Field trip to Philippine

Uhmm, why I was on airplane bound for Manila on 24th May, just 2 days after my job-starting day. Manila is one of our study sites as Asian mega cities. Anyway, I enjoyed my first trip to Philippine.
This time, the member consisted of Makoto (leader), Taka, Tomo and Yu from Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) and Bill and Ricky (Florida State Univ.), and Fernando and some students (Univ. of Philippine). As soon as we went out of airport, we faced to the atmosphere specific to Asia. That is, heavy traffic jam, noise, eyesore colorful signboard, which I’d usually watched in other Asian cities. Mostly the conditions were same in Tokyo though, we could not say anything for terrible driving manner in Manila. We stayed there about 1 wk and collected groundwater and river water samples and measured submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) at adjacent coastal area by physical and chemical approaches.
I’ll show some pics here. I understood that Philippine is located in Asia, but they have totally different culture due to the past colonization by Spain and US.


Singing restaurant at Manila. At first night, I asked Peter to take us to the restaurant serving local food. Waiters and waitress enthusiastically presented songs and dance on the small stages near our tables. Sometimes cooks also joined. I had fun, but it took time until we finished dinner, because they like singing rather than serving us….

The base for our coastal surveys. Around Manila city, there are many houses along coast and river line. How could they stand against severe typhoons which attack this area every year?

We’re scared to move to the house with heavy baggage. Even if we drop off, it’s just 1m depth shallow water. But take care, 1m deep sludge with hydrogen sulfide was also accumulated there under anoxic conditions…


People at living at these houses make their living by collecting fishes, mussels and seaweed. They spend a lot of time to collect and dry the seaweed, probably a species of Hypnea,.

But agents buy these algae in very cheap price, less 4 Philippine peso (0.08 US dollars) per 1 kg dry weight to import them to China for food and materials.

We tried to go up the stream to collect water from the source as reference, but it was hard. It was easy for us to estimate high conc. of ammonia everywhere. The water-weed covering the surface and water buffalo were everewhere.

One of painful scene is the big landfill at the hillside of Manila city. Around the landfill, there were many houses and people earn there livings by collecting something on the landfill. Two years before, a landslide(landfill_slide) after heavy rain killed many children around this area.

Curious children gathered soon just after we started our sampling everywhere.

Bike, which is useful here, cause’ it pass through traffic jam.