San Vicente did not, as I suspected, have any kind of hotel or pension or inn or guest house or lodging. In that situation, I figured I would be sleeping in my tent and I understood from many conversations I’d had that I should present myself to the barangay captain to obtain his permission and protection. I rode around San Vicente, and people actually made the decision for me and pointed the way to the barangay captain’s house without my even asking for directions. They simply assumed that that was the place I was looking for.

I found the barangay captain’s house on a pleasant back street. A dozen people were cutting up copra and setting it out to dry on the street. One of their number ran into the BC’s house (barangay captain’s) to let him know that someone wanted to speak to him. I sat in the entrance to his house and waited – a bit nervously. I had never spoken to a BC before and asked for permission to stay in his barangay. I didn’t know what this would entail.

The BC finally emerged – a rather short and elderly man with a rugged face and blue hat perched somewhat jauntily on his head. There was a little snap on the brim of his hat, and it reminded me of a little star, giving off a slightly communist official air. The BC began by asking me all the usual questions – focusing in particular on my mission. He was completely confused by what I was doing in San Vicente. And he seemed very suspicious. It was a somewhat harsh interrogation, I thought. He seemed to think I was hiding something and he asked to see some identification – a “cedula” – something with my picture and signature on it. He was quite clear about that. I went back out to my bike and brought in my money belt with all my ID. Oddly enough, my passport made no impression on the BC at all. He seemed completely uninterested in it, and, in fact, never did come across the information page or the Philippines visa page. He flipped through some blank pages and then set it aside. My little bundle of Canadian ID interested him far more, and he ended up focusing mainly on my Ontario driver’s license. After all, it looked quite official. For a while, he called me Sarnia, which is my hometown and not my name.

I wasn’t quite sure what the BC was looking for, but in the end, it was my bicycle that brought him over to my side. I had told him that I was a tourist and that I was traveling around Catanduanes by bicycle. I could tell, however, that this information made no impression on me. It didn’t really register. So I finally invited him to come outside and see my bicycle. Once he saw it in all its glory, his manner changed completely. He still didn’t understand what I was doing, but he seemed to understand that I was stuck for a place to stay. Even he, with his limited experience of such things, knew that with the bicycle as my transportation and the sun beginning to set, I wasn’t able to go on to Virac or any other place with commercial lodging.

The BC finally made up his mind and he said that I could stay in the barangay hall – the barangay equivalent of city hall. This was much better than I had hoped for, and I pictured at the very least a little building with a roof, a clean floor, and a toilet out back. That’s all I needed. In fact, I didn’t even need that. I would happily have stayed in my tent, but no matter how I tried to get the BC to understand that, he simply dismissed it out of hand. Such a thing made no sense to him at all.

Once he made the offer of the barangay hall, he got a key and we set off through the streets of San Vicente – me pushing my bike the final hundred meters of my day’s long journey. We were quite the procession as we went through San Vicente, with all the people shouting out questions and the BC answering them. With the BC as my guide and protector, the local people were even more outgoing than before – if that was even possible – and the greetings and questions and laughter came from all directions.

The barangay hall turned out to be something of a disappointment. It was still under construction and the entire bottom floor consisted of nothing more than a rough cement pad with bags and bags of cement and other construction material. I asked about a toilet – private or public or whatever – and the BC said that the toilet wasn’t finished. He pointed in the corner at a toilet just sitting there still inside it’s packaging waiting to be installed somewhere.

There was a narrow set of stairs going up to the second floor, where I found myself in a long and narrow room, most of which was taken up by a long wooden table. Heavy wooden chairs surrounded the table. On a dresser at the side, there were some water glasses and a big wooden gavel and base. I imagined the barangay officials sitting around this table and the BC banging the gavel when decisions were made final.

I surveyed the room with a bit of dismay. It was blisteringly hot up there and extremely dirty. There was very little floor space available, and I could tell that it was going to take quite a bit of effort to make it livable for the night. It would have been so much easier to set up my clean tent, but this was to be home. I was a hospitality prisoner once again. I’d have to somehow sweep and clean the foor after making a space for my sleeping pad. Then I’d have to rig up some kind of complicated rope system from which to hang my mosquito net. There were no hooks in the ceiling. The ceiling was also cement, so there was no way for me to install my own hook. And once I’d set up my home for the night, I’d still be stuck with having no toilet. Forget about having to take a pee during the night, how was I going to deal with the much larger issue of my upset stomach – something that was becoming more urgent and painful all the time? I was picturing a very long and embarrassing night.

I asked the BC if there was a public toilet nearby. He said that there wasn’t, and that I would have to use the toilet at his house. First thing I wanted to do was deal with my stomach cramps, but I also wanted to take a quick bucket bath so that I could get the dirt and sweat of the day off my disgusting body. My clothes were just wet rags, and I wanted to get out of them and into something dryer. I quickly gathered up my toiletries and my towel and some clean clothes and my valuables and stuffed them all into a bag and returned with the BC to his house.

Luckily, the BC did have a toilet in his house and I quickly asked if I could use it. Not a moment too soon, I was in there and stripping off my clothes and trying desperately to stave off disaster. There was little room in there and I was drenched in hot sweat as I tried to make myself comfortable. The bathroom did have a porcelain toilet, but, of course, there was no toilet seat and the hard edges cut into my butt painfully. I have no idea how the Filipinos with their much more slender posteriors manage these operations. How do they not simply fall into the toilet? And why is there never a toilet seat? For public toilets, I can understand. People smash them and break them. But in a private home, why not get the plastic toilet seat when you buy the toilet? It can’t be that much more expensive, and it would make life infinitely more comfortable and convenient.

Well, I did what needed to be done and then I stepped out and into the adjacent shower room. Just that operation was a chore. I had to step over wooden partitions, low cement walls, huge plastic laundry tubs and then somehow work my way through a narrow door. Once inside, my labors had just begun. Now I had to somehow find places to put my clothing and valuables out of the water and dirt and junk. Then the bucket bath process was a chore. They are small things, but they add up – no place to put your dry clothes, no place to put your towel, no place to put your toiletry bag, no place to put your soap, no place to put anything. You do your best and then you set about trying to soak your body, soap up and then rinse off while staving off disaster on all sides. It’s exhausting. Again, I don’t know how local people do it. It must not be an issue. Else why don’t they make simple adjustments? Put in a hook or two. String a rope for a towel hanger. Put in a little shelf for a soapdish and shampoo bottle. I can only surmise that the way they do these things in the Philippines means they don’t need any of these items of convenience. I haven’t even mentioned brushing my teeth and shaving. It is an effort to put it mildly. I go into the “bathroom” with the idea that I will emerge feeling refreshed and clean and happy. But I come out feeling like I’d just completed a rather long and nasty war. I’m exhausted and even sweatier than when I went in. Having said that, once the fresh sweat has dried off, I do feel better for having made the effort. And I feel more comfortable in my somewhat drier clothes that I’d changed into.

I sat with the BC for a few minutes after my bucket bath and he tried gamely to come to grips with my mission. He surprised me in the end with his intelligence and understanding. His English was also surprisingly good. He came out with sentences like this one: “What I am trying to understand more fully, is why you are doing this.” He understood me that I was a tourist and I was traveling around Catanduanes for pleasure and for fun. What he didn’t understand was the nature of the fun. What was fun about staying in San Vicente? Why didn’t I go to Boracay – a place he’d heard about and understood to be lots of fun? While walking from the barangay hall back to the BC’s house, we were passed by another man. He called out to the BC and they had a short conversation. The BC told me that this man was one of the barangay officials, and he was wondering if the foreign visitor wanted a girl for the night. I told the BC that the foreign visitor definitely did NOT want a girl for the night. The BC conveyed this information to the other man, and they both nodded their heads and walked on. It was a very matter-of-fact exchange, and it quite took me by surprise. Setting aside the assumption that I’d be interested, where would I take this girl? To my little love nest on the hard dirty floor of the barangay hall?

I was exhausted from my day of the labors of Sysyphus, and I wanted nothing more at this point than to collapse somewhere. I knew I should eat, but with no access to a toilet during the night, I was not going to take the risk of kick-starting any kind of digestive emergency, and I decided to forego dinner. I was pretty much in the middle of San Vicente, and, small as it was, it would still be quite difficult to get out of the barangay and into any kind of countryside where I could squat down at my leisure. I doubt very much that I could have managed that no matter how late at night it was. I also couldn’t see myself banging on the BC’s door at two in the morning and getting him out of bed.

After completing the construction of my bed for the night (not an easy task), I went out into the barangay to find a cold bottle of beer. I enjoy a cold beer as much as the next dusty bike tourer, but I don’t absolutely have to have one. I just thought I’d see what was what. I went to the main store and eatery and found there a very lively young woman with a bright chain wrapped around her head. She had a hippy vibe going on, and her English was excellent. Her store did not have beer, but she knew where it was sold and invited me to follow her. This was not exactly what I wanted. I like to have a cold beer if it is a simple and easy process. But if there are suddenly ten people involved and you have to walk from store to store to store and shouting questions and going through a long process, it seems a bit ridiculous. I begin to feel like a drug addict looking for his fix rather than just a guy having a cold beer. A beer is not that important.

In any event, I’d started the process, and I had to follow through. My hippy guide led me through the dark streets and we ended up at what seemed to me to be a house. We gathered at the fence around the house and questions and answers began to be shouted back and forth. The foreigner wanted a cold beer, it seemed.

Someone came to the fence and said that they had cold beer. There was a lot of complicated discussion about this, and my hippy guide told me that they only had small bottles of beer. Only small bottles. Was that okay? I said that was fine. How many did I want? I said that since they were small bottles, I’d have two. What kind of beer did I want? Another long and complicated discussion about the types of beer. In the end, the hippy guide told me that they only had Red Horse. That was fine with me, though I wondered why they asked me what kind I wanted if they only had Red Horse. Finally, we got to the end of this long and, frankly, bizarre transaction. The many people who had gathered at the fence now ran off to get my 2 small bottles of Red Horse beer. They were gone a very long time, and then they came back. Another long discussion. My hippy guide turned to me and said that they only had large bottles. I wanted to give up at this point, but stopping the transaction promised to be as difficult as continuing, so I said that a large bottle would be fine. I had no idea what happened to them ONLY having small bottles. They were quite firm on that point. Did they have a magic fridge that changed the size of the bottles when they closed the door and they never knew what they would find when they opened the door? I will never know. It’s just one of those many, many things.

The large bottle of Red Horse beer was finally produced. And it was large – a full liter of strong 6.9% beer. A bit more than I wanted, but I didn’t care. Now we had to have the long discussion about the price and the deposit on the bottle. I won’t go into the details of that discussion. It was too ridiculous to relive, but the issue was finally settled and after a long time, I was walking back to the barangay hall with a 1-liter bottle of beer under my arm – feeling somewhat embarrassed and very ridiculous. I didn’t think I would have more than half of the bottle, but I wasn’t counting on the cyclist’s thirst, and I quickly downed the entire thing – paying a bit of a price later with a slight headache and hangover. On the positive side, this large bottle gave me a handy urinal, which I could use throughout the night. I filled the bottle, and then I would sneak outside in the dark cover of night and find a patch of dirt where I could empty it unseen. Then sneak back up to my barangay hall nest.

The night was an extraordinary one in terms of sound. The barangay hall was set right in the middle of San Vicent and a fortuitous power failure had kept all the radios from firing up. It was lovely. Instead of the horrible music, I was treated to an incredible babble of conversation, shouts, laughs, cries, and unamplified songs. There were extended families in all the small huts surrounding me and their voices rose up around me and filled the air, as if I was floating on a cushion, a bubble of amazing sound. Or perhaps it was the effect of the 1 liter of Red Horse beer coursing through my veins and into my brain. Either way, it was wonderful to lie there in this unique setting and listen to the sounds of San Vicente.

In the morning, I made my way back to the BC’s house and used his bathroom and bucket bath room. Luckily the anticpated digestive emergency had not developed during the night. I had coffee with the BC after my bucket bath, and he tried once more to understand me and the world I had come from. He mentioned that once he had encountered a British man and his daughter (it could have been a man and his wife) who walked through San Vicente. He described them accurately with their huge backpacks on their backs – “So much luggage!” I learned that this had happened decades ago before he became the barangay captain. Just as with me, he puzzled over what possible pleasure they could derive from walking around Catanduanes with such heavy bags. He shook his head at the memory and lit another cigarette. It was beyond understanding.

A woman was raking rice on the street when I left the BC’s house. She stopped me for a chat and she asked me point blank if I liked to drink alcohol. I wondered if my purchase of a beer the night before had cemented my reputation as a man of ill repute. This was not her point at all. When I told her that, yes, I had had one bottle of beer last night, she shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me? We could drink together and go dancing!” It seems there was no stigma attached to having a drink at all. Had I been up for it, I could have been out drinking with the residents of San Vicente all night and whooping it up.

 

Tags: barangay, barangay captain, BC, Catanduanes Bike Trip, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Red Horse, San Vicente