The skies look good this morning so I imagine I will be hitting the road. I hope that physically I do better than I did on my ride here from Tacloban. I don’t have my hopes up too far, though. I’m not in good shape. My right ankle is very sore. It’s difficult to walk first thing in the morning. My right knee is sore and very swollen for some reason. One of the toes on my left foot has swollen up and is very tender and hot to the touch. I must have gotten some kind of bug bite during the day yesterday. Finally, my back is quite sore. When I get up after sitting and reading for a while, it is impossible to stand straight. I end up lurching around like an old man. On the positive side, my left knee, which had given me so much trouble before, feels better. I rode about 20 kilometers yesterday just exploring this area, and it gave me no trouble. However, that was without a load on the bike. It is pushing a heavy load that seems to cause the knee problems.

I’m fairly certain that I’m going to go to the island of Biliran today. It has long been on my list as a place to check out, and I will be riding right past it. It’s quite a small island, only about 35 kilometers by 20 kilometers. Yet, it is supposed to very beautiful and interesting. People compare it to Camiguin island, which I visited on my last trip here. There is accommodation in the capital town of Naval and supposedly nowhere else. My map tells me that it is 64 kilometers to Naval. My informants say that it is closer to 100 kilometers. Either way, I should be able to get there today. It is a paved road the entire way. The road that goes around the island is marked as a secondary road, which means that is likely unpaved. I’m told that it is a very rough road. I imagine that cycling around Biliran will be similar to cycling around Camiguin. Just a much shorter trip. I can see Biliran from the beach here in Caligaran. It has been covered in clouds the entire time, but it is clearly quite mountainous.

I don’t know how long I’ll spend on Biliran. This gets back to my problem of late – the conflict between cycling and staying in one place. I’ve always liked staying in one place while overseas. I did more hanging out than cycling pretty much everywhere I’ve been, but the impulse seems even stronger now. I’ve been thinking about that a lot while here in Caligara, and it is easy to come up with a justification for it. The main one is that my goal in going to another country is to enjoy myself and have new experiences and get to know something of that country. Cycling serves in that it gets me to places like Carigara (rather than to tourist destinations), but when you list all the places in a country that you can be, the road itself is the worst place of all. The road is crowded and noisy and dangerous. So why spend all your time in the worst place that a country has to offer? Bike touring comes off very poorly when you think about it in those terms. It would be like going to Canada and spending all your time cycling down the 401 near Toronto during rush hour. That wouldn’t be the best use of your time as a visitor to Canada.

However, it certainly is ideal for short distances. Having a bicycle is certainly ideal. Without a bicycle, I wouldn’t have been able to explore Carigara and the surrounding area as I have done. You simply can’t get anywhere on foot. And today, wanting to go to Naval on Biliran, a bicycle is ideal. Getting there using local transportation would be a nightmare for me. I would have to depend on other people and it would take forever and be chaotic and uncomfortable. And it would involve an endless series of bits of transportation. I’d have to find a way to get from this resort back into the town of Carigara. That would involve negotiating with someone and getting ripped off. Then I’d have to somehow find the local bus terminal and get there. Then I would have to wait for hours as the local bus filled up with passengers. There would be no schedule. I’d have to carry a heavy backpack the entire time and while waiting I’d have to use the local horrendous bathrooms – assuming they have any. That is always a problem. Then the trip would be horrendous and slow. I’d arrive in Naval and then have to find other transportation to bring me to a hotel, and once there, I’d be trapped again with no way to explore except on foot. For me, there would be nothing worse and I simply wouldn’t even do it. I’d stay home. So a bicycle is clearly superior. (I have to remind myself of this from time to time.) When I think back, I think it was unfortunate that I had so little money while I was hanging out in Quito. It would have been nice to buy a bicycle while I was there.

The weather yesterday continued to be somewhat rainy and extremely windy. But there were breaks and I managed to spend an entertaining day. I enjoyed taking my camera out and taking pictures of the bits of marine life that had washed up on the shore. I still like my Olympus, but I often wonder if I made the right choice. I certainly do miss having an optical viewfinder. And it always feels somewhat flimsy and delicate in my hands.

I rode into Caligara for an early lunch and found the town to be somewhat quiet. I discovered that it was a holiday. I was told that it was “Heroes Day.” But restaurants were open, and I got a good meal. I explored the town after that and then I went for a long ride down some small backroads into the farming villages. It was a beautiful ride through green rice fields spread out below the mountains. As always, I was tremendously curious about the people in the farm houses and how they lived. To my great surprise, about a kilometer from the main road, I found a quite fancy resort with a restaurant, a swimming pool, nice grounds, and a few rooms. They had big signs advertising their “home-cooked meals”. Rooms there were 1,200 pesos a night.

 

 

Tags: Biliran Trip, Canada, load, Philippines Bike Trip 2013