Adventures in Lubang Island

OK blogreaders, strap in. I’m sitting here with my good friends Captain Morgan and Bombay Bicycle club and I’m ready to rock.

Last Sunday, I got up at 6am and walked to the office. My peaceful stroll was ruined however, by the local weirdo rubbing his inner short shorted thighs, making eye contact and wishing me a good morning. I’ve seen him every weekday for the last two months and normally I just stare at the ground as I walk past the bench he sits on, but given that we were the only two people on the street it seemed rude not to at least acknowledge his presence. An omen of things to come, who can say?

Our departure had been delayed first by a week, then Monday became Wednesday, Wednesday became Thursday, Thursday became Friday, then Friday became Sunday, so it was only right that 6.30 should become 7.15 before we were finally on our way. I took the delay as a chance to grab a sly McDonalds breakfast, unaware that we would be getting another one just an hour later.

We were off to Looc. I’ve decided I’m going to start including maps in my blog, so here’s the first one.

A picture paints a thousand words

So what were we doing in Looc? WELL. We at SIBAT have set up a joint venture with the University of the Philippines (UP) Electronics and Electrical Engineering Department. One of their masters students, Raphael Dorilag, is working on building a wind turbine and he wanted somewhere to put it. He and his team came to SIBAT to ask if we knew somewhere good, and we suggested Looc, where it will be incorporated into a project to provide good clean water out of tapstands to the good clean people of Looc. The tapstands will be shared between 4-6 homes, so the people will not only have water that is legitimately safe to consume, but also won’t have to walk very far to get it. This is good. The UP guys want to monitor the wind conditions so they can do whatever with the data, so we all went down to Looc to install the mast which will eventually be the home for the turbine, but for now will just hold a load of wind speed and direction equipment, until the turbine is completely finished.

While this part of the project is essentially UPs deal, we from SIBAT were there to provide our expertise, and also to make final fine plans for our water distribution system. We needed to know exactly how high the hill was, so we can buy the correct pump and make the correct plans for the building of the water tank. Question, dear blogreader: How do you accurately measure how high a hill is? We went to the town hall to borrow as GPS. It was no good, so we went old school. Using a long piece of wood, a spirit level and a tape measure, Rodel and I made our way up the hill from the water source diligently taking measurements as we went. Maybe the picture will make it clearer.

Picture of the year right there.

As for the actual hoisting of the mast, it was a real effort. We (by that I mean the local people) started by carried these five big steel sections, each six metres long and weighing 250 kilos up the hill. There, two of them were spectacularly welded together to create a “gin pole” for pulling the mast up and down.

Sabrina from UP took this one and I spent 45 minutes trying to replicate it to no avail

The next two days were spent putting it all together. There are 16 cables totalling over 400m, and these all needed to be measured, cut, tied, bolted and adjusted before we could get anywhere. At this point, I got quite frustrated. There were a lot of delays as Raphael failed to communicate his intentions and a lot of time was wasted. Rodel accurately described it as “amateur”. For example, Raphael had bought everything in exact quantities for the finished product, an erect windmast, but had failed to account for items that would be used in the erection. This resulted in corners being cut. The upshot of this was a complete ballsup; at one point during the actual hoisting, one of the cable ties buckled, and the whole mast crashed to the ground. Nobody was injured and the only damage done was to one poor anemometer (RIP brother), but it was a cockup that was due to poor project planning and nothing else.

The night before the tower tumbled, I saw legitimately one of the most beautiful sights of my life. Raphael had literally run off with my camera, but it was one of those moments that I won’t need a camera to remember. For you, my gorgeous little blog readers, I will do my best to describe it:

There was laughter in the air as we downed tools for the evening. The local guys who had been working with us were all having a chuckle practising their English on me, and we posed for a series of boy band style photographs. They waved their goodbyes and headed home. Raphael ran off. Rodel and I started talking about something or other, but soon we were both completely entranced by the colours forming on the other side of the valley. We had just about dried off after the monsoon rains had engulfed us an hour before, and now it was the turn for the other half of town to have their share. The sun was setting behind the hills to my left, and as it hit the thick clouds, they turned to a colour lying somewhere between pink and orange. It wasn’t your archetypal sunset with streaks of colour contrasting against one another, it was one continuous band, stretching down the hill and into the sea. There were no battle scars across the sky, there was no differentiation, it just peacefully graduated from this beautiful pinky orange through to deep blue over the ocean to my right.  Contrasting against the fresh yellows and vibrant greens of rice fields below, it was truly incredible. Every second for fifteen minutes it changed as the variables sun, wind, and cloud mixed together to produce a 900 different paintings each worthy of the finest galleries.

I called it “God’s cinema”.

Right. Enough pretention. Back to reality dreamy heads.

Just so anyone looking at the photos isn’t confused, we had arrived in Looc with 6 people from UP, but after two days, four of them went home, and two days later the SIBAT team had to abandon ship too. We left Raphael, Jun, a local legend named Jordan, and a 45degree tower to go drink brandy with our favourite lashinghero, Tatay Nani of Cabra. No, in all seriousness, we had received word that the pump that we installed on my first field trip had stopped working in Cabra and given we were in the area in made sense to go and check it out.

Stopping the night in the big town of Lubang, at about 8pm the municipal engineer, Arnel, who I met briefly once before, turned up roaring drunk and shouted at me how much he liked me and how much he wanted to have a drink with me. My omphalophobia getting the best of me, outwardly I grinned but inwardly I groaned. Luckily he spared me and selected Rodel to go buy the brandy with him, leaving me watching Iron Man on the telly. Only, they didn’t come back. Two and a half hours later, Rodel returned alone. Apparently, after requiring Rodel to put the key into his headlight-less motorbike, Arnel had changed his mind about drinking and driven (with Rodel on the back) 5km to a local gambling den, lost all of his money, and determined not to end the night a loser, roared back home to get some more, leaving Rodel stranded without a mobile or any idea where we were actually staying. Rodel, to his credit, didn’t want the trip to be wasted so he picked up some brandy and on his belated return we stuck a Mr Bean DVD in the machine and drank to that.

The next day, we made our way to Cabra. The problem was thus: the brand of pump we installed is notorious for problems with its control unit, so we just had to take it off the wall, poke around inside a bit and declare it dead. We packed it up and at some point this week I’m going to go shout at the guy who sold it to us (probably not shout, but y’know). It’s doubly annoying because I’m going back to Cabra on November 1^st to show one of the project funders our wonderful non functioning water supply system, and if she’s not impressed they won’t fund any more projects and that will be mightily frustrating indeed.

We left Cabra the next day with the controller and about 15 kilograms of peanuts as a going away present. On the boat were two cows! They survived but I don’ think it was very comfortable for them!

cattle class

Back on the main land we met up with a sober Arnel and visited yet another project just to check up on it, and everything is going sort of smoothly. Just a few touch ups needed. Arnel invited us over for a drink, again I groaned, but luckily his 26 year old son had some of his mates around so I hung out with them and ate some banging fish called Lapu Lapu. Ten Scott Mills points if you know who Lapu Lapu is without googling it. In fact, you can be top of my postcard list if you’re the first to reply (if you’ve sponsored me).

I’ve now moved through the Bombay Bicycle Club albums, Bon Iver, and two Bryan Adams albums, so I think it’s about time to sign off, never mind the rum. Much peace and love to all and sundry.

EWB are still open for donations!

Photodump: https://plus.google.com/photos/106608639711482833981/albums