Part of my “goals” here in the Philippines is to explore these wonderful Islands. I have several travel guides at home, of course the lonely Planet is a must have. My big problem with Lonely Planet or the “Jens Peters” travel guides is simply that there are only a few pages about the destinations I plan to visit. On my research for a travel guide to Bohol, I came across a guide called Bohol Insider written by Jack Sterling.
Well, I live in Dumaguete and have been to Bohol a few times –it is only a short Ferryride away- so I was very interested what “insider knowledge” Bohol Insider has to offer. Bohol Insider is an e-book what is absolute perfect for me as I always travel with my notebook anyway, so I don’t need to carry around a 500+ paper-book, where there are only some pages about the area I plan to visit.
The purchase was done via Paypal for US$ 9,95 and after a minute or so I got my download-links. The purchase included also a free Tagalog phrasebook. The download took about 3-4 minutes as 12MB is a huge file in Dumaguete-Broadband-Speed. Bohol Insider is a travel guide with more than 150 pages full of information and great illustrations.
The first thing which I recognized was that the book had my email-address on each page, a small thing but I like that personal touch. After scanning through the first few chapters it is pretty obvious that Jack Sterling is obviously living in the Philippines and is not just a student send from the well known Travel Guides to write short paragraphs about some Hotels and tourist attractions.
The Bohol Insider Travel Guide covers a lot of interesting areas way beyond the typical “where to go – what to eat – what to see “ – questions. The book covers many details like money changing, dealing with vendors, historical back-grounds, diving info and and and… just a lot of stuff I could not find in any other guide and I caught myself a few times thinking “Yeah, Rhoody, you messed that up on your last trip”
The Travel guide has a nice format with great pictures. One thing I really like is a kind of funny cartoon-mascot which goes through different situations typical for the Philippines I made some screenshots and posted them below. They made me smile numerous times and I saw myself many times in that situations.
One thing I actually miss is a kind of index, where I could go faster to the section I look for with a single “click” and not scrolling, well I am lazy… hehe
Jack Sterling’s Bohol Insider Travel Guide offers free updates and since I bought the book a month ago it extended from 145 to 156 pages and I am almost sure that index for lazy Rhoodys will come one of the next updates.
All in all Jack Sterling’s Bohol Insider is in my opinion by far the best Travel Guide about the beautiful Island of Bohol and helped even me… and I am living since 8 years in this lovely country. For US$ 9.95 free updates and the free Phrasebook, Bohol Insider is a total no-brainer and of great value, no matter if you are an experienced Philippines traveler or a first-timer in Bohol.
What is the brand name of Contraceptive Pills are really efficient to use? This is Most of the woman asking about.
That’s every woman thinking about when they decide to use contraceptive method to avoid giving birth.
A lot of woman been searching for what brand of the pills witch is really best for them. Some of this woman they go for searching online with Pill is really works good for them. But its seems like they need to try more different kinds of Pills after two to 3 months using the pills they might think is good… Then after few months they will see some changes in their body figure and even in skin especially their faces will develop some pimples and some time its really oily skin. They need to invest more money in first place to avoid pregnancy and by getting ugly cause of using this pills witch is not really they want because of the side effect.
Woman taking Pills been experience some chest pain its one of the side effect by taking of this Pills because they develop into pimple shape of there body. They don’t want to see their face anymore on the mirror. They look like a pimple in gigantic size version plus there faces having so much it too and sometime they experience shortness of breath that they don’t want to breath anymore as they see their face looks like jackfruit and if you touch it, its feels like sandpaper if its not yet really develop into really pimple size. Chest pain that they get insulted by there own partner or friends recognizing that they having so much of this pimple and gaining weight..
Taking Pills and having chest pain seem like they don’t want to breathe in anyway. Not because it’s expensive than the generic brand of medicine it’s because of the side effect of this kind of Contraceptive Pill. Its also been written in the description of this pills that some of this side effect will occur like “HEAD ACHE “ “LEGS PAIN” or “ ARM PAIN ” will experience and “NUMBNESS” too…. So don’t be surprise… head ache is also side effect keep tem thinking why there are not slim as they are like before.. legs pain also is because they have to do some work out and do some more exercise just to loose some weight. Woman feels so depressive, Because they think that they are not attractive and not pretty anymore, they look like 30 years old older than there real age.”GAINING WEIGTH” is also effect and of course hiding their face and body because of this strange things growing on their face. And NUMBNESS is because they have to go for jugging and people will see how fat they are now not like before they look
nicer. Numbness will experience that they still have to feel pretty even they are not anymore…
A lot of woman now been trying more and more different brand of pills and experience different side effect from each kind Contraceptive Pills they take.
Every woman have to visit there doctor to make it sure that they really got and see what is really efficient to use as a contraceptive pills.
Here you can see what was going on the next few days after this dramaitc accident at Bushmans Hole which took another divers life while trying to recover a dead body from the bottom of the cave.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, as word spread of Shaw’s death, the Dreyers and most of the dive team went home. Andre Shirley arrived on Sunday, after driving all night from Badplaas, to take her husband for additional recompression treatments in Pretoria. But Herbst stayed at the hole, and he was in a grim mood. It had been left to him to retrieve all the lines and gas cylinders that still hung in Bushman’s depths, work he had started on Monday. By Wednesday, he was ready to go after the deepest cylinders, and he had called in his Afrikaner diving buddy Petrus Roux to help, with the police assisting at shallower depths. Standing at the water’s edge, the police team held an impromptu memorial service for Shaw. Police diving superintendent Ernst Strydom and Roux read from the Bible. Herbst hadn’t planned to say anything, but emotion gripped him, and a few words came.
“I’m going to miss you, mate,” he said, as if Shaw could hear. “It’s a good place. Rest here, stay here.” The group sang “Amazing Grace” as black clouds threatened rain. And then Herbst and Roux dived into the hole.
They dropped to 300 feet and attached lifting buoys to the shot line to raise the cylinders still at 500 feet to a more manageable depth. When they returned to the surface, they were approached by police diver Gert Nel, who had been helping to clear lines in the chimney. “Did you see them?” Nel asked quietly. “See what?” Herbst asked. “The bodies,” Nel said. “We saw Deon and Dave stuck in the cave at 20 meters.”
Herbst rested up and returned to the water. As soon as he cleared the narrow neck of the chimney, his cave light locked on to Shaw, floating eerily upright, his arms spread wide and the back of his head and shoulders jammed against the ceiling. Shaw’s light was hanging below. Looped around it was the cave line he had attached to Deon in October, and cradled almost perfectly in the line, its legs hanging down as if on a swing, was the headless body of Deon Dreyer. Herbst realized that Shaw’s light must’ve gotten tangled in the cave line. When Herbst and Roux had lifted the shot line with the buoys, it had pulled the cave line—and with it Deon and Shaw—off the bottom. As Shaw ascended, the gases in his body, as well as those in his suit, rebreather, and buoyancy wing, had started to expand. Up he had gone, dragging Deon with him.
Herbst brought Deon out first. The police team laid a white body bag along the water’s edge and lifted Deon into it. There was a surprising firmness under the wetsuit, and Strydom was shocked to get a whiff of rotting flesh. One of Deon’s flippered feet fell off. A policeman tossed it into the bag alongside the body, and the zipper was closed. Shaw had died doing it, but Deon’s body had finally been taken back from Bushman’s Hole.
Shaw was recovered next. It was a distressing job. His body was grotesquely swollen from the change of depth and pressure, and it was locked by rigor mortis in the free-fall position. Herbst, standing in the surface pool, had to cut Shaw out of his equipment. “That was quite bad,” he says, choking up.
Herbst cut the helmet cam free, too. Gordon Hiles, who had been filming the morning’s work, was relieved to see that the camera’s housing was still intact. Herbst was exhausted, with a pounding headache. He needed to call Don Shirley and Ann Shaw. But more than anything, he wanted to see what was on that video.
IT’S NOT AN EASY THING to watch a person die, especially if that person is a friend. Less than an hour after the helmet cam was removed from Shaw’s head, as Hiles made a copy of the video for the police at the top of the crater, Herbst watched the film of Shaw’s last dive. Later, he and Shirley (who calls it “a snuff tape”) examined it frame by frame, backward and forward, multiple times, to try and understand every nuance of Shaw’s death.
The picture is dark, and sometimes hard to see. But along with the sounds of Shaw’s breathing, picked up with perfect clarity by the camera in the stillness of the cave, the video tells the tale of Shaw’s final moments. When Shaw reaches the body of Deon Dreyer, he is 12 minutes and 22 seconds into the dive, and he’s been on the bottom for just over a minute. He pulls the body bag out and starts to try and work it over Deon’s legs. As he does, a cloud of silt obscures the picture. When it clears, Deon’s body, its head having fallen off, is floating in front of Shaw.
This was totally unexpected. Deon, as it turned out, was not completely skeletal, and he was no longer stuck in the silt. Instead of decomposing, his corpse had mummified into a soaplike composition that gave it mass and neutral buoyancy. And for some reason—no one has an explanation—the body had become unstuck from the mud as soon as Shaw started working on it. “The fact that the body was now loose, and not pinned to the ground, was not one of the scenarios that we had thought about,” Shirley sighs. “The body was not meant to be floating.” It’s a lot easier to slip a bag over an immobile body than a body floating and rolling in front of you at 886 feet.
Shaw starts fumbling and, for the first time, lets out an audible grunt of effort.
Herbst, listening intently through headphones, heard the steadily increasing distress in Shaw’s breathing and knew there was trouble coming. “Breathe slower, man, breathe slower,” he urged out loud. Watching the video with a clear head, it is hard not to wonder why Shaw didn’t just turn around right then and abandon the dive. In October, he had turned for the surface as soon as his breathing rate increased. Now he was panting, and Deon, who was attached to the cave line, was floating free. The body could have been pulled up. “All the options involved putting the bag on,” Shirley explains. “He’s sticking with his plan. Which is what you’ve got to do.” Still, when Shirley first saw the video, he couldn’t stop himself from pleading, “Leave it, leave it, leave the body now. It’s loose and can come up.”
Shaw, however, is responding only to the pounding of his narcosis and his determination to finish the job. He keeps working to control the body, letting go of his cave light so he can use both hands. Deon is rolling and turning in front of him, resisting Shaw’s efforts to get him into the bag. Shaw has been at it for two minutes, and the cave line is seemingly everywhere. It snags on his cave light, and Shaw pauses to clear it.
At this, Shirley and Herbst bridled. A cave diver should never let gear float loose. “It’s a recipe for disaster,” says Shirley, who will always regret not being present when Shaw told Hiles he would put the light to the side at times. “Do not do that,” he would have warned him.
Now Shaw is acting confused. He is working at the torso, instead of the feet. His movements have lost purpose. After more than two and a half minutes of work—and three minutes and 49 seconds on the bottom—Shaw pulls his shears out, fumbling to open them. The plan was for him to cut the dive tanks away as he rolled the bag over Deon. Shaw’s breathing rate continues to increase. Suddenly he loses his footing on the sloping bottom. He scrambles back to the body in a cloud of silt. The grunts of effort, hateful little bursts of sound, are painfully frequent.
Shirley and Herbst guess that Shaw’s narcosis was then closer to six or seven martinis. “You focus on the one thing. You don’t focus on the dive anymore,” Herbst says. “The one thing becomes everything. And I think with Dave it became the body, the body, the body.”
Still, Shaw keeps checking the time on his dive computer. After five and a half minutes on the bottom, he’s aware enough to know he has to leave, but he doesn’t get far. The video shows the bottom moving beneath him. Then Shaw’s forward progress stops. His errant cave light has apparently snagged the cave line tied to Deon’s tanks. Shaw knows he has caught something and turns awkwardly. His breathing starts to sound desperate. He pulls at the cat’s cradle of cave line, as if trying to sort it out. Every breath is now a sharp grunt. Shaw struggles to move forward again but is anchored by the weight of Deon’s body. The shears are still in his hand, but he never cuts anything. The pace of his breathing keeps accelerating, and there is a tragic, gasping quality to it, so painful to listen to that Herbst and Shirley will no longer watch the video with sound.
Twenty-one minutes into the dive, the sounds finally start to fade. Dave Shaw, with carbon dioxide suffusing his lungs, is starting to pass out. He is dying. It’s heartbreaking to watch. A minute later there is no movement.
The “big” Robinsons Mall is open a few weeks now. It appeared before the opening that it is the reinvention of the wheel for Dumaguete. Unseen waves of excitement swapped through Dumaguete and I heard a lot of people talking bad about Lee Plaza and how great Robinson will be. This guys are exactly the same who are talking bad about Robinsons Place in Dumaguete.
So what is Robinsons Place in Dumaguete now… breathtaking, stunning, disappointing, a disaster? Ok let me get Rhoody’s opinion online. Robinsons is a perfect step in the right direction. The Mall is simply a provincial Mall in a province-town.
Knowing some people I had the chance to enter Robinsons Place Dumaguete about one hour before the grand opening. I definitely like the place in general. The stores and shops are what had to be expected. Some local shops moved there and there is not a lot new. Like each Mall in the PI they have problems with stocking up for the opening and run out of stock after the first few hours.
Glamorous opening
That of course gave the “typical” complainer enough reasons to whine around again…. the traffic.. and the bike-turn-arounders at parking area, and it is too cold inside. Andandand…
My Rhoody-Award goes again to a part German – Speaking – Expat community here in Dumaguete for what I hear online and read on several blogs and internet-board. I really love Germany, but this “personalities” made me turn my back to the country, Rhoody can’t live with all that grumpiness. ood that their very limited English skills keeps them of Dumagueteinfo. I wouldn’t be a moderator for DI with those guys around…
Ok, here are my two cents. The traffic is less than before unless you go at 5 – 7 pm. But there is no way of going smooth in the city for the last 4 years and all this retired complainers can go there from 9 am – 4 pm, where there is absolutely no problem at all.
At present are 39 out of 100plus shops open and we are of course in the province and won’t have the shops many are dreaming of.
I have been there a few times now, alone, with Rechel, with the little one and never had a bad time. The little one has space, mama can look at shoes and high-heals and I go “talent-scouting”. We have a look at the Supermarket if they re-stocked (for all complainers, they had a lot of great stuff at the opening what you do not get anywhere else in Duma and it will come back.)
correct, keep Mall clean, but make trashcans bigger
Of course Robinson Place Dumaguete was a “Rush-Opening” and stores and shops are not finished, the staff is not very knowledgeable and things are out of stock , however there are already some new options for dining, shopping, watching a movie (81 Peso only !!!! ) or just roaming around, getting an overview and go to buy it somewhere else.
Listening to some people here in Dumaguete it seems they are “forced” to go there, bad luck to you !!! I am a kind of free and can decide where and when I wanna go. Having my little one Happy and smiling for some hours and seeing Rechel in different sexy high-heals (without buying them… hehe) makes me also happy and willing to pay 2 peso more for my coffee at Robinsons Place in Dumaguete City.
When you wake up at 4:30 in the morning and have two girls running around in your house like “chicken without head” there are a few options. One of these options would be that your girl found another girl in your cabinet. Another option: You simply life in the Philippines (where it basically has nothing to do with the daytime..hehe).
In my case yesterday it was the first communion of the “little-one” and the excitement of her and Mama was almost touchable. As I am not that into the church thingy I promised my little one (of course) to go with her at her “big day”. After we got dropped off at her school, where the celebration was held in the gym I had my last cigarette before show-start.
It was actually very exciting to see all this little girls and boys in a mixture of anxiety and nervousness and excitement. There was quite a tension in the school-gym. Unlikely other events in the Philippines, the show started on the spot at 8:00am with a …. Guess what … of course, a parade, where the parents/guardians had to bring their little one to their place. For that we had to present ourselves to all visitors on the grand-stands by walking a “round of glory” through the gym.
My little one had wet hands and Mama raced down first leg like a sprinter on the 100 meter finals at the Olympic games, made me wondering who is more nervous. I was pretty excited and very proud of my two girls and it was the right decision to go there, btw, I was the only long-nose at this event and had the feeling that a lot of eyes were on me.
After the mass started, some of the kids got bored pretty soon (at least those in the back-rows) and entertained themselves, constantly being reprehended by some teachers sitting behind them but without showing any effect on the kids. That made me wondering how this “teachers” are able to control the Kids in the classroom, as they are not able to do that at a “big event” like this. (I have actually a few more thoughts, but as you know, there is only one why question per day allowed and I “wasted”mine for today already, so I need to put them in a later post… )
After 1.5 hours the highlight of the show was scheduled and Mama and I led the little one to her first holy communion and after each participant got their “bite” the atmosphere relaxed a lot, 3 more songs and it was done.
We spend the rest of the day making it “Daisy’s day”, meaning whatever she want to do, we do. So we ended up in the movie-theater, malling, several restaurants, ice-cream, restaurant again and went tired but very happy at 10:00pm back home.
My goal for this day was to make it unforgettable for the little one. I am not sure if I succeeded but I saw here and Mama smiling and excited the whole day and they did the same to me.
This part goes mainly about the terrible experience of Don Shirley, who got in deep trouble on his long way up after his malfunctioning apparatus.
IT WAS 7 P.M. SATURDAY EVENING in Hong Kong, and Ann Shaw was in her living room. Her 21-year-old daughter, Lisa, was with her, on break from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. The doorbell rang, and Ann opened the door to see Vickers, accompanied by two friends from church. Ann thought the dive wasn’t taking place until the next day, but as soon as she saw the somber group, she knew. Vickers explained that Dave was five hours late. He suggested there was still a chance he could reappear. “Oh, no, he won’t,” Ann replied. “Not if he’s been down there so long.”
Ann, who has a deep faith in God, tried to believe that there was some higher purpose in what was happening. More than anything, though, she was struck by how completely her life had changed in the brief time it took Vickers to relay the news. The last time she’d had that feeling was 30 years earlier, at 19, as she walked down the aisle to be married, with Dave Shaw, himself just 20, waiting for her at the altar.
Back at the hole, van Schaik didn’t have time to think much about Shaw. With five other divers in the water and only two reserve divers on the surface, she had to focus on Don Shirley. She sent Gerhard Du Preez, 31, into the hole to find him, with instructions to check everyone on his way down. Du Preez found Shirley just below the ceiling of the main chamber, checked that he was OK, then turned immediately for the surface to report back.
Alone again, Shirley continued his retreat. As he approached the chamber ceiling at about 164 feet, he started feeling faint. Instinct told him to get off his rebreather and onto his open-circuit bailout before he lost consciousness. He stuffed the regulator into his mouth, and as soon as he did, the cave started to spin around him. Shirley didn’t know it yet, but a small bubble of helium had formed in his left inner ear, causing extreme vertigo. He was in a washing machine, and off the shot line. In the dark, all he could see with his light as he spun was black, followed by the flash of the cave roof, then black. He saw a flash of white go by, and then again. It was the shot line, and without thinking he thrust out his hand to grab it. That grab kept him alive. If he had missed, he would have drifted off, lost in the blackness. Up or down, it wouldn’t really have mattered. Depth or the bends would have finished him, and van Schaik and her divers would have returned to an empty line.
The washing machine finally slowed just long enough for Shirley to read the backlit screen of his primary VR3. It showed he had come up to 114 feet. It also warned him that he needed to be down at 151 feet. Hand over hand, Shirley descended. As he reached his new depth, nausea hit him and he started to vomit. Shirley would feel the heave coming, pull the regulator from his mouth, throw up, and then replace the regulator. Fighting the vertigo and nausea, he managed to grab some spare gas cylinders from the cluster clipped onto the shot line nearby. The thought that he might die never occurred to him. I will survive, I will survive, he kept telling himself.
After about 20 minutes, Truwin Laas, 31, van Schaik’s second reserve diver, appeared. Shirley scratched on his slate, I’M HAVING A BAD TIME. I’VE GOT VERTIGO AND I’M VOMITING. Laas made sure Shirley was breathing the right gas mix for the depth, decided he was stable, and left quickly to update van Schaik. Shirley, alone again, started cycling repeatedly through a subroutine of survival, asking himself, Where should I be now? How long should I be here? And where do I have to go? Each breath was a conscious act that got harder as he tired. Suck, hold, exhale. Suck, hold, exhale. I will survive. I will survive.
Now the marathon began. Van Schaik started cycling divers down to stay with Shirley. Du Preez, Laas, Sander, and Vingerling dived repeatedly that day, racking up three or four dives apiece despite the risk of getting the bends themselves. (Herbst, who was out of action for hours with a suspected minor bend, went down once more; Andrews and Stojakovic had been too deep to dive again.) The divers clipped Shirley to the shot line in case he convulsed or passed out, unclipping him only to move him from one decompression stop to another. Every movement brought a new round of vomiting. “It was heartbreaking to hear,” Vingerling says, mimicking the spastic violence of Shirley’s dry heaves.
Before the dive, Shirley had told the team that if anything went wrong, his wife, Andre, was to be given the bad news straight and fast. Andre, who had stayed behind at Komati Springs to run the dive center, had been getting regular updates. After one call, a slate was taken to Shirley. MESSAGE FROM ANDRE, I LOVE YOU, it read, and then, YOU’D BETTER HANG IN THERE OR ELSE.
After more than ten hours in the water, Shirley finally reached a depth of 20 feet. He was exhausted and approaching hypothermia, but he stayed there decompressing for almost two hours. The next circle of hell was at just ten feet and had to be endured, according to the tables, for a full two hours and 20 minutes. As soon as Shirley settled in, a sharp pain flared in his left leg, a sign that more bends could be on the way. It was time to take his chances on the surface. LOWER LEFT LEG HURT. COULD BE LACK OF USE? he wrote on a slate. Soon after, Sander appeared. I’M HERE TO TAKE YOU HOME, he wrote.
Shirley was carried out. He had been in Bushman’s Hole almost 12 and a half hours. “Don’t cut the drysuit,” he managed to growl when he saw Du Preez coming at him with a pair of shears. Shirley was winched up the cliff face, and within 22 minutes he was in the recompression chamber.
I had birthday a few weeks ago. My birthday is a thing I really keep as a secret. I am not into this big parties. A couple of beer with friends and I am happy.
I have no idea who leaked that date, however, about one week before Rhoody’s birthday two of my neighbors approached me and asked me what I want as a birthday gift.
Just to explain that a bit …. My two neighbors are beautiful young woman early twenties with a lovely body, cute smile, long hair and basically all a “bad boy” like I can dream off. The only problem is that they are absolutely not interested in men and prefer the company of each other … (hope you get what I mean)…
Knowing that they have no big budget and having my famous dirty mind, I made it pretty simple and told them:
I know you sweetheart’s don’t have a lot money but if you really want to give me something for my birthday … hmmm let me think… hhhmmm. (Well at that point my mind went absolute off the materialistic track and so I answered:
“I wanna watch”
On my birthday just after lunch I got a text from the two sweeties asking me to come over and get my birthday - gift ….
YESSSSS …
2 minutes later I was ready and on the way…
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well, I know my english is not that good…
maybe I should make drawing of my x-mas wish-list….
