This will likely be my last day in Tacloban. I will do a bit of shopping and organizing and planning and then I’ll be back on the road tomorrow morning. Yesterday, Sunday, was a pretty quiet day in Tacloban. I like Sundays in the Philippines as there is so little traffic on the streets. But they can also be a bit boring as so many businesses are closed. It is a true day of relaxing in the Philippines.

I spent the morning relaxing with the best of them, and then I hopped on my bike to ride down the coast to the small town of Palo. Palo is famous as the spot where MacArthur landed when he returned to the Philippines during World War II. There is a park and monument there to commemorate this “I shall return” historical moment.

As I rode my bike to Palo, I reflected again on the difference between my perception of historical events and their reality. When I read about the events of World War II in the Philippines, I get a certain impression of cut-and-dried facts: this happened and that happened. They decided to go there and do this and they went there and did that. This happened and that happened. But the reality had to be so far from cut and dried. I am here in the Philippines in peace time with modern roads and I could barely find Palo. I’m at my wits ends doing the smallest of things. How must it have been to be here decades ago as a soldier, as an officer of an army? As I cycled along the coast toward Palo, I found it nearly impossible to imagine the reality of an army landing on these shores and facing Japanese resistance. What must it have been like? I can’t really process it.

Not surprisingly, I got completely lost as I tried to get to Palo. Tacloban is actually a bit more advanced than any city I’ve been in so far when it comes to street signs. They aren’t everywhere and they aren’t exactly user-friendly, but at least there are street signs here and there and I found the street that led out of the city and, I assumed, south along the coast to Palo. However, I quickly found myself confused as to the direction I should take, and there were no signs to show the way. I made educated guesses and I stopped now and again to ask for directions. I wasn’t terribly worried about it because my map showed only one road following the coast and heading south. As long as I hugged the coast and went south, I should be fine. There was little chance of going wrong, I thought.

Of course, I ended up going in completely the wrong direction. And thinking back, I still can’t understand what happened. I guess my maps aren’t detailed enough to show the true nature of the geography. I chose all the roads heading south and I cycled and cycled and cycled. Then I happened to glance at the compass I had mounted on my handlebars. I was astonished to see that I was heading north! How was that possible? It seemed impossible. I had only been going south. The only road on my map went south. For me to go north, I’d have had to stop dead, turn around and go back the way I’d come to Tacloban. Yet, I hadn’t done that. So how in the world could I be heading north? It blew my mind. It’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge of MacArthur’s fleet of ships. I’d have landed the poor guy on Luzon instead of Leyte or something.

Whatever my brain was telling me and my maps were telling me, I couldn’t argue with a compass. The thing said I was heading north, which meant I was going in the wrong direction entirely. I pulled over and asked some people for directions. They confirmed that I should turn around and go back the way I had come. I didn’t understand anything else about their directions, but I knew I had to head south, so I turned around and headed off in that direction even though my brain was screaming that it made no sense. I came to a series of intersections and I made some educated guesses and to my relief eventually found myself riding south along a coast road with the ocean on my left. From that point, I knew I couldn’t possibly go wrong. As long as I stayed on the coast, there was no way I could miss MacArthur’s landing spot.

I’d read that the monument consisted of a set of statues showing MacArthur and his men striding out of the water. I had no idea how large these statues were, but since they were in the water, I assumed they would be quite large. The coast curved ahead of me and I could see ahead for many kilometers. I thought I’d be able to spot the statues, but I saw nothing.

When I arrived at the park, I understood why I hadn’t seen them ahead of me. The statues were not massive behemoths striding out of the ocean. They were situated in a pool of water just a few inches deep and located up on a rise inland from the ocean. I rode my bike toward the statues and took a few pictures along with everyone else. The statues were made of brass or bronze or something and were much larger than life size. With their feet inside the water, they reminded me more than anything of the liquid terminator in the movie Terminator 2. I guess I am very much a child of my generation. There I was standing in front of a monument to one of the key events of World War II, and all I saw were movie references.

Still, as I said, my mind was full of the significance of what I was looking at and I struggled to try and visualize what it must really have been like that day. It would have been an incredible thing to land on those shores with an army. There would have been no Bo’s Coffee serving delicious hot lattes and American breakfasts. There would have been no paved road and bicycle vendors selling ice cream and mango shakes. Just rice fields, palm trees, and mountains.

I could understand why they chose that spot. It was relatively flat and there was a large area of flat land where the army could establish itself. There’s no way they could have landed, for example, along some of the mountainous coasts I had cycled along.

Lots of other people were there. There were tourists like me who had come to see the monument and take some pictures. One Filipino man had brought along a big toy rifle and he waded out into the water to pose beside MacArthur for a picture. Most of the people there, however, were there just for a picnic on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. There were groups of people everywhere with picnic lunches spread out on blankets under big umbrellas. There was a beautiful sandy beach just a bit further up the coast and lots of people were swimming there. There was one part of the beach that was particularly crowded and I guessed that it was the beach directly in front of the Oriental resort hotel.

There was’t much for me to do there after I’d seen the monument and taken some pictures. I turned my bike around and slowly made my way up the coast back toward Tacloban. It was a beautiful day and I stopped many times to just sit on the cement seawall and take in the scenery.

Once in Tacloban proper I stopped at a museum. It was, apparently, a house that had been built by Imelda Marcos and was filled with gifts from world leaders. It was supposed to be quite interesting in a quirky “Marcos” kind of way, but I ended up not going inside. In typical Filipino fashion, it was only possible to buy an entrance ticket for a group. It was not possible to go into the museum as an individual. Who can possibly know why? It’s just one of those crazy things. In order to go into the museum, I was told that I’d have to buy tickets for three people. The woman told me that I should go get my friends and come back with a group. I told her that I had no friends, that I was traveling alone, but this made no impression on her. Even buying three tickets did not amount to a huge amount. It would have cost 200 pesos ($5). But the silliness of it annoyed me and I turned away without going inside. I actually got a good look inside from the front door while I was talking with the ticket-sellers and I didn’t see anything that grabbed my fancy.

Palo is not very far from Tacloban, but by the time I got back to the city, I had cycled about 30 kilometers in the hot sun, and I wanted to enjoy a cold beer. I cycled around for a while, but I didn’t find anything like a bar. I stopped at a few sari-sari stores and local restaurants. Some had beer, but none of it was cold. Then I spotted a shop that called itself a “Convenience Shop”. It looked a bit like a convenience store crossed with a grocery store and it had a chest of ice in the window. I figured I could buy some beer and ice there and bring it back to my hotel. They had beer on the shelves and I grabbed a couple of bottles and asked for a bag of ice. There were two women at a strange little desk at the front of the store. I put my beer and the ice there and waited to be noticed so that I could pay. This took a very long time. I could feel my annoyance starting to rise. My ice was melting and I just wanted to pay and get out of there. Then these two women started talking to each other. They pointed to my beer and to the ice and talked and talked and talked. I had no idea what was going on, and I just stood there and waited trying to control my impatience. They didn’t manage to resolve anything, and they called out to the back of the store and a third woman joined them. The three of them then started in on a long discussion. My annoyance level rose another notch. This seemed to happen every time I just wanted to buy a beer. It’s not like it was an earth-shattering event. If I knew it was going to take me an hour to find a beer, I wouldn’t bother. It was just a whim and I thought I’d grab a beer and enjoy it.

Finally, one of the women turned to me and spoke to me in English. She said that the beer hadn’t been priced and they didn’t know how much to charge me. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not like we were talking about a modern super-store with computers and bar codes and scanners. Everywhere I go, people just make up prices seemingly off the tops of their heads. So what was the problem here? Just tell me a price and I’ll pay it. Heck, just ask me. I knew what the price should be! But these women were apparently helpless and just kept telling me that they didn’t know the price. I should mention that I’m not talking about some rare foreign import. I had grabbed 2 dusty bottles of San Miguel.

The three women started talking amongst themselves again pointing at my beer occasionally. I finally gave up and I lost my temper a little bit. I told them to forget about it and I left. My bicycle was locked up outside and I set about unlocking it and putting my pannier bag back on the rack. It’s stupid, I know, but I was annoyed enough that when I was ready to leave, I stopped at the door and gave the women a piece of mind. I said that I had some advice for them. If they wanted to have a store and sell things, it might be a good idea to know what their prices were before they put things on the shelves. You know, just a thought. I was pouring on the sarcasm even though it would have been completely lost on them. The main woman started to explain to me again about how they hadn’t priced the San Miguel. Like some kind of caricature in a movie, I put my hands over my ears and said, “I don’t even want to hear it.” And I got on my bicycle and rode away. I was so annoyed and angry.

I’ve thought about this a lot – the times when I lose my temper – and I know what’s going on. The problem is that there will be a series of events that annoy me, and I will want to blame somebody. But there is never anyone to blame. And in my mind, I blame the Philippines as a whole. I see every Filipino as a representative of the whole country and I blame that one person for everything that goes wrong.

It’s ridiculous, I know. When I’m in Canada and someone screws up, I don’t blame that person for every single thing that went wrong that day or week. It would be illogical. But here, I do that. And though I’d had a good and interesting day, a number of annoying things had occurred. Even a good day in the Philippines is going to be annoying and frustrating and difficult. It’s just the nature of the place. In this case, I’d been annoyed by all kinds of things throughout the day – the lack of road signs, the jeepneys that cut me off all the time, the museum that wouldn’t sell individual tickets, the stores that wouldn’t keep cold drinks, the Internet café that had both a “We’re Open” and a “We’re Closed” sign on the door, and on and on. I swallow my annoyance and frustration each time. And then I suddenly snap and my reaction is totally out of proportion. I’d gone into a store and been told that they can’t sell me a San Miguel beer because they didn’t know the price. It’s not a big deal. But my anger was not directed just at this. I was angry about all the things that had gone wrong that day and all the previous days going back to paying $184 for a tourist visa extension. So I lost my temper. And in my defense, I should point out that it’s not like I had just happened to pass this store and popped in on my way back to the hotel. No, I had been cycling for a very long time going from store to store to store trying to find a beer. This had been a difficult process. And I’d had to wrestle my bicycle up onto a narrow sidewalk with people jostling and pushing me around and find a place to put my bicycle. Then I had to lock it up carefully and remove my pannier bag. And all of this in a brutally hot sun. Just parking my bike here is an effort and results in a fresh river of sweat pouring off my body. So to actually find beer and ice and be literally standing at the front desk cash register with my beer in a bag ready to be taken away and then be told that I can’t pay for it, well, I think I can be forgiven for losing it a little bit. (I should also point out that San Miguel beer has the price stamped right on the bottle cap by the brewery.) Still, I felt embarrassed once I cooled down.

As I rode back in the direction of my hotel, I spotted a large grocery store, and I decided to make one last effort. I pulled up in front, locked up my bicycle, removed my pannier bag, and went inside. The security guard did not want to keep my pannier bag, which is nice. Most of the time, I have to leave it at the front door, and I worry about it. I found a set of refrigerated display cases at the back and there was beer inside. Of course, nothing was cold. And they didn’t have any regular bottles of beer. They only had the huge bottles that can sink a battleship. But they did have beer and there was even a price list on the door of the “cooler”. And there was another case with ice in it. The ice was of the “suspicious” variety – just water in long tube-like plastic bags that had been frozen. With this ice, there is no way to tell if the water was purified or had come from the ditch next to the open toilet across the street. But I’d been drinking pretty much all of the water in the Philippines and had survived so far. I got one of the giant bottles of beer and one of the tubes of ice. There was no problem with the price at the cash register and I was on my way with beer and ice back to the comforts of my hotel room.

I’d had these large bottles of beer before, and I’d paid the price of a bad headache later. It’s not that much beer, to be honest, but I started getting bad headaches in Taiwan after even one small beer. Something to do with dehydration or who knows what. Anyway, I thought I would only have some of this giant beer. I took my big tube of ice and cracked it hard over an edge of tile in the bathroom. This gave me a big chunk of ice that filled my coffee mug right to the top. There was just a thin edge of empty space between this one chunk of ice and the edge of the mug. I poured the beer carefully into that edge, waited a second, and then drank it off. It was so delicious – beer iceberg. That, I suppose, is the tradeoff of travel. Things can be extremely difficult and frustrating. But when you finally get what you want, you’ve had to work so hard to get it that you really appreciate it. A cold beer in Canada is standard. All beer is cold all the time. Just grab a beer from any fridge anywhere in the country, and it will be cold. Here, it is a nice surprise when something is cold, so I really appreciate it.

As I drank my beer, the glacier of ice would melt a little bit and there would be a little bit more room for the beer. I felt like a chemist carefully mixing my beer. And before I knew it, that battleship of a bottle of beer was gone. I wished I had gotten a second one.

 

 

Tags: bike, museum, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Tacloban