three-day trip to Bicol (I was mistakenly referring to Bicol as an island in previous posts; turns out it's a region of the Philippines that includes the two small islands we visited) and our last three days in Manila.

First of all, to give you an idea of where we had the privilege of spending three days of our lives, here is a typical view from the compound where we stayed:

The "Shekinah" is the larger of the two boats where we spent a good portion of our stay--we stalled twice in the middle of the ocean in the smaller one. There are no cars on the San Miguel and Cagraray islands; only boats like this one. On the bow stands Than, short for "Jonathan" and pronounced "Tawn." And, in the background, that is the 8,000-foot-tall Mt. Mayon, a perfectly shaped cone volcano that juts up out of the bay at Tabaco, the nearest city to where we were staying. Overall, the views here were overwhelming, as if one could not possibly take in all the beauty in a few short days.

Besides boats, the main mode of transportation is the human foot. We spent hours and hours walking to our various destinations on San Miguel Island. Typically, the scenery was so awe-inspiring that I actually enjoyed all the walking.

Next come the creatures--so various and exotic, the animals we encountered on the islands ranged from monkeys to water buffalo. Here are two of the monkeys that were kept in the compound's miniature zoo:

This one was mean, and that's all I have to say about him.

And here is what the front end of a water buffalo looks like (you don't want to see the back end):

She didn't really like having my camera in her face, so she stood up and I ran. They're domesticated, but there's still only so much taunting one water buffalo can take:

The islands were very fertile; farms and animals were everywhere the tropical foliage wasn't, and rice was one common crop we saw.

Lastly, I wanted to include this picture of a beautiful little girl I met at the Bible study we spent two hours walking to on our first day in the islands. She was so shy at first that it was difficult to get a picture of her, but right before I snapped this one she went and put a flower in her ear. She was still shy until the end, but as we walked over the hill away from her family's home, we could hear her shouting, "Bye-bye!" Such sweet people, those Filipinos. We miss them.