Friday April 1, 2011 10:30 a.m.

Jasmin by the Sea

Camiguin, Philippines

It is the next morning now. Technically it is my second morning in the Philippines, but it is the first morning that I’ve woken up here. It is raining fairly hard and, in fact, has been raining all night. It started shortly after I went to bed and then never stopped. I guess the weather forecasts were true. This doesn’t look or feel like a spring shower. This feels like rain that has settled in, likes the place, and doesn’t plan to leave.

I left off the story with me boarding the boat. The boat pleased me immensely. In fact, despite my ranting yesterday about the “third world” nature of it all, I am pleased with how things went. My problem wasn’t the difficulty of my arrival. It was that I was mentally unprepared for it. I hadn’t really taken that into account with this holiday. And this really is a holiday. It might even be my first holiday ever. I have always tended to have some kind of purpose to my trips overseas, however vague. This time, I had no real purpose. I was your basic office worker. I had some days off that I had to use up and there was a very cheap flight to the Philippines. I didn’t come here to discover a new country. I’m pretty familiar with the Philippines. I came here to take a break from work. However, I didn’t plan it that way. I get why people would gravitate toward a nice package holiday to a resort in the Dominican Republican. If you only have a week, you don’t really want to be uncomfortable the entire time. There’s no payoff to all the discomfort. I booked a horrible flight, which meant that I was exhausted. I had no idea how to get where I was going, so I was stymied by transportation problems, and I was traveling like a local person without any of the knowledge or skills that a local person has. So it was difficult. For a pure pleasure holiday, it would be so much better to have all the arrangements in place and then you are magically transported to a beach resort and deposited at a bungalow with air conditioning, hot water, and all the other amenities.

I could have done some of that even here on Camiguin. There are some relatively nice resorts here, particularly one called Paras. Their bungalows are fully modern and comfortable and luxurious. I could have reserved with them, and they would have sent someone to get me at the airport. This resort actually owns a very fast boat. It leaves from the dock in Cagayan de Oro. At least I assume they own it. It has the same name as the resort: The Paras Sea Cat. Someone told me yesterday that it costs 500 pesos, which isn’t very much. The best thing for me to do would have been to reserve with Paras and then let them handle the arrangements. Short of that, I should have made a reservation at a hotel in Cagayan de Oro and let them pick me up at the airport. I could have stayed the night there and then taken the Sea Cat the next morning. It leaves once a day at 8 in the morning except Thursday. I couldn’t have taken it yesterday even if I wanted to since it was Thursday. But I could have taken it on Friday.

It’s pretty easy to see that I should have gone that route from a comfort and convenience point of view. However, I think my way got me some pretty interesting experiences. I won’t forget that bus ride any time soon. I kept saying yesterday that it would have been so much better to be traveling by bicycle, but there is certainly one downside to that – danger. From up there in my front seat of the bus, anyone on a bicycle looked like an insignificant ant to be crushed. The bus driver at least gave the jeepneys, the tricycles, and the motorcycles the courtesy of a triple blast and howl from the air horn. Cyclists didn’t even get that. They were simply blown from the road by the backwash of air as the bus roared past.

I thought about Theroux a lot as I rode on that bus. The last book of his I read was Dark Star Safari, in which he wrote about his last trip through Africa. At one point, he rode in one of the bush taxis that make up the bulk of the transportation network in Africa. He swore, and it sounded like a very genuine promise, that he would never ride in one again. It was simply too dangerous. It is part of life there, but what is the point of gambling with your own life? That bus ride yesterday felt like I was gambling with my own life. The tricycles and motorcycles were clearly outclassed in the mass department. A collision with them would wiped them out as if they were never there. But my bus might have then lost control and hit a tree or gone into the ocean. However, there is something else out there prowling the roads of Mindanao, which, though they might not outclass my bus, certainly equal it. These scared me more than anything: logging trucks. I don’t know where they were coming from or exactly what type of trees they were carrying or where they were taking them, but they were in just as much of a hurry to get there as my bus driver was to get to his destination. My bus and these trucks seemed to be in a bit of a macho competition. Neither gave ground and we passed each other with inches to spare. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I was sitting at the front of the bus on the left side right behind the driver and my stomach lurched every time we encountered one of these trucks. They carried their trees crosswise, not lengthwise as in Canada. These trees were already cut into equal length pieces and were stacked across the bed of the truck sticking out beyond the truck’s bed on both sides. As they approached, they looked like the behemoths they were – massive walls of timber bearing down on us. There wasn’t enough room on that road for trucks like that and a bus like mine. There simply wasn’t, and each time we blew past each other, the bottom of my stomach fell out. I could even visualize the result of a collision, and it wasn’t pretty. I saw the entire contents of the bus, seats and passengers, simply letting go and hurtling forward to be crushed. Given all of this, I’m not sure that riding a bicycle would even be feasible on these roads. It would be very dangerous.

Luckily, none of these things happened on my bus trip, and I arrived at the dock and climbed aboard my ferry as I described. As I mentioned, I was delighted with my boat. I only felt bad that I was so tired and hot and sick and miserable. Riding on that boat is the kind of thing that I love and under normal circumstances I would have eaten it up. Still, it was fun. The boat was simply a rusty hulk. Again, a Canadian would probably not even have chosen it as the boat that I was to board. There were three boats there, and of the three, this one looked like a derelict. It looked like a ship that I used to play on as a kid in my hometown – a rusty hull tied up and abandoned on the river, a place for kids to explore and dive off of, certainly not a working boat that would carry passengers and vehicles.

It was a combination of a vehicle and passenger ferry. On one side, it had a ramp that could be raised and lowered onto the dock for cars and trucks to use. The horn was blasting as I walked aboard. There was only one vehicle on board – a big pickup truck. Besides that, there was some cargo and perhaps forty people. On another day, I would have scrambled over the entire boat and explored and photographed every nook and cranny. Being somewhat exhausted, I only did a bit of exploring. I got out my camera and took a few pictures. I took a couple of pictures of the shoreline. It was total Apocalypse Now. I didn’t have any expectations of Mindanao, but the island appears to be very lush. The shoreline was a dense jungle. Not many tourists make it to Mindanao because of the Muslim guerilla group operating there. I don’t have any up-to-date information on the situation, but it seems that they are still active and much of the province is affected by it. Locals and foreigners are kidnapped for ransom and sometimes killed. However, it looks like it would be a fascinating and rich place to explore.

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the Muslim nature of Mindanao was apparent in the airport in Manila. Among the passengers waiting to board the jet were women in various levels of Muslim dress. I simply don’t have the vocabulary for this, but I believe the headdress is called a burqa. Some of the women had partial burqas that covered their heads and necks but left an oval opening for their face to show through. A couple had the full head to toe black outfit, and I have to say that these are an incredible and evocative sight. One woman in particular stood out. It’s impossible to say how old she was, but it’s a good guess that she was young. She was completely covered in a solid black outfit that covered everything except a tiny slit that showed her eyes. I know it’s a ridiculous thing, but being of my generation, I can’t help but make movie and book references, and when I saw her walking around, I imagined a powerful wizard under there. It was an outfit that doesn’t seem possible outside of a Hollywood movie set. It was simply too exotic and too glamorous. The lines of her clothing were not haphazard in any way. This was not a black bed sheet that had been draped over her head. This was clearly an article of clothing that had been developed and designed for a certain look. I could imagine costume designers in Hollywood working for weeks drawing this outfit and trying to get the look just right. It’s not too much to say that it was beautiful, particularly the lines around her head and face. The front of the burqa didn’t simply hang from her nose in a bunch. It was cut and sculpted with beautiful lines that hung just right. It was hard not to stare. It was something of an alien encounter for me. I felt I was in the presence of someone from another world. And I suppose I really was. I certainly had no skills to deal with someone like that. How could you relate to this person at all unless you spent time in her culture? I would probably chat with anyone who was standing beside me in line to board the aircraft and with anyone who happened to sit beside me on the plane. But I don’t think I would have the nerve to chat with her. I have the idea that it would be forbidden. Perhaps it isn’t true at all, but I have the idea that she isn’t allowed to talk to any strangers at all let alone a giant male barbarian from Canada.

I knew before I came here that Mindanao was Muslim, but this is another thing that I didn’t really think about when I booked my flight here, so I wasn’t really prepared for it. Most of the women, of course, weren’t dressed like this woman in black. There were only two that I can remember. The others had partial burqas. And many of these wore their burqas more like women from the fifties and sixties would have worn a headscarf to keep their hair from getting mussed up – as an item of fashion. They were colorful and matched the rest of their outfit. These women wore earrings and other jewelry. In fact, their presence made the women in black even more interesting. How do these women think of themselves and of each other? The women in all black were clearly dressed this way as part of their culture and it was at least partially (if not entirely) based on concealing their beauty and sexuality. Yet, serving them on the airline were flight attendants who clearly had been hired because of their beauty and sexuality and then given tight-fitting uniforms to reveal and heighten it. Men’s eyes everywhere on the jet couldn’t help but stray to them as these flight attendants were forced again and again to stretch up and lean over the seats to arrange bags in the overhead compartments and then close them. These were not tall women and they often had to stand on top of parts of the seats and lean right over the men in them. What did the women in the all-black outfits think of them? What did they think of the female passengers who wore their burqas as colorful headscarves? In the end, I don’t think there is any great mystery about it all. They are, at heart, just people and women like all women. They dress this way because it is part of their heritage and they just live their lives. It is tempting to ascribe to them all kinds of extreme emotions and opinions, as if you are writing a tawdry Hollywood blockbuster, but I’m sure it is not nearly as powerful and significant as one might think. I have to admit to some fairly trivial concerns when I saw them. Here I was with totally standard clothing with pockets and bags everywhere, and I was having a heck of a time keeping track of all the items I needed – my keys, my wallet, my money, my passport, my boarding pass, my luggage tag, etc. How did this woman do it? Did she have all of this squirreled away inside internal pockets? Could she retract her arms inside this outfit and rummage through all these pockets and then stick her arms back out the sleeves? I can’t even imagine her trials and tribulations when it comes to bathrooms here. I go in clean and dry and emerge a complete mess – hot and sweaty and wet and disgusting. The floor is wet and disgusting. The walls are wet and dirty. Anything that touches the ground is going to get soiled. It’s a major effort for me to go into them. How can this woman possibly deal with it?

I don’t know the extent of Islam on Mindanao. Certainly, these women in the departure lounge (some kneeling and praying at the far end) were so far my only exposure to it. After I landed at the airport in Cagayan de Oro, I didn’t see any evidence of Islam. Everyone and everything looked just like everywhere else I’ve been in the Philippines. I think it is restricted to the southern and western part of the province. The north, where I am, is not Islamic. I have seen no mosques at all and no one dressed in Muslim clothing. My Lonely Planet guidebook is a few years old, and it says that Cagayan de Oro, where I had landed was about the furthest west you can safely go. That may or may not still be true.

 

The ferry ride to Camiguin was about an hour and fifteen minutes long. The island was clearly visible out there in the ocean and it looked much larger than I had expected. It is only 64 kilometers around the entire island by road, but that is still a pretty large place, especially when you consider that the entire thing is made up of volcanoes old and new. I took a couple of pictures of the island in the distance and I wandered around the ship taking pictures of standard romantic boat stuff – piles of thick ropes, the anchor chain and winches, rusty metal everywhere. There was a passenger lounge of sorts with a TV showing the usual violent Hollywood film. (My bus had one, too, and they played the revenge genre film “Taken”.) There was no air-conditioning or anything like that, of course. I stayed on the outside of the lounge sitting on hard metal and wooden benches. I struck up a conversation with a young man and found out that his name was Mike. He was born on Camiguin and was studying criminology in Cagayan de Oro. He was going back for the weekend, and he offered to help me get from the dock to Jasmin by the Sea, the place I had chosen to check out first when looking for a place to stay. On a bicycle, I would simply start riding and then see where I ended up. In fact, my plan had been to rent a motorcycle in Benoni, where the ferry docked, and then go from there. However, the weather looked terrible, so I didn’t think I would be able to use a motorcycle every day, and with Mike’s help, it looked to be a simpler matter to go straight to a place with bungalows.

I was very glad to get Mike’s help. It makes a huge difference. Arriving at a place like Camiguin on your own can be total chaos and confusion. Arriving with the help of a local makes it as easy as can be. There is always a cheap way to get somewhere. The local people manage to get home, and they don’t have much money. So there is a way to do it without paying 350 pesos to a taxi driver. I could certainly afford to pay for whatever form of transportation I wanted, but using a local form is more interesting. And, to be honest, I don’t want to be ripped off. I think that plays a much greater role in the relations between backpackers and locals than anyone admits to. Even the most budget of backpackers have enough money to pay for whatever they want in the way of transportation. They can afford to pay 350 pesos to a taxi driver easily. However, it comes with the feeling that you are being ripped off. And no one likes to be ripped off.

It took a long time for my ferry to get lined up to dock. The ferry drove in to Benoni headfirst, but the ramp was at the back. So after going in nose first, it then had to slowly and laboriously turn itself around 180 degrees. Meanwhile, there was a lot of activity on the dock. I mentioned that there are porters at the airports. There are porters at the docks as well, and these aren’t organized. It is a total free for all. I saw about thirty men waiting. They had all climbed aboard another boat that was docked there and they were lined up along the side waving and shouting at the people on my boat. They were trying to make eye contact and establish a bargain from a distance. Many waved at me and I felt rude not responding, but there was no way to wave back a refusal. How do you do that? Any motion from me would be a sign that I needed a porter, and I didn’t need one. I could carry my own backpack.

As our ferry got closer, all these men ran from the boat they were on to the dock and gathered in a group. It was quite a performance. They stood there exactly as a group of men who had gathered for a 100-yard dash. They jostled and pushed for position. They stood with their feet apart, crouched down, elbows bent, ready to launch themselves forward. I’m sure they would have taken a running start and jumped across the decreasing gap except that the ramp hadn’t been lowered. Slowly the ramp went down and to my amazement, the most spry of the bunch did a standing broad jump. They jumped up and forward like an Olympic athlete, with both feet in the air at the same time, timing it just right so that their toes just caught the edge of the descending ramp. They timed it to perfection, having done it hundreds of times before. These men had the advantage of a quarter of a second. Right behind them, the rest, who didn’t have that kind of spring in their legs, ran forward as the ramp came down. I’m talking about full speed. It was a twenty-yard dash with the winner getting as his reward not a job but the chance to ask for a job. I was the only foreigner on this boat, so this wasn’t a tourism thing. They were running toward fellow Filipinos who had come back to Camiguin with large boxes and bundles of things they had purchased cheaply in the markets of Cagayan de Oro. I don’t know how much they would be paid for their help or how much of their economic lives this represented, but considering how competitive they were amongst themselves, it was important to them. I found a website before I came here that gave the findings of a survey or research project. They concluded that the average household expenses on Camiguin were about $2.25 US per day. So an entire family survived on 100 pesos a day. I tend to doubt these figures when I see them. I don’t see how it is possible. But even if you double or triple that figure, you are still talking about very little money, and these men worked hard to get a simple job of carrying someone’s bags or boxes for a tip.

A bunch of men approached me to ask if I needed a hotel or transportation, but I pointed to Mike and said that I was with him. There was some back-and-forth between Mike and these men. I can’t imagine that they were too pleased that he was butting in. By helping me find cheap local transportation, he was denying a guy with a tricycle (I didn’t see any taxis) a lucrative job, perhaps the only chance this guy would get for a job for that entire day. As I said, I was the only foreigner on that boat, and as such, I was the prize they all wanted. And Mike took that prize away from them, and he was doing it for nothing.

Mike and I walked together to where some vans were standing. These appeared to be the standard form of transportation here – the Camiguin version of the bush taxi of Africa. He signaled to one guy when we were quite far away that he wanted two seats. This minivan was in its way far worse even than my hellish bus. It was a true mini-van with tiny proportions. Yet, it wasn’t going to move until it was completely full. Full in this case means 15 people including the driver. Amazingly, that is the normal load. There were actually 15 seats – 5 rows of 3 people per row. That is practically a busload in Canada. Here, that is the capacity of a mini-van.

I was very glad to have Mike’s help and to be using local transportation, but once again I yearned for a bicycle. We were passing the most beautiful scenery and interesting villages, but I could see nothing of it through my little window. I was crouched down and jammed in. My stomach was heaving as I fought off motion sickness. It was a miserable and horrible trip and it seemed to go on forever.

Most people stayed in the mini-van until we got to the main town on Camiguin called Mambajao. Mike and I got off there as well. It cost us 30 pesos each, about 66 cents Canadian. I did wonder if I should pay for his fare. Obviously, it would mean nothing to me financially, but I wasn’t sure of the ethics. He had done this to help me. By paying him, I would be turning it into a financial transaction and from that day forward he might try to get money out of foreigners. So I took it as him just trying to be friendly and helpful.

Mike’s family lived somewhere around Bug-ong, the same town where Jasmin by the Sea is located. I understood that the two of us would then continue on together by what he called a moto-cab. However, when we got out, things changed. He said at first that there was a transportation strike. There were no moto-cabs. Then, in keeping with the total confusion that surrounds everything that happens in this part of the world, he led me to a moto-cab and arranged for this guy to take me to Jasmin by the Sea for 20 pesos. He told me in one sentence that the moto-cab drivers were on strike and in the second sentence that this moto-cab driver would take me. More, there were moto-cab drivers everywhere clamoring for my business. So I must have misunderstood, right? Apparently not. I asked him and he insisted again and again that there were NO moto-cabs. I then pointed and asked if this wasn’t in fact a moto-cab. Yes, it was a moto-cab. But you said there were NO moto-cabs. That’s right. There are NO moto-cabs. Here is your moto-cab. Is 20 pesos okay?

There is nothing you can do. Black is white and white is black and up is down. If, in the end, you have a guy willing to drive you to Jasmin by the Sea for 20 pesos, you can’t really argue. Just get in and go. You will never be able to figure it out and make sense of it all. Just accept that fact.

Mike said that he had a motorbike there. Perhaps it was a family bike? I don’t know. I went off on my own in the back of this moto-cab. There was nothing good about that trip either. Nothing in the Philippines is built for anyone over 5 feet 8 inches, and I was hunched over and jammed in. There was lots to look at and take in, but it was a real effort to look. And I was being thrown around so much it was all I could do just to hold on and not injure myself.

We arrived in Bug-ong (or the Bug-ong area anyway), and my guy drove down a narrow lane to the right. We bumped along for a hundred meters, and then through the trees I saw glimpses of the ocean and then we arrived at my current home. I was pretty pleased. It seemed almost exactly the sort of place I was looking for. There were some separate bungalows around and a pleasant outdoor restaurant. A very nice woman in her sixties got a couple of keys and showed me what was available. She first showed me Number 3, which was a room in a building right on the water. From the balcony, you can see the ocean and the beach and a nice area with palm trees and hammocks strung between the trees. It was plain but comfortable inside. It had its own bathroom with the basics. No TV or air conditioning or anything like that. Just a bed and a table and a chair and a table and an electric fan. She then showed me another bungalow. This one was #1, I believe. It was behind the restaurant, so you didn’t get a view of the ocean, but it was three times as big as the first one. It also had a big balcony with lots of seating. Best of all, it was a separate building. I’d rather it was right on the ocean, but in every other way, it was fine. The one by the ocean was also beside the restaurant, and I was worried that there would be music and noise all night. I chose #1 and put my bag inside. It cost 700 pesos a night, by the way, which is about $15. I don’t know what a Filipino tourist would pay. Probably a lot less. Higher prices for foreigners seems to be creeping into the Philippines. It seems very wrong, but it is also hard to argue with, as $15 a night is relatively cheap for someone on a short holiday from work.

I was dying for a cup of coffee, and I ordered one as well as a chicken curry for lunch. The chicken curry was identical to the chicken curry I had had long ago on a resort island off of Palawan. I started to wonder if the cook had once worked there.

After a while, a foreigner showed up at the restaurant and ordered the first of five or six bottles of San Miguel beer. He was an honorary local in that he lived here half of each year and then lived in his home country of Switzerland for the other half. He has been doing this for a very long time and is now married to a woman from the Philippines and has a family. His native language was German, but he spoke English well, and he knew the owner of this hotel very well. She had been married to a Swiss man. He’d died nine years ago and she had since married again. She owned this place, but she spent only part of each year here. She lived in Austria with her husband the rest of the time. I was lucky in that she had just come back with her family about five days ago. I say lucky because she is a very nice person and has a great laugh and is nice to talk to. She and the Swiss-German, whose name was Marcel, talked up a storm catching up on all the news of the people on Camiguin that they both knew. It seems there is quite a large group of foreign men who had settled down here, mostly European. I’m sure there are a thousand great stories in there. At first glance, you have to conclude that these men are a bit of an odd bunch. Perhaps men with problems. I’ve since seen a few of them, and you can’t help but have a reaction to them. I admit that I have a bit of a prejudice when it comes to older Germans and other Europeans. They come from a different world, and I’m not comfortable around them. The stories I heard last night had a lot to do with heavy drinking. They live here because it’s much cheaper than Europe. They can work half a year at home and then live here for half a year and do little but drink and scuba dive and hang out. I saw a couple of them last night over dinner. One fellow was in his late sixties or even early seventies and he was unshaven and wearing dirty shorts and had an immense hairy stomach sticking out over his shorts. He didn’t seem a pleasant specimen at all. He spoke German in a booming voice.

On the one hand, one feels a stirring of pity for these men. They seem out of place and lost. Yet, why should that be? There is nothing particularly admirable about the life of men doing the normal thing in Canada. They go to work every day for years. Then they retire and have solid incomes and spend their days simply drinking coffee in coffee shops and running errands. They are simply passing the time with trivial tasks. These men here on Camiguin are living relatively adventurous lives. True, they are taking advantage of an economic disparity so that they can live well here when they probably couldn’t at home, but what is wrong with that? Marcel married a local woman and has children. He lives here and is part of the local culture and local economy. He scuba dives constantly and drives a motorcycle and has a far richer and more varied life than the majority of men I know ever have. Still, I can’t help but feel a twinge of something when I think about them.

I was just chatting with one of the women who works here. Her name is Janet and she is wearing a T-shirt that says in big letters “If you’re rich, I’m single.” She says it is just for fun, though. She is happily married. I’m sure she has talked to no end of foreigners and heard the same things and dealt with the same questions a thousand times, but she was more than happy to chat with me. I mentioned the ex-pat community, and she said that they were very glad to have them on the island. They bring a lot of money to the island – money that is sorely needed. However, tourism also raises prices, she said. Foreigners pay more and more, and the prices go up, and this ends up affecting the locals, too. I guess it is this process that can lead to dual-pricing, and from that point of view it is quite normal. You can see it as not intended to gouge foreigners but to help the locals. A foreigner can easily pay ten times the going rate for things like a tricycle ride. So the tricycle riders start to raise their prices. But a local person can’t afford to pay those prices. It’s a weird world to live in – this world of a westerner traveling in a place like this.

Janet and I talked about the various ways of getting here, essentially what I was rambling about yesterday. My choice – to take a bus and the local ferry – had nothing to do with economics. But for her it was all about economics. She talked about the “first” ferry. It took me a while, but I figured out she was saying “fast” ferry. This is the Paras Sea Cat, which costs 500 pesos. She said that it cost less to take the bus and local ferry. Then I started to add it up in my head. The bus to Balingoan cost 135 pesos. The local ferry cost 150 pesos. That is already nearly 300 pesos. My first reaction was that it then made no difference financially which route you go. The difference is only 200 pesos. Yet, for her there is no reason for “only” to be in that sentence. 200 pesos is only about $4 Canadian. For that, you get the convenience of coming directly to this island from Cagayan de Oro in perhaps an hour and a half. The cheaper route – bus plus local ferry – took four hours, five or six ours with waiting time. That’s a no-brainer for the average foreigner. Why not take the Paras Sea Cat? Only 200 pesos more. For Janet, that 200 pesos might be more than a day’s wages. It probably is. It’s natural to be curious about how much people earn, but I hesitate to ask. It puts too much light onto the difference in our economic situation.

I didn’t stay up very late last night. After my lunch and talking to Marcel and Melinda (the owner), I unpacked and took a shower. It was still light out, and I took my camera and took some pictures of the resort and the beach and the ocean. There is no beach to speak of right here. It is a rocky shoreline. There is a bit of a beach to the right and the left, but it isn’t a white sandy beach. It is volcanic black rock. Very dramatic and beautiful, but not the stuff of picture postcards.

By then, I was nearly finished. I had dinner. I didn’t even want dinner anymore, but I had preordered it – Chicken Cordon Bleu, if you can believe that. I wasn’t thinking when I ordered it. It isn’t expensive or anything, but it is the craziest and richest thing you can imagine. It’s like bacon wrapped in cheese and stuffed into a chicken that has been breaded. It’s like the ultimate in decadence. I see kings living on it and then getting gout.

After that, I set up my mosquito net. I have two mosquito nets – a big one which I bought long ago and used in Ethiopia and Guinea, and a small lighter one I bought in Taiwan. I brought the smaller one simply because it is lighter, but I wished I had the big one. In any event, I’m glad I had a mosquito net at all. I’m sure some people could sleep through that mosquito onslaught, but there is no way I could have. For me, a mosquito net is the #1 most important traveling item now. Expensive hotels might keep the mosquitoes out, but even then it is not guaranteed. These bungalows are filled with them. I moved the table and chair from the balcony into my room and listened to some music and wrote a bit. Then, around 8:30, I went to bed. I drifted in and out of sleep all night long. The rain never stopped and it was nice to listen to it falling outside. The first time I woke up it was about 6:30. I could have gotten up at that point, but there seemed little point since it was raining so hard. My number two and number three most important items for traveling are ear plugs and an eyeshade. I put in earplugs and put on the eyeshade to block out the morning light and sound, and I went back to sleep, waking up once more at 10:30. I slept for 14 hours to make up for lack of sleep the night before. My shower was a slow and laborious process. I have my own bathroom with running water, but, of course, there is no hot water. You don’t need hot water, but it does take some effort to train that cold water on your body, especially when the water pressure is not that high. I had to fumble around to shower and then shave, but it was all done and then I came to the restaurant. The Philippines is not known for great cuisine, and that shows up everywhere including their coffee. Coffee here is instant. I like instant coffee, but the stuff they use is horrible thin powder. It doesn’t taste very good. I wrote for a couple hours, and then I had spaghetti carbonara for lunch. Lunch is now over, the rain has lightened, and I guess I’m going to go for a walk and see what there is to see.

 

Tags: Cagayan de Oro, Camiguin Trip, job