JudyB
Queen of the Nuts
This is the understatement of the year...
Heading Out - At Least Temporarily
- Thread starter grouper52
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grouper52
Masterpiece
Thanks for covering all that for me, Judy!
Of course, a purchase of my book would help prepare one for meeting Dan and seeing Elandan as well... [BTW, I get no proceeds from the book anymore, having turned over the rights to the Robinson family several years ago before the second printing, which they arranged and paid for all on their own. I merely promote it because I think it's a damned fine book, especially for anyone interested in bonsai.]
Of course, a purchase of my book would help prepare one for meeting Dan and seeing Elandan as well... [BTW, I get no proceeds from the book anymore, having turned over the rights to the Robinson family several years ago before the second printing, which they arranged and paid for all on their own. I merely promote it because I think it's a damned fine book, especially for anyone interested in bonsai.]
Bonsai Nut
Nuttier than your average Nut
I REALLY enjoy seeing these photos. I love the South Pacific, and I wish I could get to the Philippines. Please share with us your experiences. I know I try to keep us on a "bonsai only" track, but in this case, if you want to share general experiences / impressions (as well as bonsai) I would love to see them.
M. Frary
Bonsai Godzilla
Me too Will.
grouper52
Masterpiece
It's a mixed bag here, both Heaven and Hell, but probably closer to Heaven for a great many people. In that way it is similar to many other places.
The cost of living here is often absurdly cheap, and a US dollar goes a long way.
Certain places in the past were extremely dangerous for a "large target" like me - my wife insists I go nowhere without a large male relative or hired driver/body-guard - although crime is already down quite a bit since Duterte took over, both street and organized crime, and general corruption.
Many people find the climate suits them very well, but I hate it - so we are moving up to Baguio at about 1 mile elevation: very temperate year around.
Wonderful beaches in many places, but I'm not into that either.
What most people find most attractive about the Philippines is the friendliness of the people. They are slightly less friendly and trusting of Westerners than I remember them to be when my ship would pull in here back during Vietnam, but there is still a palpable national sense of goodwill towards Americans that has lasted unchanged for a number of generations since MacArthur liberated the islands from the incredibly, horrifically cruel and brutal and bloody Japanese occupation. Unless you are a complete a**hole around the people here you will find them to greet you with a simple goodwill that I think is unique.
And then, of course, I hear there a few bonsai-friendly species as well . . . .
JudyB
Queen of the Nuts
Another understatement....
grouper52
Masterpiece
grouper52
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Just to get a sense of how some people live here, I present some photos of my SIL's gardens. They grew up on a large farm a day's drive south of here in Bikol Province. There were twelve children (!) and her father was so skillful that he was able to send the eight girls to college just by producing rice and coconuts. (For a short while I had a part ownership - i.e. supplied the money to purchase - of a small herd of breeding water buffalo, called carabao or some such here, which the family later sold off to buy medicines for their mother when she was dying). All her father ever saved for himself was a very small amount he would take into town on occasion for cock fighting. He also hunted wild boar, and went after fish and crabs in the nearby ocean. The four boys took over the farm, and the two surviving ones and their sons run it still.
The girls all went to college, all eight of them, and they are all married now and most have children. half have lived overseas as workers, including the SIL we are staying with now, who worked as a domestic in several European countries, stayed with us and helped us open and run our jewelry store in Taos, and now lives in Manila. Her husband is an engineer who works overseas jobs for a large Korean conglomerate, mostly unpleasant third world countries. His salary has been enough to send all three of kids to the best schools, and to buy a nice home in a gated community here in manila, where we are staying these past few days. His wife, the SIL we are with, is still a farm girls at heart and simply must have plants around her, and has filled her small yard with beautiful plants: below is her small yard, every inch filled with the beauty of plants. The photos fill several posts. You'll note here large bougainvillea bonsai in the 3rd, 4th and 5th photos, and my little one low down in a subsequent one. Enjoy.
The girls all went to college, all eight of them, and they are all married now and most have children. half have lived overseas as workers, including the SIL we are staying with now, who worked as a domestic in several European countries, stayed with us and helped us open and run our jewelry store in Taos, and now lives in Manila. Her husband is an engineer who works overseas jobs for a large Korean conglomerate, mostly unpleasant third world countries. His salary has been enough to send all three of kids to the best schools, and to buy a nice home in a gated community here in manila, where we are staying these past few days. His wife, the SIL we are with, is still a farm girls at heart and simply must have plants around her, and has filled her small yard with beautiful plants: below is her small yard, every inch filled with the beauty of plants. The photos fill several posts. You'll note here large bougainvillea bonsai in the 3rd, 4th and 5th photos, and my little one low down in a subsequent one. Enjoy.
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grouper52
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grouper52
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JudyB
Queen of the Nuts
This must be the Heaven part, so lovely, that stacked pebble wall is such an interesting touch. Thanks for these photos, and sharing this experience, it is interesting.
Tieball
Masterpiece
Excellent choice you've made. Enjoy every moment. Keep posting trees of interest that you can photograph from your new home area. I also like reading the story behind a tree, the location or the owner.
ghues
Omono
Many thanks for posting Will........gives us an insight to a place many of us will never see in person
Cheers Graham
Cheers Graham
grouper52
Masterpiece
4:30 AM local time . . . just part of an amorphous mystery called "time" to this disoriented brain of mine.
We leave in a half hour or so on a many-hour drive north up into the mountains where lies Baguio, home of the old Presidential Summer Palace and Camp John Hay, the old command center for wartime operations in this region during WWII. AND, also, home of the only true pine trees I know of in the tropics: They have some sort of very elegant, very beautiful red-barked pines that are native to that area - I'll snap some photos and post later.
All photos this trip, BTW, are simply iPhone processed in iPhoto - a bit embarrassing given my usual standards on this site, but it's all I've got, and certainly good enough for the "travelogue" part of this.
After we leave the city we go through many miles - no: correct that - we go through many kilometers of flat and very beautiful rice-farming land called the Central Plains. To add to the pleasure of the drive there is a superhighway through it all the way to our exit into the mountains. This highway is the most impressive road I have ever been on, anywhere, and stands out like a diamond among other roadways here. I asked about it last time, because it seemed very, very, very much unlike any other engineering/construction project I've ever seen here. Turns out the Philippine government asked a Japanese company to do it. In record time they finished this gem, and the moment they had finished the Filipinos had them leave.
The winding roads up the mountains to Baguio are another matter, often a bit dangerous, especially with the free-for-all style of lane-less driving practiced here, and some very run down large trucks and such. But the compensation is a lot of little road-side stands in the small towns along the way, where one can occasionally find great bonsai!
Gotta go. More later. (Never did a travelogue before, except, I guess, the chapters about collecting trips with Dan. )
We leave in a half hour or so on a many-hour drive north up into the mountains where lies Baguio, home of the old Presidential Summer Palace and Camp John Hay, the old command center for wartime operations in this region during WWII. AND, also, home of the only true pine trees I know of in the tropics: They have some sort of very elegant, very beautiful red-barked pines that are native to that area - I'll snap some photos and post later.
All photos this trip, BTW, are simply iPhone processed in iPhoto - a bit embarrassing given my usual standards on this site, but it's all I've got, and certainly good enough for the "travelogue" part of this.
After we leave the city we go through many miles - no: correct that - we go through many kilometers of flat and very beautiful rice-farming land called the Central Plains. To add to the pleasure of the drive there is a superhighway through it all the way to our exit into the mountains. This highway is the most impressive road I have ever been on, anywhere, and stands out like a diamond among other roadways here. I asked about it last time, because it seemed very, very, very much unlike any other engineering/construction project I've ever seen here. Turns out the Philippine government asked a Japanese company to do it. In record time they finished this gem, and the moment they had finished the Filipinos had them leave.
The winding roads up the mountains to Baguio are another matter, often a bit dangerous, especially with the free-for-all style of lane-less driving practiced here, and some very run down large trucks and such. But the compensation is a lot of little road-side stands in the small towns along the way, where one can occasionally find great bonsai!
Gotta go. More later. (Never did a travelogue before, except, I guess, the chapters about collecting trips with Dan.
)
grouper52
Masterpiece
Computers here are acting strange - maybe the back-to-back typhoons, maybe the usual Third World tech prowess, or maybe China disrupting the net here as a show of strength in advance of Duterte meeting their PM to see if the PI gets to keep its sovereignty. Great times in the South China sea.
Anyway, no way of knowing what I last posted or what the responses were, or whether, after my political post I'm still welcome here ... so . . . .
Before the photos, I spent some time last night, since BNut wants some travelogue info included with the bonsai, looking at several PI entries on Wikileaks .... no, no, NO - not Wikileaks ... Wikipedia looking into various aspects of this strange country. For instance, I wanted to know who they were, where they came from and how and when - but no: it is all shrouded in mystery and controversy, so much so that even Wikipedia trips all over itself with dire disclaimers and cautions about the truth of anything published about such matters. People with apparently great minds have apparently looked at the question from almost every imaginable angle: historically, geologically and geographically, culturally, genetically, linguistically, according to artifacts and metallurgy and the rare ancient bone, and who knows what else. But I think, in my own cautious way, I have been able to achieve perhaps the only correctly-concluded summation currently extant about their origins: that the Filipinos are definitely NOT descended from Vikings. I'll just leave it at that.
I also found it surprising that the first known organized world religion to have taken hold on these islands was probably Vajrayana (Tantric/yogic) Buddhism, not the much older Hinayana or Mahayana varieties. This supposition apparently comes from artifacts found here. Since the Yajrayana had its origin in India and its surround, and was well established there long before it spread up to Tibet and China, it is surprising that there is very little evidence of a similar influx of Hindu Tantra, such as permeated the culture of Bali, and likely other contiguous areas before the Moslems invaded.
Anyway, back to the travelogue, about which I will say only a small amount today before moving on to bonsai photos, and that small amount is only to say that each minute here is so very rich in stimuli - sensory, like visual/auditory/kinetic/tactile/gustatory and olfactory, and so much even richer in internal impressions, thoughts, feelings, connections and insights, that I realized before we were a block away that nothing short of a multi-year weekly documentary by someone really talented in such could begin to convey anything complete enough to be anything but misleading. So, I'll give up on that today except to show below two photos of the landscape of life in the Central Plain, and then three photos of the Pines of Baguio, capturing a little of the inter-typhoon mist and the surrounding environs as well. Bonsai later! Enjoy.
Great times in the South China sea.Anyway, no way of knowing what I last posted or what the responses were, or whether, after my political post I'm still welcome here ... so . . . .
Before the photos, I spent some time last night, since BNut wants some travelogue info included with the bonsai, looking at several PI entries on Wikileaks .... no, no, NO - not Wikileaks ... Wikipedia looking into various aspects of this strange country. For instance, I wanted to know who they were, where they came from and how and when - but no: it is all shrouded in mystery and controversy, so much so that even Wikipedia trips all over itself with dire disclaimers and cautions about the truth of anything published about such matters. People with apparently great minds have apparently looked at the question from almost every imaginable angle: historically, geologically and geographically, culturally, genetically, linguistically, according to artifacts and metallurgy and the rare ancient bone, and who knows what else. But I think, in my own cautious way, I have been able to achieve perhaps the only correctly-concluded summation currently extant about their origins: that the Filipinos are definitely NOT descended from Vikings. I'll just leave it at that.
I also found it surprising that the first known organized world religion to have taken hold on these islands was probably Vajrayana (Tantric/yogic) Buddhism, not the much older Hinayana or Mahayana varieties. This supposition apparently comes from artifacts found here. Since the Yajrayana had its origin in India and its surround, and was well established there long before it spread up to Tibet and China, it is surprising that there is very little evidence of a similar influx of Hindu Tantra, such as permeated the culture of Bali, and likely other contiguous areas before the Moslems invaded.
Anyway, back to the travelogue, about which I will say only a small amount today before moving on to bonsai photos, and that small amount is only to say that each minute here is so very rich in stimuli - sensory, like visual/auditory/kinetic/tactile/gustatory and olfactory, and so much even richer in internal impressions, thoughts, feelings, connections and insights, that I realized before we were a block away that nothing short of a multi-year weekly documentary by someone really talented in such could begin to convey anything complete enough to be anything but misleading. So, I'll give up on that today except to show below two photos of the landscape of life in the Central Plain, and then three photos of the Pines of Baguio, capturing a little of the inter-typhoon mist and the surrounding environs as well. Bonsai later! Enjoy.
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grouper52
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Well, along the way to Baguio we heard rumors about a bonsai shop well worth visiting, and after many fits and starts, twists and turns, we happened upon it - Magnificent! It belongs to a man who uses a "hunter" to find trees for him to go collect - and he was off collecting today - and his wife, who helps him style and tend the collection.
Unlike Michael's artistic jumble of trees, these people seem to be possessed of both great eyes and hands to create the bonsai, and great marketing ability to arrange them pleasingly. The pictures below may give you some idea of the several hundred great trees they had in varying sizes, styles, and stages of development.
Enjoy!
Unlike Michael's artistic jumble of trees, these people seem to be possessed of both great eyes and hands to create the bonsai, and great marketing ability to arrange them pleasingly. The pictures below may give you some idea of the several hundred great trees they had in varying sizes, styles, and stages of development.
Enjoy!
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grouper52
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M. Frary
Bonsai Godzilla
If they were they ought to look more like me wouldn't you think Will? Well maybe not so ugly but still a little larger in stature than they are.
grouper52
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grouper52
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