Sunday February 14, 2010 3:30 p.m.

San Vicente, Palawan

Being 3:30 in the afternoon, it’s a bit late for my morning coffee, but I’ll take it when and where I can get it – comfortable that is.

I woke up this morning in my little bungalow in Nagtabon with the idea that I would hit the road and see where I ended up. I thought I might end up on Coco-Loco island, but they were fully booked. I could have gone there, but I would have had to wait until the next day. And I might have done that except that the girl helping me wasn’t inspiring me with much confidence. She refused to be pinned down on any actual facts as to whether they had cottages available and when the boat left. And I’ve already been to Coco-Loco island, so it’s okay that I don’t go there again, especially now when the island is so jammed with people.

Anyway, I haven’t eaten all day, so I probably won’t be coherent in my summary. Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.

The beginning takes me back to Nagtabon. My first night there wasn’t very comfortable, as I didn’t bring my mosquito net and the room didn’t come with one. I found out later that they did have them. I just had to ask for it. I did in fact ask about one when I arrived, but the woman forgot to bring me one. I also didn’t realize that the windows could close. I checked them out, and they didn’t look like they had any shutters. So the windows were wide open and I didn’t have a mosquito net, so I got bitten a lot. And unfortunately every single bite got infected. This has happened to me on every trip to the Philippines. The last time was the worst. That was when I came to Palawan on my bicycle. My feet and legs were so badly infected that I had to go to the hospital to have them taken care off. It got to the point where I could barely walk.

And now that I think about it, it might not be the mosquito bites that are getting infected. I’d heard before that it is the sand flea bites that get infected. And those sand fleas are so small that I could have been bitten by them a lot without even realizing it. I’d also heard that the infection is triggered when you go into the water. And that kind of makes sense, because the worst of the infection I have now didn’t kick in until after I went for a morning swim. Then all hell broke loose. It’s astonishing how fast the infections developed. The worst one was on my thumb. And my whole thumb swelled up. I eventually punctured the blister because the pressure was so painful, and all day yesterday and today a yellow pus mixed with blood has been oozing out. It wouldn’t be so bad except that based on my past experience with this, these infections will not go away without antibiotics. And they grow and grow. I’ll eventually end up with large rings of infection with quite deep craters in the middle. The one on my thumb already looks like that. It looks exactly like an angry red volcano. So I guess I have a choice. I can break up my time here with a visit to a hospital, or just endure it for the remaining 7 days and then have them treated when I get back to Taiwan. Even if I get them treated now, they won’t heal for quite a while, so I’m stuck with them for the rest of this trip. They’re really nasty looking and incredibly itchy and tender to the touch. They are going to make life a tad difficult.

Luckily, I just happened to throw into my toiletry kit a tube of anti-itch cream. That has helped a lot.

The woman at the cottages served dinner to the three German boys and me together, so I ate with them. She served us at a table outside under a thatch roof. There were no fish, so we had rice, a fried egg, sauteed beans, and some kind of sauce. I was really hungry, so it went down really well. I became tired quite early, and I retired to my cottage around 8:30. The boys stayed up quite a bit later. They also got up fairly early. One of them had to meet his girlfriend at the airport in Puerto Princesa at 9:30, so they left at around 7:30. Normally, I’d have been up and about by that time, but I slept heavily and fairly late.

The first thing I did in the morning was grab my snorkel and mask and go for a swim. The beach at Nagtabon is really beautiful. Great sand, shallow water for a long way out, no jellyfish. Gorgeous shoreline with coconut trees ringed by high hills. The tide was out in the morning and I had to walk for a long way to get into deeper water. There is no coral at all there, which means there is almost no marine life. That’s okay. It also means no nasty marine life like jelly fish. It had been a long time since I’d been in the ocean, and I had that odd sensation of how big the ocean is. I get that from time to time. I think it comes from wearing a diving mask. You are down there in the water and you can see the water getting deeper and deeper away from you. It gets so deep so fast that you start to think about just how big an animal could be lurking out there. The water you are in is connected to all the ocean water on the planet. I know that statistically shark attacks and such things are so rare as to be no worry at all, but you still think about sharks when you’re out there. It is their home turf after all.

After my swim, I had my breakfast. Rice and fish, of course. It’s a good thing I like simple food. Still, I don’t think I could survive very long on that diet. A whole fish just sitting on your plate and staring at you with its milky dead eye, is not that appetizing. And eating it is such a carnivorous operation. It still has its skin and bones and everything else. So you literally tear it apart and consume it. I can do it easily when I’m hungry and when I’m traveling, but I can’t imagine eating that every day, which is what many Filipinos do. I’m glad that I had a little bit of help in the shape of a local dog, a local puppy, and a local cat. All three were begging, and when I came across a bit of fish I couldn’t quite stomach, I tossed it to them. The puppy in particular needed it. He was on the verge of starvation. The dog was actually very healthy and happy. I think his name was Peep Peep or something like that. He became my companion for the whole time I was at Nagtabon.

I spent much of the day just sitting under a thatch roof and reading a book. It turned out to be a terrible book – something I grabbed off the shelf at the Formosa just before I left: a spy novel by Le Carre. I read it anyway, not having much else with me.

In between bouts of reading, I slathered on the sun block and then went exploring up and down the beach. The first day I had company on the beach in the shape of a boyfriend and girlfriend and then the three Germans. This second day, there was no one else. There were barely any Filipinos. It felt like a deserted beach. I walked along the beach to the end and then followed the arms of the bay all the out as far as I could go. It became very rocky and I had to scale a little bit of cliff from time to time to keep going. Finally, I reached a deep gorge in the rock that fed into an underwater cave of some kind. That was as far as I could go, and I turned back.

It turned out that most of the Filipinos were gone because they were having a party to celebrate the completion (or purchase, I guess) of a new boat. They were having a big beach party at another beach beyond the bay that held Nagtabon. Later in the afternoon, they returned, and the party continued on some property just behind where my cottage was. Nagtabon apparently has electricity from time to time, which means KARAOKE! Loud and horrible, as always. Luckily the electricity when you get it always goes out at midnight. So the horrible noise didn’t go on all night long. It easily could have.

I could easily have joined the party, and at some other point in my life perhaps I would have. However, I wasn’t up for it, and I just stayed reading my book till the sun went down. Groups of children would come talk to me from time to time. The most interested group was made up of three girls – 10, 11, and 12 years old. They studied English in school and they tried all of their English out on me and we had the usual conversation. And they giggled a lot. Much of the giggling was about my skin it seemed. I find my skin to be horribly blotchy and covered in blemishes on top of being an unhealthy pasty white. Their skin by comparison is perfect – smooth and evenly golden brown. However, they seemed to think my skin was the best thing going. They kept saying it looked so soft and creamy. I started to get a bit uncomfortable with all this attention from these young girls. They were young, but they seemed almost like grown women to me – at least the 12-year-old.

For dinner, I had rice and fish with a half a can of some beef mixture. (Can’t think of the name of that stuff right now.) I found it really hard to force down this fish. I would have preferred more of the beans and sauce. It’s interesting to live so close to your food. My first day, I didn’t have a fish for dinner because the local boys just didn’t catch any that day. I had fish that night because that very day, they had caught it. And I had no idea what kind of fish it was. It was whatever kind they happened to catch.

I got a mosquito net from the caretaker lady and I put it up. It worked in that it kept the hundreds of mosquitos that were in my room away from me. But it didn’t work perfectly. The holes were too big, and the smallest of the mosquitos could still get in, so I still got bitten throughout the night. At least they didn’t keep me up. These mosquitos seem to have feathery light wings and they don’t seem to make as piercing a whine as the mosquitos I’m used to from Taiwan and Canada. In Taiwan, one mosquito loose in the room means I get no sleep at all until I hunt it down and kill it. In my cottage last night, I was bitten a dozen times at least, but I wasn’t woken up. I’ve now got these infections growing on my back and shoulder blades. They’re horribly painful because they go deep and the flesh starts to swell up badly. It’s difficult to reach the ones on my back, so I can’t lance them to release the pressure.

Stuff like this makes me appreciate how tough real explorers had to be. I can just BARELY handle this kind of discomfort, and I can do it only because I’m hopping from comfortable room to comfortable room. Actually, the cottage at Nagtabon was pretty primitive and not comfortable at all, but it was still miles better than camping in the bush. I can’t imagine exploring a region like this when it was “undiscovered” and you had to fend for yourself outside. You’d have to be tough to do it.

In fact, I was reflecting again on how tough in retrospect my other trips were. I don’t think I thought of them that way at the time. Sure, they were physically difficult and emotionally trying, but when I think about them now, they seem MUCH more so. I’m comparing them to this trip, for example. This trip is almost nothing by comparison. Everyone speaks English. I’m only here for 11 days. I’m traveling by motorcycle. There are comfortable hotels and cottages and cold beer almost everywhere. And even with all of that, it’s kicking my butt. I’m tired and sunburnt and covered in infected sores and dirty and constantly fighting with my gear. I spent today on my motorcycle on those roads and I think back to my last trip to Palawan on my bicycle, and I can’t believe that I did it. It just seems so difficult when I think about it. It makes me realize that if for some crazy reason, I do go on another bike ride in Africa, I shouldn’t take it lightly. I think lately, I’ve started to take these things too lightly.

I must say that on average, I prefer riding a bicycle. It just feels right. Riding a motorcycle feels strange to me. One problem is packing. I like that the gear on a bicycle is so open. I can organize everything and I know where everything is. Plus, I can get at things easily and quickly. And I can leave things out to dry. Traveling on this motorcycle with a backpack on my back is very inconvenient. It’s as organized as I can make it, and I have my daypack (with all its pockets) inside my backpack, but it still feels like chaos. Everything is just a big jumble in there.

I also don’t have any systems. I have no idea what I’m doing. My bathroom at Nagtabon was just a toilet and a cement floor with a garbage pail of water and a scoop. In Ethiopia I would have KILLED to have that much luxury. Yet, on this trip, I’m finding it difficult. I suppose that’s a function of how short the trip is. This is only day three on the road, after all. I haven’t had time to develop a system.

I decided not to have my fish and rice breakfast this morning. This was partially because I didn’t want another fish, but I also didn’t want to wait around, and I didn’t mind the thought of going hungry. I’ve got a few pounds around my midsection I wouldn’t mind getting rid of. I knew that by not eating, I could get irritable during the day, but I thought I’d take the chance.

So I woke up, showered and shaved, packed, and was on the road by eight in the morning. The caretakers were sad to see me go. They hoped I would stay for a full week. In terms of the beach, I could have. You simply could not have asked for a more beautiful place. And my cottage was also perfect in that it sat right on the beach with incredible views. When you go to places like El Nido or Port Barton, you would kill to get a place like that. And if I had company and was there with a girlfriend or something, I suppose I could hang out. But there was really nothing to keep me there beyond a day or two. And it really wasn’t that comfortable. No beer anywhere let alone cold beer. No restaurants or coffee shops. And that doesn’t really matter. They brought a thermos of hot water right to my door and I made my own instant coffee. And they served me food. But I wanted to hit the road. This is a motorcycle journey after all.

The charges for this place were very strange. I think I mentioned before that the cottage cost 900 pesos a night – the same as my room in Puerto Princesa. That makes them way over-priced even considering the postcard-perfect setting and scenery. I had a thought that the caretakers were over-charging me and pocketing the difference. I then thought that they would do the same with the meals. I was worried that I was going to get a nasty surprise.

However, when I asked for my final bill, she said that it came to 1,950 pesos. That’s 1,800 pesos for the two nights, and then 50 pesos each for the three meals. I thought she’d made a mistake and I told her that. But she insisted. I felt bad paying so little for the meals considering that I got a lot of food that she prepared herself (a complete fish with each meal) and then she did all the dishes and she served me right on my verandah. And that included four or five cups of coffee. I thought I should give her a big tip, but I didn’t. I still thought the cottages were twice as expensive as they should be, so it kind of worked out.

 

 

 

Tags: Coco Loco, Palawan Motorbike Trip, Puerto Princesa, Taiwan