6 July 2010 Gizo & Ranonga One morning in 2 April 2007, we woke up at home in Cairns. By force of habit, even before breakfast, I turned on the computer and checked BOM, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, for the day's weather. There was a tsunami warning button in red. Blink, blink. Huh? As we had [...]
28 – 30 July 2010 M’Buke Island A jar of lime powder (kambang); a bean-like green stick called mustard (daka) and green betel nuts (buai) Betel nut chewing is a custom or ritual that dates back thousands of years from Asia to the Pacific, a tradition very much a part of modern life in many [...]
28 - 30 July 2010 M'Buke Island, Anun Island & Champoin Island The traditional sailing canoes of M'Buke Islanders Last year in February, when I was still researching WWF Coral Triangle projects to cover for our expedition, I had heard of the traditional community canoe making project of WWF Western Melanesia Programme in M'Buke [...]
28 - 30 June 2010 S2 22.915 E146 49.513 - M'Buke Island S2 18.697 E146 51.595 - Anun Island At low tide, we navigated our small boat through the incredibly healthy coral reefs of Anun Island, M'Buke. Anun and another beautiful island called Champoin are proposed ecotourism sites by the M'Buke Islands People Association [...]
27 April 2010 Woodland Resort, Donsol We have not been to the Butanding Festival since 2003. It was exciting to be here again during the festivities and the fluvial parade was not to be missed. Woodland Resort. The very resort where we hosted our German guests when we used to run whale shark tours from 2000 [...]
24 - 27 April 2010 Woodland Resort, Donsol WWF Research boat with our big Panda flag at the "mast" as we go forth and look for whale sharks in the waters of Donsol Bay To address some important questions about where sharks spend their time and what habtitats are important to them, a [...]
9 – 11 April 2010 The dynamic ADEX organizing team of Publisher John Thet and his editors Asian Diver Jonathan Meur, Asian Geographic Lunita Mendoza, ScubaDiver AA Diego Garcia join us pose with our lovely WWF flag on stage. Editor Lunita Mendoza hugs the Panda Mascot! It was a fabulously planned and executed event! [...]
26 March 2010 Today, I received a birthday greeting from our dear Paul Sunters, the Managing Photo Editor of the WWF Global Photo Network! It is my one year blog anniversary since writing my first entry! Imagine that! I went back to that first entry and thought, "where has the time gone?" And yet we've done so [...]
19 - 20 January 2010 Sometime early November last year, we got an email from Dr. Lida Pet-Soede, WWF Coral Triangle Programme Leader to discuss an idea of having a photo exhibition of our expedition in Manila during the first WWF Coral Triangle Business Summit in January 2010. We knew this was going to be [...]
December 26 Four out of six outrigger boats already in the fishing grounds when we arrived The crew on our ship went fishing by 9:30am. As in all of them! We just got here! They tethered our boat to the rakit and the other smaller outrigger pump boats already in the area tied [...]
