Friday April 12, 2013

6:30 a.m. Virac, Catanduanes, Philippines

I lost the war of the little things this morning. The man in the room beside me was snoring like a freight train and at an incredible pace. I can’t imagine breathing that fast while sleeping let alone snoring that loud at the same time. I wonder how snoring has managed to survive as a human trait? Wouldn’t every snorer eventually be killed by someone out of pure annoyance and then the snoring trait would die out evolutionarily speaking?

I also couldn’t get into the common bathroom. Someone was in there at 5:30 and then at 5:45 and then at 6:00. It was driving me crazy. Finally, I couldn’t get a suitable seat at the Jollibee. Jollibee is the only place open, so I have no choice. And even though it is 6:30 in the morning, they haven’t altered their music selection or volume at all. I might as well be in a nightclub at 1 in the morning. I try to find a seat as far from the speakers as possible, but they went a bit nuts with the speakers. They are everywhere and almost impossible to avoid. Finally, they have giant air conditioning units everywhere. I appreciate that it is nice and cool inside, but these machines blast the cold air right across the tables. Sitting at one of those tables means sitting in an icy blast.

An amusing note: While still in Taiwan, I got hooked on a move called “Pitch Perfect”. I found it so entertaining that I watched it seven or eight times. In the movie, I heard all kinds of modern music that I hadn’t heard before – the hits – as performed by the fictional glee clubs in the movie. I had never heard any of the songs before. Here in the Philippines, I’ve been hearing those songs constantly – songs like “Titanium” or maybe it’s called “Bulletproof”. They are almost the only songs I hear other than Gangnam Style – a song that plays endlessly everywhere.

I ended up at a table that is uncomfortably close to the speakers, and I went rummaging inside my bag for ear plugs or my iPod. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my iPod with me so I can’t use the ear buds as ear plugs. Crazy thing that I come to another country and then use all kinds of devices to block it out. Yes, travel in another country is great. Then why do I go to such efforts to block it out? I ride a bike so I don’t have to deal with the hassle of the horrible transportation systems. I stick in ear buds and earplugs to drown out the horribly loud music that plays everywhere. Well, let’s get to yesterday.

After my first Jollibee experience yesterday morning, I set off on foot with my camera. It turned into a great photography tour. It was pretty much the first time I had the Olympus out in the Philippines. I’ve had it with me on the bicycle while riding around, but it is too much trouble to get it out just for a random shot of the countryside – shots that are always boring anyway. It’s best to use that camera on walkabouts.

My walkabout took me down the main street and then down a bunch of side streets. Lots of people asked me to take their picture, and I was happy to oblige. I also shot lots of candid shots. My favorite picture from that walk is of an older man sitting on his streetside verandah reading a newspaper. My second favorite is probably that of a pig getting a drink of water from a hose. I could probably come up with a dozen more “favorite” pictures if I think about it. The children are always good for some candid street shots. With the Olympus and its touch screen system, I take lots of pictures when people don’t realize I am taking one. So I get all kinds of natural expressions on their faces. They aren’t just staring at the camera and smiling. One thing I’ve learned with the Olympus is how elastic people’s faces are. Catch them in mid-expression and their faces are contorted into all kinds of bizarre shapes. Faces are extremely active.

I stopped at a little motorcycle repair shop and chatted with the mechanics while they fixed flat tires. The mechanic was using the exact same device that I saw in Cambodia – a type of vice. However, the heat wasn’t coming from burning gas but from an electric iron. It was an actual household iron that had been turned upside down and turned into the base of the vice. He put the tire with the rubber patch into this device, tightened the vice, and then plugged in the iron for five minutes. It melted the rubber together and formed the patch. I remember having this done in Cambodia after my “Super Patches” didn’t work. The glue wasn’t up to the heat of Cambodia and simply didn’t stick. I had to use the local technology, and it worked great if I remember right.

The mechanic clearly had experience. He set about fixing the flat like it was as natural as breathing. He kept the tire on the motorcycle and just pulled the tube out. He pumped up the tube with air and then ran it through a container of water to check for bubbles that indicate a link. The container of water was, appropriately enough, a large tire that had been cut into pieces. The tire formed a natural trough and once it was filled with water, it was the perfect shape to run a tire tube through. A common mistake for people fixing a flat tire is to find a leak and then fix it and put the tube back into the tire. This guy was too crafty for that. He found a leak and marked and plugged it by sticking a piece of rubber tubing into the hole. Then he kept checking the rest of the tube. The reason for that, of course, is that one often has more than one hole in a tube. If you find one leak and fix it and stop there, chances are you’ll find the tire will still be leaking when you put it back together. You should check the entire tube and look for all the leaks. The cost for this operation was 20 pesos (50 cents US) per patch. Pretty reasonable.

I followed the streets all the way to the waterfront and shot a few pictures there. I shot some cats, some pigs, some objects, some more children, and some landscapes. It was really great.

My goal for the morning, however, was to visit the local market. I’d seen it the previous day while riding around – a giant 3-story yellow structure surrounded by hundreds of tricycles and small shops. I don’t even know how to describe the experience of going into that market. Of course it’s just a market. People go shopping there to get their daily or weekly vegetables, fish, meat, and whatever else they need for the day. But being so foreign to me, going inside and climbing up the stairs was like descending into another world altogether. It felt like a netherworld. It was dark, and I think that had something to do with the mood of the place. It was also extremely dirty. It was probably clean in all the ways that really count, but on the surface it was pretty dirty and garbage was strewn everywhere. There were a number of people sleeping on the floor in corners and on the floor and on raised wooden platforms – people that probably lived there full time in one fashion or another.

I climbed some stairs up the second floor first, and I found myself in the butchering area. There were dozens of long tables where who knows how many animals and fish had been cut up that morning. The butchering was all done, but there were big pools of blood everywhere. Beyond the butchering tables, there were a few stalls selling pork and other meat. Pork is always the most striking product since people tend to keep the heads of the pigs on display, and there is nothing – absolutely nothing – as spooky and disturbing as a pig’s head just sitting there on a bloody counter. The cut is always perfectly smooth, so the flat surface of the neck matches the flat surface of the counter so that it looks like the pig’s head is growing right out of the counter. Pigs don’t have a lot of motion in their faces, I don’t think, so a dead pig doesn’t look that much different to me from a live pig. The head is just this thick hunk of meat with coarse skin, stubbly and hairy ears, and small mean eyes. So the head sitting there seems to be just as alive as the pigs I had seen in the pens earlier being hosed down and drinking water from the hose. It goes without saying that I always think of Lord of the Flies when I see pigs in markets. The book has made more of an impression on me in my life than any other book, and looking at the heads of pigs in markets, I can easily comprehend how the boys felt with the heads of pigs on sticks and how Simon would imagine that the head was talking to him. I always feel that the pig heads in these markets are communicating. They seem so alive.

From the meat section, I moved deeper into the market building into the fish area. I had had the 150mm lens on the camera, but I found the perspective was too tight for the market, and I switched to a 50mm. The 50mm is also a faster lens, and it gave me more light to play with.

If the butchering section of a market is something of a challenge for me to take in and understand, the fish section is even more foreign. I grew up on the Great Lakes in Canada, but really had nothing to do with fish. The closest I ever got was breaded fish sticks from the grocery store. I don’t think I ever saw an actual fish on a dinner table until I was in my thirties and somewhere in Asia. So fish have never struck me as food. They strike me as something to look at while snorkeling and perhaps something to keep in a tank in your living room, but when I see a fish – any fish – I never react with a “Yum! That looks tasty!” response. I’ve never purchased and cooked a fish and I’m 100% certain that I never will.

In this case, I’m just talking about your basic fish that looks like a fish. A fish market in Asia, of course, contains an incredible variety of sea life – stuff of monstrous dreams. Yet, all of this is meant for the cooking pot. I walk around fish markets feeling totally out of my element. If everyone in the world were like me, there would be no fish markets. Out of 6 billion Dougs, not one would wake up in the morning and think, “Hmm. Some eels would be good for breakfast” or “I wish I had the head of a shark for dinner.” Give me some eels or the head of a shark as a present, and I will take a picture of it and give it back to you. I wouldn’t have any idea or inclination of what else to do with it.

I walked through the fish market snapping some pictures here and there – of the fish for sale and of some of the people and children. I was a big center of attention, of course, and I caused some commotion everywhere I went. Some people wanted me to take their picture. I had some trouble with that before I figured out what was wrong. With the Olympus, I’ve gotten used to shooting from waist level. I look down at the tilted LCD screen and take a picture from there. People aren’t used to that, so they sit there and wait and wait for me to take the picture when in fact I’ve already done it. I was happy with the image I got, but they often weren’t. They wanted the posed happy smile picture. When I realized what was going on, I then switched to the viewfinder. Once I raised the camera to my eye, then people knew what was going on. They would then give me a big smile. The children would do something goofy with their hands. They’re good pictures, too, but I prefer the candid ones when they aren’t looking at the camera and smiling.

People often used me to tease each other, too. It took me a while to figure that one out. People called out to me to take a picture and then they would indicate someone that wanted their picture taken. But that person would then run away. I realized then that the people were joking. They would pick someone that they knew was shy and then set that person up by saying they wanted their picture taken, when in fact they didn’t. They do that in particular when there was something physically different about them. I noticed one younger woman who had large bumps all over her cheeks and chin. I have no idea what they were – some kind of condition where large moles grew everywhere. The people around her all pointed at her and shouted at me to take her picture. This happens with really fat people and really ugly people. It’s a pattern I’ve noticed in a lot of my travels. It is something that would never happen in Canada. People are very sensitive about physical appearance. In the Philippines (and many other countries I’ve been too) physical appearance is very important. However, they are much more matter-of-fact about it. They will simply talk about things that we would politely ignore. In Ethiopia, people talked about skin color quite frankly. For them, dark skin was ugly and they would tease and make fun of anyone with darker skin. They would point them out to me and tell me how ugly they were. And in this fish market, this woman’s friends all made her a figure of fun for the foreigner with his camera. Interestingly, there was nothing in her manner to indicate that she cared one way or the other about it. I don’t know what was in her mind or heart, but according to her behavior, she was just as matter-of-fact about her face as everyone else was.

It was a good morning, a very enjoyable morning, and it made me feel better about having this camera with me. While dealing with the idea of bike touring in Legazpi, I was thinking that I had made a mistake by selling my original Nikon D40X and upgrading eventually to this Olympus system. I would have saved a lot of money and trouble by sticking with that inexpensive but good D40X. But once I went on “walkabout” with my camera in my hand, I enjoyed having the Olympus. There are advantages to it, but they only become apparent when walking around and taking pictures like this.

On my walk, I had stopped at a newish hotel to check it out. It is called the Catanduanes Inn. It was a very nice place and the woman at the front desk told me that it was the newest and best hotel in Virac. They had expensive rooms, but they also had cheaper rooms at about 700 or 800 pesos. On a shorter holiday, those rooms would be perfect.

Right beside the hotel was a small restaurant. I had ignored it before because it looked like another fast-food joint. In fact, the name actually had the words “fast food” in it. But this time I glanced inside and found a wonderful place to eat. It wasn’t fast-food at all – at least not in the sense of hamburgers and fried chicken. It was only fast in that the food was presented buffet style just like a local eatery, and you got your food very quickly. All of my favorite Filipino dishes were there and picked out a few for my lunch. It was nicely air conditioned inside and the seating was comfortable and the food was fantastic. There was even complimentary soup with every meal and they brought over a big pitcher of ice water. It was fantastic and I had a wonderful full meal for 80 pesos.

After my lunch, I dropped by the local tourism office. They had a floor with lots of pictures of local tourist attractions plus a museum up on the third floor. They didn’t have brochures or maps or anything like that, which struck me as odd, but it was an interesting place to visit. The building was very old but completely restored. A woman named Jay chatted with me for a bit. She worked there and was very friendly and full of useful information. She mentioned that she was taking a group on a tour at 1:00 and she invited me to join them. She was taking this group by car to the port town of San Andres and to some old churches and waterfalls and other places of interest. I was very surprised and pleased at this invitation and said that I would be glad to join them, as long as the other people didn’t mind. I wasn’t quite sure if this was a private tour or what it was. I checked out the museum and looked at all the pictures and confirmed with Jay a couple of times that I should just come back at 1 o’clock. I eventually left and said to Jay that I would be back at 1 o’clock. Everything was all set up. I went back to my hotel and rested for a little bit. I put on some sun screen and got my camera gear sorted out and cleaned my sunglasses and all that. I went back to the tourism office and got there at five minutes to one. I’m always a tiny bit early for everything. I went up the stairs, and another woman that works there greeted me and said she was very sorry, but Jay had left with the group at 12:30. And that was it. It’s just one of those bizarre things that happen in countries like this and you’ll never get an answer to why or be able to make sense of it. I was supposed to be there at 1. The tour was at 1. There was no confusion about it. No misunderstanding. But when it came right down to it, Jay just decided to leave at 12:30 instead.

I was pretty annoyed, but in the end it was probably all for the best. I looked forward to chatting with Jay, but it’s unlikely I’d have enjoyed being squired around inside a car. And who knows what the group was like? My original plan had been to walk along the beach and take pictures and I just went back to that plan and set off on my walk – which turned into a fantastic experience.

I walked first just to the waterfront here in the town. I climbed over the seawall and walked along the rocky and sandy shore there. Some children were playing in the sand and flying kites and fishing, and I shot a few great pictures of them. A wide and very long beach area began at the end of Virac’s waterfront. I walked along it for several kilometers and never got anywhere near the end. As far as I could tell, it just went on forever, broken up only occasionally by a river coming down out of the mountains.

The beach was completely deserted as far as any kind of development went. There were no hotels or bungalows or restaurants or bars or anything like that. The sandy beach was extremely wide – perhaps fifty or sixty meters – and ended in a line of trees. Inside the trees were all the people in a long series of fishing villages and towns. Lots of people were hanging out in groups in the shade and I had to greet everyone as I walked along. The children in the water all tried out their English on me, the favorite phrase being “What is your name?” The only annoying part of all this was that the children, once encouraged by getting a reply out of me, would then have to try out that question over and over again. If I did not respond a second or third or fourth time, they would keep shouting the question over and over and over. It was just a big game for them – difficult to resent but equally difficult to endure after a while. With my experiences in certain other countries, I was a bit nervous that if I didn’t play this particular game, I would suddenly have rocks flying at my head – and there was no shortage of rocks on this beach – as the poor stray dogs knew only too well. This pelting of the poor dogs with rocks was also very difficult to endure. I have never understood the point of this, but it is a common sport the world over. The poor dog isn’t harming anyone or doing anything wrong. Why, then, do people in Asia have to torment them so by hurling rocks at them. It must make the life of these dogs a misery – unable to ever really rest or sleep – always worried that someone is going to come up on them and hit them with a heavy rock. A number of dogs barked savagely at me as I walked along, and I understood them only too well. I was a human, so I was the enemy. I wanted them to understand that I was a good human, and they didn’t have to worry about me, but their fear and aggression was too deeply ingrained, of course.

I did pass one kind of official compound. I had seen it from the street the previous day, but I have no idea what it is. It looks like a government retreat center or vacation spot. In any event, the whole thing is enclosed by barbed wire strung between thick cement posts. When I approached the first cement post at the corner, a dog and then four more dogs ran at me barking savagely. They formed a semi-circle and advanced on me. I was feeling a bit ornery by this point, and I changed my course a little bit just to advance on the dogs and eventually force them back. They gave way, of course, broke rank and retreated. Then I noticed a security guard standing inside the fence outside a shack right in the corner. That is where the dogs had come from, and it was clear that these dogs were his personal and informally-trained security force. I was kind of glad that these dogs were getting their own back – getting organized with a human to back them up. I don’t think the children would be throwing stones at these dogs for no reason.

I walked along the beach for about 2 hours. It was getting late in the afternoon, and suddenly it was time for the fishing boats to come back in. It took me a while to pick up on the rhythm and routine of all this. It turns out that all the people hanging out in large groups in the shade were not just hanging out for no reason. They were waiting for the boats to return. They knew all the boats that had gone out early that morning for their villages and they knew approximately when they would return. From far out at sea, they would spot them heading to shore and there would be a stirring of activity. People started to move about and shout to other people and more and more people gathered.

The fishing boats were the typical Filipino bancas – the kind that you see pulled up on shore all over the place. The fishing banca would head straight to shore without slowing down in the slightest. I thought this might just be a bit of bravado, but there was a point to that, too. The boat would have to be dragged out of the water and all the way up the sandy hill to the highest point beyond the tide, so it was to their advantage to hit the beach going as fast as possible to drive their boat up as far as they could.

As they aimed at the shore and got very close, the people in the village all rushed down to water. When the boat hit the shore and the engine was cut off, everyone surrounded the banca and got a hand hold on the outriggers. Someone else put wooden rollers in front of the boat to make it easier to move it along. Then on a signal, everyone started to push, and in the sense that many hands make light work, this extremely heavy boat would be rolled and pushed up the hill, someone running ahead to put the rollers in front of it.

This, I learned was not just for the fun of it or because of a sense of community and helpfulness – thought that is surely a part of it. It was for fish. Once the boat was securely in place at the very highest point, everyone stuck their heads over the boat’s edge to eagerly scan for the day’s catch. An excited chatter would break out if there was a good catch, a low moan and groan would emerge if there was nothing there. When there was a good catch, a man suddenly would stand up holding a bucket of smallish flying fish. There would be as many as twenty or thirty fish in the bucket. Once this bucket of fish came out, the people who had helped push the boat up the beach started jumping up and down and shouting and waving their hands in the air. This fish was their payment for helping, and the fishermen threw the fish into the crowd one by one. People grabbed them out of the air and scrabbled on the ground to collect them up. Some people got no fish at all. Some got three or four and threaded them through their fingers like a bouquet of flowers. Then, if another fishing banca was coming in, the people ran back to the water’s edge and helped push that boat up and out, then collected their payment in fish. I saw people with fish sprouting from their fingers like a fan of feathers running from boat to boat and grabbing the outriggers and pushing it up. There was a holiday or festival atmosphere throughout all of this, and I saw it happening up and down the beach during my entire walk.

The first time I saw it was the most interesting. The people at this boat were excited to see me and my camera, and they called out to me to come and take pictures. They even delayed pushing the boat out of the water until I was in place and could take pictures. At this time, I had no idea that this was a daily routine and I didn’t know that fish as payment were about to go flying through the air. It was all very exciting and interesting.

The fishermen on this first boat had been the luckiest of all the boats I saw. Once the flying fish had been thrown to the crowd and snatched up, young boys climbed into the banca to bring out the real haul – the big fish. Four of them in total came out of this banca – all of them longer and probably heavier than the boy struggling to lift it out. I have no idea if this was a good catch or an average catch, but it seemed like a good catch to me. These fish were huge – the type to make a North American angler drool with envy.

One man in the crowd spoke fairly good English and I stood with him for a bit and chatted. He explained that the fishermen go out for between six and eight hours every day. I expressed my opinion that that was a pretty good haul for six hours of fishing. Each fish was worth about 1,000 pesos, he said, and so the four fish came to a total haul of 4,000 pesos ($100). The fishermen would try to sell the fish locally, but if they didn’t sell, they would bring them to the market in Virac – probably to the market I had been to that morning.

My informant was less enthusiastic about the haul and about fishing in general than I was. He pointed out that such a catch was not guaranteed. As often as not, the fishermen came back with nothing. Worse, sometimes the fishermen themselves never came back at all. The best fish were in the deep ocean, but the further out the fishermen went, the more dangerous it became. The weather was changeable and the ocean was dangerous. Catanduanes is known as the wettest place in the Philippines, and they are hit hard by the annual typhoons. It was not uncommon for a heavy sea to come out of nowhere and a fishing banca would tip over and the fishermen all drown. Better, my informant said, to have a regular job – one with benefits – and not have to go out to sea at all.

I had lots of small but interesting encounters as I walked along the beach. One man helping to push a banca up the beach held up his hand to show me that nearly all of his fingers were gone. What happened to them? I asked. “Shark!” everyone shouted. I think they were pulling my leg, but you never know.

A woman hanging out in the shade with a big group of people waved me over. “One shot! One shot!” she shouted – the Filipino invitation to come and take a picture. I decided to see what was going on and I walked over to the group. Not surprisingly, the woman was a bit over-the-top. It is almost always the craziest people that have the most courage to approach a foreigner. For that reason, I often have the impression that there are more crazy people in a country than there really are. It’s just that as a foreigner traveling around, you tend to meet all the crazy people.

I thought this woman wanted me to take her picture, but she ran away when I turned the camera in her direction. She indicated the baskets and buckets of flying fish. She wanted me to take a picture of those. Then she indicated a very large fish on a board. It had a big flat head and she said it was a Dorado. I dutifully complied and took pictures of all these fish. Then she said, “Give me my money! Give me my money!” I guess she wanted me to pay her something for the pictures. I declined, since I hadn’t wanted to take the pictures in the first place. Everyone then started shouting for money, and then men started making drinking motions with their hands indicating that I should buy drinks for everyone. It was an uncomfortable moment. I never know what to do in these situations. Eventually, I just joked and laughed and said my goodbyes. I didn’t see why I should give them any money.

Many times in just the two days that I’ve been on Catanduanes, I’ve had a conversation that clearly stemmed from the local people’s belief that I was in the Philippines to find a Filipina wife. It was just an assumption based on their experience of the many Americans that come here and wind up doing just that. When people ask me of my opinion of the Philippines, they invariably add “the beautiful women” to my list of things I admire – as if the beautiful women here are just one more product of the Philippines I’m interested in. They also ask me if my government is giving me money. I realized after a while, that they were wondering if I was retired and living on some kind of pension – as many Americans and Europeans do in the Philippines.

At the far end of the beach at about the point where I turned around, two women called out to me and then came over for a chat. They were quite direct and asked me in rapid-fire fashion about my nationality, my marital status, and my age. My answers were all satisfying to them and after adding that I was very, very “guapo” – particularly my blue eyes – they asked if I wanted a Filipina wife. Both women, not surprisingly, were single, and had called me over with the express purpose of seeing if I wanted to marry one of them. I hate to disappoint, but I had to turn down their kind offer and continue my walk back along the beach.

It was an eventful walk and a great day, and I ended up with a wonderful series of pictures. I had dinner back at the little restaurant I’d discovered at lunch time. The power went out while I was there, and it was amusing to see how everyone just took it in stride. There was barely even a reaction. The whole restaurant went dark and seconds later, everyone just turned on the screens of their smart phones. The woman at the cash register calmly flicked on a battery-operated light and things just went on as normal. The power goes out for a few minutes at a time randomly all day and night long I’ve found. I find it refreshing as the thundering music coming out of every available speaker stops for just a blessed bit of time.

 

 

Tags: Asia, Catanduanes Bike Trip, music, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Virac