March 22 Saturday 2008

After breakfast yesterday, I strolled around Casa Rosa taking pictures of the fort and the town. I had thought that Casa Rosa was named after a woman named Rosa, but now I think that it means ‘House of Roses’ as there are many flowers around. I don’t know that any of them are roses. I don’t much about flowers. They are mostly flowering bushes of one kind or another and I tried to put some flowering bushes in the foreground on some of the pictures that I took. I then showed rare common sense, and I hung out in my cottage during the hottest middle part of the day. I’m usually out there with the mad dogs and Englishmen, but I thought I’d be a bit more sensible this time.

The cottage was a nice place to hang out. I was particularly impressed at how many windows there were. Plus the windows didn’t have glass or screens. They had a very elegant system of shutters. I think I’d seen this type of shutter before, but I can’t remember where. It’s difficult to describe, but they seem to take one piece of wood and cut it from top to bottom in a wave pattern. Then they attach slats to those waves. When you pull down on the slats, the waves separate the whole things up. Push up, and the waves fit together like an interlocking puzzle and the shutters close. It’s the work of seconds to walk around the room and pop open all the shutters. Sunlight pours into the cottage lighting it quite naturally and nicely. And Casa Rosa being on a hill, it gets a cool breeze off the ocean and the cottage cooled down in seconds. These open shutters do mean that there is a bit of a security concern. No one can fit through them of course, but it would be easy to poke a stick with a hook on it through the shutters and snap up anything you saw in the room. I remember this was a common problem in Vietnam when I was there, so I know it is done regularly. I just made sure to keep nothing of value on the tables or the bed, which are near the shuttered windows. I put everything on a back shelf that was far removed and quite inaccessible.

I have cottage 4 and it has wonderful views of the area. When I got out of bed this morning, I popped open the shutters on the right and let out a little cry of delight. I knew the fort and the harbor was there, but I’d kind of forgotten about it and it was a pleasant shock to suddenly see it revealed like that. Since I’ve moved in, I’ve noticed that cottage 4 is quite a bit simpler and smaller than the other ones. Perhaps it is the only one that goes for 900 pesos. The other cottages all have quite large shaded balconies, and one or two even have hammocks. Cottage 4 does not have a shaded balcony. It just has two plastic chairs out front. It also faces directly west, so it is much too hot to sit there in the afternoon. The sun beats down like a hammer. The other cottages would be nicer in that they all face north and would have some shelter from the sun. Cottage 4 could easily have a balcony put on its north side and that would make it perfect, but it’s close to perfect as it is. It commands a perfect view of the whole area whereas the other cottages are more set back and have obstructions in front of them.

Around 3:30 when the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky, I started to get ready to go out for a walk around town. Of course, I wanted to check out the fort, and so I put my wide angle lens on the camera. I’m a little suspicious of that lens now and I don’t often use it. I used it a lot in Cambodia, and I found that it could be deceiving. It worked well for the temples of Angkor, but it didn’t work well for general shots. I would look through the wide angle lens at street scenes and think it looked incredible, but the final slide was rarely interesting. There was just too much in the frame. The picture was too busy and somewhat bland. Still, I’d brought it all this way, and the fort seemed like a natural subject for the wide angle, so I thought I’d try it out.

The pictures may end up similar to those from Cambodia that I don’t like, but when I got out there with the camera, I loved what I saw and I shot nearly 80 pictures of just the town and fort as I walked around. No matter in which direction I pointed the camera, the view was strong and dramatic. I couldn’t help but push the shutter again and again and again. I did make one adjustment, though, and I tried to put something in the foreground of each shot to give it some variety. Luckily, that was easily done. Taytay has a very friendly layout for a photographer. Taytay is on a harbor of course, but the fort is built out on a short peninsula. And two causeways lead away from the fort and arch back to the shore. The water is also very shallow and many of the houses along the water are built on stilts. The result is that you always get some distance and angles on the town and you get all kinds of boats and water and other things in the foreground no matter what you did.

The fort itself is not that dramatic. It’s not like it towers into the sky and bristles with ramparts. No, it just sits there – a big chunk of stone walls. But in this setting it is a very strong presence. It really brings the whole area to life. It was Good Friday yesterday and the fort was actually closed. All I could do was walk around the outside. Perhaps today I can go inside and walk around on the inside.

I had a few interesting encounters on my walk. People here are always eager to talk and I passed the time with people here and there. Some spoke English and some did not. A popular activity was strolling around in the shallow water looking for shells and starfish and that sort of thing. Some of the people looked like they were doing this in order to sell them. Others looked like they were out on a holiday and were doing it just for fun. I can’t imagine why the Spanish would have chosen this spot as their capital. The water strikes me as far too shallow for any ship. I can see some people nearly a kilometer offshore and they are in water only up to their waist.

The main cathedral was full all day yesterday for Good Friday and I could hear singing and other things going on. Drunk men were also out in force. The usual group of them tried to get me to join them and drink with them. I wasn’t feeling up to it and from a distance it looked like they were drinking some kind of local concoction and not something out of a bottle. I felt it was best to pass.

Beyond that, not much happened, though it was a wonderful day. I got the sense that I might have done an injustice to Taytay when I was writing about how cut off from the world it was. On my walk, I saw at least two signs for places that offered some kind of Internet access. I didn’t even try to go there, though. I’m sure they wouldn’t be open until after 5:30 when the electricity comes on. Plus, their equipment would be such that it would be very slow and clunky. I also came across a hardware sort of store, and assuming you had local gear (such as a local flashlight) you could probably get every replacement part there. I even managed to pick up a couple of screw-in hooks for my mosquito net. I only brought one with me and I forgot it in a hotel already. I screwed it into the ceiling, and then forgot it when I packed. This morning I realized that I forgot my shaving puck at Pem’s when I moved out. I blame this on the Ortlieb pannier bags as well. I just haven’t found a rhythm for packing and unpacking. I still always search the entire room before I leave. That’s a habit I’ve had for years. I go into every room and just look around and look under the beds and everywhere just to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. Somehow, though, I missed the hook in the ceiling and the shaving puck in the bathroom. It’s very annoying. I even left Pem’s and forgot to leave the key. I discovered it still in my pocket when I got up here to Casa Rosa. I had to walk back down and return it (and get all sweaty again) before I could settle down to breakfast.

I walked back up to Casa Rosa as the sun started to set. There is a cottage much higher on the hill above, and I walked up there to take a couple more pictures. A person could reasonably ask why someone needs quite so many pictures of the fort and Taytay. I guess no one really needs that many, but I’m hoping a few of them will turn out nice.

The atmosphere at Casa Rosa was quite a bit different last night. An entire American family showed up and added an odd note to the place. There is a man and a woman and at least six kids. They range in age from five or six to fourteen. And they are all full of energy. I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation from time to time and I was astonished at the self-confidence of the children. I wonder what it would be like to be that young and have the experience of going to places like this. How would the world and life seem to you as you got older? I got the impression that this was a second marriage for the man and woman and that they had children from their previous marriages. It was the Brady Bunch in the Philippines. The man spoke to the kids like they were adults. They had some very mature conversations as well as the usual conversations that kids would have. I really couldn’t figure them out not having seem a family quite like that before. They are clearly on vacation as the kids were talking about how much they loved “island-hopping.” But they could also live in the Philippines, as they have a teenage Filipina with them. She could be an adopted daughter or some kind of nanny. It’s hard to say.

More typical of Palawan were an older German man and his younger Filipina girlfriend. I’d seen this German man the first night as well. He’s staying at Pem’s, but comes up here to Casa Rosa for the food and the view and the beer. He was an odd-looking fellow in his sixties. I know it’s ridiculous, but my first reaction when I saw him was that he looked like a movie version of a Nazi in hiding. Yet, in his sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, he also looked like Hunter S. Thompson. I spoke to him last night, and found that he spoke almost no English. He tried to speak in the English he knew, but he couldn’t help but slip back into German. It was just like the older Dutch people I grew up with in Sarnia who spoke in a garbled mixture of Dutch and English almost without realizing it. I didn’t understand much of what he said, but I garnered the impression that he’d been coming to Palawan for 17 years. He liked Taytay, but he didn’t like El Nido anymore. It used to be a wonderful place he said, but now it was too crowded and there were too many bars.

I’ve heard so many contradicting stories about El Nido that I’m interested to see the reality for myself. I’m not sure when I’ll go there. I could go tomorrow or the day after. At the beginning when everyone was scaring me half to death with stories of the terrible road, I was thinking it would take me two days or even four days to get from Taytay to El Nido. It’s pretty clear though that I can get there in one day. I believe it’s 61 kilometers from Taytay, and I’ve heard reports that the road is steadily being improved. There are still mountains and rocks and dust and it is going to be tough, but I believe it will be less tough than the road from Roxas to Taytay. The American who is buying land in El Nido said that he’d heard the road was paved all the way. I spoke to someone else who had just come from there and they said it was paved in sections. Whatever the truth, I should manage to cycle there in a day. It will be a long day, but that’s to be expected.

I haven’t thought much ahead, so I don’t really know how long I’ll spend in El Nido or what I will do after that.

 

Tags: Casa Rosa, El Nido, Palawan Bike Trip