It all begins in St Pauls National Park, with its magnificent limestone mountains and a topographical map taken from a GIS office.

Back in Japan, a group of 28 students began to help me build the diorama. Computers, scanners were primitive and expensive then. We made do with photocopied images, cut up and enlarged to scale.

We decided on a scale of 1:5000, divided the whole thing into 16 sections, and traced the contour lines to make them clearer.

The diorama was to be built of layers of urethane sponge. The printouts were used like this to cut out the contour layers.

We used double-sided taped to stick the layers of sponge together. Much more forgiving than glue.

And gradually this is what it began to look like. this piece is one sixteenth of the whole diorama. It began to take longer than I had thought.

And so it went on. The guy with the long hair is me, worrying about whether we are going to finish it on time, and how we can get it to Palawan.

One of the mountain ranges was a limestone formation, and very rugged. exciting to make but at times the students questioned whether the landscape they were making was real or not.

Nearly finished. sixteen pieces all placed together was a very satisfying sight for the whole group.

Now for the tricky bit. The plan was to use the urethane sponge as a mold, and make a hard plastic cover with liquid plastic. Only one shot at doing this over there so we did a practice run on a small piece. Not completely satisfied, but we went with it anyway.

And finally we were off to Palawan. How we packed it all up and got it there is another story. This is the vehicle we used for the last leg of the journey - having one of it'S regular breakdowns.

Off the main road and a couple of kilometers up a disused logging road to the community camp.

Harmless fun and not nearly as dangerous as it looks - we are only going at about walking pace.

The base camp. Actually a village center that was part of the "deal" with the community we were supporting. I had only asked for roof for the diorama, but they had used the opportunity to build themselves a community center.

We camped in tents which we brought along with us..

The community had just received official government sanctioned rights to their communal lands - quite a big deal - and the diorama was a symbolic gesture on our part towards that.

This was a tense moment. The sponge had been compressed by putting it in large ziplock bags and vacuuming out the air . I was a bit worried that the pieces would re inflate when they arrived, but they did so perfectly.

The whole idea of the diorama was to give the community graphic model that would help the community come to grips with all the NGO talk flying around about GIS, mapping, boundaries and other technical talk being thrown at them.

Most of all, the the diorama showed how those weird-looking contour maps worked.

The community were supposed to do some of their own mapping. Here we are teaching a bit of simple mapping with compass.

We also invited some government officials to come a teach what they thought needed to be taught. Fred Mapano from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources came down and rose to the task.

Ted Baltazar, who actually field-mapped the boundaries of the communal lands - also came down to charge things up with an animated talk.

The community members seemed to appreciate that someone educated was finally taking the trouble to come and to teach them something. I think this mattered more than whether they followed much of it or found it relevant.

Back to the diorama... time now to glue the pieces together.

This was a fascinating exercise. we had a brainstorming session in which the community members names the places they could identify on the diorama.

To my amazement, every gully and even ridge had a name, though not all could remember them. Only the older folks after scratching their heads for a while could finally recall the more obscure parts.

It is a shame that this knowledge will die with the elders. The days of such intimacy with their land are disappearing as the younger ones move away from a subsistence existence.

Now to repeat the tricky part: making the plastic shell - which should last longer in the jungle.

Unfortunately it did not work out perfectly. a couple of mountain ridges on the north coast lost their fidelity. I was quite disappointed by this. But anyway not many people go there and we fudged over it..

Next step was to paint it in what i hoped would be a natural-landscape-looking green.

It looked terrible. Something else was needed to make it look more natural.

Fortunately, the dipterocarp trees were in full flower at that time, and actually rained down from the trees daily when the afternoon breeze kicked up.

We scooped up a bucket-full of them, mixed them in with a new coat of green paint and there we had it: a micro-forest!

And there is stood. Boundaries painted proudly in red. and a 3-meter by 2-meter weather-proof plastic diorama.

We eventually moved it to a new home where it could lie flat.

The place is called Cabayugan. The diorama lasted three years - until my last visit there in 2000. After that I have no idea what happened to it.

if I could do it again, I would not do the hard plastic thing, but stick with the urethane foam. harder to clean, but looks better and lasts almost as long (if you can keep the rats away).