#35 27th. January 2004

Moalboal January 2004

Hi, Friends of Moalboal!!

Already 2004 and soon February, time goes fast here in Paradise. In
the middle of this month it looked like high season was over but now
we start to see a lot of new faces. The Peso hit a record low
yesterday, 55,8 peso / US$ and over 70 peso/?. I can not remember
Philippines ever being this cheap for Europeans. As a reference, a
beer in Chili is now 25 pesos. We have also seen a lot of Japanese
come and go. Most of them are coming from Mactan just for the day.
Fortunately most of the know how to dive these days

WEATHER:

Not the best.

ACTIVITIES:

Volleyball at white beach every Sunday around two O'clock
Soccer every Monday and Friday, starting 16:00. When playing do not
go full out, David knows that. Yesterday he broke his collar bone,
but it doesn't really matter because he was going home to Sweden on
Friday anyhow :)

BIRTHS, SOCIAL AND GOSSIP:

Kalle, owner Savedra dive shop, will turn 40 next month. He wants
everybody to know that they have opened a travel agency inside
Savedra called Cebu-Travel Philippines (http://www.cebu-travel.com) and
that they are Dive Silver sales agent (http://www.divesilver.com)

Mark the Shark, Nelsons son in law, turned 33 and we had a good
party at White Beach, Red Horse, fire walking and volleyball.

Magnusson is now 40 years old, believe it or not but we drank a few
beers on his birthday as well.

Berndt and Aileen got married already last year on another island,
and I forgot to write about it, but will soon have a party here on
the beach for the good old boys.

For all you karaoke lovers, Pacitas nipa huts is now the place to
stay. You do not even need to go to the restaurant to listen, they
play it so loud that you can stay in your cottage and enjoy. I've
heard that they make up to 100 pesos a night with that machine. The
backside, though, is that some people move out.

The New Moalboal Pool champion since last Thursday is COOS.

PRACTICAL:

Sun Pride Food through Stephen G. Castillo have donated 20 buoys to
the Buoy project. I know that Takka has already taken charge of six
of those. The Buoy project is an non profit organization that just
wants to save the reef. The more Buoys we install = less anchors
thrown on our beautiful corals.

In my last letter I gave the wrong address to Marcosas new homepage.
Michael sent me the following:
Hi Lars,
may be you got any rumor wrong, our homepage http://www.moalboal-cebu.com
from Marcosas Cottages exists since years already, but we try to
promote Moalboal in general, so we start in November 2003 one
site "all about diving" in Moalboal: http://www.divemoalboal.com and one
site "all about Moalboal" http://www.infomoalboal.com. We are always fully
booked in high season and it is very easy, to advise people just to
look at this page for any other accommodation. As more visitors come
all business will benefit. So thanks to all who are joining the page
until now. Next update will be in February, than I hope the new
rising star Chili Bar will join the page.
I will come around at New Year to take some pictures.
There is good news; Simon did an update of the grandmother of all
Moalboal pages:
http://www.moalboal.org.uk/index_main.html
Best regards,
Michael from Marcosas

WHALE SHARK SIGHTINGS:

Plenty this year. I know of at least five different spottings this
month, from Tongo up to Tuble. Moalboal is again Whale shark capitol
of

GENERAL:

If anyone has any information that they think would be interesting
for people on this list, please do let me know and I will add it in.
If you know anyone that would like to receive this letter, please
tell him or her to send me an E-mail to starner@... and I
will add him or her. I've found it to hard to do it through
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/moalboalmail

Best regards,

Lars Starner.