April 3, 2008 8:00 a.m.

Today is my last day on Coco Loco, and it began with a tremendous thunder storm. It started around 6:00 this morning and went on for an hour or an hour and a half. I lay in my bed listening to the thunder and the heavy beat of the rain on my thatch roof. There was only one leak and that dripped through the mosquito net onto my leg. A simple shift to the left dealt with that.

The storm is gone now, but the sky is gray and overcast and there is a strong wind. I don’t mind at all. I enjoy change in the weather, and I enjoyed two solid days of sunny weather and snorkeling. It was even better than sunny. There were huge storm clouds over the main island while on Coco Loco it was clear. It was a dramatic scene.

I snorkeled for large parts of the day and continued to be amazed at the coral and the life on it. Robert took me out on the other side and showed me where the best areas were. It’s impossible to say what the highlights were. I saw a stingray and a big moral ell, but the range of interesting and beautiful fish was astonishing. Then there was the fantastic variety of coral. The abundance was almost unnatural – like a crazy person’s painting of extravagance.

On my side of the island, I visited the huge white spotted moray eel agailn. Then I saw a second moray that came far out of his little cave and gave me a fierce show – all stabbing eyes and pointed tteth. I also came across a lion fish that for some reason hung almost head down in the water, his long spine like the remnants of sails torn to shreds by the wind. I shouted to Robert that I’d spotted a lion fish. I was the newbie, blown away by this strange creature. Robert was the experienced guy. He told me that there were lots of lion fish, and even one twice as big as this head down fellow.

Farther out on the reef (it seemed to go on forever) I spotted what seemed to me to be a huge puffer fish. I think these shy fellows with their odd box shape, frantic little hovering fins, and bulging eyes are my favorite. They seem to float rather than swim, and are more than ugly enough to come out the other side of ugly and be quite cute, almost endearing. Next to them in my affections are clearly the clown fish. This is a Finding Nemo side-effect. The clown fish really do seem to brush themselves against the anemones just as Nemo did before school. I also got something of a biology lesson. At first, I thought I was seeing things. All over the sandy bottom, I saw fish near holes in the sand. Then what looked like a small lobster would come out of the hole throwing sand this way and that. When I got close, the fish and the lobster would both retreat backwards into the hole. I spoke to Peter, the local diving instructor, later, and he told me I wasn’t imaging things. The fish were called gobie or gobie shrimp. The gobie had developed a symbiotic relationship with the shrimp. The shrimp dug the hole in the sand and kept it clear. The fish watched for danger. When the fish sensed a threat, it would wriggle its tail. The shrimp are blind and can’t see the threat, but they can sense the wriggling tail, and the two of them would retreat into the hole to safety.

At one point, I was hanging out in shallow water chatting with Robert. He told me that he was an undercover cop in Munich. I could see that. He had a natural kind of cop-thing about him, and I could him picture him in that job. I mentioned the show “The Wire”, and how the cops on that show were ruled by statistics. He said it was true. The trick for him was to arrest one person a day consistently. Then he only worked about 2 hours a day. The rest of the time, he hung out at coffee shops. If he arrested more than that one month, then they’d expect him to do it every month.

I also spent the days reading. I finished “the Tortilla Curtain.” It was a good book overall, but I found it an uneasy mix of comedy and extreme human suffering. The suffering and hate and pain and tragedy in the book were too much at times. It made the book profoundly depressing. Then what I think was meant as comedy came across as unpleasant and jarring. The ending was also unsatisfactory. It was one of those endings that pointed the way, but left it up to your imagination. I can appreciate that, but in this case I felet the book would have been stronger if the author had fleshed it out. In the end, I felt it was a book that didn’t have the courage of its convictions. I remember thinking that it was no “Grapes of Wrath.” It was “Grapes and Wrath” for the lazy and cynical generation.

I also read “The Trail of the Apache Kid” from cover to cover. It was a good old western with a hero who tracked down an evil Apache Indian who had kidnapped his pregnant wife. The hero even had an Indian sidekick who was an expert tracker. Now I’m back to “The Portrait of a Lady.” I’m enjoying it, but I do get tired of that genre where everyone either inherits a fortune or tried to marry someone who has inherited a fortune.

 

Tags: Apache Indian, Coco Loco, Finding Nemo, Palawan Bike Trip, Tortilla Curtain