I did make it to Gigmoto and though I didn’t find the perfect lodging I was looking for – a nice bungalow on the beach with its own bathroom and water supply – I found something that in its way might be a lot better. It was certainly a lot more interesting – a room in a private home.

The owner of the house was Domingo Tatel, a retired man and the Filipino equivalent of an empty-nester with children scattered all over the world in the typical Filipino way. I got to Domingo’s house through asking people on the street. I had been told that there was lodging in Gigmoto, and I assumed that meant some kind of hotel. That, however, was not the case. There were no hotels and no official lodging of any kind. I rode up and down all the streets looking for any telltale signs of guest houses. I saw none at all and when I asked a woman about lodging, she took me around the corner from the barangay hall and brought me to Domingo’s house.

At first, I was quite reluctant. From the outside, Domingo’s place looked like any bar or restaurant – it was dark and dingy and cluttered and hot. And there was loud music playing. I was picturing some horrible room way in the back with dirt and filth everywhere. It was not the home I was hoping for, the home that had given me strength for all those hours of pushing my bike up mountains.

I did go inside, though, and an older somewhat vague and unfocused man in a white singlet and shorts eventually got up from the table where he was sitting and showed me a room on the main floor. It looked much like the room I had stayed in in Salvacion – essentially someone’s bedroom. I thanked Domingo and said that I would keep looking around. If I didn’t find anything else, I would return.

The point was that I had been told about some kind of lodging elsewhere in Gigmoto and the magic words my informant had used were “on the riverside.” That conjured up all kinds of lovely images in my mind – a nice hut in a grassy field beside a flowing river. I thought I should check this place out, and I got on my bike to find it. I had been told it was near the Iglesia ni Cristo, and I found that in short order. Then through a lot of questioning on the street and lots of laughter and jokes, I was introduced to a woman who led me into a plain looking cement building where this mythical lodging was. My heart sank as I went inside. It was truly awful – and that’s coming from someone who has stayed in some really awful places. It was just horrible. I was led down a narrow hallway with wooden walls on each side with a door every few feet. Someone had obviously just thrown up these cheap plywood walls to divide this large space into a dozen little shoeboxes. The woman showing me the place brought me to the very end and unlocked one of the doors. Inside, it really was just a shoebox with a plain wooden platform on the floor for a bed. There was no mattress or bedding and the woman said they could produce that. The walls only went up seven feet or so and stopped, so there was no ceiling and anyone and anything could just climb onto a bed and look over the walls into the adjoining shoeboxes. A crazy-looking fan was suspended from the ceiling. When the woman turned it on for me, it swung around like a helicopter about to crash. The floor and the walls were dirty, and there were piles of garbage lying around with bugs and spiders in all the corners. The “comfort room” was behind the building and the woman led me there. The toilet was about what you’d expect – an ancient porcelain thing sitting in a cinder block closet with barely room to turn around in. A horrible stench hit my nostrils and I realized (using my ears, oddly enough) that the stench wasn’t coming from just the disgusting toilet. In fact, all around it was a row of large stalls in which resided a splendid assortment of large pigs happily grunting and shitting away. There was a water pump back there and the ground was filthy and muddy. In that heat and in my exhausted condition, it was a vision of a nightmare, and when the woman set about getting some bedding for that wooden platform, I stopped her. I wasn’t feeling very charitable and I told her directly what I thought – that this room and this place really wasn’t suitable for any type of human to live in, no matter how poor. I’d be better off lying down on the street. As I said, I’ve seen some horrible places in my time and stayed in them happily, but there was something about the wonton lack of cleanliness and comfort in this place that set my teeth on edge. It felt almost insulting that this was offered as any kind of place for a human to spend the night. It was too much after my long day, and I set off on my bicycle back to Domingo’s house – a place and an offer which now seemed MUCH more appealing.

Luckily, Domingo wasn’t insulted by my turning down his room after my first visit. I realized later that he could have been insulted. It wasn’t, as I thought, a hotel and bar combination. It was his home, and Domingo was offering me a room in his home. To be fair to me (and my perceptions), I learned later that Domingo had run a kind of bar and restaurant out of this building. His children, who are supporting him in his old age, didn’t like that he was working so hard and got him to stop. So though it looked a bit like a restaurant and bar, it was really just his private home.

The schedule for my day had gotten totally out of whack by the time I had accepted Domingo’s offer a room, and I was now faced with an uncomfortable situation. The sun had set. It was dark. I had had no food all day long and I was out of filtered water. I generally like to arrive earlier than that so that I can settle in to my new home, get cleaned up to an extent, and figure out how to get water and get something to eat before the sun sets.

Domingo told me that there was no food in the town anymore. There would have been food during the day, but it was too late now and everything was closed. I could, however, eat with him if rice and fish was okay with me. I thanked him and said that would be great, but I would like to first take a quick bucket bath. Domingo lives in this big rambling house with just one other person – a young man that Domingo said was his cousin. I got the impression that the cousin lived there for free or cheaply in exchange for doing household chores. Domingo asked him to show me the water pump at his old house. I grabbed my Dromedary bag and followed him to this house and got my 10 liters of water for the night and the next day. I filtered a couple of liters of it right away so that I would have some water for dinner. It would have made life a lot easier if I just drank the local water, but I still wasn’t convinced it was as pure and clean as everyone said it was. These are people who can’t tell the difference between cement pavement and rock and gravel and who say things are three kilometers away when they are really ten kilometers away. I didn’t really trust their judgement.

When I finished my bucket bath and water filtering, I joined Domingo and his cousin at one of two large dining tables. To my dismay, they had the very large television on and blasting out at an absurdly loud volume. It was doubly absurd because Domingo clearly wanted to talk to me. He needed to find out all the usual things – my age, where I was from, where my wife was, where my companions were, how long I’d been in the Philippines. He screamed these questions at me and I screamed my answers back – both of us competing with the horrific sound blasting from the TV situated just three feet from our heads. Why didn’t Domingo turn it off or turn it down? I simply didn’t know. It was like this terrifying noise, whether coming from a TV, a stereo, or a videoke machine was simply part of the natural order of things and it was impossible to imagine a moment without it.

Luckily, the next show was a nature show about giant squid, and though it was unpleasantly loud, it wasn’t unbearable, and I had a long conversation with Domingo. I found out that he had six children. All six were now grown up and living elsewhere. One daughter was living here in Gigmoto – in Domingo’s old house with her husband and family. The other five were scattered about – in Manila and in L.A. in the United States. They had all gone to university and were engineers, lawyers, accountants, and medical technicians. (Not sure why the Philippines produces and needs so many engineers.)

Gigmoto is Domingo’s hometown and he was originally a government official. He found that his salary was insufficient for his children’s education and he made the decision to go overseas. He went to Manila and applied for a position through an agency. Things were easier back then, he said, and after a month of interviews and application forms, he was on his way to Saudi Arabia. This was in 1978, and he worked there until 1992. He worked for a food company of some kind. He loved it there, he said. He got a good salary. He had great living conditions. His apartment was paid for by the company as were his flights home and his vacations. Plus, since this was a food company, he could have all the food he wanted for free – even ice cream and baked goods. He was there for the first Gulf War, and he wanted to leave at that time, but his boss wouldn’t release him from his contract. As far as I can make out, Domingo’s job was warehouse manager. Domingo was paid well, and this covered a university education for all six of his children. I don’t know how much of his salary he managed to save – I got the impression that all of it went to school fees – and now he is a pensioner and his children send him money each month to live on. He owns this house as well as his old house where his daughter now lives. So he pays no rent. He said that electricity was expensive and his bill was about 1,000 pesos a month ($25). He paid for cable TV. That only cost 250 pesos a month ($6). Beyond that, he had few bills. Water came out of the ground. He had some kind of family farm in the mountains that was being worked by someone else. I assumed he also got an income from that.

Domingo seemed to be a happy man who had had a happy life. He kept busy now watching TV, sitting out on the street when it’s cool, and running for city council. He had been a city councilor for three terms and was currently running for his fourth term. I found that a bit hard to believe when he first told me, but I saw his campaign posters about town – showing a much younger and more spry Domingo. The current Domingo is not exactly a go-getter. I didn’t see him setting any city council meetings on fire with new ideas and big plans for the future. He shuffled around his large and empty house pausing to shift something there and move something here and perhaps dust off something there. Conversation with him was also fairly typical of conversations with older men – very one-sided. He heard my answers to his direct questions, but beyond that I don’t think anything I said penetrated at all. He was lost in his own internal world thinking his own thoughts.

Domingo was very friendly and a great host, though. He accepted me into his home without a second of thought and he sat me down at his table and served up a big bowl of rice with fish. He charged me for the room but only 100 pesos a night – a nominal fee. When I woke up in the morning, I found coffee and bread waiting for me on the dining room table. The fly in the ointment of that morning coffee scenario was the music. He had put in a CD that could justly be titled “The Sappiest Love Songs from the West, Ever” and he had turned up the volume of the stereo to what I would consider to be beyond human tolerance levels. Why do this? Again, I have no idea. I thought that perhaps he was going deaf. That’s still a possibility, but I don’t think he was deaf. If I knew of a place where I could go and sit down and have a cup of coffee in peace and quiet, I would have done so, but there was no such place in Gigmoto. It was either in Domingo’s discotheque or nowhere. I wanted to chat some more with Domingo and hear more about his life, but there was no possibility of screaming above the volume of the music. I had no choice but to simply sit there and let the love wash all over me.

After my coffee and bread, I put together some stuff for the day and got on my bike to look around Gigmoto. It turned out that there wasn’t much to see in Gigmoto itself. The waterfront at Bagamanoc was fairly quiet but it was a madhouse of activity compared to Gigmoto’s. I suppose the fact that it was Sunday had something to do with that. It actually took me a while to realize that it was Sunday. It was only after I passed the fifth church with the sound of hymns wafting outside that I checked my watch and saw that it was Sunday.

The one big attraction in town is the Nahulugan Falls – just three kilometers west of town in the mountains. Everyone encouraged me to go there – third after Boracay and Puraran. I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t go to the falls. I stopped first for a very good breakfast at a roadside eatery. Once fueled up, I cycled west along the only possible street and after a long and difficult push of the bike (no riding was possible once more) I found myself at a barrier across the road. A barangay ordinance had just been passed that allowed them to charge a 10-peso entrance fee to the falls. I signed the ledger and paid my 10 pesos and then pushed my bike the final kilometer or two.

The falls were very pleasant and an absolute relief after the heat of the road. To my partial dismay, there were people there, including a group of young men passing around one of several bottles of brandy. They all waved at me and encouraged me to come and join them. It’s somewhat terrible, isn’t it, that I have this urge to visit other countries and then generally find conversation with local people unbearably empty and boring? But it’s the truth. I knew these guys would ask me all the same questions and then we’d run out of things to talk about.

I went for a nice swim in the first natural pool. Then I climbed up to the main pool right under the falls and went for a swim there. Then I could no longer put off the inevitable and I swam over to the group of men. They gave me an empty glass and a bottle of brandy and let me serve myself. Being 10 in the morning, I was more interested in a cup of coffee than brandy, but I gamely did my best. I answered all their questions and assured them wholeheartedly that I would be going to Puraran and that I had already been to Boracay (though 20 yeas ago). They wanted to know what I thought of the falls, and one young man wanted to know if I had seen waterfalls before. Did we have them in Canada? I didn’t want to disappoint his national pride, but I had to tell him that we did indeed have waterfalls. Certainly we don’t have many (any?) quite as perfect as these types of falls in the Philippines, but we do have waterfalls.

These men were having a picnic lunch of sorts and they tried very hard to get me to join them. I pleaded off saying that I’d just had breakfast. It’s always a weird moment because when I turn down these invitations, people always assume it is because I only eat hamburgers and don’t eat local food. This group happened to have with them a single small can of some kind of meat dish. They offered this to me on several occasions. Once, I was sitting far from them on a bamboo bench up on the hillside. I had closed my eyes and was listening to the waterfalls when I was startled by a voice right in my ear. I opened my eyes to find one of the young men standing in front of me and holding out this can of mystery substance. I felt much like a gorilla in a cage with a scientist offering delicacies through the bars to see what might entice me to eat. I hardly knew how to respond because even if I was delighted at the thought of canned mystery stuff, I had no way to open the can or eat what was inside. I could accept the can, but what then? Just hold it? Beat it with a rock? Later, in fact, this same young man came back with the can and borrowed a large spoon from some other picnickers. He worked on the can for a few minutes with the spoon, but he couldn’t get it open. It was a disappointing day for him from the point of view of interacting with a foreigner, but it was a very good time for me. The water was cold and refreshing but not too cold. It was delightful to sit there in the shade with occasional dips into the postcard-perfect pools. I broke out my Kindle for a while and read – to the utter astonishment and puzzlement of everyone around me. I’m always asked what my Kindle is, but I don’t get the impression that anyone understands the concept of an e-reader yet.

I coasted back into Gigmoto on my bike and found the town just as somnolent as before. I tried to find a pleasant place to sit and have a drink, but there was nothing as far as I could see. I ended up sitting on a plastic chair in a patch of shade along with Mel, the owner of a little shop. Once we got through the usual questions, I asked him about cell phones and SIM cards and “load na ditto”. His shop had signs for these things all over the place. I ended up buying a second SIM card from him for the Smart network. I had been told long ago that Globe was the best provider, and I had purchased a Globe SIM card in Legazpi. But this fellow disagreed. He said that 95% of the people in the Philippines use the Smart network – and that’s why I never see signs for Globe anywhere. It is always Smart. My problem is that I seem to burn through my Globe “load” and get nothing in return. I send three or four text messages and use up 300 pesos. It seems there is something wrong. For 40 pesos, I bought a Smart SIM card from Mel and bought 200 pesos as a regular load. It took a while, but I finally figured out that a “regular load” involves simply transferring a “load” from the store owner’s phone to my phone. This is different from buying a charge card, as I had done with Globe so far. Much of the world of cell phones was still a mystery to me. Mel’s store had a wide range of advertisements related to Smart loads and products. I understood none of them and I asked Mel to explain them to me. His English was up to the task, but he wasn’t really able to help me understand what it was all about. For my purposes, it didn’t matter. All I needed was a SIM card and then a “regular load.” I sent a text message to my brother in Canada to let him know that I had a new cell phone number, and my sister-in-law replied, so the new SIM card appears to work. I still hadn’t managed to figure out how to send a text message to Taiwan. I had tried multiple times, but I hadn’t found the magic combination of numbers and symbols to use.

Time hung somewhat heavy on my hands in Gigmoto once I had seen the famous waterfalls and gotten my errands done. It was uncomfortably hot out on the streets. There were plenty of people to talk to, but I had no patience for the social interrogation that day. I tried to find a little shop where I could sit in the shade and enjoy a cold drink or a cup of coffee, but such places were thin on the ground in Gigmoto. It was not a barangay geared to the casual visitor from Canada. To complicate matters, there was a power failure. That, I have to say, was something of a mixed blessing. It meant that Domingo’s home was peaceful and quiet. The TV and the stereo sat dark and silent. But it also meant that none of the fans would work and even simply sitting or lying down resulted in rivers of sweat pouring off my body. I was quite tired in my body and mind. I didn’t have the energy to read and my limbs felt extremely heavy from my exertions of the previous day. My push of the bike up to the waterfalls, had, in fact, been extremely difficult. My legs hadn’t recovered from getting to Gigmoto. At the moment, it appeared that one day of hard cycling required one day of recovery time. Perhaps, I thought, it was only due to the heat and the unusually difficult nature of the cycling (read “pushing”). I reflected on my choice of Catanduanes as my first cycling destination. It was a very uninformed choice considering that my goal was simply to do a short cycling loop from and back to Legazpi in order to work out some kinks in my cycling gear and equipment. It was meant to be a casual shakeout journey, and it turned out to be the toughest cycling I’ve ever done. I didn’t regret the decision at all. The trip around Catanduanes was turning out to be one of the better experiences of my cycling and traveling life, but it was probably just luck that my gear and my body had held up as well as they had. It was probably quite unwise to, on my very first days, cycle in that heat over rugged mountains on unpaved roads and sleep in villages. That was a lot to deal with all at once.

Most of the people I spoke to in Gigmoto were unable to understand where I had come from on my bicycle. Part of the reason for this was their perception of the dangers in the north of the island. One man who finally understood that I had cycled up to Pandan and then down to Viga and Gigmoto expressed great surprise. He believed that the north was far too dangerous for that due to an ongoing insurgency and the activities of the New People’s Army (NPA). If the NPA was active in the north of Catanduanes, no one had mentioned it in all their many warnings. I certainly saw no evidence of an insurgency or even a military presence beyond that one soldier in Viga and a truckful of soldiers in Pandan. The man said that perhaps the NPA had taken a break to run for office in the elections. I laughed, thinking he had made a joke, but he was serious. Guerrilla fighter one month, politician the next. It didn’t strike me as that farfetched when I thought about it. The switch from guerrilla fighter to politician happens all the time in countries around the world.

Around 4:30, I decided to get a jump on dinner. I did not want a repeat of my arrival in Gigmoto when I could find nothing to eat. However, I had missed my opportunity again and there was nothing to eat. I walked up and down every street in Gigmoto, but there wasn’t a single eatery or canteen with food available. “All gone” or “Finished” I was told over and over. That was a bit disappointing. I knew I could have rice and fish with Domingo again, but I didn’t want to impose. And I was looking forward to the experience of another meal out on the streets of Gigmoto. Other than eating and giving people my biographical details, there wasn’t much else to do in Gigmoto. But with no food anywhere, I was reduced to scrounging up what I could in the shops and sari-sari stores.

Sari-sari stores are a big part of one’s experience of the Philippines. These are small shops run out of people’s homes. More than anything, they remind me of chicken coops. Certainly, the wired screens that make up the entire outside surface is identical to the wire used to build chicken coops in Canada. It is handy for the sari-sari shop owners. It is probably quite cheap and durable and protects them from shoplifters and thieves. The wire also provides a convenient surface on which to hang things. Products are rarely even removed from the plastic bags it is delivered in. The store owner can simply take the bag and hang it from the screen with a hook and in this manner put all their products on display. At the bottom of the chicken wire, there will be a little square cutout with a small wooden door. The door is often closed and the sari-sari store looks empty and unstaffed. Local people know better and they simply knock on the wooden door with a coin until someone appears. This someone can be anyone in the family from the father to the grandmother to the youngest child. They all know the prices and can conduct any transaction for you.

With my practical mind, I saw many problems with the sari-sari store. For one thing, there are far too many of them. The 7-11 chain can only dream of having that kind of market penetration. There might be a 7-11 on every corner in Taipei, but there is a sari-sari store every twenty feet in the Philippines.

I also found it difficult, as a customer, to see what products were for sale. For a local person, this likely wasn’t a problem since all the sari-sari stores carried the exact same products at roughly the same prices. There was no need for any clerk-customer interaction beyond the exchange of product for money. That’s a good thing because I found it difficult to communicate through that tiny wooden window anyway. I always felt I was in hobbit-land, having to lean way over and look through that little opening to see if there was anyone on the other side. Then, without being able to see the person’s mouth, I was denied the opportunity to lip-read, which made it much more difficult to understand them.

Another unusual aspect to sari-sari stores (indeed for shopping in general in the Philippines), is that most products are sold in very small, usually single-serving, sizes. Shampoo, laundry soap, coffee, pasta sauce, whatever you care to name is sold only in tiny sachets, tiny packets, and small cans. Again, I felt like I was in hobbit-town. Everything felt designed for tiny people – even the food in cans. There were no large cans meant for a family or a hungry Canadian cyclist. The only canned foods available were tiny cans like the little one my friend at the waterfalls kept offering me. I found out that night in Gigmoto that even three of those cans does not amount to a full meal for me. Six of them might be a moderate meal.

These small portions and packages surprised me in particular because as everyone knows, buying in bulk saves money. It is far more expensive to buy your coffee in single serving envelopes than to buy a large bottle of coffee. Buying shampoo in tiny envelopes would be far more expensive and less economical than buying a large bottle.

Perhaps it works like this: Yes, you’d think that poorer people would want to save money by buing large quantities. However, if you are very poor, you might not be able to afford to buy a large amount at once. Even a single bottle of shampoo might be a big purchase. Therefore, the very poor might have no choice but to buy the small envelopes even though it ends up costing them two or three times as much in the long run.

I kept looking around Gigmoto until I found a shop that I could actually walk inside and see what was for sale. Does being able to walk inside make it by definition NOT a sari-sari store? I don’t know. In this shop, I could get close to some shelves and see some canned goods for sale. I bought three cans – two cans of a local product (asado) and one can of pork and beans – and some bread. And this I brought back to Domingo’s place for my dinner. I felt profoundly ridiculous carrying my bag of little cans and bread. I wanted to tell people that this was not normal for me. I would far prefer to have a big plate of rice and some local dishes, but there was nothing available. So I was reduced to eating out of these little cans – like a survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Yet, no one seemed to find my dinner to be strange. Domingo did not raise an eyebrow at my dinner selection. He said that I would have been welcome to join him for his dinner of rice and fish, but no matter. His cousin supplied me with a can-opener and I opened the three cans and dumped their contents into a bowl and quickly went through them with some bread. It was certainly one of the stranger meals I’ve had on the road.

Tags: barangay, bike, Catanduanes Bike Trip, Gigmoto, load, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Pururan