Sunday, March 16

It’s breakfast time once more at Ysobel’s. Their breakfasts aren’t very economical at 160 pesos. One can get a much better and bigger breakfast for less somewhere else, but it does have the advantage of being just downstairs from my penthouse, so here I am. Even here, though, their coffee consists of a slim package of Nescafe instant coffee. The one improvement on other places is that they don’t provide just a cup of hot water which quickly gets cold, but a thermos of hot water. If I was staying here longer, I’d probably buy some of my own Nescafe. Then I can at least make the coffee stronger.

I thought I might be on the bicycle this morning, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen. Yesterday morning some clouds moved in and it started to sprinkle. All morning there were little patches of rain. I kept an eye on it hoping that that is all that would happen. However, some dark clouds came over and the rain started to come down in torrents. I kept an eye on that, too, hoping that it would last for ten minutes and then stop, It sort of did. But then ten minutes it started up again, and then again, and then again. It rained all day, and it rained hard. I can’t even imagine what it has done to the roads. I thought it was wise to let a day go by and see if the sun would come out and dry up some of the road. So far, it doesn’t look good. The sky is overcast just like yesterday, and I suspect that it is going to rain again today.

After breakfast yesterday, I moved over to a lawn chair by the beach and tried to settle in to read my book. I tried to ignore the sprinkles as long as I could. But then the sprinkles would get stronger and stronger until I was driven to shelter. Then the sprinkles would stop and I’d move back to the chair. A few minutes later, the sprinkles would start again, and I was forced back to the shelter. I eventually gave up and decided to walk down to the beach to find some lunch. Just as I got ready, the heavens opened and the rain came down as hard as I’ve ever seen it. That heavy rain trapped me at Ysobel’s for quite a while. I didn’t really mind. The rain was beautiful.

When it let up briefly, I walked down the beach intending to go back to the Bamboo House for lunch. I was pleased when I got there to have an American man greet me and invite me to join him and a young woman at their table.

He told me his name, which I’ve now forgotten, but I will call him Paul for now. I didn’t get any of his story, but he was a very friendly man who liked to joke and tease people. He and the woman had come in from Puerto Princesa on the same bus as Allen, the Frenchman I’d met the day before.

The woman’s name was Yvonne. Her age is difficult to guess at, but I’d say that she in her late twenties. I spent much of the afternoon and evening with her just walking around and then having dinner, so I learned a bit more about her.

Yvonne was German, though she was living and working in Oxford as a social worker. I didn’t understand all of the steps that got here there, but I assume she studied social work just as Dane and Mace did. Then she spent some time in Estonia. After that, she found herself in England and got a job in Oxford.

She had four weeks for her holiday and was going to spend all of them on Palawan. Her arrival in the Philippines was quite an adventure. It was so traumatic that she almost didn’t want to talk about it and therefore relive it. She arrived at the airport with a hundred pounds in her pocket and a credit card. She was going to change the hundred pounds in the airport to get her started. After that, she was going to get money from her credit card from ATMs. This neat plan started to fall apart when someone picked her pocket and her 100 pounds was gone. Suddenly, she had no money at all, and no way to get into Manila. I can’t even imagine the panic that must have set in at that point. She talked about how terrible she felt, but she seemed to handle it very well. She was almost stoic about it.

The first thing she had to was find a taxi driver who was willing to take her into Manila on the condition that he wouldn’t be paid until she found an ATM. Hmm. I might be getting ahead of the story. I think there were 3 ATMs in the airport. The one on the left was broken. The one on the right was broken. The one in the middle took her card, but then wouldn’t give her any money. She didn’t know why, but it wouldn’t accept her credit card.

When she got into Manila she found that the ATMs there wouldn’t give her any money either. She went to a bank or several banks, I’m not sure, but the banks wouldn’t accept her credit card either. They didn’t give an explanation that she could understand, and they weren’t very friendly either. They simply told her that there was nothing they could do. She was suddenly in Manila with no money at all. Nothing. She had a taxi driver who needed to get paid and she had nothing to pay him with. She had to find a place to stay and had no money to pay for that either. I imagine on top of the pure panic, she must have been annoyed that her vacation was now starting with hours and perhaps days wasted as she tried to sort this out.

The taxi driver was something of an angel. He was not worried about the fare at all. He drove her around everywhere and even took her out for a lunch of some kind of fish-head soup. It doesn’t sound appetizing, but she said it was delicious and she was so hungry by that point that it was like a feast.

Luckily, Yvonne had many friends she could call on, and somehow she contacted them and arrangements were made to send her money by Western Union. With the time difference and everything else, this took a long time and she was living on a bit of fruit and lots of tea and sugar which her hotel provided for free. I thought by this point, some other traveler would have stepped in and lent or given her money, but it sounds like she simply didn’t ask or even tell anyone her story. That seems very stoic to me! I can’t resist a good tale and would have told everyone in sight. I’m sure had she told people her story, many would have offered to help her. I don’t want to make her relive it again, but I’m going to ask her some more questions about how it all worked. I’m curious about these sorts of things.

I had more evidence that Yvonne was something of a stoic. I had actually seen her earlier walking down the beach in the rain. I was sitting on a stool under a shelter right by the sand reading my book, and she came walking along in the pouring rain. This was at a time when the rain was coming down hard and she walked along as if it wasn’t raining at all.

She ended up at the Bamboo House and sat there the whole time in her wet clothes. She and the American man both had bottles of beer in front of them, and I assumed they had just finished lunch. I ordered spaghetti carbonara again, and afterwards we ended up going for a walk down the road away from the beach and into the nearby hills. I had this idea that she was going to go back to her hotel and change out of her wet clothes, but she didn’t seem to mind being wet and we walked for quite a while down these very muddy and wet roads, her in flip-flops and me in my bare feet.

At first, there was quite a bit to look at as we passed through the town of Port Barton. The rain had made everything lush and bright and carabao posed conveniently in the middle of green rice fields. With the rain, one really got the sense that this was jungle. I also got a better sense of what the road to Roxas might be like. The ground was not just rocks and sand, but a very slippery type of clay. A bike ride to Roxas would surely involve a lot of walking the bike and getting very dirty.

Port Barton ended quite soon, and we found ourselves walking down the squishy wet road through nothing but jungle. We kept thinking there must be something to see eventually, but there never was and we turned back and walked in the other direction. In that direction, the road hooked up with the main road and we went back into Port Barton.

It was nice to have company, and I invited her to Ysobel’s to see the place and have a cup of coffee. I was a little surprised when she accepted, because in her shoes I would have been dying to go back to my hotel and change into dry clothes. But she seemed to take all this in stride and didn’t even mention it.

She told me some more stories as we sat at Ysobel’s, including some of her adventures in Thailand. It sounded like she’d had quite a few adventures there.

 

Tags: ATM, Bamboo House, Palawan Bike Trip, Port Barton