Wee Steps to Mountain Goathood

THE GREGORY-IN-WAITING

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:26:06 GMT

A young woman riding shotgun in a passing SUV hollered as I went about my night run: "Go Pops!," she shouted in encouragement. I did not recognise the voice but a lump formed in my throat. Thanks, whoever you are, I needed that. My young -- and not so young -- colleagues at my mountaineering club are the only ones who address me that way. To my ex-university friends I am affectionately named "Goat" or "Alpha", and of course my daughter calls me "Dog".

I'd donned my running kit to do my usual mile-loops around the Makati Sports Club. "This is a celebratory run," I told an AMCI colleague later: the cardiologist had just cleared me to go back to all the things I'd loved doing after assuring me that I have the heart of a 20-year-old. I felt fine after four miles but I stopped to chew the fat with the rest of the climbers at the park. About a dozen would be doing the Kibungan mountain range the coming weekend, while my team was headed for the summits of the country's second- and fourth-tallest peaks.

After my mystery collapse three weeks ago I had gone through an alphabet soup of the most intimidating heart and brain tests to try and pinpoint what had caused the one-off attack: ECG, Stress Echo, 24-hour Holter Monitor, EEG, CT Scan, plus complete blood and urine tests besides. It's been an emotionally fraught period, but if you've been through the adversities I'd had, you learn to take the worst of them with courage and dignity. All the tests save one turned up normal, but for the neurologist that was enough to stop me. There were brain wave patterns in the test that she did not like.

I have not unloaded the backpack that did not travel, 11 kilogrammes minus water and fuel, since I am not quite ready to turn my back on the outdoors. It stands in a corner of the bedroom, waiting for the next hike, even as I began taking a half-dose for an unspecified seizure disorder. "You take that for two weeks and we'll see," the doctor said.

If you've gone through it more than once then that's an epileptic seizure, the medical journals say. I've had a single episode, but that was actually three in rapid succession, so maybe I now qualify as one. There are any number of causes, the doctor said, but most probably it was from the head trauma from a horrific cycling accident I'd had 20 years ago. "It doesn't matter how long ago it had taken place," she said. It could always come back to bite you. The worst times to have an attack would be in the water or a mountain ridge, but you could just as easily kill yourself while passed out behind the wheel of a moving car.

And yet, I have a young friend who confided to me that she has the same condition. She is one of our strongest, fastest climbers, and she'd managed to lead a normal life nonetheless through the wonders of modern science and medicine. Management is the key word. Some types can be treated, others are not. The neurologist actually said I could now go back to my normal activities, though she wants to see me from time to time, so I hope I would be able to use the loaded backpack soon.

ON BIRD ISLAND

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:52:45 GMT

I woke up shortly after 6:00 am last Tuesday to find myself alone, on my back on a bed of dark green seagrass. The sky was a bleached grey-blue and in the still air there was a barely audible ripple of the tide slowly creeping in and filling the crevices dug up by fiddler crabs toward the barrier line of mangrove trees inland. It was maybe two hours after the water reached its lowest level, and the brine pushed cream-coloured, crushed coral into my hair, my clothes, and my old maroon school pack beneath my back. For a while I could make no sense of what was happening. And then suddenly it hit me: If I did not try to stand up soon I could easily drown and die there.

I remember the last thing I saw, through the viewfinder on servo mode before my world turned upside down, was a Ruddy Turnstone, a male in unmistakable chestnut breeding feathers, scurrying on its short legs among the seaweed. That was my sixth new species during this trip. The previous day I had nailed many of my target birds after I and the local park warden followed the advancing water to glass the retreating Far Eastern Curlew, the white-rumped Eurasian Curlew, the Bar-Tailed Godwit, and the Asiatic Dowitcher, the flagship bird of the Olango wetlands of the central Philippines. In late afternoon I went in alone on the ankle-deep low tide to photograph the Terek Sandpiper and more godwits.

On hindsight what transpired shortly after I returned there the next morning was probably the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. The nature reserve was beautiful in the early morning light but I was on my own. Help was nearly a kilometre away: the warden at the park office. Can you tell me what else happened after your vision went, the doctors later asked. Did you have convulsions and seizures, they wanted to know, but the only thing I could tell all of them for sure was that the camera and the tripod also went down when I did, and that there were several episodes.

After the worst passed I forced myself to drink lots of water and hobbled back to the park office. It was not easy. There, while waiting for a ride to the clinic I saw a tiny bird, a sulphur-bellied flyeater, hopping on a step of the building’s wooden stairs.

I get asked a lot now what had happened. Basically the medical people said that for some frightening moments, my heart stopped pumping blood to my brain. I feel fine now, but at the moment, everything is up in the air. There is a mountain of tedious steps that I have to undergo to answer the question why. I am just thankful He gave me the opportunity to be with my daughter still.

TWO BIG YEARS

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:07:01 GMT

All Fools' found me at my preferred lowland habitat, a swamp, to complete the second year of my morph into a bird spotter. There I was pleasantly surprised to see like-minded friends, Raul and Rissa. We spent a good part of the morning with farmers who were ploughing the irrigated fields for the year's first rice planting, and were rewarded with our first sighting of a long-toed stint, a tiny Siberian visitor that was practically invisible, even in its breeding plumage, among the brown clods jutting out above the flooded furrows.

After several visits to the place, we also finally saw a black bittern, pushing up my lifer count to 73 for the past year and 179 overall. To top it off, we found three pheasant-tailed jacanas, all in their breeding phase marked by the appearance of singular long tail feathers.

It was exactly two years ago that I got my fist binoculars, plain Bushnells. A fantastic purchase that was. I had not quite achieved my target of 100 birds for the past 12 months with less opportunities to go out, but nonetheless it had been, in a way, to use a Hollywood cliche, a big year. My highlights for the period were the Philippine eagle-owl at an Angono historical site, my first shama at Mount Kalawitan, coletos and Philippine falconets at Mount Palay-Palay, a Peregrine falcon in Pagbilao, my first tailorbird and huge numbers of sunbirds at Balinsasayao Lake, the citrine canary-flycatcher at Mount Banahaw, a substantial increase in the number of wild ducks in my list including the green-winged teal from all that trawling of the fish ponds in Gabu and Candaba as well as Paoay Lake, and my first snipe. Add to that, of course, meeting people who are really passionate about this wonderful distraction, guys like Richard Ruiz of Laoag, Professor Tirso Paris and Agriculture Undersecretary Fred Serrano of Los Banos, and Rico the Balinsasayao park ranger.

A few months ago I took the plunge and got hold of some recording equipment. It had been a frustrating but also enjoyable experience, and though I still have to produce decent-quality images (that one of Philippine ducks, above, was my first-ever frame to be post-processed with the software that came free with the digital camera -- not much to write home about), my meagre collection of captures has served my purpose, which is to keep mementos of my encounters with these magnificent creatures.

There are 400-plus species still to see, and over the next 12 months -- work, climbs, runs and dad roles permitting -- I hope to add to my list of migrant water birds before they fly out as spring deepens up north. Then when only the residents are left in the summer I would seek out the supposedly readily accessible species that have somehow eluded me: full-size forest woodpeckers and hanging parrots, quails, endemic kingfishers and spiderhunters. Come the fall I would start to pay attention to the annual raptor invasion.

KALAWITAN

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:32:12 GMT

Perched on the highest usable branch of a pine tree atop Mount Kalawitan, I could see to my far right a woman in repose -- Mating-oy Dinayao, the Sleeping Beauty of southern Kalinga. The rooftops of the hill town of Sagada shimmered in the temporary noonday heat to the northwest. And immediately below me were two vandalised summit markers. The older piece of metal lay face down and rusting in the dirt, its originators now unknown. Right beside it stood a chrome sign with the name of the mountain and the incomplete word _AYY_. Put up by the people of Bayyo, the letters B and O had been savagely punched out with crowbar blows.

Much like the tribal water wars of old over the scarce resource, the small mountain towns of the Gran Cordilleras are locked in a new and potentially explosive conflict to grab a share of the region's hottest must-have thing -- tourist dollars. Why should Sagada and Banaue have all the fun?

At 2,714 metres above sea level, Kalawitan (Calauit in the topo maps) is the Philippines' 10th tallest peak. It opened to the local climbing community sometime last year, and the town of Sabangan, owing to its ideal location beside the main north-south Halsema Highway, assumed the still contested role of the de-facto gatekeeper. Its community guides insist the summit is within municipal limits since it lay on the near side of a creek that marks its boundary with Bayyo. One of the two rival claimants insist the stream must be reckoned from its source, said the guides.

The climb is unique in that the locals limit access to only up to 14 backpackers at any one time. They currently average about two trips a month in the dry season -- the mountain is closed to tourism in the wet months. Two AMCI teams visited the mountain this month, including my group of Bugsy, Pie, Kim, Ai, Rica, Josh, Bitoy and Alvin.

Backpackers are a notoriously skinflint bunch. Left to their own devices, all they really need is a reasonably flat, open patch on which to pitch their tents and not much else. It does not even need to be dry. By requiring them to leave their tents, portable stoves, mess kits, and frozen food at home, the locals maximise the value-added to the local economy. The local guide association, trained in business sense by a recent Swiss visitor, provide all these for a fixed fee. Just in case you forgot your sleeping pad and sleeping bag they can even provide you with extra blankets. All visitors must follow a set three-day itinerary (shorter ones for beginners) and must stay during the night at a cluster of mountain huts located above the Kapangdanan River at about 1,190masl.

But let no one be fooled into believing the mountain is a cakewalk. The trek from the highway trailhead at 1,156masl to the Apa camp site and back in themselves are a breeze, leisurely walks past the bleached-white rocks of the docile and meandering Chico River. The trail rises only gradually as it enters the narrow valley created by the tributary. The walk beneath the forest canopy reveals the ingenious improvisation of a mountain people who have mastered the use of water and stone, two of the more unyielding elements of nature. Two layers of ditches, one a few feet above the river and the other high up on the cliff side irrigate the terraced rice fields below. Pie and I used some parts of this upper section as the setting for an impromptu and a bit terrifying trail run.

The summit assault by contrast is daunting on its face -- a net elevation gain of more than 1,500 metres. The long-haired lead guide Raymund set a 5:00am start and said we must reach the summit by 12 noon or turn back wherever we would be, since they do not allow night treks for laggards and the return hike itself would take another six hours. In the end we made the summit in just six hours flat -- an amazing 250 metres per hour ascent even though the team stopped frequently to take tonnes of pictures. It also took us just four hours to get back to camp.

Kalawitan, meaning the tallest according to Raymund, is remarkably unspoilt. A moss-backed montane forest covers most of the trail after a short patch of old pines in bloom on the lower slopes. This is game country however. The trail is studded with snares, all booby-trapped with huge shotgun rounds. We were firmly warned not to stray beyond five metres either side of the path.

The relatively expansive summit area is marked by patches of dwarf, yellow-green bamboo and a recently disturbed shallow water hole. "Deer," said the betel nut-chewing middle guide. "It went that way," he motioned toward the trees. All throughout the climb, he would look at some unseen footprint hidden on the ground beside the trail and interpret it for us amazed city dwellers.

I had not realised how steep the climb through the mossy forest was until it was time to go down. My hamstrings immediately cried bloody murder, though I managed to walk it off after about 10 minutes and began to enjoy the descent, using the tree branches and my long legs to propel myself downward at speed.

Although I do not normally write about it, let me just say that the victuals were great. The woodfire at the camp grounds were almost always crackling alive, for the heavy coffee drinkers like myself. Tomatoes, my favourite vegetable, and onions were a mainstay of the meals, except at the summit lunch when I forced myself to eat three hard-boiled eggs from out of the all-meat packed lunch. The young male cooks actually wore aprons and prepared the flour wrapping to the minced vegetable rolls themselves, and joined the guides at night for their traditional war dances complete with small brass gongs.

THE OWL'S LAST STAND

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:59:44 GMT

It seemed an unlikely place to find such a huge and rare bird in the wild. The East Road that stabs through dreary shopping malls, slums and lumberyards at the edge of Laguna de Bay and sprawling metropolitan Manila branches off to a narrow, uphill road that is clogged with ugly purple motorised rickshaws that haul the work force and the students of the barrios to school or places of work before giving way to a steep, winding climb that leads to rolling hills sheared of all trees and converted into a golf course, unfinished row housing, and a casino in the middle of nowhere. Women caddies walked on the side of the near-deserted road and we had to ask the guards several times whether we were on the right track. It turned out we missed the turnoff into a gravel road and had to double back. We left the car in front of the dark pedestrian tunnel carved through the rock.

"You're here for birding," declared the lone guard, who has had more visitors armed with binoculars, tripods and cameras of late rather than historians and linguists trying to divine the meaning of picture words etched on the walls of a limestone cave about 5,000 years ago, perhaps by some of our poorly-known ancestors. Our very own Lascaux. "They're over there," he said, leading us to a stand of mature white teak. But we only found the male, glaring down at us from a branch, bleary-eyed and starved for sleep after a full night hunting for food.

The Philippine eagle-owl, a magnificent, 20-inch nocturnal bird of prey with a mane that evokes the visage of a male lion, is on its last stand at the tiny sliver of a wooded park better known as the Angono petroglyphs. A fellow Wild Bird Club member I'd never met had discovered the family a few months earlier on his daily walks to the park. They are one of only two known families of eagle-owls in metropolitan Manila -- the other family having taken residence at the Balara compound of Manila Water Co. I signed up for long queues for a chance to see the Balara brood, but in the end work always got in the way, so I grabbed at the chance to visit Angono at the first opportunity.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature rates the species, found only in six of the larger islands in the Philippines, as "vulnerable", just one step above "endangered", due to a small, severely fragmented population that is under intense pressure from lowland deforestation and hunting.

The wide swathes of fairways must be ideal for night hunting, but the guard believes the bird itself could soon be doomed to extinction there. Half the hill that hosts the cave of ancient scrawls itself has been bulldozed and flattened on the other side to give way to a warehouse and a garden, and that is not the only problem. "The people who live on the other side sometimes throw rocks at them at their perches," the guard said. "We know because the rocks would rain down on the view deck at times." I managed 42 frames of the beautiful creature, all full-frame-ready, before we retreated, profusely apologising to the king of the night skies for intruding in its shrivelled realm. A fourth were actually in sharp focus. I could not have been happier, although the absence of the female and their young gnawed at me.

PICO REVISITED

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 01:08:49 GMT

We met a man called Edel Peredo about halfway up Pico de Loro yesterday as we stopped to watch a scale-feathered malkoha gather twigs to make a nest. It is a large and visually arresting bird, found only in the forests of Luzon, Catanduanes and Romblon and nowhere else in the world. I could not get a clear shot of it with the admittedly deficient 135mm lens, and I was reluctant to get closer as I might be ruining its one chance to raise its young this year. But in a way the man in front of me (I hope I spelt his name correctly) was even more remarkable -- small and thin and dressed like a peasant, with a machete on scabbard hanging from his waist and leading a long line of first-time climbers up to the famous parrot's beak. He knew the names of the birds of these hills by heart, knew their distinct songs and their spectacular plumage, and knew the particular fruiting trees that these birds fed on. Come back in October, when the balete fruits ripen, he said. It turns out he is the resident forest ranger, PAMB according to him, and has met many of my colleagues at the Wild Bird Club in its apparently losing advocacy to preserve the last strip of forest in rapidly urbanising Cavite.

It felt so good to be tramping up mountains again, even on peaks like these that barely qualify. "Akyat-gulod", is the derisive term some of my colleagues use for destinations that can be done in a day or less. We managed it in less than six hours on my second visit, though my colleagues were not interested in tackling this mountain's infamous lower beak in the brisk winds of midday. The fact is, I had not been up a mountain since November 2, an appalling four months on the flats, discounting a short hike last month on the lower skirts of Makiling. Even my running mileage has suffered due to work commitments. But there is nothing quite like giving your legs a workout on an inclined plane. There are a lot more muscles involved than even long-distance running, and they are worked a lot more intensely.

With guys like Bugsy and Enrico and their cars, practically all the minor peaks of central and southern Luzon -- Tarak, Natib, Arayat, Sembrano, Daguldul, Talamitam, Maculot, Batulao, San Cristobal, Makiling, Malepunyo, to name a few -- fall under day-hike range. This is important for me because I am a mere working man. Yesterday was a walk in the park though, seen in the context of what some of our other AMCI friends were doing that very same day: Roger completing a 102-kilometre run in the annual Bataan Death March race, Zean running a half-marathon at speeds I could only dream of, and ultra-marathoner Cheryl doing a 21-kilometre training run at full race pace. Yet another group of AMCI members were blazing a new trail up San Cristobal. But then some of these friends are practically half my age, so I guess you could say I am in exalted company.

It felt strange moving on the forest floor with binoculars as well as an SLR camera dangling from my neck. As my outdoor interests broaden some things have to give. The first thing you sacrifice is speed: you resist the urge to fly atop the rocks out of fear of slipping and reducing high-quality optics to smithereens. The second is the overwhelming urge to just stop and, well, smell and photograph the flowers, and to go off trail to follow the insistent bird sound instead. Apart from the malkoha, I managed to see some balicassiaos, remarkable luminescent-blue drongos, along the trail. You can't begin to imagine the sheer range of notes that they make in full song: It's like listening to a full orchestra on an open-air amphitheatre.

These may be the last few summers for these forest birds though, as forest conversion creeps higher and higher up the skirts. No trees means fruit-eaters starve to death. Parts of the valley beside the early part of the trail are now fenced off with concertina wire, apparently by local farmers. Edel the forest ranger remembers seeing whole flocks of crested serpent-eagles circling around the beak as late as the early 1990s. These days they are mostly solitary apparitions. There are only five rufous hornbills left on the entire Palay-palay range, he says with sad conviction.

INDIAN, ARROW

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:12:05 GMT

"You know, you have to learn to take decent pictures," my friend and work colleague Jay told me more than three years ago, when he made the mistake of agreeing to join me on a long mountain hike. "Because you're the only person I know in our profession capable of reaching these places."

I do take atrocious photos, at least according to another hiking friend. Most would be soft focus, to put it mildly, even with a point-and-shoot auto-focus, while I also seem to have the talent to make really good-looking people turn ugly on photographs. It took me a long time to gain the courage to try my hand at single-lens reflex cameras, and will probably need an even longer period to learn to use them properly.

The tipping points were when I decided to spend some of my already limited spare time to seek out then stare at wild birds, on top of peak-bagging and long-distance running, and also when my daughter started using one. At least we now have a common point of reference and interest, because I could probably count by the fingers of one hand the number of times she had agreed to join me on my outdoor activities. The other is the convergence of technology in my profession. The journalists of the next generation would be required to produce Pulitzer-winning copy, world-class photographs and television-ready video footage day in and day out, using only an SLR camera for the last two tasks. I, a dinosaur of a bygone era who had gone to school in the age of typewriters, had better evolve or perish.

Rubbish, said the second friend, referring to all of the above, likening the decision to buying a Harley-Davidson. And a poor man's hog at that. Well, the photographers and television guys may laugh at me and my skills, or absence of it, now, but amongst us, it is their jobs that are the ones most at risk by this convergence. In the near future there will be no out-and-out reporters, photographers or videographers. There will only be content providers.

It has been a steep learning curve though, to use a cliche, even for the most basic tasks. The wide angle-capable kit zoom is almost idiot-proof actually, since, if there was one thing I learned in the days of film photography, it was that at small enough apertures, they focus from x distance to the horizontal figure 8. I've yet to get a really sharp image with a super-telephoto though, even using spot focus and tripod. It must be the Indian, as they say, because the arrows are fine pieces of engineering, crafted to near-perfection. Either that, or I need a new set of distance glasses.

There are also hard truths to learn, among them that 400mm does not cut it for most birds, unless you consider those behind a cage, and if you try to crop and blow them up too much they become useless. Also, that if you try to load your tripod aboard a Cebu Pacific plane without a protective case, their baggage handlers have the uncanny ability to separate the gimbal head from the legs in mid-air. The finer points of back-lit subjects and exposure bracketing -- not to mention shooting video -- and all those other items that I have no idea about at the moment, would have to wait in the future.

The rig is heavy, 1.5 kilogrammes with the kit, so I am not really sure if I would actually enjoy lugging the thing up the mountains especially now that I've decided not to carry a gram more than 10 kilos in food and water, clothing, shelter and pack at any one time. We'll see.

RAMBLING

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:18:47 GMT

“You are standing on it,” said the old man I’d met about an hour into a backwoods walk. I was looking for a spillway that a teacher at a nearby school had mentioned when I asked for directions. There was a white-throated kingfisher and a blue-tailed bee-eater on a nearby power line and so I failed to notice that the wet, earthen paddy wall had broadened into a wider, paved path coated with a thin film of mud.

I had crossed over a hill to look for water birds in Pasil, a marshy patch of farmland southeast of Paoay lake. “I think we’re related,” said the man after we had made the obligatory exchange of credentials, which, in these parts, entails mentioning the name of your home village and the name of your father. So then I had to kiss his hand -- he was, by Philippine reckoning, a distant uncle. He wondered what I was doing there – the only reason he was walking was to collect bets on jueteng, an illegal numbers game.

Built by earthmovers, the broad hill paths that criss-cross the rural north are changing fast. Now there are paved sections, and a few tricycles and small-displacement motorbikes would occasionally break the long stretches of silence. People had basically stopped walking these trails, so I had them largely to myself. My father advised me to bring a stick to take care of the dogs, but I did not bother: I could usually stare down the most ferocious of them to a stalemate.

People in the West call this activity “rambling”, walking in the countryside for pleasure. Since I also run, climb mountains and engage in birdwatching, the leisurely pace is something I could do in my sleep, theoretically. But it is such a rare activity in these parts now that I was variously mistaken for a salesman and a surveyor. Three days earlier I had made a similar walkabout eastward, going through five villages in four hours. Pepper and tomatoes were being planted on drying fields dotted with haystacks from the last rice harvest. The last hamlet, Bollilising, was named after the colasisi, the Philippine hanging parrot, I was told, but it was more to honour the bird’s memory, the equivalent of a stone monument, since it was not among the birds I saw.

Small flocks of Philippine ducks flew high up, heading east, during my second walk, when I saw Kentish plovers, yellow wagtails and common sandpipers on the edge of the marsh. Although this region is known far and wide for its itinerant labour, the farmers transplanting rice seedlings probably were unaware how far these long-distance voyagers had flown. After all, this is the region that produced the first Filipino overseas workers, sending out its sons, the "pucan canes", by the shiploads to cut sugar cane in Hawaii, back when planes had not been invented. The tradition has endured, reflected in the large, Mediterranean-style houses in pastel hues that dot the countryside, built with remittance money. It was past noon when I hit Salbang, broadly tracking the path of two streams that spill into the nearby South China Sea coast and marvelling at the colourful plastic bags and other flotsam embedded high up the branches of bamboo clumps that lined the river bank. This area was hit by floods back in October, I think.

PADSAN AND THE WATERHOLES

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 05:52:17 GMT

We came for the rare migrants but the face-off on the far bank soon caught our attention: a grey heron belligerently walking toward a pair of immature Brahminy kites, lounging on the soft fine sand at daybreak. Surprisingly, it turned out into a no-contest. The red eagles flew off as the big wader chased them one after the other. Whoever said raptors are top of the avian pecking order have got their facts wrong.

After lucking out on rare white-shouldered starlings at the Laoag cemetery, our host Richard Ruiz took us to a site with a guaranteed lifer for me: on the bank of the Padsan River near the local Muslim shantytown. The resident birds had consumed all the mulberry fruits at the cemetery, so there was no more reason for the seasonals to visit, he said. We duly found the white wagtails at the muddy edges of shallow pools near the river mouth, freely mingling with common sandpipers, yellow wagtails and Java sparrows. We ticked off the ocularis subspecies, the ones with dark eye stripes, and the leucopsis race, which went without. It would be interesting to know how many of these people were among the 700,000 people or so who were displaced by the unending wars of the south, as opposed to normal, itinerant Maranao traders who have set up shantytowns across the Philippines, from Taguig to Baclaran to San Lorenzo in Laoag.

A short drive to the rice paddies of Lagui-Sail later brought me my first sighting of a Eurasian kestrel and white-bellied munias. But the day's highlight was a private fishpond beneath the airport control tower, where Richard counted a flock of about 450 ducks that fled as one from pond to pond as we crept up to get a better view. He and Doc Calope, another local birder, had discovered the sanctuary for the endangered marsh ducks while exploring the mouth of the Padsan earlier this year. They had heard a quack and instinctively followed the sound, climbing over the fence and committing trespass. They later got to know the owner, who had bought the property for a seemingly bargain price of about 10 million pesos eight years ago. The caretaker told us the ducks stayed there for nearly the entire year, leaving only during typhoons and when the rains bring the water to their highest level.

A systematic inspection revealed at least four species among the huge flock. Richard easily spotted the northern shovelers, with their oversized beaks and dark-coloured necks that were unlike the signature yellow of the Philippine ducks. Then he saw the white vertical line behind the bills of some other duck that had similar feathers as the shovelers -- he identified them as the female of the greater scaup, a heavy, diving duck that is listed as an accidental migrant by the local birding field guide.

We were about to leave when he re-examined some other ducks that we had lumped with the shovelers -- they had strange yellow tips on their beaks. Spot-billed ducks! Surface feeders that are listed in the field guide as rare, with only three previous sightings anywhere in the Philippines at the time the field guide was written. At nearby Paoay lake the following day my duck count rose some more when we saw a pair of small, green-winged teals that had hitched onto a flock of tufted ducks.

DUCK-WALKING MASINLOC

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:35:44 GMT

Ternel the long-haired landscape photographer found them first and frantically waved at the rest of us to share the excitement: pairs of webbed feet imprints, frozen in time on the drying cement-grey puddles of the Masinloc coal-fired power plant. We found the presumed owners across the dirt road, on the stagnant pond behind the tall grass about 200 metres away. We were as close as we could be to a breeding population of about 200-plus Anas luzonica, possibly among only 5,000 or so left on earth.

The endangered Philippine ducks, one of nearly 200 or so remarkable bird species that are found only in the country, were easily the highlight of the long, 10-hour return drive up and down nearly the entire length of the Zambales coast.

Coal-fired baseload power plants are normally the big bad wolves of this antiseptic, politically correct age, and why not? They have huge footprints, all 137.22 hectares for this 2x330-megawatt one, with a third unit set to rise next year; they belch out supposedly climate-altering greenhouse gases and bring acid rain; and they need to grow a forest around them as a sort of carbon sink before they are even allowed to operate. Just like windmills but more sinister, their humongous, orange-on-white smokestacks dominate the skylines of their localities and dedicated jetties have to be built to bring the dirty, cheap black coal that they burn by the thousands of tonnes everyday to turn the turbines on which entire countries rely for cheap electricity.

Imagine the irony, then: These plants, just like Sual to the north and Pagbilao southeast of Manila, offer what are arguably the safest refuges possible for wild birds and specifically Philippine ducks, which, like many other birds, are being rapidly hunted and eaten to extinction everywhere else in the country.

Power plants are made of expensive stuff, so they are among the most heavily guarded properties in the country. This makes them no-go zones for even the most heavily armed of poachers. You don't argue with security guards armed with assault rifles.

Since sea water is an integral part of their cooling systems, coal-fired plants are also invariably located along the coasts, making them natural allies of mangrove forests, another fast-vanishing entity in the Philippines. I padded up my life list to about 158, I think, with an osprey and a slaty-breasted rail among a vast array of nearly 60 bird species that we found during a two-day bird survey. For many among the 10-member Wild Bird Club of the Philippines team, the secretive rail which skittered on the shallows beneath the mangrove roots was the star turn of the trip. For me though, it was the way the eyes of the staff lit up as they saw for the first time their extravagantly-hued, winged neighbours at close-quarters, courtesy of high-magnification birding optics that we shared with them, and the way they lapped up our club president Anna's basic birdwatching taxonomy lecture later on. Our tiny tribe could be about to increase.

Bani Point, the property's highest section is the site of the Masinloc plant's 80-hectare ash pond, where the solid by-product of all that coal burning is dumped. Bright-capped cisticolas in their breeding plumage, white-throated kingfishers, large-billed crows, black-naped orioles,olive-backed sunbirds, and large numbers of doves and some pigeons -- red turtle-doves, zebra doves, and, amazingly, pompadour green pigeons, as well as blue-tailed bee-eaters and rails also thrive in the trees and reeds of the pond, created by a naturally occurring spring and augmented by seasonal rainwater.

Plant staff said the ducks are known to breed there, with clutches of up to a dozen eggs found scattered among the weeds surrounding the ash pond when they burned the place ahead of the reforestation, according to them. Whoops. By December, when the fledglings are grown, the pond dries up and the ducks migrate to the nearby Lawis river, where they are, unfortunately, fair game for poor locals wanting to augment their protein intake.

The plant does produce a lot of ash -- about 10 percent of the fuel, according to plant officials. The fly ash portion is a valuable raw material for cement production, and, as things stand, local officials seem to have first dibs on the more desirable by-product. Business, Philippine style, I guess, even though Masinloc is now owned by AES. The Americans are usually finicky about these things. The other, less desirable by-product is good only for making cinder blocks, and it now threatens to overwhelm the ash pond. The original plan had been to bury the pond with the refuse, but better counsel prevailed and the duck habitat has won a stay of execution for now.

TESS OF THE TORTUGAS

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 02:26:53 GMT

The last time I drove to this part of Manila Bay we were chasing a huge pod of up to 500 melon-headed whales that had decided to beach themselves to die on the muddy shallows between the mangroves and the receding sea. By the time we got here the giant sea mammals had had a change of heart, having realised that life is beautiful, after all, and headed back to sea, leaving us to shoot the necropsy of a dead adult and the rescue of a solitary straggler.

My return was a happier occasion. I was with my best friends and we were taking Tess from Connecticut on a cultural re-integration tour. We were armed with binoculars, a spotting scope and an ice box, and the only creatures of the deep that were floundering behind the retreating tide were tiny bulbous-eyed mudskippers, trying not to catch the attention of thousands upon thousands of sandpipers, plovers, terns, egrets, herons, kingfishers, and perhaps other birds that were also poking about the brown soup for breakfast. A colony of vicious red ants remorselessly attacked my legs on the first spot that I chose to set up the tripod, but the sting and swelling were forgotten as we enjoyed the visual feast. Tess said practically all the birds we saw, including the swallows, bitterns and a solitary Brahminy kite at the nearby mangroves and the bee-eater and grassbird we saw near the toll booth later on, were lifers for her.

The coastal village of Tortugas (maybe this was a sea-turtle breeding site 500 years ago, who knows?) sits north of the delta created by the Talisay river as it empties its guts onto the bay from Mount Natib, Samat, and the adjoining highlands to the west. The delta, on the boundary between Balanga and Pilar, and the coast of Tortugas and nearby Puerto Rivas, by the side of a smaller river that I presume is called Sibacan, are studded with swamps and mangroves that are threatened with urban sprawl, including an epidemic of private cemeteries. The birding site is a two-and-a-half hour drive from Manila through the NLEX and SCTEx expressways and the Roman highway (this one was named after the local political empire, not the global one of old), but I could not find a functional road map of the area, so we resorted to the clever Filipino search engine: pay a tricycle driver to drive ahead of you to lead you to the site. We arrived at high tide, as planned, but only got to explore the Tortugas section of the coast after Tess, Cris and I spent the first hour tramping through the fish pond paddies on the landward side. Raul, with his uncanny skill at finding birds, went straight into the mangroves and sat among the wading flocks as they fed when the water lapped the coastal forest at high tide.

The town mayor has declared the area a protected site, which may yet spare the mangroves. He built two elevated observation decks for birders by the breakwater, and a strange-looking taller one closer to the mangroves behind. We wondered why the cylindrical, window-studded structure was shaped that way. The park attendant said it was built to resemble a bird cage. Well, to get your people on the same page you have to start with something that is familiar to them, I suppose. It should be worthwhile to explore the north side of the mangrove coast, if we get another chance.

RAD DIET

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 06:56:36 GMT

Letting your eye doctor choose what you eat is a radical idea, but it happened to me during my latest visit. She created her own arbitrary food triangle and crossed out the group with the most desirable edibles: chicken, chicken cube, eggs, mayonnaise, pasta with white sauce, ice cream, bread with egg, plus cakes, pastries and cookies. For good measure she took out dairy -- cheese, butter and milk -- as well, then to make sure I did not resort to a construction worker's diet, she forbade instant noodles, pancit, ginisa mix, and magic sarap, whatever these last two may be.

Factoring in the fact that I had shunned red meat for more than 13 years, I was left with very few choices indeed: shelled seafood, dried fish, fish paste, fish sauce, soy sauce, tofu, soya milk, queer and unpalatable items like taho and tokwa, and nuts, but thankfully including peanut butter, chocolates with nuts, and something called Nutella. Fish, rice and leaves were not discussed, so I presume I could still eat them. Now I am even more an inconvenience to the camp keepers, and this would likely force me to plan my meals on my own during climbs.

I had gone to see her resigned to getting prescriptions for even thicker reading glasses after suffering from chronic pain in the eye sockets. I may run and climb with much younger people, but the eyes don't lie. But she surprisingly waved off the need for new glasses, bless her.

The problem, according to her, is that I have had undiagnosed meibomian gland dysfunction for years. Simply put, they had not been producing enough oily tear film, leaving the eyeballs dry. That explains my frequent blinking, she said, a tic I'd had since I was a kid. Since she saw nothing else wrong with my eyes after soaking them in dye, she suspects food allergies. Hopefully, warm compress, eye drops, dieting and some red pill will fix it. She also said I could go ahead and get myself a new pair of recreational glasses after this thing is cured.

On hindsight, I don't really miss the crossed out food items -- at least not yet. I'm fine with tomato-based pasta sauce, plus now I have an excuse to indulge in shellfish and crustaceans. I come from a part of the country that is famous for its extreme diet -- my maternal grandfather had me eat raw egg every day, direct from the shell, and my own father routinely eats things I would not even touch, like raw fish left soaking for a few days in vinegar and fish paste. Maybe the restrictions will now help push me into a total vegetarian diet, something I have always considered doing in any case.

MANTALINGAHAN

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 04:30:53 GMT

A wispy figure stealthily left the trail as we stood up to resume our descent from beneath an ancient mangese tree on the lower skirts of Mantalingahan. I could see a pair of frightened eyes peering through a wall of dark green saplings, but it took a lot of slow talk and friendly hand gestures to coax the woman out of hiding. She had a small, delicate face, possibly prematurely aged by malnutrition and the hard life, and wore a colourful array of beads and a woven skirt. I could not understand a word she said, but I presume they were friendly. We had come face to face with a rapidly vanishing, tree-dwelling people, and it must have been a shock for her to see two huge, 40-something alpha males humping giant rucksacks made of synthetic fabrics and armed with long, aluminium poles -- shaped like spears, mind. We were rocking their world by our mere visit to this largely unexplored queen peak on the massif central on the south of Palawan island.

Tony my group leader and I had been ploughing through the rain-slicked forest floor for nine hours near the tailend of our climb column, were hungry and beyond exhaustion, it was about to get dark, and we were facing the unpleasant prospect of a night trek lasting four more hours. We had been up this mountain for the past five days, our head lamp batteries were nearly spent, we were down to our emergency food supplies, but at least we had the immediate possibility of a proper shower to look forward to to drive us on. By then, my sky-blue trek shirt had enough mud on it to stand it on its own, like a dome tent, as it were. Can you imagine the state of Angie's, who wore baby pink.

Why do we do this, is the stock question posed to people who deliberately use up their precious holidays by putting themselves through the torture of going up and down mountains. The pictures that we bring home with us do not really tell the entire story, because most would have been taken at the more pleasant sections of the trail, areas where you had the breathing room to stop, aim the lens and press the shutter. You do not have that luxury while sliding down a muddy trail, crawling under a log, squeezing through dense undergrowth, scrambling up a rock, hanging on for dear life on a root on the edge of a precipice after your foothold gave way, or struggling to free yourself from the clutches of a thorny bush, one of which managed to tear a single thread of Dyneema from my backpack, a fabric that is supposedly 15 times stronger than steel based on weight. The white thread dangling from the topload had the consistency of dental floss. (Although, Valen's photographic output for this climb was exceptional in this regard, I must say)

For me personally, it is a character-building exercise. And perversely, it is something I enjoy at least as much and as often as the quiet pleasure of helping my teenage daughter solve crossword puzzles while eating out at Pancake House.

Just like when trying to tame a wild beast, you do not approach Mantalingahan directly but do it the roundabout way. You drive south, past the agricultural chain gangs of the Iwahig penal colony, along roads that have never met concrete and where locals have yet to learn about Edison's 131 year-old invention called electricity. Then, on foot, gingerly circle south and east some more, going up and down its lower ridges crosswise so that at the end of two days, you have an elevation gain of less than 700 metres. Even though this was recently declared a national park, the lower slopes are inhabited by poor people who bear multiple children and cut down century-old trees to farm the clearings. Some lop off the crown of tall trees to build wooden platforms on which to erect grass huts. This is one of the demographic groups that my friends who support a reproductive health bill would want to deprive of their freedom of choice by halting their procreation.

There is a community about five hours' hike from the roadside trail head of Ransang that was visited by fellow journalists a few years ago and used the same guides as we did. But they paid for their lack of physical and medical preparation with their lives. For a while there I thought I was also out of my depth, struggling badly to keep up with my nine-member group on the morning of the second day, so much so that I was asked if I would consider turning back. The young women in my group -- Grace, Pam, Lyka, but especially the assistant group leader and camp keeper Danna -- were the real strong and fast climbers.

The noontime showers worked miracles though because it lowered the ambient temperature at the lowland tropical rainforest which I had always found oppressive. Refreshed, I was able to stick with FR's group, a unit that included eyeglass-wearers Mike, Cyril and Joel. I was climbing with distance glasses for the first time, but, even though I hurt my knee badly in a fall, we made good progress and by dusk reached the Kebgen helipad, a small forest community shepherded by a Baptist missionary. This was the same unit in our 39-member team who would find and bring back Madie when she went off trail and down the river trekking alone on the descent two days later. And it was in this same camp where Tony killed a three-foot snake while both were out at midnight to forage for food in the camp kitchen.

The third day was the only time we reached camp before sundown. My self-confidence fully restored and resuming my duties as group sweeper, the trek to Paray-paray, about 400 metres below the summit, was a pleasant mix of lowland dipterocarp, mossy forest, a boulder slope and stunted trees. Save for pine forests, Mantalingahan probably has it all. But at 1,700 metres, the camp was on the outer edge of comfort for my pack-light mode. I had ditched the fleece jacket and a lined sleeping bag and went with running singlet and shorts to save weight, and the unlined bag that took its place was not nearly enough to keep my legs warm inside the tent. Thankfully, the camp was sheltered from the winds.

As in all other days, our fourth called for a 3:30am wake-up call, this time to induct two dozen new members at dawn and to assault the summit. We set a 2.5-hour cut-off to hurdle the obstacle course, a dwarf forest mined with sharp rocks that you use as footholds, in lieu of a trail, a la Mount Guiting-Guiting. I counted just 14 people aside from myself who made the top before we turned around at 9:00am, including Niel, after I pulled him out of a five-foot hole that he fell into on the way up, and Lyka, Grace, Danna, Jay and Lester from my group.

Most had gone up with just a litre of trail water and were dehydrated going down. TJ, the team sweep and a member of my 2006 batch, went up with nothing but a trowel while FR was ordered to wear trek shoes instead of flip-flops. AMCI is a club full of characters.

It would take most of us two more days to double back to Ransang, and the trek extended to a sixth day for two, accompanied by four group and team sweepers. I was on the trail for a total of 48 hours, by my count. My hands and arms were tattooed with cuts and gashes. Mud caked my trek shoes and my trek pants from the knees down, and when I slipped them off my feet had the texture of dried prunes.

A FOREST SIT

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:40:27 GMT

Relying on remembered paths and photos posted by previous visitors, I went to the La Mesa dam in search of the ashy thrush, which had caused a sensation in the local birdwatching community in June by nesting and successfully fledging its young in a spit of damp lowland forest that was no more than 20 metres across, sandwiched by a road and a densely populated community and running a daily gauntlet of feral cats and various nest-raiding birds.

On the trail behind the orchid park, I met UP professor Gerry who had arrived even earlier. The thrush and the red-bellied pitta, another surprise La Mesa resident, were no-shows, he said, and he was already on his way to the canna blooms to wait for the naked-faced spider hunters. I showed him my aluminium chair and assured him I was prepared to wait for the ground-dwelling birds all day. I thought so, he said. Go past the horses and sit by the stump and wait. Birders do not publicly announce where they'd seen uncommon species like this one, classified as vulnerable by the IUCN, mostly for fear they could be unwittingly exposing the little things to predators or bio-prospectors, preferring to relay directions to a select group by word of mouth. Today it was the Diliman professor; the previous Sunday it was Los Banos professor Tirso who took me to the Swinhoe's snipes at IRRI; and Fred, the agriculture undersecretary to his brood of waterhens at the Agri Park.

It took about half an hour and two sittings before I found the birds. At first I hid behind a large tree, but it was only when I moved to the end of the lane, facing my previous station, that I saw tiny splotches of colour and sudden, darting movements on the dim forest floor. They had been feeding behind me!

Found only on Luzon and Mindoro islands, the medium-sized thrush has a large expanse of white with polka-dot dark markings on its breast and two strips of white on its wing feathers. I saw at least two adults and what appeared to be a juvenile, smaller and with a lot less white on its breast. They would peck at a dead leaf, as if looking for worms and bugs underneath, and sometimes raked the loose soil with their claws, like chickens. A big rail, which looked like a white-breasted waterhen at first glance, stood near the sub-adult, but I dared not investigate the other one lest my lifer bird would disappear. At one point I sat on my haunches to get a better view.

It was like seeing the forest in a new light, a meditation. Before this, I had always gone through trees at a brisk walk, limiting my viewing fare to perching birds. After a while I went to sit deeper in the forest and saw a male emerald dove feeding on the floor. While I'd seen this bird in flight several times, it was my first time to see a relatively stationary one. Green wings and pink bill, they are a beauty. Later on it rained, but I sat it out.

Soon the paths filled up with noisy, disorientated park-goers who would ask for directions. I still had not seen any pitta nor spider hunter at all, but my life list for the past eight months or so is up to 51 species. I saw 106 in my first year, and I hope it will be another big year.

PALAWAN RUN

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:01:07 GMT

"55:27," said timekeeper Ming, as I completed my 8.4-kilometre qualifying run. An indifferent 6:39/K pace then, which I think is about right. I had not done a competitive race since my first and only road ultra-marathon in August of last year, and boy, did it show. Although I have religiously kept up a thrice-weekly running routine, my long-run mileage had tailed off over the past two months or so as the winter bird migration season began and I found myself ranging far afield to gawk at sandpipers, plovers, wagtails and snipes at some remote rice paddy at dawn. I can't remember the last time I'd done vomit-inducing (for me, of course) sub-5minute/K intervals -- everything had been done at a relaxed pace, be they long or short or intervals. Reminding myself it was a Sunday morning, I added a half-hearted extra 2.1K and hurried back home to get back in bed.

The reason we're back in pseudo-racing mode is to earn the privilege of visiting Palawan's tallest peak. This is a modest 2,086 metres above sea level mountain, but one that had been climbed by very few people before. We would be using as camp sites helipads and base areas that were cleared for an international biodiversity expedition several years back in which scientists found giant pitcher plants that swallowed rats whole. You are only as good as your last run, as they say, and mere membership in the club is no guarantee you would be up for 11-hour slogs per day on offer.

Due to the sheer logistics involved, and maybe because it's a five-day expedition, there have been few takers. I have had to make two separate flight bookings to accommodate slight changes to the itinerary, and have been taking mefloquine. This mountain hates journalists, having killed one previously through malaria. I still have to solve the potential problem of contaminated water sources, although we could always boil it as a last resort I suppose.

The objective of the climb is to blood and formally welcome at least two dozen of this year's recruits as official members of our club after a four-month training regime in which we taught them to walk on walls, among others. Our sub-group of 10 -- seven recruits and three club members, is a diverse lot indeed: 7 carnivores, one devout lacto-ovo Seventh-Day Adventist, one middling pescetarian, and one hardcore vegan.

SIX KILOS TO ULTRALIGHT

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:42:24 GMT

It's the ultra light Holy Grail, the maximum total load for three-season backpacking. Theoretically 9.0 kilogrammes should be ideal in local conditions, where we only have to deal with the ever-present rain, the infrequent storm, and basically nothing below zero degrees Celsius. Easier said than done though -- 18-20 kilos is my routine pack weight, and I can carry up to 33-40 percent of my body weight if need be, which would be 27-32 kilos or thereabouts, I believe. But after five years of climbing, I became intrigued enough to look.

You start by slashing your total base weight in pack -- your rucksack itself, shelter and sleeping gear, and clothing other than the ones you wear on the trail. The target weight is 4.0 kilos, with the backpack, tent, and sleeping bag the main targets of weight cutting. There are obvious candidates to leave home -- the two-person tent in favour of the solo, the air mattress for a 3/4 foam pad, and the trekking pole. And yet I am still nearly three kilos over. I've tried going without a sleeping bag a number of times for the lower peaks, with outcomes that had not always been pleasant. Never underestimate a mountain, stupid. Speaking from experience, the bin bags you use to line and waterproof your pack do not cut it as pyjamas. Expedition Plus on Mile Long carries the lightest sleeping bags around here, both my 500-gramme model and another, locally manufactured, unlined version that looks like a giant stuff sack and which I want to test in my next multi-day climb.

My huge pack is the other obvious culprit, though for the life of me I could not stuff all my gear within a day pack that weighs nearly a kilo less. Maybe I need a proper weekend pack, or perhaps I should start looking into sub-kilo tarp shelters. There is a big danger there of course, because if there is a one constant out there, it is precipitation and mud in a single package, and and things could go bad fast in single-wall contraptions or tents without bathtub floors. I've seen Gilbert rig a fly atop two cross poles and a tarp in the howling wet winds on the summit of Mount Ugo, but I heard that became a disastrous combination in the rain up the Paniquian trail of the Mariveles range. I also need a lighter footprint.

The key to survival is to stay dry beneath the tent at all costs. Beyond that, it's all about how much comfort you can give up without compromising your safety. Rain shell, fleece and base layer are pretty much the basic clothing requirements above 2,000 metres in this country, though I've experimented with just the fleece a number of times -- feasible if the weather is dry, which is rarely the case. The air is almost always wet at those altitudes. Raincoats can't replace shells either -- you'd end up soaking all your dry clothes in sweat in your sleep. The one thing all of us climbers do, however, which would be a shock to people who do not go traipsing up mountains, is changing into our wet trekking clothes (we use just one set for the entire trip, to save weight) on waking up the next morning, just before dismantling and packing our tent for the day's march. The sensation is not unlike bathing inside your refrigerator.

For my next climb, an overnighter up a modest peak, the rest of my gear weighs 8.0 kilos -- consumables in the form of food, water and fuel, eating implements, head lamp and extra batteries, stove, first aid kit, and basic toiletries. That puts me six kilos over, but mostly it's because we have a dry trail and we haul all hydration from the trail head with no water sources beyond it. My greatest success has been with the mess kit, reduced to a skin-and-bones 80-gramme titanium mug and 15-gramme spork (photo), thanks to Bugsy. Our other small stuff can be found in the most unlikely shops: The lightest toothbrushes around are folding kits sold by the Mini Stop 24-hour chain, for example. (I should charge for advertising here.)

My club does love to cook though (I have a monster appetite myself, so I'm not complaining), which adds a lot to the pack weight. The next step of course would be to learn to eat leaves and nothing else (like a goat!) and go totally vegan, like Mau, who miraculously manages to make do with a tiny, self-contained pack that also holds his own stove and pots on even the longest of club climbs. Or eat cold, uncooked muesli, like our American colleague Beth. It's not a very appetising prospect, even for a pescetarian like me.

S.O.S. KINGFISHER

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:18:58 GMT

Turquoise, my favourite hue, stands out like a beacon to lost ships even on the dim forest floor, which was how I found the mortally wounded bird. The adult white-collared kingfisher was twitching weakly among the dead leaves, unable to fly or stand up. When I picked it up it gave my palm a feeble peck with its outsize beak, which apparently was the only part of its body not paralysed. It was my first time to see this species up close, and what rotten luck that it was under such distressing circumstances. It is my daughter's life bird, the spark bird of several birding friends, and the most beautiful flyer you will ever see outside a cage anywhere in Manila.

I had gone to Corregidor to inspect the bird life as my mountaineering club held its orienteering weekend for new recruits, where they do serious map and compass work on the first day and run 15 kilometres with a two-hour cut-off on a hilly course the next day. A series of forest trails took me to the war memorial topside and the big-gun placements on the southwest side, where I saw what appeared to be a smaller than usual brush cuckoo (Kennedy field guide suggests I actually saw a mangrove blue flycatcher, which is more than three inches shorter and a lifer for me!), its breast a wash of tangerine, before I got lost going down a forest trail that led to the mouth of a Japanese World War II cave.

I saw the stricken bird on the long backtrack, and, not having been through a similar situation previously, I did what any ordinary Filipino would: send SMS messages to friends for advice. The only reply was a command: "Take it and give it food. Stroke it a little.... Try to heal it." I gave it some milkfish bits from the remnants of my packed lunch, along with Tang juice, but it spit the food back out. So reluctantly I made the long march back to the road, intending to take it to the aviary for veterinary help. Bad luck: the aviary is long closed, and there is no vet nor doctor on the island. I hitched a ride with a jeep that was sweeping up after the trainees who missed the navigation cut-off time, where Mai got it off me and did the petting part.

The island is one of the few areas of the country where birds are not preyed on by Filipinos, either for food or for sport, and I am otherwise happy to report they are thriving on the tiny, tadpole-shaped island at the mouth of Manila Bay. I glassed 19 species, including a flock of pompadour green-pigeons, lifers for me, that foraged the fruit trees high up on the ridge above the Malinta tunnel entrance, well beyond the reach of a troop of monkeys. A resident Pacific swallow, cattle egret, Richard's pipit, zebra doves, yellow-vented bulbuls and Asian glossy starlings shared the camp site with migrant brown shrikes, even as heavy downpours throughout the weekend limited my long walks.

Since I was the only person in the forest at the time, I suspect my kingfisher was attacked by another bird in a fight over territory. We could see no open wound, but it was shorn of feathers just below the crown as well as the coverts on the left wing. Falcons are known to inflict death blows such as these on far bigger birds, and this one was walloped at least twice. I am not sure a vet would have managed to revive it. It spent the night inside my damp tent, swaddled in dry tissue and nestled in a white baseball cap borrowed from Sharon. The next morning it was immobile and near death, and in the afternoon we reluctantly left it behind as we took the boat back to Manila. I'm not sure the rest of the party understood the point of the attempted rescue, but it sure broke Peachy's heart.

THE HOTELIER OF MOUNT BANAHAW

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:11:59 GMT

The last stretch leading to Dion Pullan's back-to-nature resort is a wild, unpaved road cratered by water runoff in parts. One is as likely to encounter owls, fireflies, pack horses or solitary dogs as tourist vehicles during a late-afternoon stroll through the two-kilometre patch, a severe rise to about a third of the way up Mount Banahaw.

"Once paved, that would be the end of the mountain," he said, convinced that his neighbours would promptly sell off to greasy developers to turn the sheltered valley between Banahaw, the mystic mountain, and its devilish sister peak, San Cristobal, into just another Boracay, minus the white-sand beach and the Ilongo accent. If he had his way he would want it the way it was since after his great-grandparents built the homestead in 1906.

In the meantime, the hotelier of Banahaw is seeking to capture that tiny cream of the tourist crop, the ones who are concerned enough about deforestation and raw sewage and plastic refuse that they would be willing to forego all but the basic comforts for a first-hand encounter with "nature lite" -- raw nature that was tamed and reordered just so, adding basic improvements so as to make the encounter stress-free, bug-free, and non-life-threatening. The half-a-dozen or so thatched roof cottages of the 21-hectare Bangkong Kahoy, wooden bench, feature door-free, wraparound porches and loft lodgings on bamboo walls. An elderly Caucasian couple and their son have been renting one cottage for weeks, but weekends are a usually a busy time for mostly young local women hires, who cook and serve ginger soup, vegetable pear omelets and salads, tofu and stewed tubers to various nature trippers, bored housewives, pensioners, trust-fund babies, and stressed-out business executives who drive about 100 kilometres from Manila in all-weather, high ground-clearance vehicles looking for peace and quiet, plus the occasional climbers who fail to hit the San Cristobal camp sites.

Banahaw is officially closed, supposedly to allow the tropical lowland forest to regenerate from the ravages of religious cultists, mountaineers, and slash-and-burn farmers, but in a bitter irony, the clearings, marked by coconut fronds and the white flowers of cogongrass, now reach up to about halfway up Banahaw. The tops of two subsidiary peaks are farmed. Dion says there is no law enforcement to speak of, and we saw men with air guns at the nearest village, where, lacking in 4X4 transport ourselves, we were picked up and put aboard the resort's rusty, white knock-off Humvee.

A folksy, well-travelled man in his mid-50s, even Dion feels compelled to mow the grass on his ample lawns to give his patch that proper touristy feel, though he seemed to genuinely love the trees and he says he wants to teach his neighbours how to care for their environment. He can tell you the names of all the birds in the forest and the trees therein, from the aromatic, wild cinnamon tree, the white lauan, and even a white soft-wood with a bark that he remembers he and his classmates had used as improvised rope back when they were walked seven kilometres up and seven kilometres down in the mud to town, where the nearest grade school was. His guests can walk up an down the bottom of wooded ravines nearby to watch birds, ride a zipline, camp out, play tennis or frisbee, ride a horse, or just sit at the restaurant to eat or sip coffee all day.

We counted a modest 16 bird species, many of them found only in the Philippines, during a recent visit, but after spending most of the day chasing after them in the thickets in the company of Tame, a languid, 15-year-old girl guide, most of the same came to roost at a rain tree outside the restaurant just before dusk. If there is to be a second visit for me, I know what I would do next time around: Put my feet up, drink coffee all day and then go and sit beneath the rain tree at dusk.

CUERNOS DE NEGROS

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 10:25:42 GMT

My tent and I really got to know each other when we went up Lake Nailig, a mist-shrouded maar that sits at 1,500 metres above sea level according to team leader Mher's altimetre. The 15 climbers reached the target just before noon but there was no shelter on the flat, narrow grassy patch between the water and the forest, so there was no choice but to pitch camp and hope the incessant rain would stop the ultra-violet rays frying the waterproofing material of the flysheets.

With two brooks also framing the site on both sides, I chose a spot as close to the treeline as possible. I was worried about the water, and though the two guides insisted there was no danger, I did not want the lake to prove them wrong. The waterline did not change much, but the wet air from the Cuernos peaks crept down the mossy forest all afternoon like a white shroud that wrapped itself around the surface of the water. With temperatures down at 18 Celsius at midday according to Julius, I slept for most of the rest of the day until shortly before dusk, when it was time to fire up the MSR stove to help Aaron, Kim and Bitoy prepare dinner: white-sauce tuna pasta, beef curry, smoked milkfish and fruit cocktail. Unable to go sightseeing, the food was easily the highlight of Day 2. And I don't even eat red meat.

Better known to the current generation of Cebuano-speaking locals on the island's east coast as Mount Talinis, Cuernos, horns in Castilian, is a three-day hike between Casaroro Falls outside Valencia City and the Magsaysay geothermal project in Dauin to the south -- though most other groups prefer to do it in the reverse. Trekking behind Jackie and ahead of Bugsy, we rose up almost immediately past denuded slopes covered with tubers and hemp, banana-like plants known as abaca that are grown for their fibre, until we reached the spine of the mountain range.

After an hour or so the last domesticated plants disappeared, leaving only oversized metal pipes bringing water from a mountain spring to the village of Apolong. It was like hearing a bottled stream, according to Rica. Otherwise, the lowland forest reverts to its primeval state -- you have to pick your way between exposed tree roots, fallen, rotting tree trunks, and vines. The understory is rich in small living things: brown, twig-like praying mantis, giant earthworm, a clump of mushrooms, and a bunch of purple fruits. There are birds, which belong to the category called "heard only", along with toads and frogs that tweet like birds. You don't climb with my friends to enjoy the view: you suffer and grit your teeth to prove you belong.

Nonetheless, I had pegged this Negros trip as a birdwatching holiday, though it was Ai, bringing up the rear, who saw the red-bellied pitta hopping across the trail. We failed to reach our first two target camp sites in heavy rain and had to settle for Plan C: the yard of a large, abandoned farmhouse.

The second day was a short hike to Nailig, beside a breath-taking sulphuric stream. Clad in an oversized green poncho, I remember walking through a field of giant ferns. All the trees had been incinerated by the steam rising from the ground. Cuernos is, after all, a potentially active volcano.

After a steep ascent up a ridge (four-wheel drive, in Filipino climbing terms -- you use all four limbs to crawl up the wall), our trekking order for the the rest of the climb was more or less established: Me trekking alone in no-man's-land in the middle and Lester rejoining Che, Jepoy and the others up front after doing emergency rope- and needlework on Ai's spectacularly disintegrating trekking shoes at the back. Paping, the lead guide, swung a machete in one hand and carried a 10-kilogramme sack of rice in the other, while Neri, the barefoot sweep, carried a homemade backpack made of sack strung up with abaca.

Day 3 features probably the tourist-pretty sections of the trail -- diagonally up the mountain's flank and sharply down a ridge, past a reed-covered swamp and back up the ridge with 300-degree views of the surrounding peaks and forests.

The trail down Yagumyum lake, located at 1,200masl or so, was through a water course that looked as though it had never been traversed by humans before. There were lengthy stretches of the trail where my heavy Montrails would sink until mud lapped at the collars of the waterproof shoes. The sun made a cameo appearance as we ate our packed lunch by the shore, but it stayed windy. The last two hours of the trek were a sharp descent through rocky, slippery paths. I cannot now recall the number of times Mher and I slipped and fell negotiating the switchbacks, and my toenails suffered a beating as well. My pack arrived back in Manila caked in mud, and according to Ai I was practically as grungy.

THE MAN WHO TALKS TO BIRDS

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:36:47 GMT

Rico Mier came up to me as soon as he saw my binoculars. Typically, I promptly forgot his first name moments after the handshake, but he soon made me a believer when he summoned a crimson sunbird that was busy browsing the red gumamelas below the viewdeck. Using a unique bird call akin to slurping soup, all other species of the tiny, nectar-sipping birds that occur on Negros island were soon parading their riotous colours before the visiting birder.

How impressive was that! I had spent the previous two hours on a rather expensive boat ride around the Balinsasayao lake with only my second ever sighting of a yellow-breasted fruit dove as significant reward, if you exclude the flock of white-bellied version of the balicassiao, a Philippine drongo called mirabilis, that I saw while climbing back up the crater rim.

I had gone up the mountain lake in search of two unique Negros babblers, but met Rico, a park ranger, instead. In retrospect, I would gladly trade in my very modest 140-odd life list for the opportunity to go birding with him every weekend. He went through the Kennedy field guide and rattled off the status of the Negros-endemic birds in the 600-plus list and pronounced the Walden's hornbill extinct, the panini variant of the tarictic hornbill nearly so, the Negros bleeding heart pigeon as surviving only as a rumour, and imperial pigeons as well as fruit doves as, well, tasty. He knew which birds fledge at which time of year, what their favourite trees are, what the leading cause of death of the local nocturnal birds is, and what time of day gives you the best prospect of seeing specific species.

He showed me the path to viewing the resident flame-templed babbler, while adding I needed to climb a lot higher if I wanted to see a striped babbler. I was severely tempted to give him the book in gratitude, but in all probability he did not need it.

The path continued across the mountain road and later led me to yellowish white-eyes as well as mountain white-eyes, both life birds for me just like the crimson sunbird. At first I thought I was looking at lowland instead of mountain varieties, but later realised the former did not occur on the island. Further on the path led to a hemp plantation, one of few that threaten the watershed around Balinsasayao and its smaller twin, Danao. Fortuitously, I heard and then saw a Philippine tailorbird indignantly scolding me. It was my first sight of any kind of tailorbird, and, though I did not know it at the time, also its nest. Just moments earlier I had passed a clump of tree leaves cleverly stitched together, explaining the normally secretive bird's rather desperate attempt to draw me away from the prize by showing its reddish head and streaked breast. I had thought all along that the living architecture was a tree ant colony.

Before I left I also saw by the gumamelas for the first time a male lovely sunbird, probably among the most colourful of the 11 bee-sized birds occurring in the Philippines. I aborted a hike to Danao because the path had been washed away by the rising water of Balinsasayao, leaving a forested cliff. I had travelled 89 kilometres riding pillion on a reluctant hired motorbike driver to see six fairly common Philippine birds, but I believe it was well worth it.

The next day I saw three more nests right at a Negros seaside resort. Chestnut munias had incredibly laid eggs on nests built on top of yellow-and green decorative plants that rose no higher than four feet, well within the reach of feral cats.

A JOURNEY TO MAARS

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:47:41 GMT

maar. n.: A flat-bottomed volcanic crater that was formed by an explosion; often filled with water.

It is not quite a voyage to discover new life forms, but it should be something pretty close. So I have packed a field guide and binoculars to make sure I don't end up scratching my head, excess baggage be damned.

These geological formations have always fascinated me. The best-known examples would be the huge crater lake on Mount Pinatubo or Lake Venado near the summit of Mount Apo -- bodies of water that are not linked to rivers or streams but have cropped up, as if from nowhere, to support thriving ecosystems. The strangest example I had seen thus far is Lake Ticub (photo), on the Tiaong side of Mount Malepunyo.

Over the next few days I hope to see at least four more of these crater lakes in the Negros volcanic belt of the central Philippines: Nailig, Yagumyum, Balinsasayao, Danao. Two are located near the top of the Cuernos de Negros, a potentially active stratovolcano that is the second-highest peak of the island, while the others are located further north. They are supposed to host the last remaining refuges of wildlife on Negros, one of the most-degraded ecosystems of the Philippine islands.

What had piqued my interest first was a turdus, a comely, brown, resident island thrush standing on tussocks near a maar in Lester's Canlaon volcano photo album last year. I expect to see the same species, which the field guide says is pretty common. It would probably be too big an ask to see a Negros bleeding heart pigeon or even a flame-templed babbler, the two iconic birds of the island, but one of the top birdwatching guides of the Philippines has given me a more modest menu.

He said to go for the more locally common but unique flyers of the island: the white-winged cuckoo-shrike, the Philippine oriole, Visayan tarictic hornbill and the Visayan flowerpecker on the lowland forests, and the Negros striped babbler at higher elevations. He also said the blue-headed fantail, the local drongo known as balicassiao, and the white-browed shama all have slightly different variations on the island. The only worry is that I am climbing with some of the best mountaineers of the country. If they set a punishing pace as usual then it's goodbye to birding.

He also suggested a side trip that would put me firmly in twitcher territory, a bird watcher who goes to the farthest corners of the earth just to set eyes on a single bird species: this time a nightingale that occurs only in the wooded centre of Siquijor, the island of witchcraft, called the streak-breasted bulbul.

LOST IN MALEPUNYO

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:19:38 GMT

Something's wrong with my thighs. They are tight and tender and I can't seem to use the stairs unless I descended sideways. It's a familiar feeling, at least: It's the sensation you get a day after running an ultra-marathon race.

I joined a reconnaissance climb of the Malepunyo range on Sunday mainly to learn if I, or the mountain, had changed five years after my first visit. Located where Batangas, Laguna and Quezon meet, and fairly famous in accounts of the liberation as the last Japanese World War II redoubt in southern Luzon, it is listed at some mountaineering websites as a fairly easy climb, though I don't think any of these groups do any river trekking. My club seems to revel in doing things the hard way. In trying to compress a normal two-day sortie into one, with a large heaping of exploration on the side, the notional itinerary was soon history.

The mountain had remained its immutable old self, so maybe I had regressed or grown old or both: short but punishing wall sections that go 75, 80 degrees at their steepest sections; long, almost vertical, descents that are only feasible freestyle due to protruding roots, twigs, branches, and vines; barbed-leaf nettles from which the nearby city of Lipa took its name; and of course the rivers, always the rivers. We do not really cross rivers, we take them lengthwise. We walk on water.

I was with six people here, and some of them are club legends. On current form, I turned out to be the weakest link. I have been keeping up my running regimen despite other, outdoorsy distractions, but my leg muscles have always been treacherous. I was hit with cramps in both quadriceps after about five hours of trekking and basically spent the last 11 bringing up the rear, dragging the twitching, screaming, uncooperative legs up, peak after tortuous peak in the oppressive humidity typical of a lowland forest just before an afternoon rain. It was a miracle I managed to keep up without slowing the team.

Sky, our trail master and a visual artist by day, knows a few mountains even in the dark, including Malepunyo, where he uses a traditional filing system to keep the dizzying number of trails fairly organised in his mind: three slanted hack marks, like a sport shoe brand. I'll name this trail after us (7-Up), he said as we marked a trail from Santo Tomas (the one Malepunyo shares with nearby Mount Manabu) with our pom-pom pink plastic strings for a forthcoming training climb.

Sky's system is not infallible, by any means. Hours later and with the light fading, we made a wrong turn and found ourselves amid a vast field of tall cogongrass, where we had to find our way home in the dark going down a wooded, boulder-studded gully that was thankfully dry.

I knew I could never keep up with Sky, cramps or no (he even beat me to a trail half-marathon the only time we raced together when I was again hit with, you guessed right, cramps -- calves that time), but FR did, effortlessly. This is a soft-spoken guy who would do back-to-back 100-kilometre marathons on a whim, and as night fell he also kept Sky occupied in a lively orienteering debate until, through trial and error more than anything else, we heard the ugly -- but at the time pleasing and unmistakable -- blasts of tricycle engines and karaoke as we hit the gap that took us to the Lipa village of Santo Nino near midnight. At least we were absolutely certain we were near some Filipino village. We had been walking for 16 hours.

I suspect our team leader Nats and Alvin, one of the club's most experienced sweepers, had been in similar scary situations in the dark in the past with Sky. Mher and Bugsy, FR's classmates in the club's class of 2009, said it was deja vu. The three of us also did a 23-hour "day hike" with him last year, so at least this time we knew what to expect.

I enjoyed going through the wooded saddles this time around. The dappled white tree trunks looked eerily beautiful in the afternoon fog after the rain. It was frustrating not to have been able to stop to observe the fauna, but then I had managed my expectations well by resisting the overwhelming temptation to bring pocket binoculars. We did flush what appeared to be a wild dove up the tree top during our desperate night descent. It sat still on a twig as I fixed it with my headlamp beam, though I failed to identify the species.

For me, the only depressing thing about the trip was not the long hours nor my feet of clay, since both still took me to the edge of my physical abilities. No, it was more about seeing a farmer who had cleared a patch of forest and was quartering a small, four-legged animal on a fly-infested wood plank outside his mountain hut.

It was too small to have been a dog, but its legs were too stout to be those of a cat either. It's a civet, he said, that he had trapped for dinner.

FARMER LUCIO IS OUR FRIEND

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 04:20:09 GMT

Foremost Farms dominates the landscape of Baras, west of the Sierra Madre. Southeast Asia's largest meat factory churns out nearly 50 tonnes of pork every day across 146 hectares of heath and hill, with an effective footprint many times that. Its least desirable by-products have carry, as they say in Major League Baseball.

Put up by the redoubtable hog farmer known as "El Capitan" way back in 1970 long before Antipolo's backwoods became fashionable, it has effectively stunted the growth of the real estate industry east and south of the hill resort and left behind a stunning nature park downwind. I saw at least two huge ghost developments during a weekend visit, leaving the forest to reclaim some of its own just 40 kilometres or so from central Manila.

I happily ditched my weekend long run and joined my friends Raul and Rissa for a full day of roadside birdwatching at and around the spectacular limestone rock formations of Mount Masungi. Although I failed to add to my life list, it was a satisfying trip, greatly aided by the fact that my sense of smell is next to useless. I saw blue-headed fantails and Richard's pipits (photo) for only the second time in my life. A clear stream runs through the Garden Cottages nature park, and it had good numbers of white-throated kingfishers, Philippine bulbul, lowland white-eyes, red-keeled flowerpeckers, and elegant tits.

Grass birds and water fowl, along with macaques, thrive in the Palo Alto development, the low-key farmer's presumably long-suffering next-door neighbour. The ecological equation is simple: The domesticated cat, next to its omnivorous master if the latter had not achieved a certain level of recurring income, is the most vicious, relentless enemy of wildlife. Once the place is settled all the ground-nesting birds would have to say goodbye to their clutch and eggs.

With an excellent network of new roads built by the Garden Cottages developer, the rocks are an easy 20-minute climb, where we found one other angry neighbour, this time a male macaque. Raul, who stayed by the road, said a huge raptor hovered above us while we were up there, but our attention was firmly fixed on the monkey. The noisy primate probably even warned us about the predator, tough if it did it was lost in translation.

During the trip we solved one of the couple's vexing riddles from a previous visit: a mystery bird that at times sings like a meowing cat. Raul and I cornered a Philippine bulbul and caught it in the act. The vocal repertoire of this scruffy, 8.5-inch nightingale that is found only in the Philippines is simply amazing. The Kennedy field guide's description does not even come close. The tailorbirds and shamas with their even more beguiling songs would have to wait another day though, for when we develop the skills to properly ogle them in their underbrush abodes. We are counting on farmer Lucio's pigs to prevent the cats beating us to them.

WE BRAKE FOR HORNBILLS

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:52:04 GMT

...and raptors, and mynas, and kingfishers, and drongos, and swifts, and lots of other types of flying things. Not to mention goats. Armed with a scope and binoculars, Rissa, Cris and I piled onto the back of Raul's tangerine pickup for Pico de Loro the moment the rains let up last weekend. Each shout of "Stop! Hornbill!!" would cause the vehicle to make an abrupt halt, sending all of us tumbling forward on the truck bed as we trained the glasses at the giant, notched beaks of the magnificent frugivores. One young male was so close we could see it regurgitating seeds. We saw six of them based on my usually suspect math, and those were only for starters.

The long road led us to the barred gate of the exclusive resort of Caylabne Bay at the gorgeous headlands that make up the lower mandible of Manila Bay, through the last remaining forest cover of Cavite province and a Philippine Marines detachment on the seaward apron of Palay-Palay, a mountain range that includes the famous parrot's beak peak. We had no luck with any kind of parrot, but on a stretch we we arbitrarily named Coleto Point, the bare treetops below the road served as perches for the bald, pink-headed myna (we saw about five in all), as well as the deceptively docile Philippine falconet, tiny curled featherballs preening in the cool early-morning breeze in between their noble deeds of chasing eagles and disemboweling small birds and oversized lizards.

The high-riding, stiff-suspension, long-wheelbase pickup is a quintessentially American flyover country icon, but it is really Australia's invention, the result, I have learnt, of its outback farmers' desire to have something to drive the missus in, while simultaneously hauling the pig to market at the back. It is something that might even suit me, even though for sure I would upset its known market demographics.

Within two hours we had our day's fill with Asian glossy starlings, a coppersmith barbet, white-throated kingfishers, a balicassiao, about four brahminy kites, a red-keeled flowerpecker, at least six whiskered tree swifts, a lot of Philippine coucals, plus a crested serpent-eagle that Raul had accidentally flushed from its roost. My post-college roommate turned out to be quite skilled at bare-eyed birding, being usually the first to spot them even though he was busy at the wheel. Rissa, the most tenacious -- bird porn, she described our pursuit -- later saw several Philippine bulbuls to add to her life list when she and I went up the Pico trail at noon and met a group of climbers. It was wet at this time of year, and we momentarily lost our way on the descent, having blindly followed a wide, rocky bed of a watercourse. The trailhead, a diagonal scar of a gap on the green wall as you go up Magnetic Hill, past the gate of now run-down Puerto Azul resort, was the backdrop for our tailgate party later on.

The vehicle took us through the quaint and little-known back roads of Cavite and Laguna that slashed huge chunks off our commute time. At the rate the residents are dumping garbage at them though, the still clear, living creeks that pass underneath these village byways should turn into dead, toxic open sewers within this generation. If you want to build a stand-alone house and you do not own SM, Cebu Pacific, Fortune Tobacco, or half of Makati, it is in places with dodgy names like Salawag, Salitran, Palapala and Paliparan where land prices are still within reach, so the rate of rural to urban conversion is astonishing. The bowels of the mountain are right now being dynamited to build a tunnel for a link road to Nasugbu. Seeing a young woman in dungarees riding pillion on a motorbike ahead of us later, we idly debated whether she had a horizontal tattoo at the small of her back or if it was just a garter impression. At length we concluded it was neither -- it was either a natural feature of human anatomy, or else was mere road grime.

WE ARE WHAT WE CARRY

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:46:41 GMT

What's in there? It's a question we always hear from desk- and couch-bound colleagues as we get back from our extraordinary weekends. I like my pack sleek outside with no attachments, so many items go in there, typically numbering more than 60 in a load that varies from 16-20 kilogrammes. The latter figure may seem formidable, but the pack weighs considerably less after the first day:

WATER. It is always the heaviest as well as most essential item in the bag, be it a minimalist 35-litre overnighter or my humongous 75-litre take-on-all-comers pack. When there are no water sources on the trail, it is always challenging because you have to carry everything. I usually allot two litres (two kilos) per day, which is a lot, and carry an extra litre for insurance. Some of my friends use portable bladders, but I find the bottled ones tailor-made for my purpose.

TENT. I've always favoured sleeping alone, so now I carry a solo tent that weighs about 1.5kg. The canopy and fly go into a stuff sack, the poles and stakes go together in another pouch, and I usually just throw the footprint into whatever nook is available inside. A near-weightless 3/4 sleeping pad usually lines the inside of the pack, which is waterproofed with two layers of clear plastic.

CLOTHES. Stuff sacks and ziploc bags are the only organising tools inside -- a layer of each for cold-weather clothing, and another set for going-home clothes. I have sturdy but quite heavy slippers that can take the place of trek shoes should they fail during the climb. A disposable raincoat goes into the top load, along with a cheap pair of gloves for technical sections of the trail.

I used to bring extra camp clothes to mountaintops, but no longer. At the end of the day, after a long hike, you rarely have energy left to change. If the camp is high up, your sweat dries up in the cold and you are forced to put on your fleece jacket, and your rain jacket on top of that if the air is wet. Plus I'm in a solo tent, so who cares how I smell?

EQUIPMENT. My assigned group load is usually a pocket stove, which goes in a Lock-n-Lock box, along with a fire shield, folding knife, a lighter, and a fuel bottle, the size of which depends on the length of the expedition. Sometimes I am also made to bring a parawing for the camp kitchen, akin to carrying a second solo tent with its own stuff sack as well as a stakes-and-poles pouch.

When push really comes to shove I also carry a portable cook set, usually a two-litre pot and a pan to match, turning me into a self-contained trekker. This load also creates space into which you can throw in all the other loose contents of your pack.

FOOD. Most of it is for the group: rice in half-kilo portions, pre-cooked and freeze-dried group meals of viand -- even though I don't eat red meat -- vegetables, pasta, condiments, cream or milk in tetra-paks, and canned food for multi-day climbs or camp kitchen items like tissue and garbage bags. A packed lunch is usually stowed in the top load. I bring along emergency food of my own, usually some dried squid that can be eaten raw if necessary, If it is a difficult climb I carry some trail food, usually dried banana chips or granola bars, and some sachets of powdered juices to mix with my trail water.

EMERGENCY GEAR. A headlamp, extra batteries, and a mobile phone go into a dry bag, along with some money for bus fare. I also bring lengths of kernmantle for tying stuff, a length of duct tape for the same purpose, a few tablets each for various aches, and tiny tubes of insect repellent and betadine to sterilise open wounds. For technical climbs we bring 3/8-inch rope or thicker, coiled into five-metre lengths. These come handy in really unexpected situations, like when somebody forgets their tent poles at home, for example (see photo below).

MESS KIT. The simplest -- a big titanium mug and a spork.

TOILETRIES. Up there it's down to the basics of a tiny toothpaste tube and folding toothbrush, a couple of tiny tissue packs, a plastic trowel, and a shampoo sachet and some technical-fabric sport towel for the after-climb shower. Using soap in a river is unethical.

AIR. I list them here as luxuries of home -- putting on airs, as it were -- but you will always find these in my pack: nail clippers and folding scissors, point-and-shoot camera, and full-size binoculars, which are packed in a waterproof but rather unwieldy plastic box. The 600-plus gramme bins sometimes go through an entire climb without an opportunity to watch a bird, which seems like a poor investment, but one never knows.

Also, I may or may not carry a 500-gramme stool, and a phone charger. If I wanted to, I could leave this last set behind, along with the pan and the stove box and go into gramme-counting mode.

My younger colleagues usually bring portable speakers for their iPods, along with rotgut (they don't much care for whisky, the man-drink), but I have seen some really outlandish cargo in my time -- how about gallons of ice cream in dry ice, or an entire roast suckling pig?