30 Sept 2007
day 5
The big news today is that we might be leaving tomorrow around 8 AM.
At breakfast, Emory and Bill were talking about going to the fish market to get bait for the RopeCams and I asked if I could go along, too. I anticipated another slow day and wanted to see a little more of Manila. Talina joined us and we piled into a double cab pickup truck around 6:30AM.
The scenery on the 20-minute drive was interesting. We drove the opposite direction that we had gone for the Mall of Asia (I think) and past large neighborhoods of raggedly put together dwellings primarily consisting of tires and pieces of sheet metal. There was something about the chaos of hundreds of two story dwellings that contained some order. We drove over a large bridge over a wide waterway (river? ocean? delta? water between 2 island? no idea) and none of the bank was visible on one side because the edge of the homes sat right on it. There were a few rickety looking boats tied to small piers attached to a few of the houses. We passed a large gym that was mostly enclosed, but was open on the sides. It looked fairly new and there were people in bleachers watching people play some game that I couldn't see. We drove past piles of shipping containers and these are the large ones like we see in the United States, not the tiny ones that I saw being hauled around in Japan. In front of some of the shacks that were right on the street (no curb or sidewalk), they were selling lots and lots of bananas. As we drove down the street past the Jeepneys, bicycles with side cars, and motorcycles with side cars, I noticed that all the lane lines were all white dashed linesŠ no double yellow lines in sight nor anything to indicate the middle of the road or divide the street into lanes for opposite traffic. It more or less seemed like everyone knew where they were suppose to drive. The most common problem with drivers is that they don't drive in their lanes nor do they go forward when they are supposed to - which results in a lot of honking. There were a few intersections with signals AND people directing traffic, but they seem about equally chaotic to the rest of the driving around here. We passed large piles of trash mixed with what looked like mud (probably decompsingŠ things) and who knows what else was in there. We also passed people (and dogs) digging through the piles of trash and the dogs were trying to eat stuff.
Our driver finally pulled over and dropped us off at a partially fenced off open air structure. There weren't too many people there selling fish, but my impression was that we were early because as the morning went on, more and more fish in buckets showed up. The condition of everything was very poor. There was trash everywhere and green water (I assume it was antifreeze) in the alley-like asphalt laid down between the raised, roofed cement slabs that seemed to be the staging area for the fish market. There were dogs and children, some of which were partially or completely naked, wandering around. The only time I saw anyone attempting to clean up the fish market was when one man stood using a hose to wash down the concrete to get rid of the trash and fish gutts. In the run off water, one small, completely naked boy was having fun running and sliding in the water like it was a slip 'n slide. He would stop, look at us, and then repeat. He was having a lot of fun.
This first stop on our fish market shopping trip only had very small fish. There were thousands of fish, but all of them could fit in the palm of your hand. We saw silver dollar fish and whitefish mostly. Emory wanted to try to find tuna or at least some bigger fish, so we got back in the car and drove a few blocks away and there we found much larger fish. They had mahi and something that looked like barracuda, but didn't have the right teeth that the people called Tanigue. There were also more of these strange fish that looked like cross between carp and arapaima with an upturned mouth. They definitely looked like a freshwater species and looked very primitive. We found out that these are called Imelda by the locals. We purchased Tanigue (later I found out that it was King Mackerel), locally considered a delicacy, and Imelda for a total of almost 100 kilograms of fish for bait. We did all that and returned to the ship before 8AM.
When we got back we helped move more stuff to the hold, while others worked on securing the last few things. One last large thing to secure was the MOC 10 trawl net. That required the crane and a lot of rope!
I worked most of the afternoon on writing the second cruise log for NOAA and since our Iridium phone is misbehaving, we also tried to prepare a bunch of photos in the right format with captions that might be matched with later logs that we send to NOAA. Greg offered to send text through his phone, but we probably can't send photos.
We had an impromptu happy hour with the gin we bought at the Hyper Market and had a toast to leaving tomorrow on Peggy's birthday.
To see all the NOAA cruise logs, go here:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/07philippines/welcome.html
and use the links on the right hand side.
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