THE MEANING OF LIFE
FILIPINO TIME
Back in my heyday, when I had a full head of hair and the waist of my trousers was four inches narrower, I worked for around a-year-and-a-half in the bustling city of Manila. Those days provided me with some of the fondest memories I had whilst working for Singapore Airlines, and through the wonders of Facebook and air travel, I still get to keep in touch with some of the many friends I made there.
As Manila became my temporary home, I tried to immerse myself in the culture of the Filipinos, which meant croaking at a communal karaoke in a restaurant after a day’s work; driving on the wrong side of the road; and getting suited up in my very own barong so that I could pass off as one of the locals. I learnt to count in the Filipino language, speak some quintessential phrases like “ohmygawd!” and “ay nako!”, and discovered that the little boys room was affectionately known as the “comfort room” in Tagalog. Was it any wonder that the toilets were always occupied when I needed one?
I joined in the Filipino national pastime of wandering around shopping malls during the weekends, and learnt to find my way around the alleyways of the Makati commercial district where I lived. I deep dived into tastings of lechon, pancit, bulalog, adobo (and other Filipino delicacies), and considered my culinary immersion complete on the day I ingested some Filipino bacteria, courtesy of an innocuous looking bowl of chicken noodle soup I consumed at a rest stop in a golf course. This invariably led to my involuntary enrolment in a half-hour express Filipino fat burning and detoxification session.
I encountered many situations when meetings would not start on time, and this was almost always inevitably blamed on one of the following:
a. the unpredictable traffic
b. the ageing infrastructure of the roads in Manila
c. acts of God such as typhoons and floods, or
d. all of the above.
Most of the time, the people who had been left waiting, instead of getting flustered, would just shrug their shoulders and pass it off as, “Filipino time”. This, in local urban slang, refers to the ever-shifting global time-zone of the country. More accurately, I was told that Filipino time refers to the moment that things finally happen, or when people finally turn up, however late that is. Soon, I began to also use it in my vocabulary (and in my defense, when I was the guilty party!), as I settled into the routine of daily life in Manila. In fact, being late was in some cases so commonplace even the national airline had an acronym befitting its legendary punctuality record – PAL INC. This, according to a French friend of mine (who speaks based on his first-hand experience), does not stand for Philippine Airlines Incorporated, but “Plane Always Late, If Not Cancelled”.
Another thing that struck me during my stay in the Philippines is how fun-loving Filipinos are. The Filipino seems to be able to find a reason to celebrate anything, and they will celebrate it with gusto. As a testament to this, the Philippines is the ONLY place in the world where I have heard Christmas carols being played in shopping malls from early September. This devotion to the celebration normally results in the cashiers and sales assistants in Rustans and SM Megamall checking in to mental institutions in early December for repeated nightmares of flying reindeer and red-and-white suited burglars. It is therefore no surprise that the Philippines has some of the most colourful and energetic festivals in the world, and I convinced Michelle that we should attend one of these festivals as part of our holiday plans.
Based on a friend’s recommendation, and by comparing pictures and videos of different festivals online, we chose to join in the Sinulog celebrations in Cebu. The festival is one of many in the Philippines that honour Santo Nino (the baby Jesus), and the word Sinulog is loosely translated from a Cebuano adverb that relates to the forward and backward movement of the ocean currents. Therefore, the dances performed during the festival often consist of the movement of two steps forward, and one step back. Contingents from all over the Philippines come to compete in various categories, and each contingent is led by a young festival queen, who carries a statue of the baby Jesus in her arms. The celebrations usually last for a week and culminate in a grand parade and street dance competition on the third Sunday of January, and this typically lasts for almost the whole day.
There was a wealth of information on the official Sinulog Festival website to aid in our planning, and we discovered that if we registered to participate in the Sinulog Photographers Competition, this would enable us to get a pass to walk along the procession route with the dancing contingents (and get photos up close and personal!). So, we signed up for the contest, and flew in two days before the grand parade. After picking up our photo IDs, we headed back to our hotel to rest.
There was a whole host of activities planned during the festival but we zoomed in on what we wanted to shoot, based primarily on the categories of the photography competition. Timings for these events were listed on the official site so we planned our movements accordingly. Given my experience with “Filipino time”, I figured that some of these events were likely to start later than the stipulated time, but nonetheless we planned to be at the venues at least half an hour to an hour before to get a good spot.
On the night that we arrived, we headed to the Cebu City Sports Centre for the Sinulog Festival Queen Coronation. As it was scheduled to start at 7.30pm, we left early and reached the centre at 6.30pm. By then, many people had taken their seats and we managed to squeeze in and find a spot between some of the official media team. The event started right on time, and before the actual coronation, we witnessed 13 teams taking part in elaborate stage performances complete with larger-than-life props, each of them fronted by their festival queen. When the stage performances concluded, the festival queens came out for a pageant decked out in extravagant costumes, most with tall headgear, huge glittery backboards, and some replete with strobe or neon lights. Some of the costumes looked so heavy on the slender build of the contestants that it was probably a miracle that none of them fell off the stage, and fortunately, the event ended without a wardrobe malfunction.
When we returned back to the hotel, I set my alarm for 5am to give us time to get to the venue of the Fluvial Procession, where the Miraculous Image of Santo Nino was to be brought by a sea-faring vessel to the Cebu Port. This was scheduled to start at 6am the next morning, but having mistakenly set the timer for 5pm instead, we woke up at 6.20am and panicked. We jumped out of bed, hastily washed up, and managed to get to the venue before 7am, only to discover that the boats had not arrived, and the roads leading to the pier were blocked by the authorities. A crowd of locals had gathered on either side of the road, and so we waited with them for the procession to arrive. Thankfully we did not have to wait long, and we got our photos as we walked along with the contingent and street dancers from the Port to the Basilica Minore del Santo Nino, the oldest church in Cebu.
We then managed to hail a cab and headed back to our hotel. Whilst in the taxi, we struck up a conversation with the cab driver, an elderly gentleman with silver hair and a suntanned complexion. He was quite curious about our visit to Cebu, and naturally, we started talking about the festival. “The grand parade starts at 8 o’clock,” he said. “You must be there early!” The official programme had the parade starting at 9am, but we thanked him anyway for his advice and made a mental note. In any case, we had intended to have an early start anyway to try and get some shots of the preparation and rehearsals before the actual parade.
The next event that day was the Solemn Procession of the Miraculous Image of Santo Nino. During this event, the statue is carried in a circular route through the main streets of Cebu, and the faithful follow behind on foot. This was scheduled to start at 2pm from the Basilica, so we watched a bit of TV before heading out for lunch just before noon. At around 12.30pm we started heading towards the Basilica, keen to look around the church before the procession started. But as we walked along our chosen route to the Basilica, we noticed a lot of activity on the adjacent street. To satisfy our curiosity, we walked over to see what the commotion was about. Lo and behold, the procession had already started! Somebody obviously forgot to update the official website!
We jumped right into the crowd and started photographing the procession. After walking for around half an hour, we ran ahead of the procession, and up an overhead bridge. There were large full-body length canvas advertisements on either side of the bridge, but the army of photographers that were already there had torn holes in them, so we managed to get some shots from the elevated position. Satisfied we had the photos we needed for the contest, we went back and took a nap, but not before re-checking the festival schedule which had been printed and posted at the front entrance of the hotel.
Later that afternoon we started making our way to the Cebu SM Megamall, where the fireworks competition was to be held at 7pm in the evening. We intended to leave the hotel at 4pm, but could not get a cab as the whole central business area had been cordoned off to traffic due to the Solemn Procession, which was still circling the city. One of the hotel employees then offered to take us to the mall in his two-seater mini-truck, and in defiance of Cebu traffic regulations, Michelle and I squeezed into the passenger seat next to the driver, but we only got as far as ten blocks before the roads became impassable to vehicular traffic. We then had to walk the rest of the way, and fortunately made it there despite getting a bit lost in a local barangay (village).
The fireworks began about half an hour after the scheduled start time, which was fine, but we then had a nightmare coming home. The cab queue at the mall did not move, and we watched on in anguish as cab after cab entered the driveway, but instead of taking passengers from the cab queue, picked up random people waiting at the side, or drove off without picking any passengers. One by one, the crowd in the queue turned to summoning Uber drivers, as we cursed our frugality for not activating mobile data for our trip, and for not being able to tap into free wi-fi! We gave up after almost ninety minutes with our butts numb from balancing on the cab queue railings, and walked out to the dark streets, where we finally hailed a cab (after waiting another twenty minutes), and paid an exorbitant premium over the metered fare to get back to our hotel.
The next morning, with the words of the cab driver fresh in our minds, we headed out before 8am to catch the Grand Parade. Some contingents were busy rehearsing but most of the participants were just sitting around, busy taking selfies, or touching up their costumes or make-up. As we walked along the procession route, there did not seem to be a defined start or end point, and all along the route we saw colourful floats, dance contingents, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers – whose shuttle had encountered a hyper-drive malfunction, causing it to crash land in Cebu. We watched several dance contingents rehearsing, most of them hi-energy routines that involved elaborate dance patterns and movements around the festival queens. We chanced upon a really friendly contingent from Dumaguete, and stayed with them for almost an hour as they practiced and huddled in prayer before the event.
By around nine-thirty in the morning, most of the contingents had rehearsed several times where they were formed up, yet there was no indication when the event was to begin. By now, some of the performers had loosened a couple of buttons, taken off their hats, and tried to find some shade as the temperature began to rise to uncomfortable levels. Beads of sweat could be spotted on many of the performers, and the make-up teams were going berserk trying to prevent the festival queens from looking like the Joker in Batman.
Another hour passed, and finally the parade started as the contingents rose to walk in formation through the parade route. There were several performance locations along the route, where the judges for the competition were situated, and so we hurried on to the nearest one and made our base there. One by one the contingents marched in and gave their best shot in front of the judges, and each time the army of photographers (ourselves included) fought tooth and nail like paparazzi to get a coveted spot to shoot their performance. Interspersed between the contingents were the floats, some with hand-waving and air-kissing media celebrities who sent the crowd into screaming frenzies and spontaneous marriage proposals. The screaming was so intense for some celebrities I was half expecting undergarments to be flung in the direction of the floats.
The parade and performances continued well into the afternoon, and by around 3pm we were thoroughly sunburnt and spent. The sun had positively sapped all our energy and we had just about heard enough repeats of the anthem “I love Cebu!” to send us scurrying back to the peace and quiet of our hotel. We took a quick shower, and then it was lights out till 5.30pm, so that we would be refreshed for the Grand Finale, which according to the official website, was supposed to start at 7pm. When we got up, we changed into new clothes, walked out, grabbed a quick bite at a Jollibee, and headed to the Sports Centre around 6.15pm. There was plenty of time to spare, or so we thought...
As we walked into the lane that led to the entrance of the Sports Centre, I saw a festival queen walking out with some performers – only this time, she had stripped off her headgear and shoulder pads. I thought it odd that she wasn’t participating in the finale, and it was even more odd when there was no security, and no organisers checking our passes to get into the centre grounds. We hurried in, sensing something was amiss, and discovered that the programme was nearing its conclusion! Who moved the programme earlier? How did the rest of the people that were here know about this change? And why the hell wasn’t the official programme updated…again?
As the finale beckoned I set up my tripod close to the official media crew and pointed the camera upwards to capture the fireworks (which had been listed in the programme). But after a single brief burst of flares, the hosts thanked everyone, and the performers moved around the stage waving to the crowd as the event wound down. I turned to the media crew and asked them about the fireworks. They gave me puzzled looks, and the eldest one pulled his glasses down, looked at me, and said, “fireworks? No, my friend, no fireworks this year.”
We didn’t manage to take any good pictures of the closing ceremony, but we did leave Cebu with a valuable lesson. What we learnt is that the concept of Filipino time is not actually just synonymous with delays, lateness or postponements – that is only half the meaning of the term. The true meaning of Filipino time lies in a very complex national consciousness where the locals just know when things are going to happen (or not!), be it earlier or later than whatever the official time is listed as. Visitors to this wonderful archipelago of more than seven thousand islands should therefore not just rely on official programmes or schedules, but go with the flow and always ask a Filipino!
WHY DID THE WILDEBEEST CROSS THE RIVER?
It was on the 10th anniversary of our first safari adventure when Michelle and I decided it was time to go for another. But this time, we swapped the grasslands of Kruger for the plains of the Serengeti to witness the annual migration of wildebeest – a grand spectacle of nature, where millions of these beasts make a daunting 800-kilometre round trip every year across the plains and rivers of the Masai Mara and the Serengeti. It is a trip fraught with perils and dangers – with natural obstacles in the landscape, and a whole slew of predators lurking in the shadows, and especially in the rivers. Africa therefore has its own equivalent of the one of life’s profound riddles – instead of asking “why did the chicken cross the road?”, here in Tanzania, the question you should be asking is, “why did the wildebeest cross the river?’
To get equally profound answers to this question, we were joined on our tour by another couple – Michelle’s BFF1 and her husband. Together, we embarked on an 8-day adventure through the many diverse regions and landscapes of the United Republic of Tanzania.
Before reaching the Serengeti, we visited several other parks in the country. The first of these was Tarangire National Park, in Northeastern Tanzania, an area famous for its elephant migrations. During our game drives, we came across several herds of these gentle giants, and the way some of them stared at us made me feel as if they were studying us in some way. Maybe they were on their guard and suspicious of our intentions? Maybe they were curious? Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted to communicate, and order some takeaway?
We spent an incredible night in our safari tents in Tarangire, surrounded on all sides by nothing but the forest and its inhabitants, and were promptly woken up at dawn by the sound of a lion roar just outside one of the tents. Later, as the rays of the morning sun filtered in, we heard the rhythmic drumming sound of a woodpecker right outside our door giving us another wake-up call. After washing up and waiting for our concierge to pick us up, we watched in awe as two elephants walked through the morning mist, in close proximity, right past our safari tent.
We then flew on to Lake Manyara National Park, which is supposed to be the go-to place in Tanzania to view pink flamingoes. Unfortunately, due to a combination of unsustainable farming and other human activities around the lake, the water levels were extremely low. This meant the flamingoes had packed their belongings and left home for wetter pastures, and so our guide told us to look out instead for tree-climbing lions. We strained our necks looking up all around us as we went through the forested areas of the park, but all we had to show for our neck aerobics was the sighting of one toucan and a rare blue monkey. On other parts of the drive, we saw a large herd of hippos, more elephants, and a couple of beautiful and graceful giraffes feeding on some bushes. We also came across a noisy gathering of flea-picking, teeth-baring, and butt-mooning baboons, who should have all probably been rounded up and arrested for indecent exposure.
Our next destination was the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a vast volcanic crater teeming with wildlife, and reputedly, one of the best places in the world to see the big five – lions, leopards, buffalos, rhinos and elephants. It really did live up to its billing, and within the crater, we came across large herds of wildebeest, buffalo, elephants and zebras. We also gatecrashed the cocktail party of a large pride of a dozen sunbathing lionesses, and the newborn parties of two hippos at a watering hole, although we kept our distance for fear of the bouncers. In any case, the rhino, the jackal and the ostrich were not invited either, and were wandering around aimlessly in the park on their own.
We also had anxious moments at a lake inside the crater, when a lone elephant dropped its GPS2 and wandered into the vehicle parking area. When this happened, all the smart humans jumped into their vehicles, whilst a couple of highly-insured and mentally-challenged suicidal ones approached the elephant, who mock-charged at them and sent them scurrying for cover behind the vehicles.
Oddly though, among all the amazing animal sightings in the crater, what I would remember most of our experience there, were the zebras that kept crossing the roads in the crater in front of our vehicle, as if to remind us that they have a road feature named after them.
After the appetisers, we moved on to the main course and spent several days in the Serengeti, where we were hoping to witness the chaos and the drama of the wildebeest crossing the river. As luck would have it, we managed to witness a grand total of five of these crossings. One was a fairly mundane affair, but the rest, like life itself, had some comedy, some drama, some frustration, and in the end, a bittersweet aftertaste. Since there were five crossings, here are five answers to explain why the wildebeest crossed the river.
Someone told them the grass is greener on the other side.
Even though we are always told that the grass is not always greener on the other side, the wildebeest just have to keep crossing crocodile-infested rivers to find out. Every year, the carnage is grisly, and the fatalities run into tens of thousands. Not all the deaths are attributable to drowning or crocodile attacks, but a large portion of them are.
One of the first things our guide brought us to see was a section of the river, filled with hundreds of bloated wildebeest carcasses, and smelling like the open graveyard of hundreds of wet sneakers. It may not have been Michelin-starred, but this was a steak restaurant that you could not afford to miss out on. You could order any cut of beef you wanted, and there was so much rib-eye, sirloin, and filet mignon, that the vultures there looked obese and badly in need of a zumba session.
As cruel and heartbreaking as it is, the wildebeests that do survive the river crossings are usually rewarded with a healthier diet and fresher salad options.
They gnu where to go.
The name “wildebeest” simply means “wild beast” in Dutch, and “wild cattle” in Afrikaans, so the wildebeest are actually free roaming, undomesticated cows. However, instead of mooing, these “cows” make an irritating “ga-noo” sound, and therefore some people refer to them as gnu. Males that control the best bits of grass and make the most obnoxious “ga-noo” noises are the most attractive to the females, which seems to draw parallels in the human world for males that possess the best real estate and the gift of the gab. But since the silly beasts keep ingesting the best parts of their real estate, they keep having to find new locations, and therefore have to keep migrating and crossing rivers to find these places.
Each “ga-noo” call is unique to each animal, which makes it easier for mothers and calves to locate each other in the dark. It also makes it easier for adults to find their partners during their massive orgies that produce close to half a million calves each year, with all of the babies popping out within a three-week period at the beginning of each year. Since we were there in September, we didn’t manage to witness the sex parties, but had to be content with watching two juvenile male wildebeests trying, and failing, to get it on with a female that looked as interested in sex as a woman on her period.
It thought it was a lemming.
Lemmings migrate in herds in search of food and shelter, when population densities become too high in one location. When a mass of lemmings crosses a river or (heaven forbid) attempts to swim the ocean, some inevitably drown, thus leading to the misconception of lemmings as the brainless, suicidal squads of the animal world.
Misconceptions aside, the lemmings have good company. In Tanzania, the local tribesmen of the Serengeti refer to wildebeest as “sifuri ubongo” – which translates more or less to “zero brains” in Swahili.
Our guide explained to us that they can never really tell when a crossing will take place, as nobody can identify the brave (or stupid) wildebeest that will be the first to jump into the water. Sometimes various wildebeests will go over to the water’s edge, and just wait, and they have even been known to wait at one location for days. We had a small taste of what this was like, as we waited two hours on one side of the river waiting for a large gathering of leaderless wildebeest to cross.
When one wildebeest does decide to jump into the water, our guide added, all the rest will follow, even if there is a party of predators in the water. Sometimes, none of them jump willingly, but because so many of them crowd round the water’s edge, one or some inevitably get pushed or accidentally fall into the water, and the melee ensues. Once the herd has crossed, because of their herd mentality and apparent absence of brain cells, it is not entirely uncommon for a disoriented member to lead the herd right back across the river from which they came from.
It wanted to play a game of snap with the crocodiles.
As sadistic as it sounds, I was quietly hoping to see a crocodile attempt to bring down a wildebeest, but we had no such luck, probably because the meals had already been abundantly catered for by the number of carcasses in the river. Instead what we saw was a heartbreaking situation when the crossing herd got caught by the current and were dragged to a deeper part of the river, A stampede ensued, causing the majority of them to panic and drown. The few that survived turned around and went back across the river, trudging past a semi-submerged crocodile, that appeared completely disinterested.
A somewhat spine chilling fact is that some crocodiles attack wildebeest not for food, but for sport. To relieve their boredom, they play their favourite game of snap with the wildebeests, and most of the time they usually win.
At the end of the day, notwithstanding the science and behavioral analyses, Occam’s Razor provides us the best explanation to the riddle of why the wildebeest crossed the river. What is it you might ask?
Because it was not a chicken.
Enough said.
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1 Best Friends Forever
2 Global Positioning System.