Silvery Toxic Beauty. Boatsman on the Pasig River, Manila, Philippines
Very toxic, even a 'biologically dead' river: the Pasig of Manila, the Philippines. Although its denizens - as I experienced a few days ago - are helpful and friendly though desperately poor (see my earlier posting). No knives like those after which the defender of Manila against the Spanish in the middle of the sixteenth century, Alquizar or Lim Ah Hong, tantang ("the Knife"), was named.
The Pharmacist from V., who's arrived here to join me to Boracay, had no desire at all to repeat my little adventure. But we went to one of the Bulwarks of majestic Fort Santiago of Intramuros, Manila, to look down upon the River and my just-Dantian infernal 'iter' of the other day.
The Pasig is terribly polluted, irrevocably dead. It exudes a stink beyond your imagination if the wind is wrong (your way). It wasn't this morning...
In fact, there's then - all things considered - even a kind of aesthetic beauty to the molten silver of its waters, to this boatsman salvaging something to eke out a living. And even to the three or four various water plants that still survive (Eichhorna crassipes, Certatophyllum demersum, Ipomoea aquatica, Pistia stratoides).
But to swim here, or anywhere near... Nope, I'll wait for Boracay!
Silvery Toxic Beauty. Boatsman on the Pasig River, Manila, Philippines
Very toxic, even a 'biologically dead' river: the Pasig of Manila, the Philippines. Although its denizens - as I experienced a few days ago - are helpful and friendly though desperately poor (see my earlier posting). No knives like those after which the defender of Manila against the Spanish in the middle of the sixteenth century, Alquizar or Lim Ah Hong, tantang ("the Knife"), was named.
The Pharmacist from V., who's arrived here to join me to Boracay, had no desire at all to repeat my little adventure. But we went to one of the Bulwarks of majestic Fort Santiago of Intramuros, Manila, to look down upon the River and my just-Dantian infernal 'iter' of the other day.
The Pasig is terribly polluted, irrevocably dead. It exudes a stink beyond your imagination if the wind is wrong (your way). It wasn't this morning...
In fact, there's then - all things considered - even a kind of aesthetic beauty to the molten silver of its waters, to this boatsman salvaging something to eke out a living. And even to the three or four various water plants that still survive (Eichhorna crassipes, Certatophyllum demersum, Ipomoea aquatica, Pistia stratoides).
But to swim here, or anywhere near... Nope, I'll wait for Boracay!