City of Durian

Davao City...much bigger than anticipated. The smell of durian follows you around the city where on every corner you can buy the spiky fruit for 30 pesos/kilo. The smell clings to those who have eaten it. The odor, though strong, is much less offensive then folklore would have you believe. The taste, however (as previously mentioned) must be an acquired taste since after the tasting it again, it still wasn't the sweetest fruit on earth.

The main difference between this city and all the others is that the most of the city jeepneys have conductors (someone to take your money, give you change and tell you where to get off) and 3/4 of the conductors are women. In every other place we've been too conducting is strictly men's work. In Agusan Marsh, we also saw women doing what would be considered "men's work in other parts of the country - fishing and farming - perhaps Mindanao has different gender roles than the Visayas...

We spent two days touring the city trying to confirm everything for Indonesia. First we went to the Indonesian Embassy to apply for a 60 day visa. We could get a visa on arrival, but they are only for 30 days, which is not enough time to visit a country that is among the top 10 in land area. Sulawesi Island alone could take months to explore. We had heard horror stories about the difficulties of getting a visa for Indonesia, but the process seemed relatively painless...that is until we went back the next day to pick up the visas and were told that it would not approved until we showed proof of incoming and outgoing tickets. PROBLEM! We are entering Sulawesi via airplane from Davao, but our plan was to take land transportation from Indonesian Borneo to Malaysian Borneo and thus we had not ticket. Our solution: Search online (have to love Air Asia) for cheap flights out of the country that we have no plans to actually use but would satisfy this silly requirement. Luckily we were able to find a $24 ticket from Sumatra to Peninsular Malaysia.

We wavered in our decision to go to Indonesia since the combined flights equalled the amount of money we have spent since we started our vacation (3 weeks worth of travelling!) but we decided Indonesia sounds too good too miss so tomorrow we are heading out of the Philippines. This in itself is causing some conflicting emotions. We've had a wonderful time the the Philippines and have enjoyed getting to know the people here (facilitated of course, by knowing the language). We feel that we've seen a lot still there are so many more islands left unexplored. At the same time, we are eager to experience some entirely new people and places though a little unsure of how everything will fly while we're learning a new language (we've been studying Bahasa Indonesia!). We know we won't get as much out of the trip since we lack means of communication but we still are excited to begin the travels!

Check out some pics of the Philippine Eagle Foundation, a non goverment agency which is dedicated to the preservation of one of the largest eagles in the world (and the national bird of the Philippines). They have developed an artificial insemination method for the birds of prey and have released a few animals into the wild. The only problem I see with their grand scheme is there doesn't seem to be enough old growth forest left to support an increase in eagle populations...