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split tongued spirit

Posted on May 24, 2008 @ 4:28 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, fear, philippines, sailing, swimming

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paraw boracay aynaku illustration travel

Swimming in open sea is my favourite sport: yet it scares me a little. As soon as I jump into the water, some sort of split tongued spirit talks and says out of the vast sea: “maybe you should sink and die”. When the spirit talks louder my worries can’t be denied. But alas, I never gave up. On the contrary I keep my eyes wide open, looking for some potential danger…
The waters out of Boracay’s beach are always damn crowded by fast boats cruising at any time of the day. It is a real hassle, since local pilots seem to care absolutely nothing of swimmers, nor to understand how fragile a floating man is. It’s hard for me to forget the time when a fast paraw nearly broke me down…The reckless driver simply couldn’t see me, I guess because the dusk…

Illustration Friday’s topic is: worry

elettricity

Posted on May 10, 2008 @ 5:54 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, indonesia, philippines, sailing, travel, wordpress

gili trawangan aynaku travel illustration

Lightnings are electrical discharges, giant sparks of electricity, from mature storms. Lightnings cause a lot of electric current to pass through water; wooden boats are not safe at all since the vast majority of lightning injuries and deaths occur on small boats with no cabin…
The short sea passage between Gili Trawangan and Gili Air found me on board a small local boat without a cabin. It is always crucial to listen to the weather on a small aquatic vessel: during that early afternoon at sea, the sky was threatening, thunderstorms were forecast and lightnings too…
When the first powerful strike came and the air filled with static electricity on a giant scale, the anxious boatman pumped up the engine, trying to get the boat fast, trying to get to land and find a safe building: actually it was raining and pouring! The storm went on for half an hour and our navigation turned out to be very uncomfortable…
When we got Gili Air’s sandy beach at last, everything was over: off course!

Illustration Friday’s topic is: elettricity

multiple

Posted on February 23, 2008 @ 11:27 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, fun, philippines, travel, wordpress

multiple aynaku boracay travel illustration

In the Philippines, the western wind is called Habagat and the rainy season comes with it. The rains in Boracay were usually a bit oppressive to me, as the dullness went on for weeks, driving my mood to absolute lethargy; moreover I was running out of money quickly. All of us were waiting for new tourists to come, and waiting for their money too: finally art rescued me.
Silk-screen printing became an exciting activity, really more than a hobby! I bought good white cotton T-shirts and printed them with my own design…
Tourists, I reckoned, ought to like and buy my home printed T-shirts!
With no shop to run, I gave my multiple masterpieces to a local vendor who stuck them up his shop’s wall and said: “I’ll let you know…“
Nothing else to do but wait; I went back to my bungalow and kept on listening as usual, to the radio’s old sweetie American love-songs…

Illustration Friday’s topic is: multiple

lapu lapu

Posted on November 10, 2007 @ 6:30 pm by massimo | Filed under: animals, blog, food, philippines, ukiyo-e, wordpress

Red groupers typically have a stout body and a large mouth. They are not built for long-distance fast swimming. They can be quite large, usually largest fish of the grouper family, and their body, soft dorsal and anal fins, are covered with scales and thick skin.
Lapu Lapu is the Pilipino name …

calamansi

Posted on May 12, 2007 @ 3:34 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, food, philippines, wordpress

Calamansi, is easy to spell, hard to forget, and adds zing when you least expect it! Calamansi is the most commonly grown backyard tree in the Philippines, among the citrus species. It is a small tree with a height of about 2 meters, with broad egg-shaped, …

postmaster

Posted on February 24, 2007 @ 11:12 am by massimo | Filed under: blog, fun, people, philippines, wordpress

With no internet, fax, telephone, even electricity, communications with the outer world was not that easy in Boracay in the early 90’s.
The tiny island was actually set apart fairly and that was its very charm, at least to me. Yet the small concrete-building at one end of the island, …

crash

Posted on February 10, 2007 @ 11:08 am by massimo | Filed under: blog, fear, philippines, wordpress

I always like stormy weather and perhaps I am a hopeless romantic. A few days after I got the island of Boracay were I was about to spend such a long time, in a low-season windy night I went to …

a ghostly place…

Posted on October 22, 2006 @ 11:43 am by massimo | Filed under: blog, fear, philippines, travel, wordpress

I once visited the ancient burial caves in the village of Sagada located in Northen Luzon’s Central Cordillera.
The area is home of the ancient Ifugao tribe, a former head hunters population who made -2000 …

claustrophobia

Posted on September 24, 2006 @ 4:57 pm by massimo | Filed under: blog, diving, people, philippines, wordpress

In clear water at 30 meters, everything is blue-grey; in murky water at the same depth, there maybe no light at all. Here divers consume air rapidly and usually experience nitrogen narcosis that tends …

carabao

Posted on September 9, 2006 @ 5:08 pm by massimo | Filed under: animals, blog, food, people, philippines, wordpress

…plowing the field by the carabao, native water buffalo of the Philippines…
In many regions of the Philippines time is measured by the growth of the rice …

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