Arrival in Philippines

This is the first attempt at a blog EVER.  I'm having some trouble understanding how to set up the page etc., and nobody around with experience to help me figure things out.  Hopefully I will get together a script-message at least, and will try to figure out how to include photos.

Much of our first week after arrival in the Philippines went to just trying to get first-level items taken care of.  We spent 3 days on a trip to Iloilo taking care of immigration issues.  The actual bureaucratic work was easily done with very cooperative civil servants,  the major complication being that the Quarantine Doctor was called out-of-office on two apparently complicated field-issues, and not available until mid-afternoon on the second day we were in town; after his 10-minute OK of the paperwork we carried, the rest of the process was fairly easy.  We had used the time meanwhile to go various places around the city seeing what goods and services are available, etc.  Iloilo is more than 300,000 population, so a lot is there available - just not necessarily in the format that homestead-desirous transplants would expect to find.  We will have our work cut out for us if we insist on doing much that is different from how the usual semi-rural folk live here.

The Philippines is a beautiful place to be.  Everything is all shades of green at the moment - you wonder if you've arrived in the Emerald Land from The Wizard of Oz.  I know I'm definitely not in KY anymore.  Looking one direction from the National Highway, all you see is palm trees and beach with ocean in the background.  The other direction, there are more palm trees, usually with some cultivated fields in the foreground and mountains in the background.  Walking inland through rice-fields and then up into some low hills, I arrive at the farmland we own which is hilly but has terraces  covering several acres, and are soon to be cleared and plowed so we can begin raising tomatoes, beans, squash, melons,corn and probably some rice (Bernadette is already starting some herbs in pots, and we have roots on a couple vine-snippets from red-seedless grapes we bought). Once we have the place into production we will begin to acquire some small livestock (chickens and other easy-keepers first), hoping to be as food self-sufficient as possible in a year or two.

A brief description of  just where we are: Malabor Barangay (neighborhood), Tibiao district, Antique (ann-tee-kay like Spanish) Province, on the Island of Panay, Philippines.  If I can figure out how to stick a map on this blog I will. Otherwise, Google Maps pulls us up pretty quickly.  Panay Island is just about in the middle of the Philippine chain, towards the west, and looks roughly equilateral triangular.  We're about halfway up the west coast.  We're 40 miles from San Jose (de Buenavista) Antique, the provincial capitol (100,000+ pop.), and about 100 miles from above-mentioned Iloilo.  A major resort area, Boracay Island, is about 60 miles north of us, and we hope to go check it out when we get a little leisure from settling-in.  Guess that's about it for now.





On the road to the farm.

 

Typical view of farm and property nearby.
 

Comfortable 2 bedroom concrete-block house - hopefully soon to be
duplicated on a lot nearby.



Philippine egg-plant? Nope. Sis-in-law Gina likes to grow orchids, and they are
parasites - grafted into another plant and protected by these shells.