The manager of the hotel in Virac raised her eyebrows at me when I told her of my plans to ride my bicycle to Pandan – the town at the northern tip of Catanduanes.

“Are you sure?” she said, with her eyes widening and her voice rising a couple of octaves at the end – sounding almost panicked on my behalf.

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure at all, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

She, then, like all of informants went on to tell me with a variety of adjectives that it was pretty much impossible. Far. Too far. And hot. It’s summer. Very hot. Very dangerous. Then, as always, came the advice: I should take a bus. I should rent a motorcycle. I should go to Boracay. This last, that I should go to Boracay, comes up all of the time. Boracay’s fame has spread far and wide throughout the Philippines. None of the people singing the praises of Boracay have ever been there, of course. Most of the Boracay-boosters have never left the Bicol region in their lives. Yet, they’d heard that foreigners like Boracay very much and this nutty foreigner standing in front of them with his bicycle should go there.

Having now been to Pandan and nearly completed my circuit of Catanduanes, I can think of a few things of actual value and usefulness that all of my gloomy informants could have told me. Long on warnings and very short on information they were. The first and most important thing they could have told me is that nearly the entire stretch of coastal highway to Pandan (once you leave behind the pavement past San Andres) is under construction. And as I know from a previous bike ride on Palawan, there is a curious construction pattern in the Philippines. Roads are not paved from the beginning until they reach the end. The roads are done on a patchwork basis. They cement over little squares and patches of road here and there pretty much at random. They also do just half of any particular stretch of road at any one time. The result is a crazy patchwork of cement and rough rocks and you never know which you’re going to be facing. As a cyclist following kilometers of bone-jarring rock, I might feel a sudden surge of relief upon reaching some completed cement pavement. But the relief barely has time to register before the pavement disappears a hundred feet later. Why is that 100-foot stretch of road paved on just one side with no pavement at all for kilometers on either side? Who can say? It seems so bizarre to me that I can hardly even speculate. Someone threw a dart at a map and where the dart lands they put in one little square of cement? And they keep doing that until the hundred kilometers of road is paved? Perhaps it is too much to face the entire job at once and so they just do little patches – like someone making a quilt and concentrating on a square at a time. Perhaps doing it in a patchwork style allows the contractor to hide their rate of progress – or lack of progress. No one looking at these little patches of cement could even guess at how far along they are. Is 10% completed? 30%? 50%? No one can possibly tell, certainly not the government, which is paying the bills. So perhaps there is a financial advantage to piecework construction.

In any event, it’s a huge job with the entire coastal road under construction at the same time. It seems to me that people in Virac would know about this and would think to tell me. They were so full of warnings and dangers that they could barely get them all out. Why not mention the one problem that was in fact far more compelling than all the imaginary ones put together – that I would be cycling through one very long and very dusty and very rocky construction site? Alas, no one mentioned it. Not that it would have made any difference. I’d have gone anyway. It just puzzles me at how lacking in information all my informants were.

The same goes for distances, of course. No one could tell me how far it was from one spot on my map to another. Certainly no one could agree beyond the very gloomy pronouncement of “Too far”, which I heard from everyone no matter what I asked. Luckily, the Philippines keeps me in a good humor. How can I not be in a good humor with the laughter raining down on me from all sides?

Long ago, while cycling in Ethiopia, I would pass a group of children and then tense up and count down the seconds until the barrage of rocks came flying at me. Here in the Philippines – in a very real application of the old “sticks and stones” saying – I ended up tensing for the laughter. I would pass a group of people – literally looking at me slack-jawed and silent – and then I’d count down the seconds until it came – waves of laughter. Endless waves. Jokes and calls. More laughter. More jokes and more laughter. Then I’d meet a new group of people and the same pattern would emerge.

I admit that sometimes the laughter rubbed me the wrong way. It was never meant (I don’t think) in a malicious way. The Filipinos laugh all the time. I’ve never heard so much laughter in my life. Hang out at a little eatery in the morning and every person who goes past is greeted with a flow of jokes and laughter. It’s just the way things are. Most of the time, I just provided the subject matter and the jokes were made at someone else’s expense. I couldn’t understand them since they were speaking in the Bicol language or Tagalog, but the idea seemed to be that they’d shout at their friends that here was a chance for them to try out their English. “Go talk to the foreigner,” they’d say, and everyone would laugh. Someone would tell a friend to go out there and help me by pushing my bicycle. More laughter. Then they would shout something in English, usually “What is your name?” And their attempt at English would bring on more laughter.

Once, I have to admit, I was feeling a bit irritable and I lost my temper. This was at a woman sitting in a little shelter at an intersection. I wanted to know which direction I should take and I asked her where the roads went. She started to laugh and laugh and laugh. She shrieked with laughter. I waited for it to die down so that I could ask again, but it never stopped. She started shouting out to people around her and with every shout, she fell about laughing again. I’d finally had enough and – to my shame – I started laughing back, essentially imitating her. I gave big hearty guffaws and fake “ha ha”s. The woman quickly got the point and went silent. It was a victory for me, but it was a hollow one and I wished I hadn’t done it. As I said, the laughter does not seem to be meant maliciously. And even if it has a negative effect on me, I don’t think the local people understand it that way. They can’t possibly understand how all the laughter makes me feel.

But I was talking about distances. I got onto this laughter sidetrack because one time, I stopped to chat with a group of construction workers resting in the shade at the side of the road. They asked me the usual questions and I answered them as best I could and bit my tongue at the endless “Too far” pronouncements. One man, I noticed, was out in the middle of the road still working – hammering at some cement with a chisel. I pointed to him and asked why all these guys were relaxing in the shade while this poor guy was the only one working? This brought on appreciative laugh from my audience. I then suggested that this man must be the boss because the boss always works harder. This made everyone laugh more and they called the joke out to the guy with the hammer and started calling him the boss. Once the joke had run its course, I asked them how far it was to Pandan. The answers came in practically a comedy routine. The first man said 30 kilometers. The second said 40. The third said 50. Then the “boss”, the man who had been working, came over to the shade. He hadn’t been there for the first part of the conversation and he asked me the same questions and said the same things all over again. When I mentioned going to Pandan, he shook his head in astonishment and said “Too far. 60 kilometers!” All the other men jumped in to correct him, each arguing for their particular distance choice. I went down the row of men and named their distances one by one – 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers, 50 kilometers, 60 kilometers. Then I pointed to the last man, who hadn’t said anything, and I said, “100 kilometers!” Everyone laughed goodnaturedly and then I said that I liked the answer of the first man the best – 30 kilometers. He must be the boss, I said, because he had the best answer. And everyone laughed again. If I’d wanted to, I could have had a conversation like that all day long with every group I met. Filipinos, as I said, like to laugh.

I can’t begin to name all the barangays that I passed on the first day of my ride around Catanduanes. I had this impression from what I’d read online that Catanduanes was a remote and sparsely populated island. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as around Virac, the road to Pandan was filled with people. People were everywhere and I passed an endless stream of beautiful little villages on the water. I pulled in to most of them just to have a look around and check out the waterfront. I could have stayed in any one of them and been quite content. There was lots to see and photograph and experience. People were lounging everywhere and I would be called over to have a chat over and over again. I did my best to keep up with these chats and keep them fresh, but the questions and the responses were always the same. They all started with “Hey, Joe!” and passed through the facts that I was from Canada, that I was traveling on a bicycle, that I had been on Catanduanes for just one week, that I had no companion (pause for sad looks), that I was single, that I was NOT looking for a Filipina wife, that my “mission” was tourism, that I was going to Pandan (pause for “too far”), and a few other things, and then I’d move on to the next group for the same conversation.

Leaving Virac, I had tried to arrange to leave some things behind at the hotel. I could have done so, but the hotel was unwilling to be responsible for anything of value. And since everything I have is of some value, I decided to just bring everything with me. That would keep things simple. I was getting used to being on a fully-loaded touring bike and it didn’t seem like quite such a heavy load anymore.

On the outskirts of town, I stopped at a water refilling station and bought a bag of purified water and filled all my water bottles. It has become very clear that I don’t have enough water bottles. The three bottles on my bike frame plus the one Nalgene bottle are not enough. I need at least one more 1-liter bottle to get me through even a partial day. With the refilling stations, I can fill up all my bottles and be done with it. Beyond that, I’ve learned that I can get potable water from various water pumps in the barangays. The word “potable” is in common usage here and I’ve learned to ask people if the water from this or that pump was potable or not. People know which pumps produce potable water and which don’t. In one barangay, I was told that only the pump by the church had potable water, and it was tested every month. So far, though, I have not had the courage to drink even this potable water unfiltered. It’s a shame because all the eateries and canteens serve this water cold in large bottles. Sit down to any meal, and a large bottle of this cold water will be produced. Being leery of the water, I only drink water that I run through my Katadyn filter. I don’t really know if this is necessary or not. It probably isn’t, but who can tell? I have the filter and decided to make use of it. On previous cycling trips, I would filter water the night before – enough to fill all my water bottles. And that water would get me through the next day. On Catanduanes, that has not proven to be possible. It is far hotter here than it ever was in Ethiopia and I go through two or three times as much water for the same distance of cycling. My clothing is so soaked with sweat that I can wring it out and produce a couple of cups of water at any one time. The sweat simply rolls down my arms and back and legs like I am my own sweaty spring. At the beginning, I was very annoyed with this, but I’ve now gotten to the point where I accept it. I am simply soaking wet with sweat all the time, and there is nothing I can do to change that fact. I might feel icky and somewhat embarrassed to be talking to local people while I am doing a fair imitation of a drowned cat, but there is nothing to be done about it – other than simply not cycling.

I’ve dealt with my need for more water by filtering water two or three times in a day. I will filter water during the night, but I tend to drink most of that. Therefore, I have to filter another batch in the morning before I set off. While I filter, I drink off a full liter of water just to make sure that my body sets off with a full tank. Esssentially, I treat my stomach as another 1-liter container, and I fill it to capacity whether I feel thirsty or not. My body will gratefully soak up that water within minutes anyway. Then during the day when I run out of water, I will stop at a barangay and ask after some potable water. Sometimes I am led to a local water pump. And sometimes, as happened in the incredibly gorgeous barangay of Balco, someone will bring out large bottles of cold water from their fridge and watch with interest while I filter it. I felt a bit awkward doing this because I am implying that their water was not pure or healthy. And it isn’t like it doesn’t take some effort. I have to work the Katadyn filter with a fair amount of muscle effort, and I will be sitting there pumping and sweating away with a dozen people standing around and watching and giving me all kinds of advice, most of it in the vein of renting a motorcycle or taking a bus or going to Boracay. I needn’t feel awkward about the filtering though. People understood it instantly and seemed quite impressed that I have my own filter. Health and health services are serious concerns here and anything that aims to purify water is viewed as a valuable thing. I don’t know if the filtering is important, but I can report that after nearly 3 weeks in the Philippines, I am still healthy. At least I am not chronically ill – knock on wood.

The first major place you reach upon leaving Virac is the port town of San Andres. Virac and San Andres together make up the developed corridor of Catanduanes – connected with a 17-kilometer paved road. San Andres seems to be the preferred port for ferries carrying buses. I happened to arrive there just as one of the day’s ferries was arriving, and I rode to the port to watch the unloading process. Without instant access to the Internet and movies and TV shows, you take your entertainment where you can get it.

This ferry, unlike the one I had taken to Virac, was filled to bursting. I lost count at ten as the huge buses emerged, and there were many large trucks on top of that. The passenger areas on the upper decks with crammed with people and once the buses were unloaded, they came pouring out of the boat. When I am on a bicycle, I sometimes enjoy hanging out at ports and bus stations and places like that. If I am traveling by bus or ferry, I find them to be extremely tense and crazy places. I dislike them intensely. However, if I am not trying to get on a bus (and facing a 10-hour ride from hell), it is fun to hang out and watch the loading and unloading process.

I don’t really understand how it works with the ferries. Most of the people on the ferry had arrived on the buses, and so it makes sense that their luggage (of which there was an immense amount) would have been loaded up on the buses already. However, when the buses drove off the ferry, they turned left into a large parking area to wait. The passengers – with all their luggage carried by porters – would then rejoin their bus and then supervise with much shouting and yelling and exchanging of money as their boxes and bags would be piled back onto the bus. I have no idea why the luggage wouldn’t just be left on the bus during the ferry ride. It seems to be a huge hassle to have to unload the entire bus and load it up again for the ferry ride. I don’t think it can be for security, since the boxes and bags are tightly sealed with ropes and other things. Perhaps the ceiling is too low on the ferry and so nothing can be on top of the bus? That is a possibility.

San Andres was also a major center for abaca, and I spent some time at a big abaca warehouse watching it being stored and packaged for shipment to somewhere. Else. I’ve seen abaca being dried and harvested all over Catanduanes in all of the small barangays and farms, and I guess all of it ends up at some point in one of these large warehouses. I can’t imagine the fire hazard these places represent.

After San Andres, the road remained cemented for a while, and my next major stop was the beautiful little village of Codon. I had read about Codon somewhere and learned that it was possible to use Codon as a jumping off point for a banca ride to the Caramoan peninsula – a gorgeous place for island-hopping. This would only be feasible with a large group, though, and I saw no need to charter a banca to go to a beautiful island when I had the entire beautiful island of Catanduanes all around me. Codon was significant for me for two reasons. One, I met a group of government officials there on some kind of inspection mission around the island. They were driving around in big government-issue SUVs, and after chatting with them we took a bunch of pictures together. Two days later, a man on a motorcycle stopped to shake my hand. He said he had seen me on the Internet – the Canadian riding his bicycle around Catanduanes. It seems these government people had posted the pictures they took, and I am now a minor celebrity – well, at least as far as one man on a motorcycle is concerned.

Codon is also important because it was the first place I had a meal “on the road” in the Philippines. I had seen the port area and photographed all the boats, and then I spotted a little shop with some pots of food out front. There was no seating of any kind. People would have their food portioned out in a bowl and then put into plastic bags to take home. I produced my pot from my Trangia set and indicated I would like to eat right there. I asked for rice, of course, and the woman asked me how much rice I wanted. The word she used was “lang” and she held up one finger. That seemed to mean one serving, so I agreed. However, she came out with my pot filled to the brim with rice – far more than I could possibly eat. I told her that that was too much. Maybe “half a lang” would be better. This struck her as particularly funny and she called out my phrase “half a lang” to everyone nearby and the wave of laughter carried, it seemed, over the entire barangay. I’m still not entirely sure what “lang” means, but I guess it doesn’t make any sense to have half a lang. Along with my rice, I also had some of the dishes on offer. It was, as all cycling meals are, extremely delicious. The woman produced a plastic chair for me, and I sat in the shade enjoying my first successful meal on the road on my bike. When I was done, I cleaned up my bowl and cutlery at a handy water pump and packed it away. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of food container so that I could buy an extra meal at these places and bring it along with me to eat later in the day.

Shortly after Codon, I said goodbye to the paved road and began the seemingly endless kilometers of bouncing and crashing over the rocky road and construction areas. It was okay, though. I kind of enjoyed the construction because it meant that there were construction workers all over the place to chat with. And the construction provided something of interest to check out along the way. Not that there was a lack of interesting things. The road hugged the coast and provided me with an endless series of views that made my jaw drop with their beauty. I passed barangay after barangay with beautiful stretches of beach and bancas all pulled up on the sand. Each was a postcard of tropical paradise. There were flooded rice fields with carabao here and there as if placed for maximum local color. Then there were the mountains with peninsulas jutting out into the blue ocean. The cycling wasn’t easy, and I was very happy to have all these opportunities to stop and take a picture and catch my breath.

 

Tags: Bagmananoc, barangay, barangay captain, bike, Catanduanes Bike Trip, Gigmoto, Leaving Virac, Pandan, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Pururan, San Andres, San Vicente, Virac