Sunday, March 9, Puerto Princesa

I don’t think every woman that works at this hotel knows my name. However, I’m pretty sure they all know me by reputation. I’m the guy who flooded room 9.

I came back at the end of the day yesterday to find everyone smiling at me and laughing. I asked for the key to room 9 and this provoked more smiles and laughs. Then one of the women asked me if I took a shower that morning. I thought this an odd question, but I answered that yes, I had taken a shower. Then I was informed that I had forgotten to turn off the shower and my room had been flooded. They pointed to a woman who was poking her head around the corner to listen in. “She,” they told me, “had to clean it up.”

I apologized to them all, but they just laughed and said it was okay. They seemed to find it more amusing than troublesome. I was confused, though. It’s quite likely that I did something that flooded the room. I’m the guy who can’t even put a rear derailleur on a bike, after all. But I’m certainly not so dumb or inattentive as to leave the shower on. This isn’t something you don’t notice.

After a few questions and answers I figured out what probably had happened. In fact, I wasn’t that surprised once I cast my mind back. The faucet in the bathroom is quite strange, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. There is just the one faucet, but it has two handles on it. I played with these two handles the other day and I couldn’t figure out how they related to each other. I’m used to the kind of faucet that has one handle to turn the water off and on and a second handle that controls where the water goes: to the showerhead or out the faucet onto the floor. But this one wasn’t like that. Both handles seemed to control the water flow only. I played with them for a while twisting them both off and on, but I couldn’t figure out the logic of how they interacted.

This was all when I took a shower and there was no problem. Later, however, just before I left the hotel, I decided to fill a bucket with water. I had noticed the bucket before, but I hadn’t fully switched into travel mode yet. Normally, the very first thing I do in a hotel overseas is fill the bucket with water just in case there was no water later. It was only the next morning as I was leaving that this thought occurred to me. I put the bucket under the faucet and fiddled with the handles until water started to come out. Then I left it and went to work on my bike for a while. Later, when the bucket was full, I turned off the water and left.

At least this is what I remember. I might have done something slightly different, because somehow a power failure figures into the scenario. I explained to the women that I was positive I hadn’t left the shower running. How could I? There was no water pouring out of the showerhead when I left.

They said that there was no water at that time because the power had gone out and I probably hadn’t noticed. There was no water coming out of the shower because the water pump wasn’t running. However, the showerhead handle must have been at least partially opened, because when the power came on later, the water started to flow and I got my rep as the dumb foreigner who flooded room 9.

“Flooded” seemed such a serious word to me, and I wondered how much damage I had done to the room. My mind raced through all the possibilities as I rolled my bicycle back to room 9. I remembered that when I did take my shower and wash my hands, the drain in the bathroom barely functioned. Even the short time it took to wash my hands covered the entire bathroom floor with water. So it was easy to imagine that a shower left running for even a short time would flood the entire room. However, how high would the water rise before it flowed out the front door? I didn’t remember any raised ledges anywhere, so I didn’t think there could have been much damage if any to the room. There wasn’t any fine wood paneling here. It was all stone and concrete. Then my heart lurched as for the first time I thought about all of my own gear. Had I destroyed something of vital importance? What had I left strewn around the floor to get soaked and ruined? That would be a fine way to start my trip. I quickly calmed down though. I had been quite methodical in my unpacking and putting together of the bicycle. I remembered clearly that I had put everything on the counter and the desk in neat rows as I unpacked. Then before I left for the day, I had gathered up all the stuff that had strayed and sort of organized it on just the desk. I had this vague feeling that I should keep everything together in one spot. I had some unusual items and I didn’t want the cleaning people to mistake it for garbage. I was beginning to calm down when I got close to room 9 and saw, sitting out in the sun amongst all the jungley foliage, the one thing I had forgotten about, the one very important thing, the thing that had already caused a fair amount of grief: the bicycle box.

The bicycle box was still in my room and of course it was just sitting on the floor. I wrote earlier about how wheels are unusual things, that they get their strength from the tension of the spokes. Well, cardboard boxes are also unusual creatures. They can be very strong in their natural state. However, add a tiny bit of water and the cardboard dissolves into mush with the strength of wet toilet paper. Anyone who has ever flooded a basement will know what I’m talking about. The stacks of carefully stored stuff in cardboard boxes will be completely destroyed.

In this case, I had gotten off fairly lucky. Bicycle boxes are very large, but they are narrow, and I had left this box sitting upright on its narrow edge. Had I lain it flat, the whole thing would likely have been destroyed. As it was, only the bottom was soaked through. The woman who had cleaned up the flood had brought the box outside to let it dry in the sun. It hadn’t dried that much and the whole bottom was so weak that even touching it lightly with a finger would punch a hole right through it. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with wet cardboard, and I knew that all was not lost. The box would never have anything like its original strength, but if I dried it very carefully it might still be serviceable. The key was to handle it carefully and not do any damage while it was wet. Then when it was bone dry, I could tape it up carefully, running the tape over the damaged bottom and up far enough on the sides to reach undamaged cardboard. The other thing I had to do was remove the tape that was already there. I know it’s very strange to have an intimate knowledge of cardboard care, but when you have shipped as many boxes and stored as many things as I have, you learn a trick or two. The one thing I learned is that cardboard will dry pretty quickly when you have a fan blowing on it. But the cardboard underneath tape will still be wet and might never dry. You might think the box has been saved, but when you go to put things inside of it, the whole box will let go where the tape is. What you have to do is dry the box as much as you can while leaving the tape in place. If you try and remove it while the box is still wet, you will simply peel away great sections of cardboard. Once the box around the tape is completely dry, you can carefully lift the tape off and take it off without removing too much cardboard. Then you let it finish drying until it is bone, bone dry.

I went through this process in the evening, and during the night I kept rotating the box to expose fresh parts to the strongest wind from the fan. In the morning, it looked okay. I’ll still have to tape up the bottom carefully, but that, with the cord I have, will likely make the box strong enough for one more trip back to Taipei.

 

I had a few other adventures on my first day in Puerto that I didn’t write about. I mentioned that I met a French production designer at a restaurant. I knew there was something unusual about the guy when he came in and sat down. He was a big white guy, in his forties I’d guess, and that meant he could have been just another tourist. Yet, he looked too busy to be a tourist. There was something about him that told me he was doing something – that perhaps he lived here. With that in mind, I went up to his table and asked him if he knew where I could find a money changer. It was Saturday, and all the banks I had seen were closed. I assumed the banks would be closed on Sunday as well, and if I wanted to leave Puerto on Sunday or Monday, I’d have to find another way to change some money. I didn’t think I’d be able to change money in the smaller towns out there.

This fellow didn’t know about money changers, but he was more than willing to talk and he told me that he was working in Palawan making a movie. At first, he told me that he was the director of the movie. I think he said that because it was the simplest way to describe what he did. When he found out that I knew a little bit about movies, he told me that he was actually the production designer. He didn’t say that at first, because he didn’t think I’d know what that was.

I’d like to have gotten more of his story, but I found it a bit hard to follow his words. I find this is often true with me and people who speak French. His English was very good. His grammar and vocabulary were excellent. However, there is something in the French accent that pitches words at a mumble. Try as I might, I just couldn’t make out a lot of words in the guttural and constant flow of sound. It’s almost like there are no gaps between words. The spaces between the words are filled with a deep growl, and I lose the thread of the sentence.

I did learn a few things. For one thing, this wasn’t his first job or anything out of the ordinary for him. He has been doing this for many years and has worked on films all over the world, including Africa and Asia. I assumed I’d know some of the films, but no matter how many times he said the names of the films in French and then in English, I couldn’t figure out what they were. He also worked a lot on television programs.

The piece he was working on in Palawan was actually destined for television in France. It was part of a series of films that were fictional but based on something real that was going on in the world. I guess that means they are films with a message.

This film was meant to highlight what is going on with traditional fishermen around the world. He said that there were large groups of people in the world who once lived on their boats. They fished for a living and their boats were also their homes. Lately, however, it has been difficult to make a living and governments have been forcing these people to give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down on shore. Many of them, he said, were now living on houses on stilts out over the water. They couldn’t quite make the transition to going all the way inland, and they compromised by building houses over the water.

I didn’t quite make the connection, but he said that young boys from some of these communities were used by unscrupulous men to dive deep for a certain type of expensive fish or other marine life. The boys were treated poorly and the work was very dangerous. There was a famous case where a group of boys rebelled against the men on the boat and killed them. But they were far out to sea and didn’t know how to start the engine or drive the boat, so they drifted. It was this story that his film was recreating.

I find lifestyles like this man’s fascinating. I guess anyone would have a similar reaction. It sounded like a pretty good job, and I asked him questions trying to figure out how it worked and how someone ends up doing what he’s doing. Given half an opening, I’d have asked him if he had an opening on his crew! Go to Palawan for a holiday and get a new job! Sounds good to me.

We never got to that point, though, and I didn’t get a job offer. In fact, I barely got any details that I could use to find out more. I didn’t get his name or the name of a single film he’d worked on or a single director that he worked with. He mentioned all of these things, but somehow I couldn’t make out the words.

 

I was very glad to find the restaurant where I met this guy. The food was fantastic and well-prepared. It was air-conditioned and comfortable. There was great music playing, and it had a wonderful bathroom with hand soap and towels. In keeping with my “bland bland bland” mantra I just ordered a burger and a Coke. The burger was beyond delicious and the Coke was ice cold. After lunch, I ordered a cup of coffee and it too was fantastic. It was served in a bodum and was good and strong, and the cream and sugar came in nice porcelain containers. It was like having high tea with the queen.

Partway through lunch, two young white guys came through the door with several bags of stuff from the market. I assumed they were the owners and founders of this restaurant and when I spoke to them later I found that I was right. The restaurant couldn’t have been very old. I’d guess it had opened within the past year, perhaps within the last four or five months. I’ll be back there for lunch today and I’ll make a note of the name.

The two guys were American and they simply raved about the life they’d made for themselves on Palawan. They loved everything about Palawan and were excited and passionate about their restaurant. They were more than willing to spend a few minutes with me telling me about money changers and the roads up to El Nido. I can’t say that they were very encouraging about my plans. I guess they were a little confused, because I started off talking about how I’d chosen Palawan because I wanted a relaxing holiday. Then the bicycle came up, and they did a double-take. They said that the roads of Palawan on a bicycle would be anything but relaxing! I asked them if they thought my bicycle could handle the roads. They said that the roads would handle my bike – the roads would eat it up and spit it out.

They really didn’t recommend trying it at all. They said it would be much smarter and even better to go up to El Nido by boat. I could ride to Sabang and then take a boat from there to Port Barton and then on to El Nido. I could have my bicycle for exploring when I wanted, but I wouldn’t have to spend endless brutal days carrying my bike over mud holes and wheeling it through trenches two feet deep. I admit I had had similar thoughts. I don’t ride bikes out of some sort of crusader instinct. I don’t have to ride every single mile. I just like having a bike with me. If it makes more sense to throw the bike into a boat here and there, that’s fine with me. I guess I’ll figure all that out today and make some more definite plans. I mentioned before that this trip really hasn’t been that well-thought out. It seems to have just happened without much input from me. So I still don’t have anything like an itinerary or even a plan. I was going to go over my new map last night, but I was far too tired. I thought that I might even start riding my bike today, but at six a.m. this morning I changed my mind. I’m in no rush, and I decided to spend another day in Puerto getting acclimated. I was quite intrigued by that squatter settlement below the Plaza Cuartel and I might go back there this afternoon with my camera and take some pictures.

The American guys at the restaurant said that I was wrong about the banks. Quite a few of them had been open on Saturday morning. They were closed in the afternoon, but I could have changed money at a bank if I’d done some investigating. That’s another good example of the weird space my head is in. I’m just drifting around without taking things very seriously. All was not lost, however, and there was a place just a block up Rizal where I could change money. They said it was called Bonito or something like that. I wouldn’t get the exchange rate that I would get at the bank, but it wouldn’t be that bad.

I left the restaurant and rode my bike up the street a short distance and saw Bonito. It felt like a pretty good place to change money. I don’t mean that in the sense that it looked professional and reliable and clean and secure. No, it looked like a crazy sort of place. Perhaps if I’d never done this before, I’d have given it a wide berth. However, I’ve changed money in some pretty odd places and never had a problem. I remember my favorite money-changing place in Seoul was the back room behind a lingerie shop. It was totally illegal and it felt distinctly odd to be walking past all the bras and underwear and then going into a room with nothing more than a desk and a giant calculator.

Bonito was a bit more normal than that. At least, they were legal enough to be able to advertise. They had big signs out front that said “Money Changer.” They had other hand-made signs that were a little less encouraging. One of them said, “If you don’t like our rates, that’s fine with us. You can go somewhere else.” Another said, “Please count your money. All transactions are completely final.” They might as well have added another that said, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” They didn’t seem to mind using a lot of words in their signs, so they could just as easily been clearer: “Don’t come crying back to us when you find out that we gave you a poor exchange rate. The banks have better rates. Everyone knows that. So what are you doing here? If you’re dumb enough to change money here, you’re dumb enough to lose money. You’ve been warned.” Yep, I’m easily dumb enough, so in I went.

The largest part of the Bonito shopping center was taken up with a kind of pawn shop and discount center. I didn’t look around that carefully, but a quick scan of the shelves revealed mountains of assorted stuff. I don’t remember any kind of pattern to it all. I think you could go in there with an equally reasonable expectation of finding an electric drill as a used guitar or a wedding gown. Four young women were at the counters. They sized me up and knew I was dumb enough to change money, and they pointed me to the back.

At the back, I found the usual money-changing operation – a desk, two calculators, and a wall of yellowing signs repeating all the warnings I’d read in the front window. Two pretty large guys were lounging around the desk. They looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties. I couldn’t say for certain where they were from, but they didn’t strike me as Filipinos. I guessed they were from India, though they seemed even large for Indians. They didn’t speak with an accent, though, so I’m left with no real clue as to where they were from.

They did, however, have the practiced boredom of men who had seen it all. They knew the drill with people like me coming in to change money. They had a desk drawer full of money and had been counting it out and shaving off their profit for long enough that it had zero novelty for them. I tried to make something of a social occasion out of it, and they sort of met me halfway, but then they lapsed back into their distracted state. One fellow kept trying to reassure me that the count was right. He took a big calculator and punched in how much I was changing with the exchange rate they were offering. Then he turned the calculator around to show me the result. But when he turned it around, his thumb hit the clear button. The calculator beeped and went back to zero. He blinked, and turned the calculator back. He punched in the numbers again, turned it around and once more, his thumb hit the clear button! I took over at that point and did the calculation myself. I realized at that point that I really wasn’t going about this the right way. I know myself, and I know that I should be careful. I get distracted in these settings. Normally, I plan all this out beforehand. I investigate the rate, then do the calculations and get the money ready before I go in. Well, I guess that’s the fantasy. Now that I think about it, there has been more than one occasion when I wasn’t very smart – notably a time in the back seat of a smelly taxi outside the airport in Conakry.

Things were okay with the Bonito brothers though, and I think I made the exchange without any real problems. I had one bad moment when I left when I didn’t remember putting my ziploc bag of traveler’s checks back into my pouch. I checked quickly and found that I had.

I haven’t found out how much I lost in the exchange rate compared to going to a bank yet. I’ll find out at some point. These guys were offering 40.3 pesos to the US dollar. I’m guessing the bank could be offering as much as 43 or 44 pesos to the dollar. That’s enough to make going to the bank worthwhile, but in my case I had no choice. I’d missed the banking hours. And I also liked the casual style of the Bonito brothers. They didn’t mess around with passports or anything like that. It was a cash transaction and nothing else. They did give me a little piece of paper, which I was supposed to sign. It felt like a formality though, especially considering that my name wasn’t written out anywhere. My signature is just an indecipherable scrawl – useless from any legal point of view.

When I had my stack of pesos safely counted and tucked away, I asked the brothers about the roads to El Nido. I was just making conversation. They had a different point of view from the American brothers, though they also didn’t think much of riding a bike. I don’t think they saw the appeal. However, they also dismissed any ideas of going by boat – far too slow they said. They even said there were no boats. When it comes to asking for advice about riding a bike, you really have to consider the source. I’ve mentioned my plans to a few of the women here at the hotel and they had a predictable response. In their world, riding a bike to the corner would be a difficult thing. It would never occur to them to do more than that. To ride to El Nido just doesn’t make any sense.

 

After my adventures with the Bonito brothers, I went looking for an Internet café. I love my NEO, which I’m currently typing on, but transferring the contents to another computer is something of a special process. The NEO doesn’t create files in the normal sense of the word. When transferring what I write to another computer, it actually retypes the whole thing. You hook up the NEO to another computer with a USB cable and then press “send.” The NEO then acts as a keystroke generator and retypes the whole file into whatever window you’ve opened on the other computer. It’s simple and it works very well. The trick is that it’s slow, and you can’t do anything else while it is typing. It keeps typing no matter what. So if you click on the mouse of the other computer or open another window or do anything, the NEO just keeps typing wherever the cursor ended up. Of course, I could just keep storing everything on the NEO and not worry about it, but I’ve got time and I thought I would dump all these ramblings into a blog as I go and whenever I get the chance.

The first Internet café I saw looked good on the outside, but was a nightmare on the inside. The computers were jammed so close together in their little cubicles that you could barely move. Everyone in there was playing loud computer games and it was sweltering hot. I sat down at a computer anyway, but I didn’t get very far. I checked my e-mail and Facebook, and it was so slow and unreliable that I decided not to bother with the NEO. There was no way I was going to sit in there for any length of time.

I found a second Internet café, and it was a step up, but by then I was a little tired and sweaty. I decided to go back to the hotel and shower and perhaps do it there. I hadn’t seen their setup, but they did offer some kind of Internet service.

I started cycling along the road back out to the aiport. When I was almost there, I saw a sign for a place called Lotus Garden and they were advertising used books. I turned my bike in there and ended up hanging out for an hour or so with a Filipina geisha!

I didn’t realize she thought of herself as a geisha until quite a bit into our chat. The Lotus Garden was a new restaurant, and they had gone to great lengths to make it look like a Japanese tea garden. There were ponds scattered about with water flowing from one to another. There was a raised wooden area with tables and chairs. And around the edges were some private shaded platforms where you sat on cushions and had your meal or drinks.

A strikingly beautiful woman in a full kimono came up to me and welcomed me to the Lotus Garden. I told her I was interested in looking at the books and she indicated that I should follow the path around the platform. She followed, and then indicated a set of bookshelves. I parked the bike and took off my sandals and climbed up onto the platform. The young woman kept me company the whole time that I was looking through the books. She asked me lots of questions about where I was from and what I was doing. We talked about books and even about some serious issues about life, such as how important people are in life. This came up quite naturally as she asked me about where I lived and whether I was married or had children. She was suitably astonished to find out how old I was and told me I looked much, much younger.

The Lotus Garden was almost empty, and this woman didn’t have anything to do, so she chatted with me for quite a while. I found a book that looked interesting and purchased it as well as a can of orange soda. She had asked me so many personal questions, that I felt comfortable turning the tables on her. I found out that she was 21 years old and that she was going to college. She was born on Palawan and had lived there her whole life.

She struck me as a serious creature and I told her so. She objected to that, and said that no, she often laughed and had fun with her friends. She said this with a composure that would have befitted someone thirty years older. Perhaps it was the kimono that gave this impression. It was a tight and heavy garment and she ended up floating rather than walking. She also moved slowly and carefully, even when chopping up a pineapple for a pineapple shake for some people who had since come in.

It was almost time to leave when I saw another very attractive woman come in the front of the Lotus Garden. I pointed her out and said that either a customer or another employee had arrived. The woman with me looked over and said that this new arrival was her partner, “A geisha like me.”

It wasn’t until she said that that I made the connection, that in her kimono, she was really supposed to be a geisha. It made perfect sense, because she followed every beat of the conversation so perfectly. It felt like a cultivated and learned behavior. She also peppered her conversation with many attempts to get me to order something, which apparently was also part of her job and her training. Apropos of nothing, she’d start talking about how I really had to come back for dinner. Then she’d talk about their great desserts. She seemed quite sad when I explained that I really wasn’t interested in eating anything.

Back at the hotel, I learned that I was now the guest who had flooded room 9. I checked over the bike box and started repairs, took a shower, and then went to the office to see about their Internet service. They charged 30 pesos an hour, which is double what the Internet café charged, but that was fine with me. Their service consisted of being able to use the computer in their office. I was surprised at that, but was willing to use it if they didn’t mind. I had asked them about plugging in a USB cable, and they said that was fine. I assumed there would be a convenient place to do that, but in fact there wasn’t. I pointed that out to them, and they said that I could just pull the computer out and plug it in to the back. I felt weird taking that kind of liberty with their computer, but they didn’t seem to mind. So I ordered a beer, pulled their computer out and turned it so that I could get at the back, and plugged in the NEO. The NEO made a connection easily (it self-installs), and I opened up a window in Microsoft Word. Everything went smoothly, but it took a long time. I had written more than I realized in my first day or two. It was an hour and a half later when the whole file had retyped itself and I had put it onto my blog.

The night wasn’t as comfortable as my first night, and I didn’t sleep as well. I had a lot of things on my mind, and it was hard to sleep. I spent some time reading my book and eventually turned off the light to end the day.

 

Tags: bike, El Nido, NEO, Palawan Bike Trip