Sunday April 10, 2011 7:45 a.m.

Jasmin by the Sea, Camiguin, Philippines

I have some music playing on my X-Mini Capsule speaker and some water boiling in my Yong Heng Electronic Heating Cup. I am mostly packed. Everything is arrayed in neat piles ready to be stacked inside my backpack and knapsack. There are a few challenges facing me today, but nothing that will be too draining I hope. I first have to get some kind of transportation from here to Mambajao and then from there to the port at Benoni. I figured out yesterday how one goes about buying ferry tickets. I also got hold of a ferry schedule. People tell me that the first two ferries of the day run on time and after that, they get later and later. I’m currently aiming at the eleven a.m. ferry. That should get me to Balingoan by 12:15. The bus station I now know is simply right across the road. I will walk there and then see about a bus to Cagayan de Oro. That should take 2 hours, putting me in Cagayan in plenty of time to find transportation to the airport. I imagine I will take a taxi with my remaining pesos. From there, it is up to Cebu Pacific Air to get me to Manila and from Manila to Taipei. Assuming I don’t misplace my passport and that Cebu Pacific have not mislaid my reservation, that should work out. I will arrive at Taoyuan International Airport at 12:40 in the early morning. The last time I did this, there was one more airport bus heading into the city, and if one rushes through customs and immigration with just a quick stop in the bathroom, one can just make it. If not, I will have to take a considerably more expensive taxi.

My hope is that this journey will not be nearly as taxing as the one out here. It’s a fairly reliable hope, as my journey is beginning in the morning after a fabulous night’s sleep. My journey to here began at 1:30 in the morning after a long day at work. I was dead tired before it even began. That was a brutal trip.

I have to say, though, that these relatively short holidays work out much better than I expect. I was somewhat prejudiced against them for a long time, thinking that just a week or 10 days somewhere was not worth the expense of a flight and the effort. I saw myself as saving up money for long journeys of six months to a year. Flying somewhere for just a week seemed a waste of money. I’ve changed my opinion totally. The 10 days that I’ve spent here in Camiguin, despite the cost of the flight and the horror of getting here, have been extraordinary. Time does that magical thing – it stretches and becomes longer when you are no longer working. Ten days feels like a couple of months. Even weekend trips now make sense to me. Since you are traveling and experiencing new things, the two days feel much longer than two days.

Yesterday, my last full day on Camiguin, began with breakfast and coffee in the Jasmin by the Sea restaurant as always. James, the pipe-smoking British polymath, joined me and we had our last chat. He had plans to move on. I don’t think he wanted to, but when he was on Bohol, an ATM machine ate his card and he couldn’t get it back. It wasn’t a huge deal as this was a card for an account he had in the Philippines. However, it did mean that he was short on cash, and he had to return to Bohol to get money from his British account. I offered to lend him money, of course, but he didn’t take me up on it. I think he was ready to leave Camiguin anyway. He hadn’t been very active in his time here. I think his trip out to Mantigue Island was his only outing. He spent most of his time strolling along the beach, reading in his room, and then drinking at various places at night. He was a big drinker. Time might have started to hang heavy on his hands. We didn’t exchange names or address or anything. I had the impression he felt himself above such things. I certainly enjoyed our conversations. His knowledge was wide-ranging and he could converse on any topic thrown his way.

Once we had said our brief goodbyes, I got on my motorbike, filled up the gas tank with 2 Coke bottles of unleaded gas, and then headed to the St. Nino Cold Springs. This took me all the way around the western tip of the island past all the places I had already visited plus one that I hadn’t – the Sunken Cemetery. I had driven past the Sunken Cemetery, but I hadn’t actually stopped. This time, I thought I might as well check it out. This cemetery was submerged by the eruption of a volcano in 1871, the same one that had destroyed the town and the church. I parked my motorbike on the street and then walked down to the shore. There was no entrance fee or anything like that. The short lane was lined with souvenir shops, but I had no interest in buying anything.

There are two points of interest to the Sunken Cemetery. The first is the large cross out on the water above it. I understood that it was floating on a raft, but when I got to the lookout point, I realized I was wrong. The cross was built on top of a solid concrete platform that had been built right on the ocean floor. The water is fairly shallow, so that was possible. The cross was very scenic out there on the water, and most people pose on the lookout point for a photo with the cross behind them. I went down a few more steps and tried to frame up a few shots that showed the cross by itself with the ocean and the sky. With your eyes, you wouldn’t see the coral reef under the water or the sharp line where the shallow water suddenly meets the deep ocean. But with my polarized sunglasses, I could see it clearly and it was very beautiful. The polarizer filter on my camera didn’t work quite as well as the lenses in my sunglasses, but it worked well enough, and I got some nice pictures of the cross with a boat floating off to the left.

The other thing one would do there is snorkel. If you snorkel, you are supposed to be able to see the graves themselves as well as the coral that had grown up around them and the marine life that called the cemetery home. I would have gone in snorkeling, but I didn’t know what to do with my camera, knapsack, and other valuables. When we went to White Island, we left our knapsacks on the boat, and with the three of us plus our boatman to keep an eye on it, we felt comfortable enough. Even then, I wasn’t totally comfortable, and I kept a close eye on things. When I went to Mantigue Island, I left my knapsack with Jennifer at the park’s ticket booth. I felt safe doing that. But at the Sunken Cemetery, there was no one officially connected with the place. I could have left my knapsack with one of the souvenir shops, but it didn’t feel right to me. It probably would have worked out, but I wasn’t willing to take the risk. It is the eternal problem of traveling alone – how to safeguard your valuables. There is no perfect solution, and you just do the best you can.

I drove down the coast road after I visited the Sunken Cemetery and shot some video along the way. I wanted to make up for the mistakes I’d made the previous day. You get to the St. Nino Cold Spring from the barangay of Compol. There, I saw a sign pointing up a road. The cold spring was about 4 kilometers from there. The drive was a pleasant one and I shot some video along the way.

I had no idea what the St. Nino Cold Spring was, and I was surprised to see how developed it was. The spring itself was surrounded by a high wall and the parking area outside was busy and crowded. There were many souvenir shops and places selling beachwear and water toys. Filipinos were out in force since it was a Saturday and we are now heading into Holy Week. The official holidays are April 21 and 22 and I’ve heard that Camiguin will be swamped with visitors then. The high numbers of people I saw on Saturday were said to be the first wave of people coming for Holy Week. (Update: I learned later that Saturday itself was a national holiday. Filipinos generally work on Saturday, so it being a holiday, they were out in force at the springs.)

Buying a ticket was a 2-step process, implemented to control corruption. You first went to a table where two women asked you for your name, your nationality, your age, and the purpose of your visit. This was all written down on a form along with the price: “20 pesos only.” (They always put the word only after the price.) You then take this paper to the official ticket window and hand it in along with your 20 pesos. All the information is transferred onto an official receipt along with the price (20 pesos only). You are given the original and they keep a carbon copy. A man at the gate checks your original and then swings open a heavy steel gate for you to pass through. The gate was strong enough to withstand quite an attack, I would think. And the way it is all designed, you see nothing of the cold spring until you step through.

The pool at the cold spring itself was large – 25 meters by 40 meters – and surrounded by grassy lawns, flowers, bushes, picnic tables, and shaded picnic tables. The shaded picnic tables could be rented for 50 pesos. Every table was occupied by a large group.

These developed cold springs have to be the easiest of attractions to maintain. It is essentially a very large swimming pool, but the water simply flows out of the ground and replenishes itself constantly. There is no need for chlorine or any kind of work to keep it clean. It simply is a natural spring. They’d enlarged it and put in a cement and stone wall around it, but that is all. Beyond that, it is natural. There are even fish living happily in the spring.

I stayed at the spring for an hour or an hour and a half just paddling around in the cool, refreshing water and then sitting on the edge in the sun and watching all the activity around me. The Filipinos, despite being island people, are not great swimmers. Most people don’t know how to swim at all. I saw two macho teenage boys paddle out into the middle and then attempt to tread water. They flailed their arms and legs about like they were drowning. I wondered, in fact, if they were simulating drowning for some kind of water rescue training. They kept this up for a minute or two and then panted back to the edge where they breathed heavily and acted the hero for a group of girls there. I didn’t really understand the whole scene at all. I’m not sure what they thought of my performance by comparison. I’ve practically grown up in water and I can tread water with almost no movement at all. I’m just a head floating on the water.

Some people at the St. Nino Cold Spring could swim, of course. But again it was all done with great effort and a lot of flinging limbs about. They had not climbed up the ranks of swimming classes at the local public pool from Minnow, to Goldfish, to Dolphin, to Shark, etc.

Besides the St. Nino Cold Spring, I didn’t have any other new places on my radar for the day. I decided to revisit the marine sanctuary with the giant clams, but that didn’t work out as I had hoped. I wanted to go without a guide this time. A guide was useful the first time, because he showed me where to go into the water and where to go to see the various fields of giant clams. It was pretty clear to me now what was out there. I was more interested in the coral than the clams, anyway. However, they wouldn’t let me go in without a guide. I insisted very strongly, but they didn’t budge. They said it was their policy, and in the end I decided not to go in. The new guide would simply bring me to the exact same spots as the first guide and I would have that feeling of being on a guided tour. I wanted to simply relax in the water and go where I wanted. I made my request strongly enough that it was even passed up to “our chairman” but the answer was still no. Oh, well.

I then completed my circuit of the island, and things worked out well. In fact, they worked out very well, and I did some things that I probably wouldn’t have had time to do if I had spent the afternoon with the giant clams.

I had noticed on previous trips up and down the main road to Mambajao a very large and ramshackle wooden structure. One night in particular, it was hopping. It was jammed with people and there was a crazy roar of voices coming from it. I assumed it had to be a cockpit, and I was right. According to the sign on the outside, it is open on Sundays only, but yesterday, Saturday, it appeared to be open. The same roar was coming from it, and the road outside was lined with motorbikes for a couple of hundred meters.

I think it would be fairly obvious that I’m not thrilled at the idea of cockfighting, but never having seen it, I thought I’d check it out. I always imagined it was done in tiny places hidden away in back alleys and kept secret. I didn’t know for sure, but I had the idea that it was technically illegal even here in the Philippines. But, if this stadium was anything to go by, it was quite accepted and right out in the open.

I needed a bathroom before I went into the cockpit, so I pulled in at an outdoor bar called X-Site. My goal was to use their bathroom and also to collect my thoughts before heading into the cockpit. I didn’t think such a thing was to be done lightly, and I wanted to relax a bit. At this bar, they didn’t have any normal size bottles of beer, and I had to order one of the giant bottles. I’m kind of glad of that because I’d seen everyone drinking these giant bottles of beer, and I thought I should order at least one before I left. And here was my chance. I didn’t imagine I would come close to finishing it, but I was quite pleased when it was thumped down on the counter in front of me. I also got a tiny brown glass with it, and I poured out little drinks at a time.

The atmosphere at the X-site Bar was provided by the customers themselves in the form of karaoke. There was a large karaoke machine with many buttons on the front and a TV on the top. There were only two customers when I sat down – 2 rather grizzled and drunk but friendly men. They were obviously regulars and they knew the numbers of the songs they wanted to sing off-by-heart. I watched carefully, but I couldn’t see how much it cost to sing one song. It was either 5 or 10 pesos. The men slid a coin across the bar and told the woman there the number of the song they wanted to sing. The woman put the coin in machine’s slot and then keyed in the number and handed the man the microphone. To say that they love to sing and that they love to sing soppy love songs in the Philippines is the very definition of an understatement. It is all they sing and it can result in some very odd moments. In this case, this was an open-air bar at four in the afternoon – a bar with large lizards in the roof, chickens scrabbling around the feet of customers, and jeepneys put-putting past on the road twenty feet away. The men singing were probably fishermen and were likely wearing the only clothes they owned. The words to the songs – hardly needed by anyone – appeared on the TV screen in two lines. The words were highlighted as they were supposed to be sung, and in the background there ran a random assortment of video clips. I saw everything from a team of draft horses pulling a wagon in rural England to an African boy beating a young goat with a stick. The video simply made no sense at all.

I don’t know if the man had a good voice, but it sounded very good to me, and he sang it with exuberance. He did not get lazy at all. He belted out the high notes and he la-la-la’ed during the musical interludes when there were no lyrics to be sung. And the topper to all this is that the songs were largely in English.

I happened to have my digital camera in my hand, and I switched on the video record function. I had been looking at pictures on the camera’s LCD screen, and, as far as the patrons were concerned, I was still doing that. They didn’t know that I was recording. They probably didn’t know that such cameras could record video and sound. I played around with the zoom and I zoomed in on his face and on his companion from time to time and then I panned around the bar to show the snacks for sale and the words on the TV screen. The man’s companion sang a song, and then a couple of women sang – both with clear and commanding voices. The big surprise for me is both how loud and how clear the sound is. I’m used to the karaoke in Taiwan which is distorted and awful. The machines in the Philippines are far superior and deliver a level of sound that wouldn’t be out of place in a techno dance bar. Their voices also came across very clear. Being something of a techno-geek, I appreciated that very much.

I drank perhaps one regular bottle’s worth of beer from my giant bottle. The two men at the bar were quick to notice that the foreigner hadn’t finished his beer, and I made them happy by sliding the bottle their way when I left. I went in search of the bar’s bathroom and I found it in the back in the form of a little shed with a sheet of galvanized tin for a door and a hole in the ground for a toilet. That did me fine, and then I went back to my motorbike.

The cockpit was only a hundred meters up the road and I drove there and parked. Then, after taking a deep breath, I headed to the entrance. From the outside, the cockpit was quick imposing. It was made entirely of wood and resembled the old bleachers you used to find at baseball parks except that there were four bleachers, one on each side to form a square with a steel cage in the middle. The tiers of the bleachers rose up perhaps seven levels, and there were special “ringside” boxes, one on each side.

When I went to the ticket counter, I was instantly sold a ringside seat for 150 pesos. Regular entrance was 100 pesos. I felt very much out of my element. The place was clearly quite macho. It was Beyond Thunderdome made out of wood. It seemed the sort of place where I had to be careful of my steps. I pictured groups of burly men taking me out back and beating me senseless if I happened to trod on someone’s prize rooster or accidentally distracted a prize rooster just when it was about to deliver the killing blow. I certainly didn’t want to make any sudden movements and accidentally bet on a bird and then be asked to pay some extraordinary sum. Protestations that I didn’t know I was betting would likely fall on deaf ears.

I’m sure that 90 percent of this was in my imagination. This cockpit was right out in the open and was obviously as much their Sunday afternoon and Saturday entertainment as a baseball game in Canada. It’s true that the audience was almost entirely male and that blood and feathers littered the ground and that there was an air of frenzy in the air, but everyone was quite polite and they were concerned that the foreigner find his way too the ringside box.

To get to the ringside box, I had to climb up some very narrow stairs. My ringside box was right beside the main money collection point, and though I couldn’t hope to decipher the betting systems, it was clear that considerable money was changing hands. In this room, there was a large table with money arranged in neat piles with pieces of paper on each pile. The paper had written on them the names of the roosters that had fought and were meant to fight, and I saw figures in the range of 25,000 pesos written on the paper. I didn’t see a lot of security around, but these men were inside a wire cage and guns were in evidence.

I think it would take a very long time to understand how betting works. Of course, in the end it has to boil down to a simple idea of betting on one rooster to kill the other one. However, how this was accomplished was unclear. People yelled continually and waved their arms about and flicked their fingers in complex patterns to indicate certain bets.

The build-up to each fight was quite long and gave everyone a chance to bet. Two men came in, each with a rooster in their arms. These men were handlers and worked for the cockpit. They were not the owners. The roosters were beautiful, big birds and they each had a razor-sharp 3-inch blade attached to one leg. The blade was curved and came to a vicious needle point. When the birds were shown to each other and egged into a combat rage, the blades were covered in plastic sheaths. Only when the fight was to be engaged in earnest were the covers removed.

The two handlers brought the two roosters close together many times so that they would lunge at each other. Later, substitute roosters were brought in, and these were also used to egg the roosters into a fighting fury. Sometimes they were allowed to make contact and their beaks stabbed into necks again and again. They’d even let the rooster down on the ground and let it attack, only to pick up the other rooster and hide it behind their backs. I assume this was in the way of a warm-up to stretch out the legs. I think this warm-up period was vital, because the fights themselves were very fast. They seemed to last almost no time at all, and the roosters were so fast that their claws, beaks, wings, and the long blades were simply blurs of motion. Perhaps those who have spent their lives watching these fights can pick out certain techniques and see what happens, but I could see it only in slow-motion replay if such a thing existed, which, of course it didn’t. The most high-tech piece of equipment around was the spider-web covered lights in the roof.

I expected to be shocked and horrified to an extent, but my overall feeling was one of boredom. Once I had absorbed the unique atmosphere of the place and watched the arcane betting systems, I was ready to go. The initial flurry of striking on the part of the roosters was over in seconds, and one was very quickly on the ground with the other rooster on top and tearing at its eyes with its beak. At this point, the handlers would generally intervene and lift both roosters up into a fighting posture, just to make sure of the end result. They would fight a bit more, but the one who had been on the ground would generally go down a second time and then stay there. One fight was over in three seconds flat. The triumphant rooster had apparently got in a killing stroke with its lethal blade on the first blow and it was all over. The crowd roared its approval, but I had seen nothing but the usual flurry of wings.

I was surprised, to be honest, at how all the fights ended in death. I imagined that these were very expensive and prized birds and that they would try to work things so that the loser would have a chance at surviving. Apparently that is not how it works. I doubted that even the winning birds survived. They were still on their feet and walking, but they were bloodied up and could easily have suffered a mortal stab wound.

The man I’d met on my very first day, Allen, was there. He was the guy who invited me back to his house for coffee and then ran off when one of his roosters was making a ruckus. He greeted me joyously and told me that his rooster had won two fights. One more, and it would be a champion. I looked for Allen when I left, but I didn’t see him. He had said something about us getting a beer together, but as it was my last night, I wasn’t that interested anyway.

I nervously got out my digital camera to record some video, but as is my habit lately, I screwed up. Somehow I hit the record button twice, which turned the camera on and off in quick succession. So even though I filmed for roughly three minutes, I got nothing at all. I’m not too upset, though. I can remember the atmosphere clearly, and I don’t really want to upload that kind of video and have it on Facebook or anything like that.

After the cockfights, I got back on my motorbike and drove back to Jasmin by the Sea for my last night. I parked the bike and then went walking down the beach to the east, a direction I hadn’t gone in yet. I had my camera with me and I had great fun taking weird perspective shots of all the palm trees rising above the sand.

Tags: Camiguin Trip, Nino Cold Springs, Sunken Cemetery, Taoyuan International Airport