I did stay in Quinapondan to give my knee a chance to recover a bit. I had a pretty good day and a less than perfect night. The dreaded videoke horror reared its ugly head. And since it was a Friday night, it wasn’t much fun for the poor foreigner.

After breakfast, I grabbed my camera and headed out into the town. I brought all my lenses in my pannier bag, but I had the 45mm lens on the camera. That has been my favorite lens lately. It is extremely sharp and the field of view is quite useful, especially for portraits. It gets me in just tight enough to fill the frame with interesting subjects.

I was surprised at the extreme reaction I got from people. It felt like they had never encountered any type of foreigner before. There was also a certain level of toughness and aggression that I have noticed all through this southern part of Samar. Perhaps they notice this toughness about themselves because I was bombarded with warnings about “bad people” wherever I went. If I believed all my informants, southern Samar is awash in thieves and murderers.

That isn’t to say that people weren’t friendly. They were friendly and quite eager to talk with me. But there was a lot of laughter at my expense, so much so that it felt mostly like jeering. They also had trouble understanding my presence in their town. I explained that I was a tourist. And most had seen me arrive on my bicycle or had heard about it. Yet, they couldn’t quite put all the pieces of the puzzle together. They ended up questioning me very hard and I felt under a cloud of suspicion wherever I went. A lot of people assumed I worked for the government in some fashion and they didn’t like it that I wouldn’t own up to my true intentions.

The children were friendly, but with them, too, I encountered a lot of jeering and what could be viewed as unfriendly behavior. My nose, for example, came in for a great deal of negative comment. Its size was pointed out all day long. Children even called across the street, “Hey, Joe! You have a very big nose!” Other children, afforded a view of my nose from below as I towered above them, felt that my face had a remarkable resemblance to the upturned snout of a pig. The children pushed their noses upward to look like a pig and then pointed at themselves and then at me to get people to notice the resemblance. There even seemed to be something off about my gait. Did I lurch? I’m not sure, but a couple of boys called me Igor. They came right up to me apparently imitating the awkward lurching they saw in my stride. When they got close to me, they looked up at me and stuck out their tongues to the sides and rolled their eyes in their heads as if to say that I was crazy.

Of course, these weren’t the only encounters I had all day. Most of the time, I was chatting pleasantly with people and answering the usual questions and nodding as they gave me all kinds of unwanted advice: I should marry a Filipina. I should have companions. I should go to Boracay. I should buy a motorcycle or a car. Apparently, when it came right down to it, nothing about me was satisfactory from my nose to my mode of travel and I was in great need of improvement.

The town itself is fairly small, and I covered a great number of its inner streets on my walk. It was blessedly free of traffic and presented all kinds of interesting views, especially since it is rice harvesting time. They harvest the rice twice a year and the streets were covered in long sheets of freshly harvested rice drying in the sun.

Once I had seen the interior of the town, I set off to the outskirts and followed a country road to a small cluster of houses in a grove of trees. An older woman there took me in hand and decided there were some scenic viewpoints I should take in. She led me along the road and then down a side path through some more trees. We passed some wells and some quaint traditional houses including her own house. We picked up some young boys along the way, who were quite taken with my resemblance to a pig. When we passed another small thatch house, the woman called out to a teenage girl there and got her to come with us. I was surprised to learn that this was her daughter. Based on the age lines in the woman’s face, I’d have placed her more in the role of a grandmother than mother. I’ve had this feeling about many mothers and daughters I’ve met in the countryside. It appears to be a combination of the women aging in their appearance a great deal and having children quite late into their lives.

I thought we were going to a beautiful local waterfall or something like that. The woman was quite eager for me to get there and take some pictures. I was surprised, then, when we reached a small stream and the woman waved her arms at it and told me to take pictures. There was nothing special about the stream. It was much like any other stream. However, to please her, I took a picture. Then she encouraged me to step into the shallow water and feel how cool the water was. I obliged her and stepped in. The water only came up to my ankles, and it was, indeed, quite cool and refreshing. The young boys stepped into the water with me and almost as one creature, they unzipped their pants and urinated into the stream. I wondered what someone like Norman Rockwell would make of such a scene. How would he paint it? Me standing there, camera in hand, cool water flowing over my feet, and a group of boys around me in a circle calmly peeing.

A quick climb up the far shore of the stream to see an empty field, and my tour of the local beauty spots was at an end. I turned back with my entourage and we retraced our steps, stopping briefly at this woman’s house. It was of traditional construction, made entirely of wood and thatch. It was raised up off the ground about three feet. The floor was made of slats of wood, polished to a shine by many years of bare feet. There was no furniture of any kind and no separate rooms that I could see. The teenage daughter said that there were no bedrooms. They all slept together on the wooden floor that I could see right there. She rapped it with her knuckle and said that it was very hard.

Once back in town, I stopped off at a small store for a cold drink. I’d been back to this store a couple of times for the simple reason that it was the only place in town whose owners had thought to put out a couple of chairs. I don’t think the chairs were for customers. They were intended for the family members, but I took advantage of them and rested gratefully out of the hot sun.

My walk continued out the other side of town and into a wide area of beautiful rice fields. There were a few people harvesting rice, and I made my way across the fields towards a brightly colored group working around a motorized thresher similar to the one I’d seen at work the previous day.

Getting to this thresher was a bit of an adventure. A couple of misplaced steps plunged me down into thick mud and my sandals and lower legs ended up covered in the gooey stuff. I didn’t mind having dirty feet, but I knew that they would be the cause of a lot of comment and trouble when I went back into town.

I took some pictures of these people at their work and then I slowly made my way back out of the fields. As predicted, a group of people at the edge of the fields focused on my dirty feet and there was a lot of jeering and teasing. An older woman took pity on me, and she led me to a small water tap hidden among some tall plants at the side of the trail. She even tracked down a thick brush for me to scrub the mud off my sandals and feet and legs. While this was going on, three groups of locals competed at making the wittiest comments and there was a lot of laughter at my expense. It didn’t feel like kind laughter, and I asked the woman, “Are they making jokes?” She said that they were making jokes and that they were bad people. She yelled at them a little bit on my behalf.

I continued on my way back into town once my feet were clean enough for me to rejoin respectable society. I passed a school on the way, and I nearly caused a riot when the children spotted me. I probably could have taken a thousand interesting pictures of their eager faces, but I wasn’t quite in the mood and I just shot one or two.

Back at my hotel (called, incidentally, KITZ Travel Lodge), I took a shower to cool off and then had an early dinner of rice, squash, and noodles. There were no meat dishes available. All that was on offer was a plate of fish heads, and I decided to pass on those.

I went up to my tiny room on the second floor to settle in, look at the pictures I had taken, and read a book. It was a Friday and I had a sense that the videoke machine in the “resto bar” below me would be more active than it had been the previous night. I felt that I was prepared for this, but I went through a deliberate thought process to make doubly sure. I told myself that there was nothing I could do about it, so I might as well just accept it. Don’t get upset about things that you cannot change.

This was all well and good, and it might have worked had the circumstances been somewhat normal. Unfortunately, they take their videoke very seriously here and it started at 4:30 p.m. At first, I thought that was a good sign. If they began singing at 4:30, then chances were good that they would stop early and I’d still be able to get some sleep. By midnight, all hope of that had vanished, as had my good mood.

The noise level in my room had to be experienced to be believed. The giant speakers of this system were, in fact, nailed to the ceiling of the room below, just a foot or two away from where my head lay on my pillow. My room shook with the bass as if a giant were slamming the entire building with a huge hammer. The volume was so high as to cause severe and unpleasant distortion in the sound it produced. Add to that the horrendous off-key singing (often screaming), and it was a night of horrors beyond imagining.

I still might have managed to keep calm and somewhat content except that occasionally, the screeching and caterwauling would stop. A few minutes would pass of blessed silence and I’d allow myself to believe that the torture was over and that I could finally get some quiet if not some sleep. And then when my guard was down, there would be a blast of sound and the awful thing would start up again. This happened over and over, and I realized that I was not competing with just one group of people – a group that would sing their favorite songs and then leave when they were finished. I was competing with the entire town and they were coming in waves. As one group finished, another would arrive. And as happens in bars everywhere in the world as it gets later and later, the people got worse and worse, drunker and drunker. And even if I managed to stay calm through all the normal groups, there was no way I could ever win against the dreaded hangers-on. You see these at every party – the one or two or three super-drunk people that have nowhere else to go and will keep the party going for hours and hours after everyone else has left.

Eventually, I lay there in my room fantasing about all the things I could do. I fumed at how the woman who ran the hotel had lied to me. I had been very direct in my questions and she had assured me that the room was very quiet. In what universe was this quiet? I can’t even imagine what goes on in her head to believe that there could be anything like quiet in a room subjected to that sonic blast.

I find that I’m always stuck when it comes to these situations. It’s a weakness in my personality and character. A stronger person would simply march downstairs and make a scene and demand peace and quiet. This is a hotel, after all, and I’m a paying customer. I have rights. However, if I did that, I would feel guilty and bad. I don’t want to impose my desires on others and stop them from having fun. And this idea is compounded with my being a foreigner. I don’t want to come across as the “ugly American” going around and trying to change other cultures to suit me and my beliefs. But I certainly wanted to.

By 12:30, I had completely lost my mind. I was just a shell of my former self. The awful caterwauling had been going on for eight straight hours and I didn’t think I could last another minute without going insane. I had to get out of my room, and I hit on the idea of just going for a walk. This was the perfect passive aggressive strategy. I could leave my room and go into the resto/bar and tell the woman that I was going for a walk. Walking around in the dark here would be seen as very unwise and the woman would know that something was wrong. I’d tell her that I couldn’t sleep because of the music and I needed to go for a walk to get away from it for a while. I’d smile and be polite and then perhaps she would shut down the resto/bar by the time I got back from my walk.

Unfortunately, this didn’t go as planned. For one thing, I couldn’t even get into the resto bar to talk to the owner. Some kind of barrier had been put up. I only got a small glance, but there seemed to be just the absolute drunks left – perhaps three men. In fact, I got the idea that the resto bar was actually closed and that these were family members or employees and they were the ones still screaming into the nasty microphone and torturing me. There was a man sort of on the outside and I told him in a combination of words and gestures that the music was driving me crazy and that I was going for a walk. I had to tell someone because it was very strange to go out for a walk, and the owner would probably freak out if she found me gone. Or she wouldn’t notice and she would lock up the whole place in my absence and I wouldn’t be able to get back in.

The town was completely dead. The only light and sound was coming from my hotel. Every other building was completely shuttered and dark. It felt spooky and dangerous. The local dogs ruled the streets and there were packs of them running around. Everywhere I went, the dogs growled and barked and chased after me. They did nothing to improve my mood and I was soon walking with fistfuls of rocks to keep them at bay. I crossed over the bridge leading out of town, and there I encountered a group of four men draped over the bridge in the dark. My impression was that these were homeless men and it wasn’t my imagination that they were somewhat hostile. They recognized me instantly as a “Joe” and sly calls began to come out of the darkness. I had been around groups of men in the past when they were working themselves up to an act of violence, and I saw all the signs here. It was not a good place to hang around and a short distance on the other side of the bridge, I turned around and went back into town. I had a large rock in each hand just in case I needed them as I passed these men again.

When I returned to the hotel, the awful, awful sond was still pouring out of the front doors. I walked past it and continued up the road out of town on the other side. I had to fend off several more dog attacks, which did nothing to improve my mood. It got very dark, and I had to turn around. The music was still playing – thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, thumpa – and there was no way I could go back into my room of horror. There was a little concrete waiting shed on the street nearby, and I took a seat there to rest and gather my crumbling sanity.

By now, word of my walk into the darkness must have reached the owner of the hotel, because there was a sudden burst of activity. Two men came out of the front and were climbing into a pedicab. The side door of the hotel opened and the owner appeared there with a man at her side. The man pointed at me – my shape clearly recognizable even in the dark – he and the woman sat there discussing me and what I could possibly be doing out there.

Then, to add insult to injury, the two men in the pedicab, after fumbling for a long time, suddenly turned on an extremely loud radio. It was apparently built into the pedicab. It was a rolling sound system. They pedaled the bike out of the parking lot and across the street to me at the waiting shed. The noise from their radio was deafening. They stopped right in front of me and started babbling at me, shouting to be heard over the sound of the music. They were clearly drunk and oblivious to their danger as the last shred of my sanity snapped. I jumped to my feet and shouted something like, “More music? Are you fucking kidding me?” Other poetic and well-thought phrases emerged from what was left of my brain. I happened to have a very large rock – much larger than my fist – still in my hand and I suddenly smashed it to the ground in anger. The two men in the pedicab finally got the idea that they and their music weren’t welcome and they pedaled off. The woman from the hotel was now walking across the parking lot toward me. I walked toward her intending to just go inside and go to bed. This is the problem with passive aggressive behavior. I had been furious and contemplating violence for hours and hours and hours. Yet, this woman knew nothing about it. I hadn’t said anything to her at all. I had simply suffered in silence. As far as she was concerned, I had simply gone out for a strange walk at one o’clock in the morning. In my mind, I had yelled at her and berated her and called her a liar. I’d had fantasies of going downstairs and smashing the videoke machine, cutting the power cords, grabbing the microphone and screaming profanities into it, and even setting fire to the entire hotel. So in my head, I felt really guilty and embarrassed. I had done none of those things, and yet the knowledge of my feelings and passive aggressive nature made me feel guilty, and it was as if I had done those things and now I was uncomfortable around this woman. Anyway, I said something like “Hey, there” and then walked right past her into the hotel. I carefully made my way up into my room through the narrow hallway and stairway and slammed the door behind me. In typical fashion, I had made an awful situation worse. Now, after my nighttime encounter with the dogs, the potential murderers on the bridge, and the idiots on the pedicab, I was so worked up and angry that even though the videoke was over, I couldn’t sleep. It was quiet and I could finally sleep, but I was so tense that I couldn’t. My heart was racing and my limbs were trembling and my brain was in turmoil. And I was well aware that in three hours, the roosters would start crowing and the traffic would start to roar and the sun would come up and pour hot beams of light into my room and eyes. It hardly seemed worthwhile to even try to get some sleep. I even had thoughts of packing up my gear and setting off in the dark on my bike. I might even have done that except that my bike was locked up inside the resto bar and I wouldn’t be able to get it out by myself.

I went downstairs to the common bathroom and took a couple of long cold showers to calm myself down and eventually I managed to sleep for a couple of hours. Another night of videoke horror in the books. I wish there was a way to avoid these, but it is next to impossible. It’s impossible to tell if a videoke machine is in use or not. I saw the videoke machine in this resto bar, and I even asked about it. And I was assured that it wasn’t a problem. My room was very quiet. But they lied to me. In any event, this is the only hotel for a hundred kilometers around. Oh, well. This is what I do. I spread cross-cultural cheer and understanding wherever I go.

 

 

Tags: bike, homeless, music, Norman Rockwell, pannier bag, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, South Coast of Samar