Our first stop was an unusual one. It consisted of a very small collection of huts on a tiny beach. No one on the boat spoke English, so I spent most of the day just guessing what we were doing and why we were doing it. This place didn’t seem large enough to need any bread deliveries. And Jack-Jack said something about this being where his family lived. So perhaps we stopped there for personal reasons. In any event, everyone on the boat and in the village was very concerned that I go to see the local waterfalls. These waterfalls are apparently on the tourism radar, and every single day boats come from Port Barton with groups of tourists to see them. Before I could blink, I was gathered up with an entourage and we set off into the interior along a sandy path. I tried to find out if this was okay. Were the waterfalls far? Didn’t we have to leave to make more deliveries? How much time did I have? Everyone just laughed off my western concerns. Time? What’s time? You just do what you want to do and things will work out apparently. After all, I was the guest on this trip and I was the only one wearing a watch.

We walked for only half a kilometer or so, being led by this old man carrying a machete, a fish, and a bucket of water. I have no idea why. And he set a blisteringly fast past. We arrived at a small village called Bigaho. I knew that because there was a large white sign that read, Welcome Sitio Bigaho & Waterfalls. There, we paused as a local guide was rustled up. This man was a short and very fat fellow. He waddled along ahead of me walking about a fifth as fast as the old man with the fish. I was worried about delaying the boat, and I mentally urged this fellow to walk faster. I was also concerned that I was in unknown waters. I seemed to have guides and I seemed to be going to a tourist attraction. Things like these were never free. So how much would I have to pay? Who should I pay? And how could I pay? My money was back on the boat. All I had was about 40 pesos in coins in my pocket. Jason would deal with this easily by doing a lot of shouting and bulldozing his way through the complexities. I, being more reserved, resorted to hints that got me nowhere.

The waterfalls were clearly a local attraction. There was a well-defined rocky trail leading along the river, and we passed a building that was a kind of visitors center complete with a guest registry and a donation box. I stopped there on my way back and signed my name and put all the money I had into the donation box. It didn’t seem like enough, but after all, I hadn’t even wanted to go to the waterfalls. I had sort of been pushed into it.

The waterfalls were nice enough. I’m sure other people who visited them would rave about the beauty and the incredible pool of crystal-clear water at the base of the falls. I’m not saying I didn’t appreciate them. I suppose if you were hiking in the jungle and you stumbled across this little waterfall, you’d be pretty pleased. And I was pleased in a way. The falls were about 25 feet high and very picturesque. If they built fake falls like this at DisneyWorld, I’m sure they’d have been pretty pleased with the results. I shucked off my T-shirt and sandals and dove in for a swim in the pool. It was very refreshing, and my plump guide jumped in and joined me. He told me that they had a group of nine people the day before – all Europeans from China. I paddled around for a while and told my guide how beautiful the falls were. Then after a few minutes, I felt it was time to leave and I climbed out and we all trooped back to the beach and the village. The boys from the boat had all come with me. I had been gone most of the time, so I don’t know if they had sold any baked goods there.

We all climbed back into the boat and set off to the next island and the next beach and the next village. This one was just as beautiful and perfect as the first had been. The Filipinos are very good at landscaping. For the most part, they care for their property and their huts. They plant flowers and fences and they sweep the trails. You would be hard-pressed to find a more beautiful setting.

At this village, we walked to a local store and then around to the back where everyone sat down at a table and announced that it was time for breakfast. This disturbed my western sense of getting things done – a feeling I’ve had so many times in my life. I remember in the days before I started cycling how annoyed I would get with buses. You’d wait around for hours for the damn thing to fill up and leave. Then you’d finally get going, and after an hour, they’d pull over at a roadside stop to have breakfast. I’d know that there were hours and hours and hours of hard roads ahead of us and that we’d probably have a flat tire or two. So I’d just want to GO. Inside, I’d be screaming with frustration – “Let’s go!”

On this delivery trip, I wasn’t quite so worked up. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere. I was just along for the ride. And I had no responsibilities at all. Yet, I did feel responsible. I knew we had all these villages to visit and we had all this bread to deliver and sell. We had just left, and now we’d stopped for breakfast. It offended my work ethic. I wanted to get the job done. Let’s at least put in a few hours of work and then we could stop for lunch. However, it’s possible that these guys had been working through the night. It was a big job just baking all this stuff and packaging it and loading the boat. For all I knew, they hadn’t slept at all. Or perhaps they’d been working hard since three in the morning and so this was a good time to stop for breakfast.

I was a bit worried that breakfast would turn into a big complicated mess, but they’d been making this delivery once a week for years, and they had a system worked out. The woman produced a big basket. At the bottom of the basket was a big square plastic container filled with rice – obviously enough for two or three meals for all of us. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that this rice would be the basis of our breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All that changed was what we ate with the rice. For breakfast, they produced a bunch of hard-boiled eggs and two cans of some kind of tuna stew. I have to say that it was delicious. I was hungry and I’d been out in the world all morning driving motorcycles, riding in a boat, swimming at waterfalls, and as always happens in situations like this, the simple meal was a feast. The hard-boiled egg was the best-tasting hard-boiled egg I’d ever had, and the rice with tuna stew was a feast. I was careful not to eat too much. I didn’t want to overdo it. I had just enough to deal with my hunger and feel satisfied. I also turned down the fish, which was the last part of our breakfast – four little fish on a plate. My boatmates were more than happy to eat my fish.

After we had breakfast and the table was cleared, I saw the sale of the baked goods in action. It followed a pattern that was to be repeated at every village we visited. The boys carried three garbage cans of baked goods to the store, and the woman who owned the store rummaged through them and pulled out handfuls of the items that she wanted. When she was finished, the woman from the boat would gather them up five by five and dump them into a box and count them as she went. At the end, she’d have a total and money would change hands and all this would be written down in a little notebook.

When we were done with this store, the boys each shouldered a garbage can and set off down one of the trails in the village. We walked until we got to the next shop, and the owner of that store would rummage through the cans and select what he or she wanted. I admired the simplicity of the system, but my western sense of logic couldn’t help but fidget a little bit. It was a simple system, but it took a LONG time. Every customer rummaged through the cans like a kid in Canada pawing through their pail of Halloween candy, looking for that one treat they wanted to eat. I imagined order forms, lists of what was available, pre-orders, pre-packed and ready for delivery. Then all you had to do was show up with one box for each shop, drop it off, collect your money and go. But that’s not the way things worked. It was even slower because we often met people on the trails, individuals who wanted a quick snack. We would stop and open one of the cans for them to rummage through it and select the one bun or biscuit they wanted. I guess it makes sense in that time is not money here. These boys and the woman were not unionized and being paid $20/hour. I don’t know that they were being paid at all. As family members, they could just be doing it for nothing. Can you imagine truck drivers all over Canada pulling over to the side of the highway whenever someone waved them down, opening up the back and letting them inside the truck to choose one Snickers bar and pay for it? It would certainly be very friendly and fun, but it certainly wouldn’t be cost-effective. In the same vein, can you imagine a delivery truck showing up at 7-11 without pre-orders? The owner of the store would come out and pick and choose from the contents of the truck and they’d have to count it over and over again and then work out the final price.

I think the hardest part of the day for me was the enforced silence – not having anyone at all to speak to. But second to that was the slowness of the process. I was enjoying myself obviously. It’s a rare privilege to be able to go along on a trip like this and see all these places from the inside. However, it was also a physically demanding day. The sun was brutally hot. The engine was very loud. The benches on the boat were hard wood and not very comfortable. And at each store, there was no place to sit or relax. This was all done out in the open in the sun with insects flying around. I was enjoying the day, but I also knew that by the end of it, I was going to be very tired and glad to have a cold beer and collapse onto a soft bed. So when village after village after village we took forty minutes to do what could have been done in five, I started to wish things would speed up a little bit.

I thought visiting Port Barton would be a highlight of the day. I thought it would be fun to revisit this place and to arrive there on a local boat. In terms of the Lonely Planeteer one-upmanship, I was way ahead of the game – staying in a local town, hanging out with the local people, and visiting a dozen remote island villages making deliveries. People in a backpacker town like Port Barton would kill to have experiences like that, but they’re hard to come by when you’re on the backpacker trail.

Port Barton had changed a lot in the last couple of years. I was surprised. Many new resorts and restaurants and businesses had opened up since I was there. It felt like quite an authentic place when I was there before. But now it already felt like a beach in Thailand – pure backpacker territory. A local man approached me to see if he could do anything for me – arrange a boat tour or something like that. He told me that Port Barton was completely full, and that there was nowhere to stay. Lots of foreigners had arrived and found nowhere to stay and had to move on. It might not have been that bad, though. While I was there, the place was nearly deserted. I saw almost no one. And I spoke to one group of 3 travelers. They had just arrived that morning on the boat from Sabang and they had had no trouble at all finding a place to stay.

One odd thing about Palawan is that most of the tourists there are European. And Europeans for me are a bit of a mixed bag. Most of them are okay, like the German boys that I met in Nagtabon. But there is a class of European that freaks me out. Some of them are simply too tough for me – like the Spaniards and the Russians. Others are just too, well, European with the men in their tiny black Speedos. They just give me the creeps. And then there are the freaks, who just freak me out. There were a number of them at Port Barton. These people are usually not young but not old either. They’re in the middle. They’ve lived long enough to have acquired a lot of really ugly tattoos all over their body. One couple I saw at Port Barton really turned my stomach. The man and the woman both had weird Mohawk style haircuts with oily ratty braids going down their backs. The man was fat and gross and white and splotchy, but had no problem wearing the tiniest of black bikini bottoms. The woman was also wearing little more than strings and her body kind of hung down here and there and bulged here and there. They didn’t look human to me. They looked like creatures – maybe extras from some movie set in a post-apocalyptic future – like Road Warrior. I felt embarrassed when I saw them, and I was more embarrassed at the reaction of the Filipinos. A lot of schoolchildren were walking past on the beach and they reacted with almost stunned horror when they saw this couple. Then when they walked past a little ways they burst into shrill laughter and talked animatedly about the weird creatures they had just seen.

I walked up and down the beach at Port Barton and took a look at the places I’d visited on my previous trip. It didn’t feel at all like the same place. I was very glad that I hadn’t followed through on my original plans to go to Sabang and then take the boat to Port Barton. I guess I would have enjoyed the chance to meet other foreigners and hang out with them, but my little motorcycle journey is turning out to be much more rewarding despite the relative isolation.

I rejoined the boys for a while as they went from shop to shop and restaurant to restaurant selling their baked goods. However, they had so many places to visit that I eventually went off on my own to do some more exploring. I popped into a restaurant I knew and ordered the backpacker classic – a banana shake. It was so good! That’s certainly one good thing about the backpacker trail – banana shakes and banana pancakes. I don’t think I could find a banana shake in San Vicente.

By the time the boys finished their deliveries in Port Barton, I was ready to head back home. However, we still had a long ways to go. And that was okay. We visited a couple of very interesting places. One in particular stands out for me because of a passenger that we dropped off there. In Port Barton, I was hanging out near the beach and I noticed this woman waiting with a bunch of bags. She struck me as very attractive and a little bit more sophisticated than the norm. I guessed that she was in her thirties and that she was a local business owner of some type. It turns out that I was completely wrong and she was from a small fishing village on an island. She paid the boys a few pesos to ride on our boat to her village. The boys were going there anyway to sell baked goods. The woman spoke no English at all, so I couldn’t learn anything about her. However, the village was by the far the poorest and the most decrepit of all the places we visited. My impression of the place wasn’t helped by the fact that it didn’t have a nice beach. We pulled up on ugly mud flats and had to walk to the village with our feet squelching in this horrible black ooze. Many of the huts in the village were built on stilts and had walkways connecting them. The buildings were all falling down and in very rough shape. I couldn’t believe that anyone lived there let alone this classy-looking woman we’d picked up in Port Barton. I took a harder look at her bags and I saw that she was carrying diapers and a baby’s toy, so I assumed she had young children in the village. It’s simply astonishing all the different ways that people in this world live. All the time that I’ve been Taipei writing my little dialogues and sample sentences, these people have been in these mosquito-ridden shacks on this mud flat. Who can say whose life is better? I’m certain they have a very rich and satisfying emotional life in that village. But it certainly looked like a tough place to live.

My own life got a bit tougher after this. This was as far to the south as we were going to go. Now the boys turned the boat around for the long trip back to San Vicente. It was now quite late in the day – sometime after five o’clock, and the wind had picked up and the ocean was getting very rough. We made only one more stop on the way back – at some kind of remote factory or processing plant. We had one other passenger who was a security guard at this place, and we stopped there to drop him off and sell more baked goods.

After that, it was a long and difficult journey back to San Vicente. The waves were quite high and they splashed over the boat constantly. The boys were used to this and they all retreated to the very back of the boat and huddled in this small space behind the engine. The woman built up a barricade out of the garbage cans and hunched behind it. I had nowhere to go and I got the full brunt of the waves and the wind. Every twenty or thirty seconds a bigger wave would hit the boat and drench me from head to foot. The saltwater burned my eyes and blinded me. The wind was very strong and chilled me to the bone as the water poured over me constantly. I had to use all my strength just to hold on to the boat and not get tossed from side to side. In the middle of all this, the engine started to fail. We lost the engine completely four times and we drifted at the mercy of the wind and the waves while Jack-Jack tried to get it going. One of the boys grabbed a paddle and tried to point the nose of the boat into the wind and waves, but it was impossible. They were just too strong, and we ended up broadside to the waves being thrown hard back and forth. There was no danger of tipping over. The wide outriggers would prevent that, but the outriggers caused their own problems. They would rise high in the air and then slam down and into the water. Then the boat would go in the other direction, but the outriggers being underwater would resist. Then they would pop free and the boat would whip in the other direction and hit hard again. Back and forth the boat went being slammed from side to side and up and down. I started to contemplate what it would be like if Jack-Jack couldn’t get the engine running. I was extremely cold and didn’t relish the idea of being out there as the sun went down. I imagine that we’d eventually have been pulled to shore by some other boat, but then what? I really didn’t want to spend the night in a village either. I’ve been raving about how picturesque and quaint they are, but that doesn’t mean I was prepared to spend the night in one with my drenched clothes, shivering body, mildly sunburned skin. I had no dry clothes to change into. A night in a village would mean a sleepless night lying on a hard wooden floor while being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

I was very glad, therefore, each time that Jack-Jack got the engine restarted. And finally, it started and didn’t stop again. Even so, it was seven o’clock and pitch black by the time we arrived back at Panindigan. It had been a long trip and it took a long time for me to stop shivering. Beck Beck was waiting at the bakery, and it was music to my ears when she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee.

I thought Jason’s boat would be in the water, but there had been a problem, and the launch was delayed until the next day. Beck Beck told me this and other news of the day as I sat there warming up and as the local children crowded around. I could never have become as well-known as Jason, but they no longer cried out “Hey, Joe” to me. It was now “Hey, Douglas.”

I drove back to my hotel and took a quick shower and changed into dry clothes. I was tired, but since Jason had gone to such trouble to arrange this trip for me, I thought it would be polite to seek him out. I also thought it would be fun to chat about my adventures. I stopped at a local store and bought four bottles of San Miguel beer and then drove out to New Agutaya. I thought I would have trouble recognizing the path to Jason’s bungalows, but I spotted his two motorcycles parked at the side of the road. I made my way down the narrow paths to his bungalows. The lights in the main bungalow were on, but I didn’t see anyone anywhere. I called out Jason’s name, but there was no reply. So I got back on my motorcycle and went back to my hotel. I timed the journey and it was exactly eight minutes from door to door. As I drove, I reflected on how little time I had been away from my life in Taiwan and yet how far away that life felt. I felt like I’d been living this life in the Philippines forever. Yet it had only been five days. That is certainly one of the great attractions of travel. It is almost like having a time machine – like living forever. I’ve only lived for five days here. Yet it feels like several months. I also reflected on how different the life was. I had wanted to visit Jason, so I drove out to his house with some cold beer in my knapsack to see if he was home. In Taiwan, that would never happen. Even if you couldn’t phone, text, and e-mail, you still wouldn’t just go to someone’s house. It just isn’t done. And it’s impossible anyway. You can’t get to anyone’s front door. Taipei is a world where you literally can’t knock on someone’s door. When I went to Jason’s place, I didn’t knock on his door either. You don’t have to. The place is wide open. And the two doors to his two rooms were open as well. You can’t get a bigger contrast than that.

Even after writing down all these adventures, I find that I have left out what could be the highlight of the whole day. While waiting for the boys at Port Barton, I sat on some concrete steps that led down to the beach. I looked about me with my binoculars and just absorbed life on the beach. Then out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something running toward me. It was small and dark, and I assumed it was a puppy. I was surprised to see it run toward me with such purpose. When it was right on top of me, I was more surprised to see that it was a little monkey. It raced into my lap and then climbed up my arm and sat on my head.

A moment later, a man came walking up to me and retrieved the monkey. Apparently it belonged to him and it had run away. He apologized to me, but I wasn’t bothered in the least. It’s not every day that a monkey sits on your head. The man took the monkey away and I went back to watching the beach. Suddenly, the monkey escaped again. It raced down the road straight toward me and this time jumped onto my shoulder and wrapped its little arms around my neck and face. The man came back and peeled the monkey free and walked away. A third time, the monkey came racing back. This time it snuggled in my lap and when the man showed up, it wrapped all its limbs and its tail around my left arm and held on tight. This time I got to pet it for a while as I chatted with the man. The man was obviously nice and the monkey was a loved pet. It wasn’t like it was running away from cruel treatment. It was just full of energy. It was cute little thing and I was sad when the man took it way again and this time it didn’t come back.

 

 

 

 

Tags: Canada, Jack Jack, Palawan Motorbike Trip, Port Barton, San Vicente