Another day in Tacloban gets underway with a good cup of coffee at Bo’s Coffee. This is the very first place I stopped at when I arrived in Tacloban, and I’ve come back many times. I’ve tried many other cafes and coffee shops in the city, but this is the only one that I can depend on. The others might produce a good cup of coffee in a comfortable setting, but it’s a crapshoot. The last place I went to kept me sitting at a table for nearly an hour waiting for my café latte. Then a woman came to my table and told me that they didn’t have any milk. I don’t know why it took them an hour to figure that out, but that’s life here. I said that I didn’t have to have café latte. Just a regular cup of coffee would be fine. She told me that they didn’t have any coffee either. They could make me some tea, but that’s all. The weird thing was that this wasn’t some tiny corner shop. This was a full-on café designed for the coffee addict. It was a combination book store and coffee shop and had all those touches to appeal to the type of person that likes to hang out on a sofa and read books and drink coffee. So the lack of coffee was a big surprise. Needless to say, I haven’t been back since then. This place, Bo’s Coffee, is more expensive than anywhere else, but it offers by far the best coffee. It is also always hot, is served quickly, and comes in a big mug. At other places you never know what you’re going to get. The setting is always consistently nice – always air conditioned, always comfortable. The music is a bit on the bland side but at least it isn’t the same five pop songs blaring loudly over and over again. My only complaint is that they tend to keep it too dark. They turn the lights off during the day to save money, but it is just that little bit too dark at the tables. It’s difficult to read. I see lots of people staring hard at newspapers and other things and having difficulty reading. Over time, you’d think they’d figure that out and turn on the lights, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I had a very typical and less-than-funny experience this morning when I got out of bed. My pannier bags, camping gear, clothing and everything else is spread out all over the room. I’ve actually been cooking in my bathroom and so all of my gear is out. Anyway, I was getting out of bed and I glanced at one of my front pannier bags lying open on the floor and I had a heart attack. The place where I’d hidden one of my stashes of valuables was open and seemed to be empty. I dashed across the room and plunged my hand inside and found it empty. Someone had come into my room while I was out and found that stash and stolen it. I experienced a massive surge of adrenalin as I panicked. The adrenalin surge was so strong that afterwards my lower back really hurt because my muscles were so tensed and charged up.

I was saying “Shit, shit, shit” to myself as I looked for my list of valuables to see what I’d lost in that stash. I also quickly checked my other stashes and found they were all there. So was my camera and my lenses. The thief had taken only that one stash. Did they suddenly panic and run out when they took it? I started to think about all the things I would have to do – cancelling travelers checks and other things.

Then I finally found my list of valuables and I realized that there had been no stash in that pannier bag. I had removed it myself when I did my last big re-organnization. I hadn’t been robbed at all.

This has happened to me over and over again on this trip. I’ve never been this paranoid before and I wonder why that is. I’m constantly having these momentary surges of panic as I think something is missing. It comes partially because I keep reorganizing and repacking and rethinking how I put things away. So I lose track of my systems and forget where I put things. But I also seem to be feeling vulnerable – much more so than at any other time. I don’t know why. Anyway, I was glad to discover that I wasn’t missing anything. Then when I got to this coffee shop, I had another momentary moment of panic as I was missing my money belt. Then I remembered I had actually used a different pannier bag on my bike yesterday and I had transferred my money belt to that bag, and it was still sitting back in my hotel room. I have got to get organized.

Not surprisingly, I am still constantly organizing and packing and repacking. I enjoy packing in an odd way. I enjoy organizing and planning – probably far more than actually doing the things I’m planning for. But I seem to have taken things to an extreme on this trip. I think that’s because my pre-trip planning in Taiwan was so poor. Plus, I left Taiwan without really knowing what it was I was going to be doing. I made tentative plans, but I really only thought as far ahead as getting to the Philippines. After that, I was open to anything – cycling through South East Asia, getting a job in Vietnam or China or Indonesia, flying to India, flying to Egypt, flying to Turkey, going directly to Africa, anything. So my brain never really came to grips with the details and I’m still paying the price for that.

Some things couldn’t have been anticipated, though. When I was in Taiwan, I bought a tiny padlock with a combination lock. It was bigger than I wanted since I could only find those stupid TSA-approved locks, but it was lighter than most. However, I found that I had trouble reading the numbers on the combination wheel. My eyes have gone totally downhill recently, and I have trouble seeing things up close now. So I was constantly finding myself having to put on my reading glasses in order to open that padlock. It became a huge pain, so while in Legazpi, I went out and bought two tiny padlocks with keys. I now use only those padlocks and keep the key on a cord around my neck at all times. I’m still carrying around the two combination locks because I keep thinking I’ll have a use for them. But they are just extra weight.

I mentioned that I used a different pannier bag yesterday. That’s because I needed to buy another water bottle and I needed to bring along the pannier bag that usually holds my Nalgene water bottles. This pannier bag has a long narrow pocket on it. It’s designed to hold tent poles or a sleeping pad. I’ve never used it that way. Instead, I put in two Nalgene water bottles. They fit perfectly with lots of room leftover at the top.

On this trip, however, I left Taiwan with only one Nalgene bottle. I have no idea why. I must have had a bunch of them at some point. Perhaps I decided to carry only one in order to save on weight and space. Whatever the reason, I’ve found that I haven’t been able to carry enough water to get me through the day. The 3 bike water bottles plus the one Nalgene isn’t enough. I’ve had to also use my Dromedary bag, and that isn’t very convenient.

So, ridiculous as it seems, I went out into Tacloban over the last week looking for Nalgene water bottles. I did find one store that carried them, but I found their prices unreasonably high. I also didn’t like the people running the store, and I left without buying anything. But after giving it some thought, I decided to check them out again. I went to a few camping stores that I had stumbled across. However, none of them carried big Nalgene bottles. So I had no choice but to go back to this terrible store. When I got there, I realized that they had a big range of Nalgene bottles. They had the 1-liter bottles that I wanted, but they also had these super-sized Nalgene bottles that held about 1.5 liters each. I tested them and I found that two of those bottles fit perfectly into the long tube-pocket on my pannier bag. It was clearly ridiculous at this point to be buying two giant Nalgene water bottles at inflated prices, but I couldn’t resist. My thinking is that the water bottles themselves are not that heavy. It’s the water they contain that is heavy. So why have that tube pocket only partially filled with bottles? Why leave any of the space empty? So instead of buying just one more 1-liter bottle as I planned, I bought two brand new GIANT bottles. I figured that even if I didn’t need that much water, I didn’t have to fill up the bottles completely. It’s just nice to have the option.

I was pretty pleased when I bought the bottles despite how expensive they were. Combined with the water bottles on the bike itself, I can now carry over 5 liters of water. Plus, I have the 10-liter Dromeday bag. That is more than enough carrying capacity. Now, though, I have one extra water bottle. I don’t know what to do with it. I might use it as a fuel bottle for alcohol. Till now, I’ve been using a very small bottle for fuel. It seemed the right size when I bought it, but I keep running out of fuel. I’ve been doing a lot more cooking than I expected and the Trangia uses more alcohol than I remember. So I need to carry more alcohol with me. A Nalgene water bottle isn’t designed to carry fuel, but it would be fine for alcohol fuel. My current bottle is too small, but the 1-liter Nalgene is probably a bit too large. Perhaps too big is better than too small. Alcohol fuel in the Philippines comes in 300mm bottles. My fuel bottle holds about 450mm. So when I buy two bottles, I’m stuck. I end up having to carry around a heavy glass bottle of alcohol or wasting a whole bunch by pouring it out. Better would be a bottle that contains about 700mm. The problem with my Nalgene is that there is no convenient place to put it in my pannier bags. It’s too big. Well, I’ll figure out something.

I mentioned the other day that I put new tubes into my tires – tubes with Presta valves. And I realized that I should have brought along a Presta to Shraeder adapter. I had two of them, but I didn’t bring them. I asked around at the bicycle shops in Tacloban, and to my surprise they had them. I bought just one and I tossed it into my tire patch kit to be used in emergencies. I was pleased with that.

Crazy as it seems, I had even more organizing to do. The problem here was my map case. I generally put the waterproof map case over the sleeping bag stuff sack which I have on the front rack. The problem is that when I stick the map underneath the bungee cords, it’s too tight. I can see that the bungee cord is eventually going to tear open the map case. I needed to come up with a different system. And to do that, I needed some kind of very small bungee cord or a strap to hook into the D-clips on the map case and then just have that wrap around the sleeping bag. The map case has four D-clips in total – one on each corner – and is designed to go over a canoe or kayak or something like that.

To find this bungee cord, I ended up going to a huge shopping mall called Robinson Place on the outskirts of Tacloban. It’s a new mall, very large and very fancy – a temple of consumerism. As always, I had trouble finding a safe place to lock up my bicycle. No one here rides a bike anywhere to go shopping or anything like that. So there was a parking area for cars and motorbikes but nothing for bicycles. I ended up having to lock up my bike to a post by the motorcycles. There was no one there to watch over it, so I was a bit worried, but there was nothing I could do but take a chance.

The mall, like all malls here, was extremely busy. I felt weird walking through it. I have trouble making sense of how much I hear about how poor people are and these huge shopping malls with so many people shopping and shopping and shopping. Of course it’s normal that there are both poor people and rich people in the Philippines. But there is something weird about the gap between the very poor and the vast numbers of these shopping mall types. I guess people have much more money here than I expected. Where is all this money coming from? No one I speak with seems to make any money at all. Yet, the number one activity in the Philippines seems to be shopping for luxury items in shopping malls.

I’ll cut the suspense here and say that I did find a bungee cord in a hardware store at the shopping mall. I had to cut it short and play around with it for a while to get it right, but I think it will work out.

I tried out my cycling gloves for the first time, and the results were somewhat mixed. They did seem to make a big difference and my hands felt much better. However, I might have purchased gloves that are too big. The extra-large seemed to be the right size for me, but it felt like a lot of the cushions and pads were not in the right places. The gloves are so big that they pads end up on the sides of my hands rather than in the middle of my palms where they are supposed to be. We’ll see how that works out. I might end up sewing some of the material in the middle together to draw the sides together. The problem is that that might bunch up the material and cause a point of friction where blisters might show up.

I waited too late last night to get my dinner, and by the time I went out onto the streets all the eateries in my neighborhood had run out of food. One place had a fish head and some rice, but I wasn’t in the mood for a fish head. I ended up buying some spaghetti sauce and a can of corned beef and making spaghetti back in my roof. It was really delicious. A nice change from my steady diet of rice.

 

 

Tags: bike, pannier bags, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Tacloban, Taiwan