Saturday May 25, 2013

8:37 a.m. Tacloban, Leyte

 

Several days have passed since I last wrote in my journal and I am now in the large city of Tacloban, the capital city of the island of Leyte, the first large island south of Samar.

Leyte is separated from Samar by the narrow San Juan Strait. A bridge was built over this strait and connects the two major islands – the San Juanico Bridge. It is 2.6 kilometers long and rises to quite a height providing wonderful views of the strait and the surrounding mountains. I walked my bike over the bridge along a narrow sidewalk. I did that mainly because I wanted to move slowly and absorb the views and take pictures. But I also wanted to avoid the traffic – the monster trucks and the demon buses and the behemoth jeepneys – roaring past with just inches to spare. If there was one time when these insane drivers would slow down, you’d think it would be on a narrow bridge like this, but they seemed to speed up if anything. I’ve tried to maintain a neutral attitude towards these drivers, but it is a losing battle and I’m quite annoyed with them, and I’m likely to stay that way. These horrible trucks and buses have dominated my cycling life over the last three days as I had no choice but to follow the national highway to Tacloban, where I needed to extend my tourist visa. The buses and trucks slow down for nothing and no one. They bother me and keep me on edge from morning to night, but they also annoy me on behalf of the people living in the small barangays. I shouldn’t worry about them, of course, since I don’t think these people mind at all. I’ve tried out my ideas about how horrible these drivers are on local people, but no one takes me up on the topic. They just seem puzzled. Yet, when I watch these buses blast through these pleasant barangays with children playing everywhere, I get quite angry. I don’t get angry because I think it is dangerous. It is obviously very dangerous, and I’ve seen a large number of wrecks of trucks and buses to support that idea, but that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is the effect it has on the quality of life of the people. I can feel it inside myself – my adrenaline is pumping all day long as I live inside this small bubble of fear and tension with tons of steel whipping by inches from me and blasting my body with wind and my ears with awful sound. I fully expected a number of buses I saw to flip over on the corners. They took the corners at such high speed that they would lean far over. It is probably an illusion based on the height of these buses, but it looks to my eyes that they have gone right past their center of gravity and are a second from going right over. I found myself calculating the angle at which they would slide across the pavement and rocket toward me. Could I swerve my bicycle out of the way in time? If not, which way should I jump? I found myself making that calculation all day long. When I wasn’t doing that, I was monitoring my rear view mirrors. I had to anticipate so many things – when vehicles would reach me, when vehicles would approach me from behind and in front at the same time, when vehicles were going to pass either approaching me or coming up behind me, when vehicles would suddenly swerve over to pick up passengers and nearly run into me. On top of all that, I had to steel myself for the inevitable blast of the air horn. I tried to anticipate when the horn would be sounded so that it wouldn’t startle me quite as much. But even that was hopeless. There was the obvious point at which a little toot of the horn would be of some use as a warning. But these vehicles would generally wait until they were right beside me before they laid on the horn. And it would be no little toot but a series of sonic blasts that nearly ripped the skin off my body.

I perhaps wouldn’t go on about this at such length except that my last day – yesterday – the day when I rode into Tacloban – was by far the worst day yet, surpassing even the horrible trip from Legazpi to Sorsogon. This is the morning after that trip and it is still affecting me. I had a great deal of trouble sleeping last night despite staying in the lap of luxury and sleeping in a soft bed in an air-conditioned room, and I think it was partially because of the pent-up stresses of the day.

I suppose it is all my fault and due to a lack of planning. It’s not like I didn’t know there would be a lot of traffic along the national highway. It isn’t called the Pan-Philippine Highway and marked on my map in a wide green line for nothing. This is the main transportation route through these islands and all heavy transport will follow this road. Plus, as someone pointed out yesterday, people in the Philippines do not generally own private vehicles. Only the rich have their own cars. The vast majority must rely on buses to get from place to place. Imagine if everyone on the highways of Canada was not in a car but instead inside a bus. Imagine the number of buses that would be on the road. I had started to think that the Filipinos were great travelers, I was so astonished at the number of buses on the road. But it isn’t so much that they travel a lot. It’s more that nearly everyone who travels has to take either a bus or a jeepney. There are few private vehicles. Plus, of course, there is no system of freeways and local roads. All traffic from the smallest to the largest, from the slowest to the fastest, from the oldest to the newest, all has to travel down the same road. I, as a slow-moving cyclist, am annoyed at the super-sonic buses and their insane drivers, but imagine what those drivers think of me – some idiot cyclist taking up space on their special road and slowing them down.

So there was no surprise that I faced some difficult cycling conditions. The problem was that I didn’t plan ahead very well. I hadn’t left enough days before my visa expired for me to get to Tacloban by the route I would have preferred. It’s obvious I would have been better off cycling down the east coast of Samar rather than the busy west coast. But I didn’t have enough time to do that. I could, at least, have cut cross-country just past Catbalogan and gone down the east coast for part of the journey. There is no guarantee that that route would have been much better, but it’s a pretty safe bet. And I just might have been able to go that route and still made it to Tacloban on time. I just wasn’t sure, and I understood that one section of that road was extremely rough and slow – like the roads on Catanduanes. I found out that my information was out of date, and that road was now in good condition, but I didn’t know that at the time, and I felt I had no choice but to follow the main highway all the way.

I stayed in Calbayog a bit longer than I wanted or planned, but it worked out well and my last night gave me a new perspective on the town. I had found it a pretty harsh and uncomfortable city – like all the cities and towns in the Philippines I’ve encountered so far. But on my last night, I returned to the Isla Café for dinner and was turned away because they were closing. I could get food, but only to go. I decided to find a different place to eat, and on a main road I hadn’t explored before, I found a set of interesting shops and a couple of very nice restaurants. One in particular caught my eye and I went inside to check it out. I don’t remember the name anymore, but it was a restaurant and a bar. It was the thought of a cold beer that got me through the door. Then I found out that they had an extensive menu. An American man was sitting at a table with his wife and children and he told me that the food there was extremely good. There were no tables available, but they had some couches as well, and I sat there and ordered a beer and some food. I generally have very bad ordering skills. I get confused when I look at menus and I generally order the worst thing at any particular restaurant. I don’t know if I did that there, but I settled on the chicken curry with rice. When it came, I had the impression that the dish was far too large for even a hungry cyclist. It looked to be enough food for three people. But once I started eating, I found I worked my way through it fairly easily.

In the meantime, the first family had left, and a second family had come in and sat down at the long table. This family also consisted of an American man and his Filipina wife. The twist here was that the party also included her hairdresser. She had gotten her hair done in Calbayog and found out that the hairdresser was her cousin. He was a man but was dressed somewhat as a woman with lots of makeup. He had a very soft and gentle voice and a typically limp handshake. He said his name was Nancy. The American man – a very friendly and nice fellow named Jim – had trouble with that and couldn’t bring himself to call him Nancy. He insisted on calling him Nan.

I was chatting with Jim across some tables and when my chicken curry was done, I asked if I could join them at their table. I sat with Jim, his wife, and her hairdresser for the rest of my evening there and had a wonderful time talking with them. Jim was an ex-Navy man and had retired to the Philippines with his family. He was unique among such American men in that he had met and married his wife 26 years ago, not recently. They had had a family together and lived in the United States. Now that he was retired, he and his wife decided to move back to her small barangay on Samar. I had actually passed this barangay  on my bike ride from Allen to Calbayog. One of their sons had originally come with them, but he lasted only a month and decided to return to the U.S. He had found life in the barangay a bit boring. Jim did not find it so at all and was clearly enjoying himself. There were times when he found there was little variety in the barangay, but then they could hop on local transport and come to the big city of Calbayog.

Jim’s house had become a social center in his barangay as he was one of the few in town with a disposable income that can run to some beer for visitors and that sort of thing. Jim said that the local term for money or income was something like “quarto quarto.” Jim had quarto quarto and so his neighbors visited him a lot and they would often have as many as 18 people over drinking and singing and enjoying themselves. Jim was a very social person and loved to talk, so he would fit in very nicely. His wife had a code phrase to tell him that he should dial it back a bit. When the people he was speaking English to had had enough and couldn’t take anymore, she would say that their nose was starting to bleed. That meant that Jim had lost his audience and they couldn’t follow his English anymore. Jim had picked up some of the local language and he peppered his conversation with those words. He was quite popular in the barangay.

I had a great time chatting with Jim and his family and it was a nice way to end my time in Calbayog. The next morning, I was back on the road.

 

Tags: barangay, bike, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Tacloban, tourist visa, visa, West Coast of Samar