Friday September 12, 2014
6:20 a.m. San Juan, Siquijor
Room 2 Casa Miranda

The robbery on Kagusuan beach is still on my mind of course. It bothers me to think of the thief out there laughing to himself at how stupid I was to leave my bag unlocked and unattended on the beach. I hate thieves. To this day, I get angry when I think of the person who stole my bike in Taipei. It’s a good thing I’m not in charge of the legal system. Murderers would be treated lightly. I understand murder. I want to kill half the people I meet on a daily basis. Murder makes sense. I would reserve the worst punishment for vandals, litter bugs, and thieves. Those are the people that I despise. People who smash and deface things for no reason are the scum of the earth and should be locked up for life. The same goes for people who throw trash on the ground. Thieves, too. I guess I’m not annoyed at bank robbers or people like that. It’s the people who steal from other people that bother me. I’ve told the story to a few people since the robbery took place, and it’s interesting that every single person has done the same thing – they blamed me. They want to hear the story, and as soon as I get to the part where I left my pannier bag unlocked, they pounce and say that it was my fault and I should be more careful. I corrected all of them and said it wasn’t my fault. It was the fault of the evil person who robbed me. The thief is the bad person here. Blame the thief. Don’t blame the victim.

The robbery story has uncovered another interesting side to life in a place like Siquijor – the strange relationship that people have with money. I’m talking about the local people. Over time, they’ve developed a dual economic system. They think about money as it pertains to themselves, and then they think about foreigners and money in a completely different way. They keep both attitudes in their heads simultaneously. Everyone wants to know how much money was stolen, of course, and when I tell them 2,000 pesos, they all react by saying that it wasn’t very much. I noticed this attitude starting even with the police. They were generally unimpressed because I lost so little money and because it was in Filipino currency, not US dollars. They just assumed my wallet was stuffed with US $100 bills. Everyone dismisses the amount of 2,000 pesos because it was MY money. They naturally assume it means nothing to me. If it were THEIR 2,000 pesos, then the story would be very different. I’ve asked around, and most of the laborers I’ve seen on Siquijor work a long full day for 200 pesos a day. So 2,000 pesos would be their entire income for ten full working days. And those are the people lucky enough to even have a job. Two thousand pesos is no joke here, but they dismiss it entirely when it comes to a foreigner.

I’ve noticed this same pattern when it comes to prices. I was talking to a woman at a beachside bar yesterday. She told me that she worked at this fancy resort for two years and she kept telling me that I should go on a day trip by boat to Apo Island and do all these other things through that resort. I am actually quite interested in going on a day trip to Apo Island, so I asked her about that. She got me excited because she said it was really, really cheap. It hardly cost anything at all. The price? ONLY 1,600 pesos per person – assuming I can get eight people to fill the boat. That’s cheap for me, she was saying. On the other hand, she could never afford it. But for me, it was chickenfeed. I didn’t break the news to her, but 1,600 pesos for a boat trip was not what I would call cheap – especially when there is no guarantee at all of the quality of the trip.

And this question of quality is connected to this strange attitude toward money. The local people have become so accustomed to thinking of their foreign visitors as having huge amounts of money that they don’t really seem to be concerned about giving value for anything. If I and seven other people fork over 1,600 pesos for a boat trip, the organizers would likely have no problem starting the trip late, ending it early, not treating us well, taking us to the wrong places or not taking us to the places they promised to. From their point of view, it doesn’t matter because we just toss around money like confetti anyway.

Within certain limits, it’s true, of course. I was having a cold beer at this place because it was a very beautiful spot with a fantastic view of the ocean and I knew the beer would be ice cold and the seating was nice. For all of that, I understood that I would be paying a bit extra for the beer – 40 pesos per bottle instead of the 22 pesos I might pay at a local roadside eatery. And foreigners will show up at this bar and drink six or seven of these 40-peso bottles of beer. It’s worth it to them to pay the premium price for the beer in exchange for the gorgeous setting and environment. Meanwhile, the woman serving you is sleeping on a sofa inside the bar at night because she can’t afford her own place and works 16-hour days and probably makes 200 pesos a day. She’s not about to pay a single peso extra for a bottle of beer. She’s going to get the cheap stuff. And she’s certainly not going to Apo Island for 1,600 pesos, and losing 2,000 pesos to a thief would be a disaster for her. For me, apparently, it doesn’t matter at all.

No word from the police, of course. I didn’t exactly expect them to roll up to the Casa Miranda with a handcuffed thief in the back seat.

10:30 a.m.

Back in my room after a long walk down the beach. I stepped outside earlier just to check out the beach, and I was surprised to see that the tide had gone way, way out. I decided to take advantage of this and I got out my camera to go for a walk out into the exposed area. I put the macro lens on the camera for this trip thinking that I could take some close-up pictures of various sea creatures. I didn’t intend on going far, but I ended up walking the entire length of the beach as far as I could go before hitting the high cliffs at the far northern end. It was a great walk full of interesting sights and encounters.

I saw, for example, a couple of dozen men pushing a homemade V-shaped contraption through the water. A net was strung between the two bamboo arms of the net. I was told they were catching milkfish and these would be sold for fish ponds. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, and I was even less sure when I waded out to these contraptions and looked inside the buckets to see their catch. The fish they were catching were so small as to be nearly microscopic. They could barely be seen with the naked eye. This confused me on several levels. What did these fish grow up into to make them so valuable? How did the men catch them, since the holes in the netting were thousands of times larger than the fish themselves? And once they had them in their handheld basins, how did they transfer them to the buckets? I saw no netting fine enough to catch these fish. It was a bit of a mystery.

Another interesting activity was taking place on shore where groups of women sat around big piles of sea urchins, splitting them open and removing the star-shaped flesh inside them. I had seen children in Oslob doing this, but not nearly on this scale. Someone had clearly gone out during the night by boat and collected all these urchins. There were hundreds of them in big piles. Then the women set to work in a kind of assembly line. Someone would expertly split them open with a large knife. One half contained the mouth of the sea urchin and this half was tossed aside. The other half contained the star-shaped flesh and some other material. This extra material was scraped out with their thumbs, and then this half was tossed over to the next woman. This woman scraped out the star-shaped flesh and washed and sorted it and then slid it down the neck of a glass bottle. They had been at this task for some time already, and each woman had several bottles filled to the top with yellowish sea urchin flesh. I had a ton of questions about this process – particularly about what came next – but the women could not speak English well. So I don’t know how this sea urchin flesh was prepared and eaten or where it was sold or how much it was worth. I was most curious, in fact, about the biology of the sea urchin. I don’t think I had ever seen them cut open like this before, and I wondered what kind of creature they were. The mouth on the one side didn’t seem to be connected to the yellow fleshy stuff on the other side. And the outside of the hard shell was covered in hundreds of tiny spines that continued to wave and move and propel the shell around even after it was cut in half. The question is whether all these parts represents aspects of a single organism connected by a nervous system and a digestive system, or were they all separate entities somehow living together on this round shell? How did the sea urchin consume what came in through that scary-looking mouth? I’ll have to look this up when I get on the Internet.

It was also interesting to see the beach sides of all the resorts that I had previously only seen from the road. The weird thing is that from the road you can often see very little. You just see high walls and fences. But the beach is public property and I can walk right along it without a problem and see into most of the resorts and check them out. I got a much better idea of what they were like from the beach than from the road. I smiled when I passed by JJ’s Backpackers Village – the place that wouldn’t even let me in to look around without buying a drink. From the beach, I could get a clear view of what had been denied to me the day before. So there, JJ’s! And I was pleased to hear that they were playing ridiculous reggae music over their sound system. I would not want to stay anywhere that played reggae. I know it is associated with backpackers and beach life, but I can’t stand it.

I also got to pet a bunch of friendly beach dogs. I was surprised that they would come right up to me. I can only assume that they learned to trust humans because they are hanging around all the Westerners staying at these beach resorts. We are the only people on Siquijor dumb enough to go all googly over a wild animal and tell him he’s “such a good boy, such a good dog!” and scratch him behind the ears. I snapped a few pictures, too. I was pleased to have my macro lens. I don’t really understand macro photography and how this lens works, but at least I’m able to take close-up shots with it. I couldn’t get these shots with any other lens. I suppose if I had to regret buying this or that lens, I wouldn’t regret buying this one. It combines a 60mm telephoto (120mm in 35mm terms) with macro capability. It is also lightweight and very sharp. The lens I could probably do without is the much heavier and much more expensive 75mm, which I purchased before I bought this 60mm. The 75mm is an awesome lens – extremely sharp and bright. However, for my purposes, the 60mm probably would have been enough and would serve well for portrait shots as well as for macro.

Tags: Apo Island, bike, Casa Miranda, milkfish, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, San Juan, sea urchin, Siquijor