firefly tour - taichi

donsol river - looking sea-ward


donsol river - looking inland


and you said, "the fireflies' lights are like my dreams, they live in cold fantasies....."



firefly, a small insect that gives out cold bio-luminescent lights in the nite; both female and male do that, but female blinks more frequent than male.

the sky is just perfect; the minimally humanly-litted surroundings of this just-about-to-developed town still affords the viewer a majestically, awful nite sky with the milky way interspersed with inter-heavenly-body dust and myriads of stars . no matter how many times you have seen this before, it always strikes the core of the soul to witness one more time the beauty of the universe with the naked eyes, out of near-pitch-black setting, just like viewing the beginning and end of everything..... so helpless yet so free, trivialising all existences and their throes....

come, join the connectedness of being. no worry about any threats.

they book the firefly-river-tour at 6pm, for the 8pm tour, and head to town for dinner. the town has wound down after 6pm.... no food joint around except for a few roadside hawkers.... finally they arrive at giddy's place, which is a hotel cum restaurant. dark, and quite gloomy; but you shouldn't expect lavish light shows, the whole country is short of power. they order some local dishes. before they can finish their dinner, a lady comes in and tells them the firefly tour is ready; she is the lady in charge of tour booking. somehow she knows that they are in this place(where else? only one restaurant in the whole town). they hurry back to the river and board the boat, that's already filled with a dozen people.

there's a tug boat to tow their bangka, so to reduce the noise when the bangka is approaching the firefly habitat.

after ten minutes gliding on the placid donsol river, they can make out, in front them, little dots of pulsing lights, zigzagging about the mangrove trees at the river bank. when the bangka stops, they are so near to the flies that some dart into them, and the kids and some adults are very excited, trying to catch hold of them. and some do have them in their palms..... and some even prepare their little bottles to bring them home( a NO, NO).....cameras are not sensitive enough to capture the dark scene..... but imagine they are like tiny christmas lights, darting, blinking around some bigger-than-life mangrove growth. a few of those flying outside the core group look like shooting stars streaking across the sky.....

the guide gives a few details of the flies, then he says, "look, the guy is catching big-head prawns in the river, " pointing to a man's silhouette under the dim light, casting his net to the river from a small boat. "we have a very beautiful river, i hope we could keep it that way. we have a very beautiful nite sky above us, i hope we could keep it that way too....." then he says, " we have very a very beautiful country, i hope the people, the new government can come here to realise how beautiful the country is and how lucky the people are.... and to make all effort to not destroy all these in unrestrained, runaway greed..."

"fireflies give out light 365 days a year, even during typhoons.... but i'm sad to say, instead of giving out lights everyday, we kill each other, and the environment every minute of the year...."

"the lights may be a thousand of them, to me they're one, the stars may be millions of them, to me, they are one..... everything may have so many copies of itself..... to me, being is singular!"