Arachnaphobia

Its 7pm on my second to last night in Boracay... and I'm nearly ready for bed! Why? Well its mostly because of a terrifying incident last night. It was 2am and I'd just finished watching Arsenal battle to victory over the unfortunate yet uninspired Liverpool, and just popped into my bathroom before my eyes closed completely. Now, I should point out, I moved into a room made mostly out of bamboo two days ago and, although spacious, its a little too close to nature for my liking, largely thanks to the big gaps in the floor opening onto the bare ground 4 feet below. I'd already discovered a rather large cockroach and been plagued by an increase in mosquito bites, which unfortunately turned out to be just a practice run.

So, this night, I shuffled bleary eyed into the bathroom and switched on the light, which immediately revealed the largest, fattest hairiest spider I've ever seen, hanging about 10 inches from my face in the middle of the room. Now, everyone knows I hate spiders, so might be prone to exaggeration about their size and hostility to justify my own fear. However, not this time, this one really was of tarantula proportions. It's body was easily over 3 inches long and more than an inch wide, while its legs were each as long as the distance from my wrist to the tip of my forefinger. I didn't know what type it was at the time, but I've since found a picture to match it, and apparently its a Huntsman (this is not the actual one, bit was just the same as this).


Now there was no way I could sleep with this monster in the next room! I shut the door in a panic, not wanting it to escape into my sleeping quarters. I needed a plan. No, actually, I needed a stick! The only thing available was the curtain rail, so I carefully removed the curtains, put on my shoes, and started to enter the bathroom. Then I saw my towel hanging up, so i added it to my armoury. I swung open the door and knocked the spider to the floor, next I threw the towel on top of it, then proceeded to jump up and down on the towel like a mental case. After about the 100th jump I deemed it enough to have made a spider pancake. I lifted the towel up, only for the spider to calmly meander out and across the room. Aaarrgh! I jumped out of the room and continued to poke at the spider with my 7 foot long curtain rail, until eventually it crawled out of the window. Relief. Or actually, I thought, as its not dead, what if it comes back in through the gap in the floor when I'm asleep?! With this in mind, I laid in the middle of my bed with the light on for the next 3 hours, until eventually my heavy eyes won over my irrational fear and I entered into a fitful sleep.

Insane isn't it? How I'm happy to let a lizard wander about my room wherever it wants, but as soon as a cockroach, or especially a spider, comes along, I turn into the old woman from the Tom and Jerry cartoons who leaps onto a chair and hollers whenever the mouse comes near!

Apart from my Steve Irwin-esque adventures, everything is going pretty well here in paradise. The only downside is that the weather has been pretty cloudy the last 4 days so my tan is not quite what I'd expect, but I'm sure its better than most of the people who have spent November and December in England or Korea! I have a friend arriving here tomorrow, which typically coincides with my last night! Then its on to Hong Kong to meet up with Martin and Pete.

More adventures to follow. And, hopefully, the only things to go bump in the night will be of the two-legged variety!

Boracay

Greetings one and all. After a long, hard slog of a year (13.5 months actually) in Korea, I'm back 'on the road' and so, as you can see, I'm also back in the blogosphere.

This past year, I've only ventured out of Seoul for a 3 days, and that was way back in February when I hopped over to Shanghai for lunar new year. In short: I had a good craic, it was very cold, the city is a nightmare to find your way around, I went up one of the tallest buildings in the world. There you go, blog done.

But back to the present, as things on the travelling front have taken a sharp upturn and now I find myself on the paradise island of Boracay in the Philippines. As you can see from my last post, I've been planning to do this little trip since December last year, so I'm mighty happy to be here.

I arrived here last Sunday 22nd November, after a brief one-night stopover in Manila. I wasn't sure what to expect, as I've heard and read the opinions of many people who think this place is too touristy and overdeveloped. Well, all I can say is, those people must usually take their holidays with Robinson Crusoe if they think this place is too much. The beach is white and beautiful, and almost empty towards either end of it. Admittedly, it gets a little busier in the mid-section, but even there, its nowhere near as crowded as its Thai or even Vietnamese counterparts. The people too, can be compared favourably to their Thai or Vietnamese cousins. They are incredibly laid back and friendly, and always seem happy, even though they are poor as church mice.

Behind the beach runs a strip of restaurants, bars, hotels, dive shops and other services for tourists. Lots of these places are constructed from bamboo, or driftwood perhaps, enabling them to blend effortlessly in with the line of palm trees in front of them. Some hotels and bars, such as the popular Hey Jude, are a little flashier, but there's nothing too garish (yet!). By the way, if you think that a place called Hey Jude would be a great place to unwind with a beer to you favourite Beatles classics... you'd be wrong. House music pumps out all night long.

One very unique thing about the Philippines is the transport. In Manila the streets are thronging with brightly painted Jeepneys, a vehicle that was first built out of the old Jeeps that the Americans left behind when they left. But in Boracay, no cars are allowed so the primary mode of transport is the 'trike'. Trikes are basically motorbikes with a shell built around them to provide seating beside and behind the driver, a bit like tuk tuks but a slightly different shape. Same same but different!

So far I haven't done much, and to be honest I don't really plan to do much either! Thus far, the main part of my day has been taken up with laying on a sun lounger in the 30 degree heat. This is sometimes combined with some light reading, and often interspersed with a bit of swimming in the warm, clear blue sea. After this, it soon gets round to dinner time when I have the difficult task of choosing between freshly caught seafood, or an array of international cuisine. Then of course, its time to hit a bar or five to drink the tasty local fifty pence beers and look at the tasty local birds! How will I cope with two more weeks of this?