I don’t even remember where I heard that of the two things to which a person could stare forever and ever, the fire burn and the water fall. Worried so much throughout this trip by the destructive effects that water can have for the daily life of entire communities, there were not many moments when we stopped to watch the water in its beauty as we did today in Wawa Dam, northeast of Metro Manila. The rural landscape that you find along the river over here is a diametrically different type of coexistence that the water has with the people than in the two cities that we have visited so far. The rocks, the waterfall, its sound, the surrounding green did nothing more than remind me of the similar places along the Vilcanota River that I used to visit with my family when I was a child. Of course, something that you don’t find there in the Andes and that is so common along the Marikina River is the use of bamboo. I will not try here any clever description of the different benefits of using bamboo in the building of houses in the edge of bodies of water, I shall leave that to the big-time expert on that, Astrid. I can only choose one of the million pictures that I took of this amazing house, that in a beautiful synthesis combines rather contradictory ideas such as strength and flexibility, space and verticality, definition and incompleteness.