Ukuleles

A few weeks ago I returned to Saigon from the Philippines. When I stumbled into my room around 3 a.m., I found an oddly shaped bag on my bed. On top of the bag was a note from my roommate John. It read, more or less, 'Here's a birthday present that you can hopefully use to pick up chicks one day.' I unzipped the bag to reveal a handsome, dark brown ukulele inside. My eyes welled with tears at the selfless beauty of John's gesture. With great tenderness I placed the ukulele on top of my wardrobe and promptly forgot about it for two weeks.

The uke - when you want to play music, but don't have the patience to learn a real instrument.

With the notable exceptions of Thomas Pynchon and middle-aged white guys in Hawaiian shirts, few people are willing to publicly admit their fondness for the ukulele. Even Pynchon himself once described ukulele players as, 'feckless, clownlike children who will not grow up.' In the pantheon of ridiculous instruments, the uke is eclipsed only by the accordion and kazoo. It lacks the face-melting badassitude of the electric guitar, the hipness of the bass, or percussion's cacophonous fury.

However, the ukulele does hold three major advantages over other, cooler instruments. First, it is cheap. John later admitted that he chose the uke as a gift mostly because, 'I don't like you enough to splurge on a guitar.' Second, it is small. While unimpressive as a living room centerpiece, the uke's compact size makes it the perfect travel instrument. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is easy* to play.

*Relatively.

For the musically-incompetent, this last fact cannot be emphasized enough. The attics of the world are filled with dusty mandolins, trumpets, and digeridoos heartlessly cast aside by frustrated owners who quickly despaired of ever mastering their respective instruments and went back to watching reruns of Duck Dynasty. My own attempts at learning the acoustic guitar petered out after a week when I proved spectacularly inept at strumming, a massive disappointment considering my former dominance of Guitar Hero on PlayStation2. Life fails to imitate art, often humiliatingly.

So a few days ago, after gingerly stumbling through a disjointed version of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', I was almost catatonic with joy. For the next two hours I played the same chords over and over again, delighted by the almost-recognizable tune I produced with only a cheap box of wood and a few nylon strings. For the first time ever I had blisters on my fingers.

There is something incredibly pathetic about a grown man's pride in learning a new skill. Although I managed to refrain from humblebragging about my accomplishment on the internet ('took all day but finally got the E7 chord lol'), I was unable to resist casually mentioning my newfound uke talents to friends and co-workers. I even showed off a bit of fingerpicking to my parents on Skype, like an 8-year old who just learned how to whistle. 'Hey Mom, check out this intro to 'Dust in the Wind! Mom? Mom? MOM!'

We expect this kind of needy attention-seeking from children, because children are generally useless human beings who require validation for the smallest of accomplishments. Kids get a gold star for not shitting their pants (literally, in many cases). Adults, on the other hand, are supposed to have outgrown this need for constant approval. We should be able to acquire a new talent or ability without taping proof to the refrigerator.

Where the magnets at?

My generation forgot to learn this lesson. The smallest act of self-improvement needs to be shared with the world, so everyone can be impressed that you jogged 2 km on the treadmill and did a couple pushups before breakfast. Ideally there should be an app for this, so you can receive anonymous kudos from similarly insecure people who are also desperate to be congratulated for their slightest progress in the Sisyphean ordeal of human existence. Also, you'd probably like a cookie.

I'm one of these people. I am a Millennial. I am unmarried, I do not own a home, and I have never held the same job for more than a year. I have no pets, investments, or marketable skills besides a U.S. passport and the ability to talk American pretty OK. I do not volunteer, speak a foreign language fluently, or cook edible meals. I have voted precisely once, writing in 'Turd Ferguson' during the 2008 presidential election.

But I can play two songs on the ukulele, three if you count the refrain to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'. And I devoted most of the afternoon to telling you all about this.

Life is absurd.

Shipwrecked

Statistically speaking, scuba diving is less dangerous than having a baby or driving to work. It is only slightly more lethal than table tennis. Your odds of perishing underwater are roughly 200,000-to-1. Your chances of being murdered on the way to Whole Foods, on the other hand, are 18,000-to-1. As always, the lesson is to quit your job and eat all the gluten-drenched trans fats you want. Also, don't have kids.

These comforting statistics were remarkably easy to forget the first time I penetrated a shipwreck. Breathing underwater is about the most unnatural thing a human being can do, short of laying eggs. It is a very deliberate slap in the face of reason, which may explain why so many people enjoy it. Like me, for example. However, breathing underwater while willingly swimming into a pitch-black aquatic labyrinth/tomb is more like punching reason in the nose and stealing its purse, then using its credit cards to buy $700 worth of indoor marshmallow roasters. Sure, you could do that (it wouldn't even be that hard, really), but why?

Well, you could probably see a lot of interesting marine life down there. After all, a shipwreck is basically a giant artificial reef, and reefs are teeming with Nemos and Flounders and all the other cuddly anthropomorphic sweethearts of the sea, right?

Just keep swimming, mother*****.

Sure they are! They're right next to the lovable stonefish, the most venomous little bastard in the Pacific and a creature widely considered to cause the worst pain known to man. And to your left we can see the unmistakable fin rays of the lionfish - you can pet them if you don't mind the subsequent paralysis, heart failure, and death. Also, if you like to be spooked by camouflaged prehistoric hellbeasts, there's a scorpionfish! And a crocodile fish!

Like when you found the cat sleeping in your cereal bowl, if your cat's whiskers could kill you.

Why are the pretty ones always venomous?

No touching!

At this point, it seems that wreck diving is mainly an opportunity for divers to either: A) get lost in a vast underwater maze, panic, and drown, or B) get stung by a venomous sea creature, suffer excruciating pain, and then drown. So why would anyone in his/her right mind decide to go wreck diving?

For me, the answer was found in a book called Shadow Divers. It focused on two American wreck divers and their quest to identify a mystery U-boat which sank off the coast of New Jersey. Although Shadow Divers is nonfiction it reads like a novel, full of boozed-up skippers and underwater piracy and, of course, Nazis.  It also presents a frank depiction of the dangers of wreck diving. The U-Who, as the mystery sub was called, claimed the lives of many top-notch divers. Worst were the deaths of Chris and Chrissy Rouse, a father-son team who succumbed to decompression sickness ('the bends') after making an emergency ascent to the surface from nearly 70m/230ft, their blood literally bubbling in their veins.

Still, when I finished the book I could not wait to dive a wreck. For a lifelong history nerd the appeal was obvious. I'd spent much of my childhood reading about the savage naval battles of the Pacific during World War II. Here was a chance to combine my love of the past with my love of the sea. And maybe take some cool pictures along the way.

~

Coron is a small island in the Philippines, slightly north of Palawan. There is absolutely nothing to do in the town proper, nor in the surrounding area, which is mountainous and densely forested. If you don't speak scuba, Coron may be the single most boring town in the Philippines.

However, Coron boasts some of the best wreck-diving in the world. The neighboring seas are littered with Japanese ships sunk by an American airstrike during World War II. Some of the wrecks are quite shallow, less than 18m/60ft beneath the surface. Others are much deeper - on one dive we reached a depth of 37m/121ft, near the limit for recreational diving. There are oil tankers, seaplane tenders, troop transports, and gunboats. The water is a balmy 30°C/86°F, and marine life is abundant. In short it is a novice wreck diver's paradise.

I dived with a group called Rocksteady. They are, to the best of my knowledge, the only Rastafarian-themed / German-owned diveshop on the island. I decided to complete a Wreck Diver Specialty course, which is basically an overpriced confirmation from the global pyramid scheme known as PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors or, as it is colloquially known, Put Another Dollar In) that its holder is not completely incompetent underwater. I chose Rocksteady because its staff were courteous, professional, and safety-oriented, and also because their boats were painted like giant bongs.

The Coast Guard must be constantly pulling these guys over.

The first time I dived on a wreck, all I could think about was Rose, that chick from Titanic. Not that one, this one. As I swam through the dark, twisted passages of the wreck I heard her shaky old lady voice narrating an imaginary history of the ship. I laughed when she described how they used the squatters at sea. Man, she's old.

Submerged commode.

Other sights were far more sobering. At one point, I passed through a large, shadowy room behind my Filipino dive instructor. He turned to look at me, and seemed to scratch his cheek. I struggled to remember what this meant in complicated scuba sign language. I checked my gauges, dive computer, hoses...everything, but he still kept scratching his cheek. Finally he wiggled his dive torch at a barnacle-encrusted shelf, and I realized what he was trying to show me. It was a human jawbone.

No humans in this cargo hold, luckily.

I took no pictures of the remains, out of equal parts respect and superstition. It was my first personal experience with a harsh, undeniable truth: the ocean is a wonderland, but it is also a graveyard.   The danger and the beauty can't be separated.

That's why we always go back.

Mr. Nick Goes to Prison

Like most people who have seen Shawshank Redemption I have a keen interest in not going to prison. For one thing, I find orange jumpsuits unflattering. And aside from softball games and amateur winemaking courses, most jailhouse pastimes involve entirely too much stabbing for my taste. So you can imagine my discomfort as I stood outside the main gates of Sablayan Prison and Penal Farm, sweating profusely under the hot equatorial sun and wondering why the hell I was here.

~

Welcome to prison!

The Philippines penal system occasionally takes an interesting approach to rehabilitation. The famous dancing inmates of Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) have received international acclaim for their performance of Michael Jackson's Thriller, which has nearly fifty-three million views on YouTube. Prisoners at the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa practice yoga and meditation through a course sponsored by The Art of Living humanitarian movement.

In Sablayan, the inmates watch birds.

~

Visiting the prison was Marie's idea. My sole objective in Sablayan was to leave as quickly as possible. But Marie had read something about a penal farm in her Lonely Planet guidebook, and she wanted to see it. The desk clerk at the ecotourism office thought she was insane, but happily agreed to arrange visitor's passes for a nominal fee. After paying said nominal fee, along with a very un-nominal fee for the dirtbike, we were on our way.

The woman in red is smiling because she just robbed me blind.

~

Before arriving in the Philippines I had no intention of visiting the prison, or even the island on which it stands. I planned to travel from the touristy island paradise of Boracay to El Nido, a slightly less touristy island paradise famous for its picturesque sunsets and spectacular karst formations. Instead, thanks to a slight miscalculation involving a ferry and two cities with identical names, I wound up 630 km from my intended destination in the backwater town of Sablayan, where there are no tourists.

And so I found myself atop a battered dirtbike, with a terrified French-Canadian girl whom I'd met the day before clinging to the back, racing furiously out of town.

~

Thirty minutes and eleventy-billion potholes later, we arrived at the prison. As we pulled off the main road, I noticed a small sign with the words 'DO NOT PICK UP MALE HITCHHIKERS' painted in urgent red letters. Continuing down the dirt path, we passed a gaggle of inmates carrying long bamboo poles. They stopped in their tracks to stare at Marie. Their smiles could best be described as predatory. I sped up.

Once we reached the main prison complex, we were directed to the administration office. There we waited while the warden finished the final touches on his new screenplay and eventually approved our visitor's passes. Meanwhile, a horde of secretaries fussed over Marie and cast venomous glances my way. Apparently they felt prison was no place for a pretty foreign lady. I didn't have the energy to explain that visiting this den of thieves and rapists was in fact her idea.

Freshly stamped papers in hand, we walked out of the warden's office and headed back to the main gates. We passed the prison hospital, which appeared to be completely empty. Apparently the inmates of Sablayan Prison and Penal Farm enjoyed perpetual good health.

This song was stuck in my head the whole time.

Back at the main gate we waited again while a different set of guards double-checked our passes. We sat on stools in the cramped, dark shack and made small talk with a group of Filipina prostitutes who had come to visit their incarcerated menfolk. The girls were flirtatious and light-hearted; two of them asked if I was married, while another gushed over Marie's curly hair. They were the nicest hookers I've ever met in prison. They carried small bags of candy and gifts for their men, which they would presumably trade for cigarettes and...backrubs, maybe.

Soon the guard returned with our passes, and we were free to enter the compound. 'It is illegal to give the prisoners drugs or weapons,' he added cheerfully as he shut the gate behind us. I felt like I was entering the world's least-fun human zoo. But I revved the engine and we scooted off into the bowels of the penal farm.

~

Sablayan Prison and Penal Farm occupies an area of over 16,000 hectares, a unit of measurement as meaningless to me as a smoot or potrzeble. However I can say with reasonable certainty that it is really, really big. So big, in fact, that we spent the next hour meandering aimlessly in search of something besides hills and rice paddies. Periodically we passed checkpoints manned by bored shirtless men who chuckled at the sight of two foreigners staring helplessly around at the endlessly repetitive scenery. The area was beautiful, no doubt, but so are many areas that aren't crawling with violent criminals.

Finally we passed an army outpost, and I stopped to ask for directions. The soldiers were surprisingly friendly. One of them put down the heavy black assault rifle he was cleaning and helpfully pointed us in the direction of the prison lake, which he assured us was quite beautiful. He and his buddies waved goodbye as we headed back onto the road. Later I would find out that a prisoner had escaped the day before, and the soldiers were very much looking forward to catching him and shooting him full of holes. 'Dead or alive, dead no problem!', one inmate cheerfully explained.

Basically what you'd expect from an average lake.

The lake was indeed beautiful, though there is only so much fun you can have at a lake without a fishing rod or jet ski. We left after a few minutes, and set out for the Inmates Recreation Facility.

~

At the rec center, a tall muscular guard escorted two prisoners over to us and introduced them with the enthusiasm of a third-grader reading poetry. Their names were Ricky and Manuel, and they would guide us on a trek up the heavily forested mountain to see the local waterfall. Marie looked mildly horrified at the idea of wandering into the jungle with two convicts. I looked mildly horrified at the idea of hiking in flip-flops.

Manuel was a small, thin man who looked to be in his mid-forties. His main job was to scurry ahead of us and smoke hand-rolled prison cigarettes impatiently while Marie and I pulled our sandals out of the muddy path and tried not to step on anything venomous. I don't believe he said a single word the entire afternoon.

Ricky was a different character entirely. He spoke perfect English and chattered incessantly from the minute we left the rec center. As it turned out, he and Manuel were the prison's two foremost bird experts, trained to identify the numerous endemic species that dwelt in the thick jungle around the penal colony. He told us that most visitors to the prison were hardcore aviphiles who were quite happy to tramp through the mountains for hours, then sit motionlessly for additional hours while they waited for a kingfisher or imperial pigeon to flutter into view. Ricky proudly informed us that he was able to discern a bird's species, gender, and age simply from the call of its voice. Looking into his broad, smiling face I felt ashamed of my lack of interest in bird calls.

Turns out the streamwater was totally potable. Refreshing!

Marie's sandal-clad feet were already bruised and bloody from the unforgiving jungle trail, so we decided to turn back when we reached the mountain stream. She wiggled her toes in the clean cool water and Manuel sat on a rock and chain-smoked while I stood and talked with Ricky. He seemed disappointed that we weren't interested in continuing the hike. It was obvious that he took great pride in his birdwatching abilities, and he seemed to sincerely enjoy sharing his gift with others. I was deeply impressed by his genuine warmth and thoughtfulness. I never asked him why he was in prison.

Eventually we made our way down the mountain and across a rice paddy. 'We have no irrigation,' said Ricky as I stared at the verdant fields, 'so we must wait for the rain. All in God's hands.'

When we returned to the rec center, we said goodbye to Ricky and Manuel as the guard led them back into the fenced-off compound. Some inmates were playing basketball on a cracked asphalt court. Others stood around and stared at us, and once again I had the horrible feeling that I was a paying customer at a human zoo. I waved goodbye to Ricky and wished him good luck in the future. I have no idea what 'good luck' entails in his world, but I hope he gets lots of it.

Marie and I climbed back on the bike. I kicked it into gear and pulled back onto the dirt path. Minutes later we reached the main road, where we reentered the free world. We had that luxury.

Balut

Imagine the most delicious food you've ever tried. Maybe you're thinking of a thick ribeye steak, grilled medium rare and dripping with savory juices. Or perhaps a fresh tropical pineapple, plucked straight from the tree and chilled to perfection on a block of crisp, clear ice. If you have a sweet tooth, you might have pictured a rich chocolate eclair drizzled in decadent caramel icing.

Keep that image in your mind, and visualize the sensations of your first bite. Envision the sublime texture between your teeth. Allow yourself to be swept away by the intoxicating aroma, and recall that transcendent moment when your mouth becomes a garden of earthly delights. Then imagine this process repeating over and over again, the pleasure growing more exquisite with every bite. Finally you dab your mouth with a napkin and recline lazily. Your belly is full and round; you pat it with blissful tenderness. You smile and sip your digestif, basking in the afterglow of a toe-curling foodgasm.

Eating balut is just like this, only the exact opposite.

~

To the naked eye, a balut looks much the same as any egg. Depending on the species of bird, the shell may be white or speckled, or even a dark brownish hue. It is only after the shell is cracked that you realize something is horribly, horribly wrong.

God's cruelest mistake.

If you've ever eaten a hard boiled egg and thought, 'This is nice, but I wish there were more feathers, claws, and leathery membranes,' then balut would be an excellent food to try after your release from the sanitarium. 

Balut are allegedly popular throughout Southeast Asia, and have recently ascended to near-mythic status in the region's street grub pantheon. Several years ago noted asshole and food enthusiast Anthony Bourdain sampled one in Saigon's Ben Thanh Market, sparking a new wave of balut fever (with congruent nausea and violent diahhrea). Balut challenges have also appeared on 'Fear Factor', 'Survivor', 'Ultimate Fighter', and many other TV shows popular amongst idiots. Today, most grizzled backpackers can tell at least three balut-related stories which are all synopsized with the tidy platitude, '...but actually it wasn't that bad!'

I assure you these people are full of shit.

~

 In Vietnam, in-shell aborted avian fetuses are known as hot vit lon. They are a popular food amongst impotent middle aged men, social degenerates and alcoholics. Upstanding Vietnamese citizens do occasionally eat them as well, presumably to horrify their foreign friends. I have been forced to try hot vit lon several times during the past year by my local chums. The eggs are quite small, half the size of one's thumb. As such, they can be gulped quickly in a single mouthful without chewing. I have always considered these bite-sized treats as a fairly innocuous dinner time diversion, like eating a handful of jalapenos or snorting a line of salt. 

When I visited the Philippines in August with my sisters Lizzie and Alexa, I insisted that we try some of the infamous balut, figuring that my battle-hardened stomach would have no problem with a slightly larger version of the familiar hot vit lon. I had forgotten the time honored aphorism that size matters.

~

On my sisters' final night in Boracay, we gathered with some friends for a seafood barbecue on the beach. Together with my Irish roommate Kieran and some Filipino friends named Cathy and Brandon, we gawked at the restaurant's wriggling menu of freshly-caught lobsters, crabs, prawns, snapper, and lapu-lapu. After placing our orders we relaxed at the table with several pitchers of icy mango mojitos, digging our toes in the sand and savoring our last evening together.

Alexa and I were trying to convince Lizzie to get matching sibling tattoos when Cathy, a lovely Filipino girl whom I would later want to strangle, was approached by an itinerant food vendor bearing a large styrofoam box on his shoulders. They spoke in rapid-fire Tagalog, a beautiful melodic language full of soft sounds and rolled consonants. I was so entranced by their hypnotic conversation that I failed to realize the vendor was selling balut.

Minutes later we were staring at the giant, heavy white eggs in our hands as Cathy and Brandon gave detailed instructions on how to properly consume the fertilized chicken embryos. Here is a condensed transcript:

1) Never, ever look in the egg.

2) Crack open the top. 

3) Pour in vinegar and soy sauce.

4) Guzzle the embryo juice cocktail.

5) You didn't look inside, did you?

6) Stop crying and peel the egg.

7) Seriously, don't look.

8) Eat the deformed baby chicken curled around its thick, curdled yolk.

9) Pick the feathers and beak out of your teeth.

10) Renounce your faith in the goodness of humanity.

Before we ate the balut, we looked like this. 

When we finished, we looked like this:

But actually, it wasn't that bad.