Monday September 22, 2014
6:00 a.m. CarCar, Cebu
Room 4, Aloha – Pink House

I don’t think there is much memory left in the NEO, but we’ll see how far I get.

A somewhat eventful day yesterday and I’m feeling the effects this morning. Tired and sore. The Doug Health Check wouldn’t give very good results this morning. Anyway, I woke in my tent to all the crazy animal noises in Oslob. I had my coffee and journal session and then I had some breakfast in town. I packed up at a somewhat leisurely pace, annoyed again at the weight of each bag as I finished packing it. I also had a large amount of purified water in the Dromedary Bag, and I considered what to do with it. All my water bottles were full – three bike bottles and 1 1.4-liter Nalgene – but that wasn’t going to get me through the day. I would need to get more, so it would be handy to just keep the extra water and start the day with it. It would soon disappear in this heat as I drank and drank and drank. Despite my bags being heavy, there is a lot of empty space, and I just stuffed the half-empty Dromedary Bag into one of my rear pannier bags. I was thinking at the time that I was really pushing the limit of how much weight a bike could carry. But, honestly, a few extra liters of water shouldn’t make a decisive difference. What if I weighed 200 pounds instead of 180? That would add 20 pounds right there, and the bike would, theoretically, be fine with it.

I wasn’t sure how far I was going to go. I have the immigration trip hanging over my head in Cebu, so getting there on Sunday (yesterday) wasn’t a bad idea. Then I could go to immigration right away on Monday morning. I think the full distance would have been around 120 or 130 kilometers. That sort of distance isn’t easy on these hills and in this heat, but it’s doable. On the other hand, I could have two much easier days and split the distance in half.

The ride was very pleasant through most of the distance I ended up covering. The Cebu coastal highway offers some very nice scenery, and it was a pleasure to take it all in while riding along. The buses with their air horns were back, but I could live with that. I also had a lot of company in the form of large cycling groups. These were like the groups I saw on Siquijor – thirty or forty people all wearing matching Lycra cycling clothes and riding on very modern and expensive mountain bikes. I was inwardly somewhat amused to see how out of shape most of them were and how much trouble they had going up the hills. They were clearly part of a cycling club and were doing this for their health. But some had just started and their legs weren’t up to the steep hills quite yet. Perhaps the heat was a bit much for them as well. I can understand both problems. In any event, despite carrying six million pounds of camping gear and camera gear, I kept up with them and even did better than they did on the hills. Quite a few of their members actually dropped out and took rides on motorcycles. This left other riders to ride their bike while pushing a second bike. THAT must have been exhausting not to mention very annoying. Other cyclists zoomed past me as they were towed up the hills by motorcycles. They just held on to a rope with one hand and the handlebars with their other hand.

As I rode, I wondered if I should have just kept cycling the previous day instead of stopping in Oslob. I had the time, and then I could have cut that day’s distance to Cebu by a large amount. I became more and more interested in going all the way to Cebu in one day, so I started to kick myself that I hadn’t ridden the final 40 or 50 kilometers to Argao. But then I learned that all this cycling craziness was related to a triathlon event in Argao. I eventually came to see how big this event was and it was clear that all of the guest houses in Argao were fully booked. Even if I had ridden all the way there, looking forward to collapsing in an air-conditioned room, I would have found nowhere to stay. So it was a wise decision to camp in Oslob.

Things were going relatively swimmingly, and then, as things do, things fell apart. I was riding up a very steep hill and putting a lot of pressure on the pedals. Then I heard the most awful sound in the world – the telltale ping of a spoke breaking. Right after hearing the ping, my tire started rubbing against the frame and the bike got all wobbly. I pulled over with a heavy heart. I was sort of expecting spokes to break. A couple had broken during the typhoon period. That might have indicated the spokes had reached the limit of their useful life. But it could also have been damage from the bike being bashed around in the tsunami or storm surge or whatever you want to call it. I was hoping it was just a freak accident, and I wouldn’t have to replace all the spokes. My experience in the past is that if one spoke breaks and then another spoke breaks, that means they are all eventually going to break.

Well, I got off the bike to check out the damage. The first bad news was that the broken spoke was on the cassette side of the rear wheel. Any other spoke could be replaced somewhat easily. But replacing this spoke would require removing the cassette. I have a small emergency tool that is supposed to be able to do this, but I never got around to actually using it. I don’t even know if it would work. My guess was that it wouldn’t. One needs good shop tools for that kind of operation. I certainly didn’t want to make my first attempt in the ditch at the side of a very busy road with the sun burning me to a cinder.

My other option was to replace the broken spoke with a special replacement Kevlar line that I have. It’s designed to thread into a spoke nipple and then you can tighten it up and it serves as an emergency spoke to get you home. I got out this Kevlar line and started reading the instructions. It turned out to be somewhat complicated when the spoke in question was on the cassette side, but it was an option to at least get me to Argao. In Argao, I figured I could just catch a bus the rest of the way to Cebu. I didn’t have time to mess around. This broken spoken couldn’t have come at a worse time – just a couple of days before my flight to Malaysia.

My attempt with the Kevlar line emergency spoke came to nothing because as I started to work, I realized that there were three broken spokes, not just the one. One was on the cassette side and the other two were on the other side – all three on the rear wheel. That pretty much laid out my options – I could do nothing.

I suppose I could have waved down one of my enemy buses and tried to negotiate passage for me and my bike to Cebu, but I really didn’t want to do that. I’d seen other people waving down buses, and they just blew past them. The traffic flow was really, really high, and I was clearly looking at a regular Sunday event as tens of thousands of rich people from Cebu return from their weekend holiday and go back to Cebu. The buses were full, and I don’t think I could have gotten one in Argao let alone at the side of the road. My best option was to walk my bike to Argao, spend the night there, and then take a bus in the morning. Argao was only nine kilometers away, and I could walk my bike there in a couple of hours. Other than the hassle of the heavy traffic, it was no big deal.

It was quite embarrassing to be pushing my bike. I was always at the receiving end of a lot of jokes and laughter while riding my bike. While walking it, I guess I looked even more ridiculous and the jokes and laughter increased. My slow speed made it even worse because I couldn’t just zoom past these people. They’d see me coming from far away and the jokes and laughter would start. And then they’d continue all the way up to when I reached them and then walked past them. It was trying for the soul. It was also embarrassing to be around so many other cyclists. They all assumed, naturally, that the hills were too steep for me and that I wasn’t able to ride up them with my heavy load. When the first couple of groups rode past me, I told them that I had broken three spokes. This information was passed around the group quickly, and my honor as a cyclist was restored. I’m not sure if this particular angle to the tale is significant, but out of all the cyclists that passed me, no one stopped to offer any kind of help. Not one person. In my turn, I had passed two groups of cyclists that looked to be in trouble. One incident involved a flat tire. The other one involved a cyclist that was suffering from heat stroke and couldn’t continue. I stopped at both groups to see if there was anything I could do. I wasn’t in the greatest of shape myself, but I had tools, tons of flat tire repair kits, and many extra liters of water. The point is that I stopped to ask if I could help. When I told these cyclists about my broken spokes, no one stopped to offer help or to just commiserate. I suppose this is the point I was trying to make in my discussion with the Singles for Christ group – that, yes, Filipinos were friendly, but that doesn’t mean much when this much-lauded friendliness amounts to little more than calling out “Hey, Joe!” and laughing a lot. To be fair, these cyclists were lost in their own world and I was such a strange sight to them, they wouldn’t really know what to do with me or how to relate to me. Also, they are much more into the group experience, and if a single cyclist stopped to help me, that person would lose the group as it cycled on ahead. Nothing is more terrifying to a typical Filipino than being alone – separated from the group. The group of cyclists could have stopped, but it wasn’t realistic to expect just one cyclist to stop. Their minds don’t work that way.

A hero did eventually emerge. This hero was a tricycle driver. He guessed that I was in trouble and he pulled over ahead of me to see if he could help. His suggestion was a reasonable one – to load up my bike and gear onto his tricycle and drive me into Argao. I was resistant at first because I wasn’t all that bothered by walking the distance to Argao. And accepting his offer could mean losing all control of my destiny and perhaps a lot of money. Luckily for me, this man was a typical Filipino in that the very idea of walking to Argao (let along pushing a bike while walking) absolutely horrified him. People generally don’t walk a hundred meters if they can help it, let alone nine kilometers. This man eventually wore down my resolve and I accepted his offer. It helped a lot when he said that it would only cost fifteen pesos. I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly at first. I was expecting a figure like a thousand pesos or five hundred pesos. But fifteen pesos was a huge bargain to carry me and my bike all the way to Argao. He said he knew of a good bike shop where they could replace my spokes in no time.

Actually getting my bike onto his tricycle wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. His idea was to take the entire loaded bike, flip it onto its rear wheel and then just lash it to the back. He got a group of men together and they started to do this. Of course, I stopped them. In any event, they never would have managed it. The bike was far too heavy to handle in that way. We discussed it for a bit, and I finally convinced him to call off his friends when I started unhooking the pannier bags. The problem was that he had no idea that they came off so easily. If you know the trick and you have done it hundreds of times, you can pop off the four pannier bags in just a few seconds. He then saw the wisdom of my approach.

I was a bit apprehensive during this operation. As I’ve mentioned before, I have had difficulty on focusing on the task at hand when it comes to cycling. I’m fuzzy and vague. It’s one thing to keep a loaded bike under control. But when you suddenly have all the bags and bungee cords and maps and water bottles and the rest of it scattered about, you can lose track of things. I only half-trusted this guy, and I still had it in the back of my mind that this was all an elaborate ruse to suddenly disappear with my bike and bags or just one of my bags. I also didn’t trust his instincts when it came to handling my bike. I pictured him doing it poorly and damaging the bike further or even having the bike suddenly fall off and crash onto the highway at high speed and get run over by a bus. I like to do things slowly and methodically and to think things through. This guy was a true Filipino and he was very gung-ho. Just grab the bike, jam it into place and then start lashing a rope. I couldn’t stop him. I did assert myself, though, and I made sure that his rope was secure and then I got out my own rope and used it to tie the bike in place. His one rope and one knot hardly seemed like enough. Even with my rope added, I was worried throughout the entire journey. A tricycle is not a smooth vehicle. We bounced around like crazy. Plus. All of his friends jumped aboard when we set off. To me, that felt like overload, but, of course, in reality with me and my bike and gear we were barely even loaded. They can put fifteen people and all their market purchases onto one of these things. Me and my bike was nothing at all.

I have to say that once the excitement died down, I really enjoyed that trip into Argao. It was a nice change to be driving inside a shaded tricycle, being powered up and down the hills by an engine, and not having to worry about a thing. It was also nice to have someone helping me, to not feel totally alone and dealing with all the difficulties of cycling by myself. It’s the old “two against the world” thing. It was also nice to be doing something that Filipinos can understand. They understand and approve of riding a tricycle to Argao and then catching a bus to Cebu. That is sane behavior. They DON’T understand riding a loaded touring bike, and a normal day here consists of constant negative pressure. They are trying to be helpful in their way, but every day, all day long, I have to deal with the long series of “should”. You should buy a motorcycle. You should take a bus. You should take a tricycle. You should have a companion. You should have a wife. You should have children. You should have a Filipina girlfriend. The pressure can become very annoying if not unbearable after a while. I want to just give in and say, “All right! All right. I’ll buy a motorcycle and go to a nice beach resort on a group trip and marry a Filipina and have children to take care of me when I get old.” I think part of it is how few Westerners I come in contact with. I get no support from any kind of peer group. If you’re backpacking around, you at least meet up with all these other Westerners and you talk and compare notes and even travel together and you support each other in what you are doing. You value the same experience and you don’t have to explain yourself constantly and fight against all this negative pressure. As psychology professors around the world know full well, it’s very hard to maintain your identity and stand your ground when you are totally alone and the entire world is your opposite. It’s like those experiments where they present a person with a clear right and wrong answer, like which of two lines is longer. One line is MUCH longer than the other, but when twenty or thirty other people all claim that the short line is the longest line, people will say the same thing. They know it is wrong, but they will go with the group pressure. My situation is different, but there are parallels. At the core of my experience, I am gaining a glimpse into a foreign land, and from a backpacker point of view, that is valuable. Every single person in Canada would understand perfectly if I told them that I rode my bicycle through the Philippines. They’d “get” why this would be interesting and in telling my story, I’d get a lot of support. “Wow! That must have been amazing!” etc. But when you almost never see another Westerner, you are surrounded all day long by thousands of people who have different values and view you as insane. They view me as so insane that quite often they never actually realize what I’m doing. The activity – cycling from Siquijor back to Cebu city – is such a foreign concept that their brains won’t accept it even after I tell them. In their world, a bicycle is for poor people who might want to ride from their house to the market one hundred meters down the road. That’s it. Even when I tell them that I’m riding to Cebu City and they repeat that statement, they still often don’t process it. They just assume I’m taking the bus. Against everything I’d said and all the evidence of their senses, they still just assume I’m taking a bus or my own SUV. The bike is for crazy hobbyists like the hundreds of competitors in the triathlon. THAT they understand. And how they understand it became clear much later in the day when I was being passed by dozens and dozens of SUVs with racing bicycles attached to the racks on the back. All the triathlon competitors had, of course, driven down from Cebu in their SUVs, had ridden their bikes in the race,and now were driving back to Cebu. That is normal. I am not normal.

To finish my story quickly, my tricycle driver brought me to a typical roadside motorcycle shop – the type of place where all the repairs are done while sitting on the dirt patch out front. It wasn’t the type of place to inspire confidence, but they did have two of those wheel-truing stands, so they understood about truing wheels. I figured I could test the waters. If I didn’t trust them, I could load up my bike and walk it to a hotel and then take a bus in the morning. A young kid was assigned to help me, and despite a hiccup or two, he appeared to know what he was doing. He removed the cassette and set about replacing the spokes with the spares that I carry with me. It was a big job, and he worked at it for about an hour and a half. Then he charged me 25 pesos. That’s about 60 or 70 cents. That is insanely cheap. I couldn’t pay him only that much and I gave him a 100-peso note and told him to keep the change as a tip.

I got back on the road and gingerly rode away, expecting my rear wheel to simply collapse and fold in half at any second. It turned out that the truing attempt was not quite successful, and my tire rubbed against the bike frame. There is not much clearance between my big tires and the frame, and things have to be just right.

Despite this long delay, it was still relatively early in the afternoon, and I had the choice to stay in Argao or cycle on. My instinct was to stay in Argao. I knew that since it was Sunday and the triathlon was over, everyone would leave and there would be rooms. Plus, even though I didn’t feel bad, I suspected that I was a bit stressed out and it might be wise to just take a room and get a good night of rest in comfort before the final ride into Cebu. With that thought in my mind, I stopped at the same hotel I’d stayed at on my way down. All of their rooms were free, and after some inner dialogue and struggle, I decided to take a room. The rooms were 700 pesos a night, and I took out a 1,000 peso note to give to the woman behind the counter. Then the fun began. The woman said that she didn’t have any change and she kind of pushed the 1,000-peso note back at me, as if this was my problem. She told me that I should go out into Argao and buy something and get change. Then I could come back. Otherwise, there was nothing she could do. I must have looked at her strangely because she then reached down under the counter and took out a cloth bag with a drawstring – the kind of bag some rich old woman would keep her jewels in. She opened this bag and showed me that it contained just one 500-peso note. “See?” she was saying. “We don’t have any change.” I was not entirely surprised, since I come across ridiculous situations like this all the time in the Philippines, but I was not happy about it. I felt like 700 pesos was too much for the room to begin with, and I felt weird about paying that much. But now this woman wouldn’t even accept my money because she didn’t have change. It’s not like I was buying a meal for 30 pesos from a street vendor and trying to pay with a 1,000-peso note. This was a 700-peso a night hotel and they’d just had full occupancy for several nights in a row. How hard would it have been to have a bit of change handy? I actually had a stack of 100-peso notes buried inside one of my pannier bags. I go to the banks myself and get 100-peso notes to avoid situations just like this. But I felt that this was ridiculous. At the very least, the woman should have given me the room and said that we’d sort out the money later. Instead, she told me to go away, get change myself, and then come back. I took her up on the first part of that and just went away. I put my 1,000 pesos back in my wallet and got back on my bike and rode away. I’m always looking for signs about what to do, and this poor customer service was surely a sign that I shouldn’t stay in Argao that night.

Not much else happened for the rest of the afternoon until I got to Carcar – the place I hoped to stay for the night. Carcar turned out to be a nasty surprise. It’s an intersection town and, as such, all the traffic from both the southeast coast and the southwest coast of Cebu Island meet up here before heading into Cebu city. The result was total chaos and traffic gridlock. I think the pace of development on Cebu is very high, and the road infrastructure isn’t keeping pace. The situation in Carcar was similar to all the weekend traffic from northern Ontario going back into Toronto on Sunday nights creating one massive traffic jam. I honestly couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Traffic had simply come to a halt and I could only stand there over my bicycle and wait with the exhaust of dozens of buses blowing into my face. I spotted a likely eatery, and I pulled off to the side to get something to eat. I hadn’t eaten much, and I could feel I was getting irritable. My fuzziness and lack of focus continued, and after I removed my one rear pannier bag from the bike and brought it into the eatery with me, I heard a big crash. I looked up to see that I had left my bike unbalanced and it had fallen over and hit a motorcycle and that motorcycle had also fallen over. It was a scene from a bad comedy. I normally adjust things and twist the front wheel and do other things to make sure that the bike is stable. This time, I just forgot and the bike fell over. Luckily, there was no damage to the motorcycle or to the bike.

The meal was not the greatest I’ve ever had, but it wasn’t the worst either, and before I left the eatery, I got some info from the guy who owned the motorcycle I had nearly destroyed. He told me that there were “many” lodging houses in Carcar and he pointed out the street where they were located. I rode to that street through the insane traffic, which, by the way, was going around a roundabout, but I could only find one guest house – the Aloha Pink House. It was a reasonable place, but I was feeling stubborn and wanted to find a cheaper place. I left and after much insanity found what appeared to be the only other lodging house in town. It was much more my style – very basic. However, they were asking for far too much money. It was way over-priced – as much of the accommodation in the Philippines is. So I went back to the Aloha Pink House and took the room there. The room came with air conditioning and a TV with cable but was otherwise unremarkable. One interesting moment came when I spotted myself in the large mirror. I generally never see myself because the cheaper guest houses have no mirrors. It was quite a shock to see myself all of a sudden and see what a wild man I was turning into. When you never look into a mirror, it’s easy to lose track of things and your hair grows long and crazy. And in this case, my body was covered in the weirdest sunburn and suntan patterns. Some parts of my body were so suntanned as to be nearly black. Other parts – the parts newly exposed to the sun with my new clothes – were burned badly through several layers of skin. You wouldn’t be surprised to see skin like that in a burn ward of a major hospital.

I found it difficult to sleep. My body was exhausted and a wreck, and my mind was racing with different thoughts – about the bike, about going to Cebu, worries about my trip to immigration, worries about my flight to Malaysia.

Tags: bike, eatery, limit, load, Oslob, pannier bags, Philippines Bike Trip 2013