I found a new place to have a meal. It was a typical eatery but had actual chairs and tables. That was kind of nice. One thing in my life here is that I often end up sitting on stools and benches and at awkward and rickety plastic tables. It drives me crazy and makes my back really hurt. I’ve never been able to sit without a backrest. Even here in my hotel room, I don’t have a chair. There is only a wooden bench, and I experience a lot of trouble just trying to sit up straight in order to type. My back hurts way too much if it curves (doesn’t bode well for me in my seventies or eighties if, the horror, I ever make it that far). I remember that my grandmother was curled up like a snail shell by the end of her life. When I sit here, I have to concentrate on keeping my back straight with my back muscles. I have to actually think about it all the time and it makes it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

For lunch, I had a typical Filipino spread. There really wasn’t much choice. I had rice, of course, plus a vegetable dish that I didn’t recognize and a meat dish that I didn’t recognize. I rarely know what I’m eating. The meat can be pork or caribao. And I had two bananas for desert. All these restaurants offer water. In some towns, the water generally comes out of large containers that they get from the water refillling stations. You can be fairly certain it is purified water. Other places provide water from the local well. When I first got here, I was a bit careful about the water source, but not anymore. I have enough experience to know that the water from the wells is quite good. And I drink so much water that I can’t be that careful. If I only drank purified water, I’d never get enough water. I love it when the eateries keep a jug of water in a refrigerator for their customers. I’ll get an entire jug all to myself and even if the water is only slightly chilled, it makes all the difference in the world, and I drink it like it is the nectar of the gods.

Most of these eateries will also offer a fish dish of some kind, but I never ask for those. With fish, I suppose my diet would have some variety, but the fish always looks so unappetizing and so difficult to eat. I can’t stand the smell of fish either.

Prices tend to be okay. I can get a meal of rice with one meat and one vegetable dish for between a dollar and a dollar and a half Canadian. Some places, like the one I went to yesterday, will serve the exact same food but charge triple. I don’t know how they get away with it. I guess the extra charge is for the luxury of chairs with backs and a bit more room for the tables. Most eateries are just little shacks and there is almost no room to move around. The benches and tables are jammed in very tightly, and everything is munchkin sized, so I have trouble finding room for my legs.

I went back to my room at Chona’s Boarding House after lunch just to hang out and get out of the searing sun. I chatted for a while with some of the students that stay at this boarding house. I could only handle their standard questions for so long, though, and then I had to leave. I get along with the boarding house dog much better than I do with the people here. The dog is a friendly creature and we’ve become great pals, much to the amazement of everyone here. My liking for animals and constantly trying to entice the cats and the dogs over astonishes everyone. They aren’t nasty to their animals here, thankfully. They don’t generally beat them or hit them with rocks and sticks. (Only young idiot boys will do that sometimes.) They also seem to feed them well and take care of their basic needs. So the dogs and cats look somewhat healthy and happy. But people don’t generally pet them and play with them. So it’s quite a novelty for them to see me doing it. It gets weird because after a single day, the local dogs will run up to me with pleasure. But the local people will try to chase them off. They don’t realize that the dogs and I have become friends.

I got back on the bike yesterday and went for a ride back to the lovely little town of Almeria. My plan was to head into the mountains there down whatever roads I could find. There were supposed to be some beautiful rice terraces up there.

I found a small cement road leading away from Almeria and into the mountains and I turned down it. It crossed a beautiful little stream and then started to climb. The climb was so steep that it was impossible to ride my bike any farther than that. I got off the bike and started to push it and kept pushing it for the next two and a half hours.

It was a tough, tough climb. I started to sweat and soon my clothes were entirely drenched. This time, I had made sure to bring enough water for the day and I had all of my bicycle bottles filled plus one of the extra-large Nalgene bottles in my pannier bag. Even that wasn’t really enough, and I had to ration myself to make sure that it lasted.

I couldn’t help but dream about having a motorcycle. On a bicycle, this was a big effort, and as beautiful as the scenery was, I don’t know that it was worth the effort. On a motorcycle, I could have raced up this mountain road without all that pain and gotten the exact same views.

I was astonished, actually, at the steepness of the grade. There were two villages on this road that I had heard about, and quite a few people went past me on motorbikes. Some of them were the motorbike taxis with four and even five people on them. The engines on these bikes were roaring with the effort. They had tiny 125cc and 150cc engines, and I don’t think they were designed for that kind of load. I wondered how quickly they wore out because of that.

A normal person would have turned around fairly quickly, but, lazy as I am, I do have something of a stubborn streak. Since I had started climbing up this road, I wanted to finish it and I kept going no matter how difficult it became.

I passed quite a few people that greeted me with the usual sentences and questions, but one farmer seemed different and I stopped to chat with him. There was something about his English that seemed more natural, and I found out that despite looking like a standard rice farmer, he had gone to university and spent a two-year contract working in Abu Dhabi. He was back in the Philippines for a couple of months before he returned for another two-year contract. I wanted to ask him about his salary, but I didn’t. I’m intrigued by the idea of money here. People are generally poor, but they are poor in odd ways. They aren’t truly poor like the people of Ethiopia are poor. In Ethiopia, a poor farmer truly owns nothing but the land, the animals, the mud house he lives in, and the one ragged shirt and one ragged pair of shorts he’s wearing. People in the Philippines are much richer. From a distance, this farmer looked extermely poor. The house was a typical wooden shack. But from the road, I could see into the shack and the first thing I saw was a big TV. The children were all barefoot and looked poor, but half of them had smartphones and were busy texting away. I look at the fancy motorbikes passing me, and I wonder how anyone can afford them. Where does the money come from? I have no idea.

Eventually, the cement paving ended and I found myself pushing the bike along a dirt road. Then even the dirt disappeared and was replaced with large rocks. There is some virtue in continuing on even when the going is difficult, but this was ridiculous even for me, and I decided after a while to end my journey. It was pretty silly to be pushing my bike along that rocky road, particularly since the beautiful scenery had long since vanished. If the road had continued going up the mountains and offered nice views of the rice terraces and the ocean, I’d have kept going. However, the road had topped out and was going along a flat section between the mountains with the jungle on all sides and no views anywhere. I asked a man about the final town, and he said it was still five kilometers away. That would have taken me another couple of hours, and it didn’t seem worth it. The towns here, even the small villages, are rarely very attractive or interesting.

Going back down wasn’t as hard as going up, but it wasn’t easy. I rode my bike nearly the entire way, and I had to really muscle the bike to keep it straight on the rocky and muddy road. Then on the cement, I had to ride the brakes. However, I couldn’t just apply the brakes and coast to the bottom. I noticed that the rims were getting extremely hot. They were so hot that I couldn’t touch them with my fingers. I don’t know how hot they can get without damaging something, but I didn’t want to find out, and I tried to apply the brakes sparingly, and I stopped often to let the rims cool down. I heard some screeching at one point, which made me think that the brake pads have finally worn down to metal. I don’t want to mess around with changing the brake pads, but I think it is time to do that. I have two sets with me, so I think I’ll attempt that tonight when I get back from today’s adventures.

My plan for today is to return to the same area. I’d find out that another road in that same region is much nicer than the one that I had taken. I want to go back and go up that road and see what there is to see.

 

 

Tags: bike, Biliran Trip, Chona Boarding House, pannier bag, Philippines Bike Trip 2013