The real adventure began at the end of my first day when I stopped at the little barangay of Salvacion and met Grandpa and his sea of granddaughters. As I rode along, I pondered just where I was going to spend the night. I was prepared to spend the night in my tent, but I wasn’t fully organized for that. I did not have food with me and would have to depend on the local barangays for that. And I wasn’t sure of the etiquette of simply putting up my tent anywhere. The Philippines is a highly organized place with many levels of government. You even see signs outside of every barangay listing every barangay official by name. I could imagine it not going down too well with local government if I simply claimed a patch of land as my own for the night. And, to be honest, there weren’t that many patches available. I saw many beautiful deserted beaches, but they were far below me down the cliff with no access short of a hang glider. The beaches that were accessible were all inside or on the edges of the barangays. One could camp there, but it would be on land belonging to the barangay. Etiquette dictated that I check in with the Barangay Captain to get permission first. And I doubted that the idea of camping would make any sense to anyone here.

So I was pondering my various options and was quite surprised, therefore, to suddenly find myself outside of quite a large restaurant in the barangay of Salvacion. Not one to pass up any opportunity for a cold drink (a cold Coke can be had for 15 pesos almost anywhere) or a chat, I pulled over to the side of the road to see what was what. And that led to one of the great adventures of this trip so far.

I was greeted first by an attractive young woman who spoke English very well. She was warm and friendly and got me a cold drink and answered my questions about the restaurant. It seemed that Salvacion was a convenient distance between Pandan and Virac for the buses and jeepneys to stop there for the passengers to get a meal. I had seen only one bus on the road, but I had to take her word for it that there were many of them each day. Their little eatery grew over the past ten years into this larger place with seating for perhaps fifty people.

I don’t want to give the impression that this was a big, clean Texaco station road stop. No, it was a fairly typical small-town in the Philippines kind of ramshackle affair – in a very pleasant way. The front was even with the road and you walk inside into an area with seating and a kitchen to the right with a series of seven or eight large pots – the equivalent of a buffet. You lift the lid on each pot to see what is on offer that day. These places don’t operate with a menu from which you make a selection. They prepare a certain number of dishes each morning based on the ingredients at hand. Then they set them out in pots and trays. When those dishes are gone, they’re gone. “No more pancit,” you might hear if all the breakfast pancit (a noodle dish) is gone. You can’t order more.

As you walk around and find a seat at a table bench or plastic chair, the floor beneath you creaks and bends. That’s because there is another level down below as the restaurant is built onto a slope. Beneath the restaurant floor are the common bathrooms and a big water tank for laundry plus some storage areas and a bunch of fairly bare rooms – more like cells than rooms. Behind this area you go through open doors into the back farm with chickens and roosters and ducks and dogs and cats and pen after pen of pigs of various sizes. When you hear a fantastic uproar developing, it isn’t an emergency. It is just the pigs sensing that food is about to be served. I went back there to watch this operation later in the evening and saw distinct evidence why a pig eating at a trough is a universal metaphor for being greedy.

I ordered a cold drink and sat there drinking the soda and drinking in the atmosphere. I could imagine an anthropologist sitting there for months and monitoring the comings and goings and still not being able to figure out the full economy of the place and who does what. It is a family operation, of course, and when you enter, it isn’t entirely clear who you are supposed to deal with. There are no clerks in store uniforms or anything like that. Sometimes there will be nobody at all and you must shout to get someone’s attention. Sometimes there will only be a young child. No matter. Whoever is there will serve you and take your money. Some tasks are dealt with by certain people, though I have no idea how they apportion these. Whole chickens seemed to be sold by Grandpa. He appeared to be the only one with the strength to get a butcher’s blade all the way through a whole chicken to chop it in half or in quarters. The resulting bits are put onto an ancient scale and then sold to the customer. I don’t know who exactly cooks all the different dishes. I was told that the cooking began at one or two in the morning in order to have all the food available for the morning rush. I was still confused by this since I almost never saw any traffic on this beautiful coastal road. Where would this morning rush materialize from?

Grandpa quickly took charge of me. He was 54 years old, though to my eyes looked much older with his graying hair and grizzled features and irregular teeth. He was very friendly and confident and rambled on at me about various things as he plied me with the usual questions. He was most interested in where I was going to stay that night, since I was on a bicycle and apparently without companions of any sort. (Sad look.) I told him that I would likely be sleeping in my tent somewhere, perhaps at the larger barangay of Dagat further up the road. Grandpa, to my delight, suggested that I stay at his place – there in the restaurant. They had a room downstairs that I could use. It was small and simple, but if I thought it would do, I could stay there. The woman I had spoken with the most said that the room belonged to her son, but he could sleep anywhere at all, and his room could be mine if I wanted it. I trooped down the narrow steps along with ten or more members of the family to check out the room. I had to bend over nearly double the entire time to avoid smashing my head against the low roof. To get to the room, I went past the laundry area and the comfort room area and then down a long narrow tunnel to the very end. Through a door, and there was the room. It looked perfectly comfortable, though quite Spartan. There was a large bed and some plastic furniture and that was it. Three of the windows were closed up with wooden slats. A fourth window was opened and closed by lifting a big wooden panel and jamming a log in place to keep it open. I saw that if I stayed there, my mosquito net would come in very handy.

It seemed odd in a way that this was a teenage boy’s room. It was far too neat and tidy for that. I attributed that fact to them renting the room out quite often. The boy would lock all his possessions away into these lockable plastic cabinets. Then anyone could stay there. That a teenage boy lived there was evidenced only by the many posters of Avril Lavigne adorning the walls. Avril seemed to be a bit of a sensation there, as there were many posters of her up in the restaurant area as well. How these posters had migrated to this small barangay on this remote island in the Philippines is anyone’s guess. I certainly can’t begin to know how.

The boy, by the way, cut quite the figure. He wore stretchy fashionable jeans, cut his hair in a cool fashion, and had a large silver stud in one ear. He walked around with a large speaker assembly – about eight inches by six inches – around his neck. This speaker had a port for earbuds and he listened to music through it while bright red and blue lights flashed on the front. I regret now that I never did find out what music he was listening to. I told those around me that Avril was Canadian like me. This made little impression. I’m not sure that they knew she was a singer. All they knew about her was that she was very beautiful. I happened to have some Avril Lavigne music on my iPod, and I thought about playing it for them, but I didn’t think it would matter. I didn’t get the impression that they would make the connection between the girl on the poster and the music. For them, she was a pretty girl and perhaps nothing else. I’ve certainly not heard any of her music here so far.

I decided to take the room, of course. It was too delightful an opportunity to pass up. I sat with the family up in the restaurant for a few minutes more and then I rolled by bicycle around the restaurant and down a steep incline that led to the back where the room was located. I had a rather large audience for this operation and I settled in to filter some water with a line of wide-eyed granddaughters watching my every move and giggling and laughing. One of the smallest granddaughters made everyone laugh by saying that it looked like I was making a bomb. This didn’t strike me as particularly funny. The last thing I wanted was to give the impression that I was a man on a bicycle with no companions assembling bombs. So I showed them the water that was squirting out of the end of the filter as I pumped. Everyone jumped and laughed.

There’s an odd quality to these sorts of nights. I have always thought of them as my being a hospitality prisoner. These people had opened up their home to me and that was a wonderful thing. However, it also meant that, compared to staying in a hotel, I had given up my independence. As I sat in the restaurant, they plied me with coffee and bananas and food. And there was no accounting the cost for any of this. It was simply given to me at random. There was also no discussion of a price for the room. That is nice, but at the same time it makes things complicated. At several points, I actually wanted something that was visible there in the store and restaurant. But not having paid for anything directly yet, how can I just ask for it? I was now dependent on their hospitality and had lost much of my freedom in exchange.

I did my best for a while to be quite uninteresting. I figured if I didn’t do anything interesting for a while and I didn’t engage the children in any games, they would lose interest in me and I would gain some privacy. It took a while, but this strategy worked and then I set about setting up my room for the night – putting up the mosquito net and laying out my sleeping sheet and making sure that things like flashlights were where I could find them if needed. Then I went down to the comfort room for a bucket bath.

I wasn’t entirely sure of how this worked. There were two small concrete enclosures with toilets inside them. Then there was the wide open area with the big water tank. So where did people take their bucket baths? Perhaps they didn’t? I didn’t know. However, inside one of the small cement enclosures, there was a second quite large water tank. Whether it was the thing to do or not, it was possible to take a bucket bath there with the toilet. It was a small space and I was constantly tripping over the toilet, but it was just workable. There were assorted ropes and wires and cables hanging above and around me and I draped my various bits of clothing up there to keep it out of the chaos below. It was a bit of a challenge and I ended up so worked up and sweaty from the physical effort of just getting organized and undressed and then dressed again, that the entire benefit of the bucket bath seemed to be lost. As always, I was at a loss to figure out how the local people could be so clean and neat and trim all the time. If this was their normal way of life, how did they stay so clean and dry? How, in fact, did they live?

Grandpa took over at dinnertime and made sure that I got enough to eat. Then he took me outside to show me the bridge. At the bridge, I met another group of granddaughtes – an older group hanging out at the bridge and talking. The oldest had just graduated from high school and her English was quite good. Grandpa commanded her to speak to the foreigner in English and then he looked on fondly as we chatted.

When we returned from the bridge, I was dropped off in a kind of small family room, where a group of the grandkids were watching a movie. It seemed an odd place to have a TV and DVD player, but there they were. They were brands that I had never heard of, but they worked. When I arrived, there was a flurry of activity to put in a movie that I could understand. To my amusement, the best they could come up with was a Chinese kung-fu flick that had been dubbed into English.

The movie was called “The Last Survivor” and it was clearly one of the very few movies that they had. The children knew all the scenes by heart and talked about what was going to happen next. They had obviously watched it over and over again – just as children in Canada might watch “The Lion King” dozens of times. These children, however, had no access to “The Lion King.” Instead they had this movie. It was very simple in its basic structure – the bad guy doing bad things to the good guy and then the good guy getting his revenge in the end – after long kung-fu training montages. However, there was a grimness and nastiness to this movie that struck me. The opening scene had the bad guy take a sword and cut off both arms of our hero. Then our hero was (inexplicably still alive) tossed out onto the street to fend for himself and survive as an armless beggar. It was truly horrifying and one of the little granddaughters had tears running down her cheeks as we watched this poor man struggle to survive. The hero ended up with just a little chicken wing for an arm sticking out of one shoulder. The actor clearly was born with no arms and just that one chicken wing. When it was covered in blood, it was a horrific image that would rival anything David Lynch could come up with.

Our hero, as any good hero would, ended up with a partner. This man was also mutilated by the bad guy. The bad guy had him held down and then slowly poured a powerful acid over his legs – dissolving all the flesh off them and leaving only bones. It was disturbing beyond words.

Eventually, of course, the man with just bones sticking out of his torso joined up with the man with just a chicken wing for arms and the two of them teamed up to fight the evil man. To say that this movie was too intense for young children is putting it mildly. And sitting there with all the granddaughters watching it, I reflected on the cultural emptiness surrounding them. I’ve only been here a short time, and it’s likely that there are depths to the cultural life here that I’m not aware of. However, it seemed while watching this movie that there was nothing at all. The only movies I’ve seen anywhere are the absolute dregs of the western world – things like “Anaconda River of Blood” – movies so bad that they come to the Philippines to die on basic cable. Then there are the Asian films like these awful kung-fu flicks. I don’t know if these chidren ever get exposed to anything else. Do they ever hear any music beyond the current top ten pop hits? I haven’t seen a book anywhere. Maybe I just expect too much.

I actually wanted to see the end of the movie. But the fighting sequences went on so long and there were so many of them that I lost patience and I got up to go to bed. The night went by fairly well. It stayed very hot down there in that room even with all the windows open. But I must have slept through large parts of the night because I was told when I woke up that several large buses had already come and gone. How I hadn’t heard them with all the people stomping around above me, I can’t even guess.

 

Tags: barangay, barangay captain, Catanduanes Bike Trip, music, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, tent