Friday, April 1, 2011 6:30 p.m.

Post day wrap-up, though I don’t know that I have enough energy to cover it all. All I did was go for a walk and explore the town of Mambajao, but that was enough for today. My bungalow, Jasmin by the Sea, is in the small barangay of Bug-ong. I still can’t pronounce that properly. It has the accent on the -ong in a way that I can’t replicate. Bug-ong is about 5 kilometers from the island’s main town of Mambajao. Mambajao is pronounced as it looks if you give it a Spanish twist and pronounce the J like a harsh H.

I had kind of an errand to complete in that I thought it would be nice to have a pair of long pants of some kind. I have my jeans, but they are too hot. I was told there was a store called Pasaluba that carried everything a wandering tourist might need. It was outside the town of Mambajao, and I turned left at the main road to head in that direction. As is my habit, I had my camera out dangling in my right hand. I know lots of people who are too self-conscious to do that. They keep their camera hidden in their knapsack and take it out when they want it. I take so many pictures that I can’t really put my camera away. And I don’t worry about looking like a tourist. I don’t think putting my camera away will fool anyone into thinking I am a local. My height, hair color, clothes, and just about everything else you can name gives me away I think. A camera not swinging from my hand isn’t going to suddenly make me blend in.

I love that the digital camera will auto-focus. That means I can take all my usual pictures by raising the camera to my eye. But I can also just take pictures from the hip by pointing my camera in a general direction and snapping away. I get all kinds of interesting shots that way.

It was an incredible walk and I snapped away with abandon. Just about everything was interesting. I’ll have to let the pictures speak for themselves. In the Philippines, they love to garden and even the poorest houses will be decorated with flowers and trees and shrubbery of all kinds. I passed some very large and beautiful concrete homes and many wooden houses and then lots of places more like shacks than homes. Everywhere, there were people and they were very friendly. Lots of young people had the courage to say hello to me and I stopped and chatted with them. A few asked me to take their picture. Just as on Palawan, the call out “one shot” and they are delighted when I take their picture, as if in some odd way I was doing them a favor. I offered to show them the picture on the LCD of my camera, but they weren’t interested in that. They just wanted their picture taken and were very happy when I did. Their English is very good and very natural. They learn it very easily and master it much better than the Taiwanese ever do.

Traffic was a bit of an issue, and I had to walk in the grass and mud at the side of the road most of the time. The people here, just like the people in Taiwan, do not walk if they can at all help it. They take local transport at every opportunity. I’m sure I wasn’t the first foreigner they’ve seen walking at the side of the road, but they weren’t jaded, and I got a reaction from everyone. Those in town asked me how I’d gotten to town, and when I said I’d walked, they were aghast and amazed.

I was very entertained by the signs along the way and I snapped a number of pictures of them. The people who saw me take them were also quite puzzled. So many of the scenes around me were familiar from previous trips – the water buffalo in the muddy pond, for example. They’re like old friends now.

The town of Mambajao was a delight. It’s small but bustling, and I had great fun walking around and taking pictures. I went into a pharmacy and bought some insect repellant and some 3-in-1 packets of instant coffee. It’s actually better tasting than the coffee you get in restaurants. I love shopping in these little shops. I also went into a big grocery store and wandered around. I bought a cheap umbrella and I couldn’t resist a little electric pot for heating water. It only cost 135 pesos, and with it I’ll be able to heat water in my bungalow and make my own coffee in the morning. I’m sure it is a piece of junk, but I hope it will do the job. I will give it its first test tomorrow morning.

I walked through the market, which in Mambajao is a large concrete building two stories high. I’ve already heard many times that the Muslims tend to be the businesspeople. They are shop owners and that sort of thing, and in the market, I noticed that most of the people running the shops were wearing Muslim clothing. I was very happy when I saw the stairs leading to the second storey. From there, I could take pictures of the streets below, and I snapped a lot of pictures of the various tricycles and jeepneys loading up with customers. It was a great place to hang out. Out the back, I noticed a small concrete path that went into a residential neighborhood, and when I came down, I went in that direction. I made my way through these narrow walkways, being greeted by children everywhere. Hello, hello, hello, they all called out and I said hello back and they were all smiles. The path ended at a road, and I turned left and followed it to the ocean. There were interesting scenes all around me and I took lots of pictures. Since this was my first day, I did feel a bit nervous from time to time. It’s one thing to be told that everyone is friendly here, but I was off by myself in the middle of nowhere, and it would have been easy for any ruffians to ambush me and rob me. I wasn’t comfortable leaving my passport and money in my room, so I was carrying it all with me. If someone held me up with a gun or knife and took my knapsack, I’d pretty much be in trouble. I’d lose everything and have no way of getting out of here. However, I wasn’t that worried. I think this is a very safe place. Everyone knows everyone, and I think this small-town atmosphere protects the naive tourist like me. If someone robbed me, everyone would know about it, and it might be easy to track them down. This lack of anonymity would keep them from robbing me. Only one fellow seemed unfriendly. He was a short (well, relative to me) but muscular man in this thirties. He had an unfriendly look on his face and he shouted two words at me over and over again. He seemed angry with me and hostile. Shortly after that, a bunch of young students passed by me, and they greeted me. I struck up a conversation and knowing that they had heard the man, I asked them what horrible, awful thing this man had been shouting at the foreigner. The translation? “Good afternoon.” The man was saying good afternoon in the local Visayan language. It was my foreign paranoia that was turning a simple greeting into hostility. It was a good early lesson.

I walked up and down all the main streets of the town and then followed some smaller streets into a local neighborhood. Everyone greeted me and children were friendly. I walked through this local neighborhood to the very end where I reached a gate and on the other side of this open gate I was surprised to see a runway. It was such an incongruous sight, and it was so perfect that people were allowed to simply wander out onto the runway. Children were playing and mini-vans were driving across it. It was like a very long playground. I guess the flights had stopped a while back, but the runway lives on.

I stopped and chatted with a number of people, including a woman roasting chicken kebabs, some children blowing bubbles, some men sitting outside a local store, a man sitting on a bridge, and a girl who asked me three times what my name was. Along the way, I passed a group of people singing Christian songs at a series of crosses. It was Friday, and it was a procession of some kind. People here are very aware of religion and they all ask me about my religion. They are essentially asking if I was Muslim or Christian. I’m neither, of course, but having no religion at all is something that people simply don’t understand. It leads to endless conversation. It is much simpler to say that you are Christian and leave it at that. After the question about religion, comes the question about where I’m married or single. Saying that I’m single caused quite a reaction. They are used to foreigners meeting local women and getting married. When they learned I was single, they instantly began offering to set me up. Sometimes the women would be standing right there. “She’s single,” they’d say in all seriousness. For them, being single is like a disease, a condition that must be rectified at all costs.

While in town, I also checked out the Rooftop Hotel. This was a very strange sight. It’s in a big building with a very large karaoke bar on the second floor. I think it is all part of the same complex. A nice young woman showed me the available rooms in the hotel. They were all theme-based. There was the Mickey-Mouse room, the Jungle Room, and another room that was filled for some reason with a hundred hand bags. These were expensive rooms at 3,500 pesos each. I saw an advertisement online for this place, and it was something along the lines of experiencing all the bright lights of Vegas in provincial Camiguin. I’m not sure they got the bright lights part right, but they certainly managed to capture the gaudiness. It made me think of Apocalypse Now again – the scene where they discover the Playboy Bunny show in the middle of the jungle. One of the characters says something like, “This is sure enough a strange sight in the middle of all this shit.”

I got the feeling that every single person I met could be my friend for life if I but let it happen. The feeling was confirmed when, as I walked out of town, I found myself walking beside a group of local people. One man said hello and I said hello back and we started chatting. His name was perfect: Allen Noguerra. He and his brother and some other family members had just been to Friday mass and were walking home. I think he was expecting it to be difficult to talk to a foreigner. He was quite surprised that it was so easy, and when we got to the gates of his home, he invited me in for coffee. He seemed prepared for a refusal and I surprised him again by agreeing so easily. It was a wonderful encounter, and I sat on a nice balcony with him and his father drinking instant coffee, eating bananas off the tree, and talking about all kinds of things. He had lots of pet dogs, and his favorite, Marlee, bounded around at my feet to be petted. Allen was a very friendly guy, and within five minutes he had it all settled – he was going to help me buy land on Camiguin and buy a house. He knew the perfect wife for me. And he had all kinds of business ideas for us to be partners in. His biggest idea at the moment involved buying eggs in Cebu and selling them on Camiguin. He had it all worked out. All he needed was capital.

Chatting with him was a great time. His father had just come in from the rice fields out back. They grew their own rice. They told me about his father – Allen’s grandfather – who owned all of a large field I had seen earlier. However, he had 13 siblings, and upon his death the land had been divided up among them and his children. Now they grew rice just for their own family.

Allen was currently unemployed. He used to work for a government agency that was funded by the World Bank. The funding had disappeared and he now had no job and was dependent on his father and mother. He was 43 years old and single himself. This was why he was so eager to go into business. The economy of his family was hard to figure out. He made it sound like he was very poor, but the house was large and impressive (at least from the outside). There seemed to be quite a bit of land attached to it, and there was a new pickup truck in the driveway. I can’t imagine how much a truck like that would cost. And how could they have enough money for that? In Ethiopia, you heard that people lived on very small amounts of money, and there it made sense. They lived in mud huts and had a few animals and a field on which they grew their food. They would have a single T-shirt and a pair of shorts patched and patched again. It made sense that they lived on one dollar a day or even much less. It wasn’t a cash economy. Yet here these supposedly poor people had many possessions including things like pickup trucks. I can’t come close to affording a pickup truck. How can they? And people have cell phones and clothes and all sorts of things. Allen said he had no capital to start a business. But how much can it cost to simply buy some eggs in Cebu and then resell them here? I wouldn’t think you’d need much capital for that.

If I had been up for it, my encounter with Allen could have turned into a long night of many experiences – a beer at the local place with his friends, a large bottle of the best rum in the world, and cockfighting. At one point, he got up and ran to the back. He heard his prize cock making a ruckus and he wanted to make sure he was okay. I was way too tired for anything like that, and I took my leave soon after. Allen walked me down the path of his home and to the main road. It was dark by then, and he wouldn’t hear of me walking back. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that excited about it either, and in seconds he had waved down a tricycle. I didn’t think there was room in it for one more, but everyone shifted over and I found myself jammed inside with ten other people with 2 hanging on to the outside. The trip back to Jasmin by the Sea went by very fast, and for 15 pesos, I was home.

I had a few other adventures on my walk that I haven’t mentioned. For one thing, I went into a market stall that had huge piles of clothing for sale. This clothing had all been donated at some point by various NGOs and development groups around the world. It arrives in the Philippines in giant bales and is sold by the hundreds of pounds. This woman will buy a bale or two and then sort it into giant piles and sell it for very little money. I was left to sort through it and I found a pair of jogging pants for 100 pesos. I had looked in the local stores, but nothing was big enough for me. It’s fitting that I end up clothing myself with a pair of old sweat pants that someone in North America had thrown away or donated to charity. They imagined it was clothing some poor fellow in some poor country somewhere, and in a way, it’s true. The only difference is that poor fellow is Canadian.

I also met another fellow named Allen. This man had called out to me on the road I was walking past. I waited for him, and he crossed over to me with a young child in his arms. He said that he sometimes guided foreigners, and if I wanted someone to guide me up the local volcano, he would do it for 1,200 pesos. He laid out the terms clearly and handed me a card with his name and cell phone number written on the back. He said that there had been few tourists lately, and he needed the money. He indicated the child in his arms. I don’t think he was using the child as a selling point. He just happened to be holding the child.

I also walked to the ocean in Mambajao. This was a wide open area where a lot of jeepneys were parked and being washed. The shoreline was littered with coconuts and branches. A girl and a young boy were walking through the water and looking for treasures.

I walked through the local park on the ocean where lots of students just out of school were hanging out and flirting with each other. They all greeted me as I walked past and I chatted with groups of them.

I couldn’t help but think as I walked around how easily my host parents from CWY would fit in in a place like this. I remember thinking that about so many places I’ve visited. I imagine that Leon would be interested in all the small-scale industry that goes on here. Every backyard and front yard is a small factory of some kind. In one, I saw two men busy making their own cement blocks. In another, I saw a man making furniture by hand. There is so much of that here. The economy allows it, and everyone is busy building and making things on a small scale. With Leon’s skills, knowledge, and experience, there would be so much to keep him busy and interested here. The people are also so friendly and open, there is limitless opportunity. It’s such a welcoming place.

It’s interesting to contrast how people in Taiwan and then people on Camiguin react to my short holiday. When I left Taiwan, I was almost burdened with guilt about taking 11 days for vacation. 11 days! Such a long, long, long time from a Taiwanese point of view. To take 11 days from your company is practically a betrayal. The Taiwanese were amazed and aghast that I would take so long. Here on Camiguin, everyone, every single person has responded the exact same way: ONLY 11 days!!!! They are astonished that I have only 11 days. For them this is far too little time. I can’t think of anything that would demonstrate the difference between the two cultures more than this. The Taiwanese are horrified that I would be gone for 11 days. In the Philippines they are horrified that my time is so short. I have to say that I prefer the approach in the Philippines.

I was worried yesterday that this little holiday of mine would not work out. Today, my point of view has gone a 180 degree shift. I had SUCH a great time today. Just today alone would be worth the effort of coming here. Every day after this will be a bonus.

Tags: Camiguin Trip, Mambajao, Taiwan