I woke up full intending to make the best of the day. Matnog was not going to defeat me. I was going to be flexible and I was going to go with the flow. I was not going to impose my Western ideas of logic and common sense. I would simply go to the tourism office for 7 o’clock and then let what happens happen. I was going to be a good tourist and understand that cultures are different.

I was up and out of my tent at around 5:00. The sunshine was already blasting my eyeballs and the roosters were blasting my ears. There was no point to just lying there. I got up and showered and then made a cup of coffee on my Trangia. Then I set about packing for the day – not an easy task.

I decided that the best thing to do was to pack up a bag of all my valuable things and lock the zipper and leave it with the Richwell staff. They could put it in their office. The alternatives were to leave it in my tent, leave it at the tourism office, or to bring it with me island-hoppping (assuming that happens). None of my alternatives seemed ideal, but there was nothjng else I could do.

Everything else, I was just going to leave in my tent and put a padlock on the zipper. Anyone could cut open the tent with a knife, but I was in the Richwell compound surrounded on three sides by a 7-foot concrete wall and on the fourth by barbed wire. There were staff everywhere and my tent was right inside the parking area with their valuable vehicles. It was about as safe a camping spot as you could hope for. With that in mind, I decided not to bother with packing up my cookstove and a few other odds and ends. I had set up a cooking area on a big table, and I was so fed up with constantly packing and unpacking that I couldn’t face putting all that stuff away, too.

Finally, I was on my bike and riding into charmless Matnog. I had been told to bring some food with me for the island-hopping tour. I had had plans to get some real food, but nothing was open. The best I could do was water and a big bag of sweet rolls. I can easily not eat much for a day and I wasn’t worried about it.

I got to the tourism office at exactly 7 o’clock as I was told to do. And the tourism office was, as I expected, locked up and empty. I found a rock to sit on and I sat there with all the giant trucks roaring past and blasting black exhaust into my face. I was trying very hard to be serene and to go with the flow. I assumed there was a 50% chance that there would be no island-hopping tour at all, and I was mentally preparing myself for that or for any other crazy and illogical thing that happened.

I don’t even know what time the tourism people showed up at the office. I had zoned out competely and didn’t even realize they were there until a boat man came up to me and said that I could sit inside the tourism office. I then found the doors were open and I went inside. I made a brief attempt – very brief – to get information, but I got no answers and I simply sat on a plastic chair to await developments. I found it very, very hard to sit there quietly not knowing what was going on. I had no idea how people could live in that constant state of simply not knowing anything and not caring. Finally, someone spoke to me and said that a woman that was at the desk represented some group that I could go with. Action! Things were happening! Island-hopping!

Hold on, cowboy. There are a few hurdles to overcome. Hurdle number one was the price. The most frustrating of the tourism guys kind of tricked me at this point. He spoke to me and said that I could go with this group, but it would cost me 500 pesos. Is that okay? Without thinking, I said it was fine. With my logical brain, I just assumed that it was a small group and when you add up the group and divide the cost by that number, you come up with 500 pesos per person. So I said fine. But, of course, it wasn’t that way at all. The point was that it costs 500 pesos per FOREIGNER. From what I could make out, this group – a group of 11 people – paid 50 pesos each. They as a group paid for half the boat. I as a foreigner paid for the other half!

I was not happy about that at all, especially when my 500 pesos still did not entitle me to any information at all – about this group, about the tour, about anything. I was also unhappy when I was told to hand my 500 pesos directly to the woman! She had paid some unknown sum to the tourist office. And the tourist office had negotiated with me on her behalf so that the dumb foreigner would pay ten times more than anyone else – and directly into her pocket. But by the time I knew all this, it was too late to do anything about it. My only other option was to simply leave and not go at all.

I paid the woman my 500 pesos, and then the tourism staff told me there was the small matter of the other fees. There was a registration fee of 300 pesos and this fee and that fee and some other fee. I had had enough by this point, and I pointed out that 300 pesos seemed pretty high for a registration fee. This brought out a torrent of words from this man, none of which made any sense. I insisted, though, that this 300 pesos was unreasonable and I didn’t understand it. He then explained that this was the foreigner price. The local price was 50 pesos for registration. The foreigner price was 300 pesos. I told him that this was crazy. I went on to tell him that the foreigner price system in the Philippines was giving the country a bad reputation. I told him that people in Canada were very angry about this foreigner price and thought it was very unfair and that they won’t come to the Philippines anymore because of it. This is completely untrue, of course, but it was true that people I knew had recently cut their visit to the Philippines short and gone to Indonesia instead partially because of the constant hassle of this “foreigner price”.

I must have looked visibly upset because the man relented at this point and said that I could pay the local price of 50 pesos. However, there was also another fee of 20 pesos for a total of 70 pesos. “Is that okay?”

I hardly cared at that point. The whole transaction had left such a bad taste in my mouth that I just wanted to get it over with and forget about it. I signed the register and then handed the man behind the counter a 100-peso note. He then filled out a receipt for 100 pesos and gave me no change. I didn’t have the energy to ask about this mysterious 30-peso charge that had been added. I assumed that there really was no extra charge and that all the numbers I was being quoted as the “foreigner price” were just being made up on the spot. They were trying to get as much money out of me as they could and just testing the waters as they went. If I had handed him a 500-peso note, he probaby would have written a receipt for 500 pesos and tried to keep all of it.

I found the whole concept of the “foreigner price” offensive for obvious reasons, but also because in my time in the Philippines I often felt like the poor man. I was struggling up hills on my bicycle and sleeping in my tent and sleeping in dorm beds while all around me, Filipinos were racing by in brand new cars and SUVs and motorcycles, constantly texting on their expensive smart phones, taking pictures with their iPads and Nikon SLRs. Where does this idea come from that foreigners are so rich when there is so much money in the Philippines?

I’d like to say that the island-hopping experience was so amazing that it made all of this worthwhile. I’d like to say that, but I can’t. It was okay, but it was definitely an experience slanted toward a Filipino sensibility and not a Western one. My idea and my hope was to go on the boat to many different spots and go snorkeling in each one. But even though I’d paid for half the boat, I was outnumbered 11 to 1 and those 11 were Filipinos. Their idea for the island-hopping experience was to pack as much junk food as possible into their bags and then spend five hours on one beach eating and drinking and eating and drinking and eating and drinking. It’s true that we went to three different places. But we were rushed through places one and two in order to get us to the third place. There, the boat dropped us off and took off and there we sat for five hours until they came back and picked us up. The Filipinos didn’t mind because they brought enough food to keep eating for all of those five hours.

I should back up in my story here and inject a bit more of a reasonable and pleasant tone, because it really wasn’t that bad. It was just different from my expectations and it was overshadowed by the unpleasant interaction I’d had with the tourism office.

Tags: fee, FOREIGNER, Legazpi to Matnog, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, tent