| Feb. 4th, 2008 @ 08:18 pm Week twenty-four: The trip |
|---|
In which Robert island-hops and gains perspective
17 January, 2008, 11:05 AM
Villa Inn, Boracay
So far my trip to the Philippines has been memorable.
I flew from Xi'An to Shanghai and met up with Husain and his friends Matt, Will and Pauline there. They're from Scotland, the U.S. and Sweden, respectively. So we all hung out in the Shanghai airport for a few hours and we got on the 1:00 AM flight to Manila. We arrived at about 4:00 AM and hired a cab to bring us to the hostel that Matt had found on the internet. I think I chose the right room, because Will, in the other room, got woken up at like 8:00 because he was being bitten by dozens of tiny fire ants.
We stayed in Manila for two days. While we were there we mostly relaxed, but we did ask the hotel staff where we could find a nice bar, and she told us to ask the cabbie to bring us to Lopez street. The cabs here, by the way, are a motorcycle with a sidecar attached to it. They can carry six people (though I'm sure they weren't designed for it): two crammed into the front of the sidecar, two jammed into the back, and one behind the driver on the motorcycle. Plus the luggage on the roof, which, for us, weighed like 60 kilos total. When we loaded it up like that, they sometimes had a hard time getting started, or going up hills. But anyway, we went to Lopez street and it turned out the entire street is lined with Karaoke bars that double as whorehouses. If Pauline weren't with us, I think we white guys would have been mobbed.
19 January, 2008, 11:07 AM
Pension House Inn, Kalibo
We've now been through three cities: Manila, Boracay and we're now in Kalibo. It's kind of odd how with each city we expected the price of things to be lower, but it's actually gotten more and more expensive with each new location. We're right now paying 1,500 pesos ($37.5) for a room with 3 beds, a fan, and nothing else. For comparison, in Manila we paid 1,400 pesos ($35) for two rooms with two beds each, and A/C. Will and Pauline share a bed, but here, Matt, Husain and I are taking turns sleeping on the floor. Ah, the joys of backpacking with little money.
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
On to Boracay! We had trouble booking flights over the telephone, so we just had to go there and hope for the best. We almost didn't get on the plane, but we finally found an affordable flight to Caticlan, from which point we took a boat ride to Boracay. Boracay is, apparently, the most expensive place in the Philippines, and the reason for this is that it's absolutely gorgeous. The entire island is jungle and beach. The beach part, however, is lined with a huge number of hotels, motels, resorts, restaurants, tattoo parlours, depanneurs, and so on. It's a huge commercial strip. That does detract from the beauty somewhat, but the beach itself is something to behold. We stayed there for two more days during which time we ate overpriced food (though still cheaper than Canada. More expensive than China, though), swam, got drunk, and bummed about. We took a cab (they're called "trikes") to the Northern beach on the island, which has not yet been developed to accommodate tourists, although I assure you it's on its way. Puka Beach, as it's called, is almost totally vacant, though the nearby restaurants are just as expensive. The lodging, what little there was, was also expensive. I keep mentioning price mostly because at least two people here are going to run out of money before the end of the trip at this rate.
From Boracay we took a sailboat back to Caticlan, and the cargo area was too small to take my bag. So I had to carry it, and of course it ended up getting soaked. Luckily, my camera and phone weren't damaged, but some of my books are a little worse off. So, from there, we took a bus to Kalibo. Now, Kalibo is not a huge tourist destination. Rather, it is, but not to foreign tourists. There are a lot of Filipino tourists here right now because we came in the middle of January, during the 796th annual Ati-Atihan festival. This holiday celebrates a group of Filipino providing shelter and protection to another group (I think- I only heard the story quickly) 800 years ago. Spanish missionaries have since altered the meaning of the festival to a non-Pagan one- oh, those crazy Pagans. The festival entails face-painting, live music, parades, and a lot of public drunkenness. It's a pretty Western atmosphere, actually, though the people are much, much poorer.
But yes, because of the festival, prices are quadruple what they normally are for lodging, and the only place we can afford to stay is this room for three beds, for five of us. There's a public bathroom, with no showerhead. Luckily for us, the toilets have no water tank, so there's a bucket we use to dump water into the bowl after we use it, to make it flush. We can also use this bucket for showering. Or, we can sneak into the vacant rooms with private bathrooms to shower there.
The food in the Philippines is unimpressive. There's a lot of Western food available, but everything Filipino we order is greasy fried meat with a fried egg. It seems to be the only national dish, almost. Also, the portions are invariably very small. We have to order two dishes to get full.
21 January, 2008, 10:04 AM
This is our last day in Kalibo, for which I'm not terribly sorry. The festival is over and that was, by far, the best thing about the city. It's dirty here, crowded, and expensive. However, the festival was a lot of fun. There must have been at least two dozen marching bands, most of which were totally percussion-based, so that if you weren't very close to one of them, you would hear five others from every other direction, blending into an awesome atonal cacophony of drums. And the costumes were amazing. Just people just bought a Halloween mask, or painted their face, or attached a flashing light to their head, but there were a lot of folk marching in the parades, representing Filipino tribes, who had amazing elaborate outfits of beads and plates and hay, all painted bright yellow and red and green. It was really cool, and even the rain for the past two days didn't dampen it. The night-time parties were dampened somewhat by the rain, but that's okay. We had a good time anyway.
25 January, 2008, 2:58 PM
José's apartment, Manila
In the past four days, I have been through Kalibo, Iloilo, Dumangas, Bacolod, Murcia, Mambukal, Silay, and back to Manila. We hopped a bus from Kalibo to Iloilo, intending to buy passage on a boat to Bacolod. We accidentally got off the bus too early, and ended up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. We found out that there was a boat leaving from nearby Dumangas, but we weren't sure how much we could trust the people who told us, because they also told us that information that we had looked up on the internet about schedules was wrong. When two sources directly contradict each other, I get suspicious, especially since most people seem to have a personal vested interest in getting us in their friend's taxi or boat or whatever. Anyway, it would have taken too long to get to the dock in Iloilo, so we went to Dumangas and got on a cargo ship to Bacolod. We pulled in at about 1:30 AM and found a hostel.
The next day, we found a jeepney (picture a cross between a city bus and a pickup truck. The rear of the pickup is extended, and a roof and benches are installed. That's a jeepney) to bring us to Mambukal, which is located on an active volcano. We sat on the roof of the jeepney, because there were so many passengers that it was hard to move inside the vehicle. We rode on the roof of the thing for over an hour, passing through several towns, sugarcane fields, and fighting cock farms. We passed through Murcia, but didn't actually stop there. Mambukal is a resort, not really a city, but because it's pretty out of the way, it's also inexpensive. There are hot springs which were actually simmering, where the air is a little hazy from the steam and the sulphur fumes. Husain actually got kind of sick from the fumes for a few hours. But the springs were redirected to a pool where it was cooled down somewhat, but still as hot as a hot bath. Matt and I jumped the fence in the middle of the night to go soak for a while. We also watched the bats wake up and start feeding at about sundown. Bats are cool.
We had booked a flight back to Manila for 1:00 PM the next day, so we woke up at 6:00 (a good three hours earlier than any other day thus far) to take a tour through the forest to see some of the waterfalls on the mountain. We still didn't have time to see most of it; you can walk all day through that forest, and we only had a couple of hours in the morning. So we got to the airport at noon to learn that they hadn't actually received our reservations and the flight was now booked up. Matt paid for a more expensive ticket and left a couple of hours later, but for the rest of us, the next available flight that we could afford was at 6:20 the next morning, so we went back to Silay to kill time. We ate, played football in the park, wandered through the town market (which is insane), sand karaoke, got drunk, slept at a bar, I got hit on by a gay guy for about two hours, and we finally got a ride back to the airport at 4:00 AM. The airport has only been operational for two weeks, so the shuttle bus isn't quite up yet. It's currently a pickup truck driven by someone who works in the mayor's office. Not a jeepney, but an actual pickup truck.
We arrived in Manila and met up with Matt's friend José, who works in the Spanish embassy here. He's only been here for a couple of weeks, but he's shown us a couple of nice bars and restaurants. Two nights ago, he and Matt went through a tour of every bar in surrounding area, which is hilarious considering that he lives in the red-light area of town. I'm sorry I wasn't there it sounds like it was a lot more fun than the way I spent my evening.
26 January, 2008, 3:04 PM
Wonder Lodge Inn, Banaue
What is it with us and late-night travel? We're losing a bunch of sleep, here. So we're all agreed that Manila is not a pleasant city. The area where we stayed for two days at the beginning of the trip wasn't too bad, but downtown Manila is dirty and crowded and expensive- more so than Kalibo. There are pretty much no redeeming qualities to the place. So, last night we caught a bus out of there. There are six of us now, as José has joined us, making us an even more ethnically unlikely group of tourists. We now have one American, one Canadian, one Palestinian, one Scot, one Spaniard and one Swede. Together we took the 10:45 bus from Manila to Banaue, which is a nine-hour bus ride. We all barely slept on the bus, and arrived here at about 7:30 AM.
First of all, this is easily the most enjoyable city we've visited. It's got a population of about 20,000 (compared to Manila's 11,000,000) and it's the least Westernised. This doesn't mean no one speaks English, because plenty of people do. And it doesn't mean it isn't easy for foreigners to get around, because there's a respectable tourist industry in this city. Rather, it means there are no huge international hotel and restaurant chains (though, of course, Coca-Cola is everywhere). The entire city is built on a slope, as it's located all over a valley, so walking from one part of town to another necessarily means going up and down as well as North, East, South and West. You can walk from the street into a building only to find that you've just entered the fourth floor, and the windows on the other side of the building show a drop down to the bottom of the valley. Banaue is also the home of the rice terraces, which I won't even try to describe. They're beautiful and I'll send pictures.
28 January 2008, 9:37 AM
We took a Jeepney yesterday up to Batad, which is a tiny village in the mountains. The jeepney couldn't actually go all the way there, it took us to a mountain a few kilometres away and we hiked the rest of the way. With us in the jeepney were two Czechs, five Germans, and two more Canadians. We didn't all stick together on the hike, but I did get to know one of the Germans and the two Canadians. We hiked for about five hours and swam in a pool with a waterfall falling into it. How awesome is that? There's a cockfighting pit in the city, too, and the weekly fight happened yesterday, so I was actually pushing to go see that, but for some strange reason that I can't fathom, I was outvoted. The hiking was tons of fun, though. I'm glad I went.
29 January, 2009, 8:29 AM
José's apartment, Manila
Yet another night with no sleep. Actually, I did sleep somewhat, but not more than two or three hours. We took another bus to get back from Banaue to Manila, 8:00 PM to 5:00 AM. We came to José's apartment as left for work, and we'll sleep all day here. The other four will fly back to Shanghai tonight and Tianjin tomorrow. I messed up, apparently, and bought my return ticket for the wrong day, so I'm going to be in the Philippines for an extra 24 hours. José, generous as he is, has offered to let me sleep at his place tonight so I don't have to rent a hotel room, which is really great. An extra day in the Philippines isn't exactly an unpleasant prospect, though I do look forward to going back to China, especially with everyone else leaving before me.
30 January, 2009, 7:01 PM
Nino Aquino International Airport, Manila
I'm not really sure how to expect returning to China. One the one hand, I'm going back to the place I live and work, where I have a stable bed and friends. On the other hand, it's CHINA. I'm going to be returning to this alien place, but is it really still alien? As much as I still think about Montreal, this place has become familiar. I know the bus routes and the cab fares, I know which restaurants and bars are my favourites, I know how to get around and find what I need in a store.
I remember my first afternoon in China. The feeling was indescribable. I went wandering around the campus, up to the commercial street, just far enough to make sure that I wouldn't get lost (though I needn't have worried; the campus is simple), and the feeling was so bizarre. The place was just so unfamiliar in so many respects and I was trying to get my head around the fact that I was going to be living there for the next ten months, at least. I was never able to shake the idea that this is strictly a temporary stay. Now that I've left for two weeks, I'm thinking about Xi'An like I normally think about Montreal, as the place to which I look forward to returning after being away.
I think leaving for two weeks was good for me. Not only because I got to see an amazing new country, with new food, culture, and atmosphere. Not only because almost everyone I know in Xi'An is also gone and I'd have little more than my pirated Star Trek DVDs for company. Not only because it's a lot warmer in Boracay than in Xi'An. But also because leaving has given me some perspective on where I am and how I fit in there- and also how it fits in me.
4 February, 2008, 12:27 PM
Siyuan University, Xi'An
So, to recap the trip!
The good: The weather was fantastic. It averaged about 25 degrees, I'd say, which is plenty hotter than it is here. The scenery was absolutely beautiful, and Banaue was the most idyllic place I'd ever seen. I met cool people, and made some friends whom I may or may not ever see again. I saw Husain again! And I swam in the ocean for the first time in about seven years.
The bad: the food was really not very good there. If you know me at all, you'll know that the quality of the food I'm eating has an impact on how much I enjoy things. I somehow managed to lose both my mobile phone and my bank card. They're both replaceable, though it's going to cost me some money and some convenience.
The return: Well… on one hand, I'm quite happy to be getting proper sleep again, and sleeping in the same bed as usual does help that. The thing is, everything is closed nearby. Without the students living here, the nearby commercial street is totally shut down, so there's nothing to do and nowhere to go nearby. The cafeterias are all closed down except one, which is serving a very limited menu of not very appetising boiled vegetables. Almost all of the other foreigners are gone to wherever it is they've decided to go. And here's the kicker: while all of the students are gone, the admin has also decided that it wouldn't be efficient to properly heat the building where we live. So they just shut it down.
However! The one foreigner here, Randy, is one with whom I get along quite well, and he has a kitchen in his room, so we're making our own food. I haven't properly cooked anything in months, and I forgot how much I enjoy it. I borrowed a space heater from one of the foreigners who's gone, so that's keeping me from dying. And there are apparently two more foreigners coming to the school sometime in the next two weeks, so that's good too. More people are cool.
I still have two weeks off, so that's plenty of time to relax (the trip to the Philippines was many things, but "relaxing" wasn't one of them. Quite the opposite) and get everything in order for the coming semester. A friend has invited me to visit her home during Spring Festival, so that should be really cool. My year abroad is half over, and I'm still enjoying myself plenty. Take care everyone!
bob-Philphotos.zip |
|  |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
mr_obert's journal
