21 Feb – Today we began our excursions into the provinces. I am writing this on a computer attached to the Internet, of course, a few blocks from the Dunkin Donuts where we had coffee and the Jollibee (mega-corporate burger joint) where we had supper; and of course always within range of a cell-phone tower. But those outposts of modern globalization have not (yet) displaced all the variety of human life. This is, in a nutshell, why I like to travel and why it feels necessary to go so many timezones away from home when I do.
Alona Beach is about as remote a place as I’ve ever been. It lies about 9 degrees above the equator, a bit over 600km south of Manila. I’m writing this in a town called Tagbilaran City, from which we caught a bus this morning to reach the beach. I commented to Luis at dinner that the human genome here is especially nice: the place is full of really cute local guys (and women too!) They speak a different dialect here but they also learn English and Tagalog in school, so it’s not hard to communicate.
One thing which struck me along the way back from Alona Beach was the local architecture. Whether the houses were shanties or villas as we drove by, they were all different. I’m so used to seeing a limited range of styles, caused either by the vastness of whatever construction company built them cookie-cutter style or by the tendency of home buyers to buy only whatever’s trendy during the decade or two that a neighborhood was built. Alas our ride was too bumpy to capture any of this with my camcorder, so I wanted to note this memory here. One style that I did notice repeatedly was a particular type of coarse-woven bamboo installed in square grids (2 feet or so on a side) on many of the exterior walls.
Thought I’d write up some of the social customs in the Philippines that are different from my past experience…
- Women, while they are not considered 2nd class in any meaningful way, are segregated from men in various places that seem surprising to one who has grown up with the American feminist movement.
- Armed guards are basically everywhere, and the people I’ve asked can’t remember a time when they weren’t.
- It’s fairly hard to bargain with vendors; this is like America where no one negotiates prices for small-ticket items but unlike everywhere else I’ve been where the asking price is virtually never the actual price paid. (Don’t believe your guidebook, either; asking prices are generally higher than the ones you read. You will burn pesos here about as fast as you do at home–this is not Thailand–some things are inexpensive but most things aren’t.)
- At the table in a restaurant or bar, the check will not come until you explicitly ask for it at the end of your meal.
- If you pay by credit card, you’ll get whacked with at least a 5% charge, if not a 10% charge, credit-card company (and Philippine government) policies be damned. ATMs are ubiquitous and all are on Cirrus/Plus networks so leave your Amex at home, just pay cash for everything (including plane tickets, hotel rooms, and nights out).
- SMS text messaging costs about ½0th as much as in the USA, so Filipinos prefer to text you on their cell phone. In fact virtually every driver, and of course every social contact, wants us to have his cell number (they’ll type it right into your phone’s address book). When traveling here (or indeed most places I’ve been outside the USA) it’s essential to have a cell phone with a local number for this reason; despite the fact that cell phones have been widespread for only about 15 years, this is an aspect of life that has reached more people than any other innovation since I was born. Expect many text messages each day, and expect to see even the fairly destitute local kids to be quietly texting each other all day. (The teenaged assistant on our boat ride today was doing this out in the middle of the sea…) It’s not like this in America, where everyone talks on the phone, loudly and in public.
Well that’s it from Tagbilaran for now. We plan 3 nights here before moving on.