When I left my hotel yesterday, I stopped by the jail to inquire about visiting hours and whether there were any foreigners in the jail. There were no visiting hours at all on Monday, but I did learn that there was an American in the jail. I didn’t find out his name, but someone later told me that he was a retired engineer and he had been in the jail for three months. His case was still before the courts.

My informant told me with some surprise that no one from the American embassy had been to see this man. I told him that this didn’t surprise me. In my experience, American embassies wash their hands of any of their citizens in jails overseas. European embassies send someone to help their citizens in overseas jails, but American ones don’t. I know nothing else about this man other than that he gets a visit from his lawyer once a week and that some Filipino friends come to see him. No one seemed to think it would be a problem for me to visit him even though I was not a family member or even a friend. Visiting hours start at 1 p.m. today and I plan to put together a little care package and then drop by the jail.

In the early afternoon, I wandered down to the docks. I had my camera with me and I shot some pictures with the 12mm wide angle lens. I got to chatting with a man at one of the big bankas and I learned that it was a commuter boat, carrying passengers just across the San Juanico Strait to a small barangay called San Antonio. The trip only took fifteen or twenty minutes and boats went back and forth all day. The fare was only 12 pesos, so I got on board just for the experience.

[slickr-flickr tag=”San Antonio North”]
The boat was largely full when it left, but it was still quite comfortable. It was a very large and elaborate bangka and was intended mainly for passengers, not cargo. The captain of the boat climbed up a short ladder to a seat on a platform inside an elaborate structure. The controls of the boat (and the engine, too, I believe) had all come from a Hyundai car. The captain steered with a car’s steering wheel and changed gears with a car’s gear shifter and clutch pedal. The gas pedal had broken, and he applied gas by pressing down on a rope with his bare foot.

The barangay of San Atonio was relatively small. A man told me that it had a population of 1,600. It was a pleasant place with long beaches stretching out on either side. The sand was a bit dark and I got powerful whiffs of sewage from time to time, but it was still quite nice to walk along a wide beach with traditional village houses and tall palm trees. I even passed a place that rented out cottages. I had my camera out and I concentrated on taking pictures as I walked. I ended up with a nice set of pictures of children as they were playing on the beach. The most interesting of them was a group of young boys playing the drums. They had made their drums out of cans and stretched rubber. I was on the beach for perhaps two hours and they played for the entire time. There were about ten drummers in total, and they simply made up the rhythm as they went along. Sometimes it fell apart and sounded a bit like noise, but most of the time there was a clear rhythm going on. It was a very successful excursion. I had thought about just hopping on one of those boats many times before, but this was the first time I’d actually done it. The trip back was just as easy as the trip out, and I was back in Tacloban around 5:30. This has inspired me to think about taking a boat out to the town of Bassey. This is the jumping off point for trips to the Sohoton National Park. I hadn’t planned on going to this park, but if it can be arranged for one person, I might do it. Apparently, you take a boat up a river to the park and pass villages along the way. Caves with large stalagmites and stalactites are the main attraction in this park.

I ended the day with a bit of a problem. One of the control dials on my Olympus camera stopped working. It’s the dial on the added grip, which means that the problem could be the contact points or the internal electronics. It’s not clear right now because the shutter button on the grip still works, which means that at least some of the contact points still work. I imagine the starting point is cleaning the contact points. I’m not sure how to do that, though. I’ll have to do some research to find out how best to do it. I don’t want to cause more damage than is already there. It’s an annoying problem because it’s not like the grip was a cheap accessory. It was extremely expensive, and I only bought it to make the camera easier to hold onto. I didn’t need the extra battery compartment. In fact, I sent that part of the grip away. I kept only the vertical portion, which made it quadruply expensive. The new Olympus that just came out has a larger body with a natural grip. You don’t have to buy an additional grip, so that would be better.

Later: I took a chance and whipped out an alcohol pad to clean the contact points. I did it very carefully and allowed plenty of time for everything to dry before I reattached the grip, and it fixed the problem. The control wheel now works again.

 

 

Tags: barangay, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, San Antonio, San Juanico Strait, Sohoton National Park, Tacloban