Thursday March 31, 2011

4:30 a.m. Manila Airport

It’s amazing that anyone can get through the process of flying from one country to another without losing something important. I do my best to prepare for these things, but what with fatigue, the complexity and the security systems at the airport, it’s impossible to keep track of things. At least I can’t. That I’m in the Manila airport and I still have my passport, ticket, money, and luggage is nothing short of a miracle. You have to pull things out in so many different situations, it’s very easy to lose track of things. And you feel so rushed and bewildered.

The one situation where I could have lost something important – my luggage – was not my fault. And it was pure luck that I didn’t lose it. I’m flying on Cebu Pacific from Taipei to Manila with a connecting flight to Cagayan de Oro. I checked in my backpack in Taipei, and I asked if my bags would be checked all the way through to my final destination – Cagayan de Oro. The woman at the counter told me that my luggage was checked all the way through. She put a very large and very red label on my bag that said “Transfer.” She showed me my luggage tag and pointed out how it said Cagayan de Oro, meaning that I didn’t have to worry about my luggage at all. It would be waiting for me at the end. I fully intended to simply sail through customs and immigration in Manila and board my connecting flight. By pure luck, the baggage from my plane had been offloaded very quickly and it was spinning around on a carousel below me as I descended some stairs. I glanced over and I saw my backpack going around and around the carousel. The big red “Transfer” label had done nothing. Had I just gone ahead, my backpack would still be there going around and around.

I asked a Cebu Pacific employee what I was supposed to do, and he explained that I had to get my own bag and carry it over to the Transfer desk at the end of the hall. The woman in Taipei forgot to mention that little fact. The man at the transfer desk did something very complicated with a computer and a printer and then handed me some papers that he said was my boarding pass for my next flight. I didn’t trust him, though, and I went to the Cebu Pacific Air counter to see if I had to check in. They told me no. My heart sank, however, when I saw that I had to go through a full security check again to board this flight. This makes sense, of course. I had entered at the international terminal and now I was in the domestic terminal, essentially inside the Philippines. This time they divided us into male and female lines for a full pat down. We also had to remove our shoes. This is on top of removing my belt and putting away my cell phone and all my coins and everything else metal. As I said, it’s hard to keep track of stuff when you do all this over and over again.

1:42 p.m.

Jasmin by the Sea, Camiguin, Philippines

What a journey. I’m exhausted and somewhat ill. I guess when I book flights and make plans I overestimate what I’m capable of. In this case, I thought I was capable of working a full day and then flying to Manila at 1:30 in the morning and then staying in the airport all night and flying out at 6:10. I was so tired the entire time. I just wanted to abandon the trip and go home so I could sleep. I really understand how sleep deprivation is an effective method of torture. In my case, I know I would do anything, tell someone anything just to be able to go to sleep. It is a stark reminder of how fragile the human body is. A night or two without sleep and I’d be a complete wreck.

My physical state wasn’t helped by the conditions I encountered along the way. The airport in Taipei was freezing cold, and I hadn’t brought a jacket with me. I nearly died in the departure lounge as I waited. The airline I flew with is a budget airline, so the seats are very small. And it is based in the Philippines, so the seats were even smaller. I had no room for my body at all. It was very uncomfortable. It wasn’t a long flight, but it felt very long. My connecting flight was much the same.

I arrived in Cagayan de Oro around 7:30 a.m. – early in the morning, but it felt very late to me. From the air, the city of Cagayan de Oro displayed a green and expansive side. There was lots of space around all the buildings and lots of greenery. On the ground, it was a different story.

I kind of wandered into this trip without much thought or planning. And I found that I wasn’t really prepared for the realities of life in the Philippines. I associate this country with beautiful beaches and the good life. However, I conveniently erased from my memories the difficult aspects of the place. And there are a lot of difficult aspects to go around. I found I was a bit intimidated by it all. I wasn’t ready for it – the noise, the heat, the dirt, the chaos, the inability to understand anything or get information about anything. I simply wasn’t prepared for all of that. In my head, I was in a beautiful beach-side bungalow drinking a banana milkshake. I forgot about how difficult it could be to actually get to that bungalow. There is a whole lot of crazy country in between.

The big problem was that my journey, rather than ending when the plane touched down, was only beginning. I was at the airport in Cagayan de Oro, but that was very far away from the island of Camiguin and even further from my bungalow. My first task was to get from the airport to a market where the bus station was located. I’d done a bit of research beforehand, and I knew that the name of the market was Agora. But that’s all I knew. The rest was going to be flying blind. I often tell myself that it doesn’t matter, that I can just change my plans. I told myself that if I was too tired to take that bus, I could just spend the night in Cagayan de Oro. And that’s true, but without my trusty bicycle, I’m still stuck at the airport. How do I get from the airport to downtown and how do I find a hotel? It’s not impossible, of course, but it’s not an easy thing when you don’t have any information or any maps or any idea of where to go.

In the end, I decided to just follow through with my original plans and take a bus to Balingoan and the ferry to Camiguin. I saw a young and intelligent looking Filipino and I asked him if he knew of the Agora market. He did know about it and he said that I would have to take a taxi there. I hadn’t been outside yet, so I assumed there was an army of three-wheeled motorcycles out there in addition to the taxis, and they are cheaper. It turns out that there weren’t any, and by asking this fellow for assistance, I had lost control of my own destiny. This always happens when you ask for help, and it is one of the reasons I try not to. This man told me I had to take a taxi. Then he went up to one of the uniformed porters and asked him for confirmation and about the price of a taxi. These porters are a common thing in the Philippines. Every airport is full of them. They are official and organized, and they will carry your bags for you and arrange transportation for a tip. I didn’t want to use a porter. I hardly needed one for my backpack. But now, short of ripping my backpack out of the guy’s hands, I had no choice. He had picked up my backpack and was marching out with it. I had no choice but to follow him. We went outside, and he brought me to the taxi area, where I was handed over to the next available taxi and told that the fare was 350 pesos, a fare I thought to be very high.

I felt weird about this whole thing, and I yearned for my bicycle and the ability to just ride away from the airport. Taxi drivers the world over are viewed with suspicion. They are often the first people you meet in a new country and you never know what is going on with the fare. It always feels likes you are being ripped off. My guy didn’t make it easy to trust him. He asked me about where I was going. I told him, and then he tried very hard to convince me to take a taxi all the way to Balingoan – perhaps more than two hours away. He went so far as to tell me that there was a transportation strike and there were no buses. It annoyed me when he said that. I hate being lied to so blatantly. I told him no and that I wanted to go to the bus station. However, I got the feeling that he wasn’t paying attention. We seemed to be going farther from the city. I simply didn’t know. I felt like a prisoner in that taxi and I could feel the paranoia growing. The neighborhoods we were going through didn’t help. They were typical neighborhoods for a city in the Philippines, but I wasn’t prepared for it. I was undergoing a kind of sensory overload, and I started to doubt my entire set of plans for this vacation. I think I overthought it. I was doing all the things that I never liked and which eventually pushed me toward riding a bicycle. I was traveling like a normal backpacker. As a backpacker, you have a destination, such as this island of Camiguin. You expend a tremendous amount of energy and time and sometimes money to get there. Meanwhile, you are passing through very interesting and new places. Yet you can’t stop and experience them because you are trapped in this sequence of forms of transportation from taxi to jet to taxi to bus, and you are traveling so fast that you can’t see anything and what you do see is only through your window. So here I was making this tremendous effort to get to Camiguin when I probably would have been quite happy exploring the city of Cagayan de Oro where I was. Islands like Camiguin – beautiful tourist islands – function very well as a destination when you are cycling. As you cycle there, you pass through all kinds of interesting villages and towns and other places and meet all kinds of people and have an interesting experience. Then you can relax and enjoy the luxuries of Camiguin. When you are backpacking, your entire trip can be just a series of places like Camiguin all linked together with buses and taxis and other things.

The point I’m trying to make I guess is that I was exhausted. I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. I had developed a horrible headache from dehydration and lack of sleep. I was feeling nauseous from the jerks and starts of the taxi driver. On a bike, I’d be in control and I’d just ride around and find a place to stay or a place to have a drink. But as a backpacker, I was kind of stuck.

We did end up going to the bus station and the fellow seemed very happy with his 350 pesos. The second I stepped out of the taxi, I was besieged with young men trying to help me in various ways. They are trying to get a tip of some kind and they all use the same technique – a very effective technique I might add. They simply ask me a question like, “Where are you going?” or “What are you looking for?” If I say, “The bus to Balingoan” they would then walk ahead of me and guide me to the bus and expect a tip for that. It’s the kind of help I don’t need. I’m at the bus station. I can just go inside and find the bus myself. The unfortunate result is that I have to ignore all these young men who are trying to talk to me. I feel rude, but I have no choice. And this is another angle to backpacking. As a backpacker, you are constantly in bus stations and train stations where this always happens. You never get away and it becomes your entire experience of the country. That would soon drive me crazy.

The bus station was part of a big market and there was chaos in all directions. There’s an organic quality to the way things work in the developing world. There are systems and patterns that have developed over decades. It’s not like a bus station in Canada, where a system is imposed from the top down. In these places, the system grows up from the motivations and complexities of everyone involved. The interesting thing is that the people who live there are so accustomed to it, that they can’t even see it anymore. They don’t ever see the need to explain anything because it is ingrained in them. They assume it is ingrained in everyone. When someone like me shows up and wants to do the simple thing of taking a bus to the next town, it’s very difficult to know how to do that. Do you buy tickets? Where do you buy tickets? There is no ticket office. When does the bus leave? Is there a schedule? Where is the schedule? Where do I put my backpack? Would it be safe under the bus?

Often, something happens that tests your patience. For example, I eventually was sitting in what I thought was the right bus. A man got on who had a bunch of tickets in his hand. They looked like cash register receipts. He asked me where I wanted to go. I told him, and he punched some holes in the ticket and handed it to me and waited. Some time passed, and then I realized that he had punched out some numbers. I had to look at the numbers and see that my ticket cost 135 pesos. I handed him a 500-peso note. He wrote something on the back of my ticket and then disappeared – without giving me any change.

Stuff like this happens all the time, and I know for a fact that half the stories you hear from people claiming to be ripped off overseas were based in misunderstandings. If this were my first time overseas, I’d probably think this guy hadn’t given me my change and was going to pocket it. Since this wasn’t my first time, I knew that small change is always in short supply. I was one of his first customers, so he hadn’t built up a pool of change yet. He didn’t give me my change because he didn’t have any change. On the back of my ticket, he had written 500, which tells me how much I paid and therefore that I am still owed change. My patience was really tested in this case, though, and I have to admit I did suspect this guy of trying to rip me off. He was following the system, but maybe I didn’t know the system and would let it go. In any event, a lot of time passed and I watched him carefully and I know he had enough change. Yet he still hadn’t come back to me after a very long time. Now I was faced with a dilemma. Should I remind him? Would he take that as an insult? Eventually, I did remind him and I got the impression that he had genuinely forgotten.

If I had the energy, I might describe how this young man handled the bunches of tickets and other tools of his trade, but I don’t have the energy. Suffice it to say that it was complicated. Complications piled on top of complications until I couldn’t begin to guess what was going on. As the bus moved through the countryside, we kept picking up other ticket guys. They had a uniform on, and each new guy went through some complex exchange of bunches of tickets with the original ticket taker. Then the bus would travel another five kilometers and this guy would jump off – in the middle of nowhere. A few kilometers later, we would pick up another. These guys were standing at the side of the road, inside shacks, in the trees, everywhere. And they kept getting on and off the bus going through arcane rituals with the tickets. I couldn’t even begin to make sense of it except to suspect that it had something to do with anti-corruption – that it was a company system whereby everyone was constantly checking up on everyone else to make sure there was no monkey business going on.

The bus ride was hellish. No other word for it. I simply HATE buses. We drove at incredible speeds, dangerous speeds, crazy speeds. And they had found the loudest horn in the universe and this guy played it like it was an instrument. The blast was as loud in the bus as outside it. It jerked me into panic every time and my headache got worse and worse. There were so many near collisions and crazy moments, I lost all sense of them. I had the impression we were in a massive structure hurtling down the road blasting things out of our path, challenging them and destroying them. It was crazy. The road was very narrow and winding and everything on the road had a different speed. The three-wheeled motorcycles were very slow and so bulky that they blocked the road. The jeepneys were faster, but they stopped every hundred meters to pick up or drop people off. Motorcycles, normal two-wheeled ones, carried massive loads that took up the entire lane. The bus got behind these guys and then laid on the horn again and again and again. There was nowhere these guys could go. And they couldn’t speed up. The horn had no function, but it was blasted over and over until the blasts numbered in the thousands. I told myself over and over again that this was the way it was in this country. It made no sense to blow your horn all the time, but that is what they did and I shouldn’t get upset. I should simply accept it as part of the atmosphere. But I couldn’t. The lack of logic drove me crazy. I wanted to scream at the guy, and I swore under my breath whenever each new blast of the horn startled me.

My headache was getting worse and worse. My nausea grew. I tried to find ways to fight it. The last thing I wanted was to throw up on the bus. And the bus ride went on and on. To add insult to injury, we were passing through stunning countryside and interesting places. There was all this life going on around me, and I was trapped on a bus. I realized that I would have had a much better time if I’d ridden my bike along this coastal road instead of going to the “famous” island of Camiguin. This road was just a road. A nothing road. Yet, it would have been full of interest to a cyclist.

I was struck once more about how mentally unprepared I was for this trip. The bus, for example, when it pulled up at the station in Balingoan, was surrounded by people trying to sell things to the passengers. Crowds of people held up snacks and fruit and pens and watches and anything else you can name, all trying to make a buck to make it through another day. When I stepped off the bus, I was besieged with eager young men wanting to do something for me so that they could get a tip. It was chaos. I really needed to go to the bathroom, and I grabbed my backpack and went off in search of anything that resembled a bathroom. I was wearing hot jeans and a heavy shirt since I hadn’t been able to change since the airplane. I was sweating like crazy and very uncomfortable. I got to the end of the bus station building and to my delight saw a kind of bathroom. They call them CR here or Comfort Room. A misnomer if ever there was one. Whatever these rooms provide, comfort is not it.

There was a desk right there and two women sat there with a bunch of tickets. Yes, right. I had to pay to use the bathroom. How much? 2 pesos. So I had to dig around and find 2 pesos and then get my little ticket. Once I had my ticket, I didn’t know where to go. There were signs, but I didn’t know the Visayan for men and women. So, like the dopey idiot abroad that I was, I had to stand there clutching my little ticket and wait for someone else to come and buy a ticket and then go into the appropriate room so I’d know which way to go.

I went into the men’s Comfort Room and was faced with a stench that could dissolve paint. It was awful. It was wet and moldy and mildewy and stinky and dark and cramped. I’d be willing to bet that 99 Canadians out of a hundred when presented with this room without context wouldn’t be able to guess that it was a bathroom. There were no toilets, for one thing. The bathroom part of the Comfort Room was no more than a wall with a rough kind of trough at its base and a tiny hole at the far left. Men lined up at this trough and let fly. I’ve never been the best at public urination. I like a little privacy and this sudden onslaught of public peeing was too much for me. Men were jostling for space and pee was splashing all over the place. There was a mist of it in the air, and I swear the guy to my right was aiming for me. Everyone was curious about me and they had all done a half turn to the left to look at me, with the result that half a dozen streams of urine came arcing in my direction. Meanwhile, men were piling in behind them and trying to get in there. I simply gave up and left. I wasted my 2 pesos.

My adventures were nowhere near done at this point. I knew there was a port here and that there might be a ferry there. But where? And how? And when? No one could answer any of my questions. It wasn’t a language problem. Again it was this trouble with ingrained knowledge. They couldn’t grasp my questions conceptually. It’s hard to think of a Canadian equivalent. I think we operate differently. However, it might be like two people standing in front of the dishwasher in a kitchen. And one of them asks the other, “Where is the dishwasher?” It would puzzle you, because you’re both standing right in front of it. It’s right there. So you can’t be asking about where it is. So what are you asking? The problem is that one of them had never seen a dishwasher before, didn’t know what it looked like. And that would be weird to us. We wouldn’t instinctively grasp that. So we couldn’t understand the question. I was asking people about the port. And the port was right there in that town. They would just nod and agree with me. Yes, the port. The port is here. Yes, but where? They wouldn’t understand my question.

Finally, I popped out the back of the bus station area to take a breather. I just needed some space. Across the street were five or six young men with those tricycles. One of them shouted “Port?” at me and they all started to laugh. I didn’t pay any attention to the laughter. This guy seemed like my salvation. So I said, yes, the port. And he indicated that I should get into the tricycle. Meanwhile, everyone was laughing. I asked the guy how much it would cost, and he said 5 pesos. That made no sense to me, but I needed to get to the port. So I hopped in with my backpack. We drove out of the bus station, crossed the street, and we were at the port. It was right there across the street. But there was no way I could have known that. I paid the guy his 5 pesos, and I reflected that the joke was actually on him. He could have asked me for 100 pesos at the beginning, and I would have agreed. I didn’t know where the port was, so he could have made up any kind of story. I was at his mercy as so many backpackers are, but he didn’t realize it.

The port was another adventure. Part of the problem, I think, is that there is so much informal economy in developing countries. In a Canadian ferry port, it is pretty clear what is going on. A ticket window looks like a ticket window. People buying tickets look like people buying tickets. In the Philippines, there are always dozens of people just lounging around and you have no way of knowing who is official and who isn’t. There are also few signs and indications of what anything is. There are also abandoned shacks and tables. People will be sitting at these shacks and tables looking no different from the official people sitting in their shacks. Signs also never get taken down or updated. So reading signs doesn’t help you at all.

I picked windows and tables and shacks until I stumbled across the one where they seemed to be selling tickets to some kind of boat. I paid my 150 pesos (again having no idea if I was being ripped off or not) and then stood around. Where do I go? It wasn’t clear. I figured that out and then I was presented with another table. It looked no different from all the other tables that had no business with me, but the man at this table wouldn’t let me pass. I had to buy a ticket from him. I found out eventually that it was a terminal fee of 2.25 pesos. I didn’t know how to pay him .25 of a peso, so I handed him a 5-peso coin and he gave me change. Inside a port building I was pleased to find a bathroom of sorts. It was supremely nasty as well, but it looked more like a bathroom and it didn’t have six guys peeing on me, so mission accomplished this time. Then I was faced with finding the boat. There were only 3 of them. 2 of them looked like ferries. The third was a rusty barge, but that was mine. The horn started to blast and I hurried aboard.

 

Tags: Balingoan, Cagayan de Oro, Camiguin Trip, Manila Airport, Mindinao