Dorland St.

As I write this, we’re in a 90-minute layover at the Bucaramanga bus depot on the journey to the Caribbean coast. Nothing exciting about a bus depot so readers will have to settle for the above day-old photo from a supermercado in San Gil.

This journey was nearly made impossible by major floods that made global headlines 4 weeks ago. The road we’re about to take in the wee hours of 5-Jan was destroyed so badly that it was closed until just a few days ago. Colombia is a huge country – not only geographically but also in other ways I’ve seen in my working (for example,  Colombians represented about 7th among the nations traffic-wise on the Web). And it’s mountainous – if a major route is closed, the detour is so long you have to re-plan your whole itinerary.

Fortunately, our (well, to give proper credit, Luis’s) plans have gone smoothly every stop of the way. It almost feels like buses and taxis are waiting just for us, never more than a few minutes’ wait (aside from the lengthy connnection here).

In general, transportation has been better / faster / cheaper (pick all 3, you geeks) than in generalthe USA everywhere else I’ve been.

Well time to post this, Luis wants to go to the bus.

We’re on a day trip 25km from San Gil. After a mucky 60-min hike, we declare the trip worth it!

After a too-long bus journey yesterday, we checked in here around 20:30 last night. This hostel has a wonderful roof deck where you’ll find a breakfast of fruits, huevos, and corn-meal pancakes.

As we pack up for San Gil, the clear sky over Bogotá beckons. (View from Hotel Dann Av 19.)

2011 finds me south of the border – just shy of the equator in fact. Luis and I chose Colombia for this year’s escape to the tropics. Colombia is well known for which agricultural product? Yes, you guessed it – coffee! We should be all set for our 12 days here.

I wanted to compose this at a proper keyboard but on 1-Jan the choices of local Internet cafes led us to a dingy overcrowded mall basement stocked with Pentium 4s from another era. I looked up the APN for this mobile provider (Comcel), put it in my phone, fiddled with it unsuccessfully for a bit, put it away. Many hours later, lo and behold, I get an email notification out on the streets of Chapinero. I have a connection while it’s still 1 Jan!

No photos on this first entry. We got here 48 hours ago after an 8-hour trip. The first lodging was at a hostel; we’re now at the Hotel Dann on Calle 19. For New Year’s Eve we walked to the Colpatria building and found an outdoor concert. At 22:45 Luis wanted to return to the hotel where the desk clerk offered us a glass of wine. We watched TV coverage for the 2011 countdown on channel 10 – the same concert we’d just left.

Today we took the funicalar up Monserrat to see the gorgeous view of this city of 7.5 million. Then we went to an Internet cafe to adjust hotel bookings at San Gil and Santa Marta over the next few days.

Naturally there were food stops along the way. Luis will write more eloquently on those!

Looking forward to San Gil!

I touched down at Logan Airport in Boston exactly 168 hours – seven days – ago. It is at this hour that we learned Luis’ tatay has departed to the hereafter.

He is a man who sacrificed all for family in his desire to make a better life for them in the USA starting over 30 years ago. It’s a sad moment for the whole Fernandez family. I have been blessed with this connection to the family and to their homeland.

I just spent part of the day with a fascinating man whom I met last night. His name is Joshua (coincides with that of a less-savory character mentioned earlier) and he’s about my age. For the past half-dozen years he’s been operating a private school, motivated by the entrepreneurial spirit: the public schools aren’t doing enough for our kids, so let me try my own methods. He’s very proud of his kids (K-5 elementary age) and showed me a book they’d put together to display their work. He wished I could stay here in Manila through next Wednesday for the year-end awards ceremony, to which he’s invited a surprise guest, a well known official in the Philippine government. I immediately thought of my friend Steve Santos back in Boston, who has been coping with public education ever since we met back in ’98.

Joshua also told me a lot about the history of the gay-pride parade, and the internal bickering (so familiar to me, from my own past activist efforts) that led to discontinuance of the Manila pride parade in June. (A splinter group held one in December, but he said attendance dropped a lot.) He also knows a lot about the political group, I think it’s called Ladlad, which is something like the HRC in the USA: their leader, contrary to Joshua’s advice, registered a party-list in the May elections without sufficient membership across the many Philippine provinces. Gay rights here is an interesting challenge. I have found so many kind, gay people throughout the nation, yet it is sometimes hard for them to find each other. And getting a movement going has proven difficult.

Joshua described a hustler episode similar to my own. One of his friends was pulled into the same trap (give me money or I’ll accuse you of rape). My suspicions are true: some corrupt cops split proceeds of any shakedown (of a local or foreigner, doesn’t matter to them) with the hustler. It’s kinda hard for me to make a good recommendation on avoiding those traps: if you don’t talk to strangers, you won’t have as good a time. (I’ve had a blast making friends with strangers here!) If you do, you could walk into a trap. I guess to live life fully, you just have to take the good with the very-occasional bad. Joshua rescued his friend: the hustler happened to pick a hotel whose owner is a close friend of Joshua’s, so the incident was quickly terminated before any great conflict.

Joshua himself, as of last night, was simply another stranger I met on the streets of Malate. I was wandering around at midnight, contemplating going to bed after the previous stranger had led me off to the White Bird go-go bar which is nice but not my kind of place (with a cover charge that exceeded money in my wallet, a mild embarrassment but walang problema, they negotiated a discount). Instead of bed, I went to Bed with Joshua and his friend Bobby. Bed is the big, and apparently only, gay disco in Manila. So I finally got to go dancing! It’s a late-night place, no cover (and no patrons) before midnight and open until well after my 3:30am departure. It was crowded but not over-packed.

Luis’ sister Bess is a very hard-working woman. She couldn’t get together Friday; it’s now Saturday and her constant demands at work caused us to miss our 3pm plan to get together with her tatay (father). Cousin Bien wasn’t feeling well so he couldn’t help get me there either. So Luis and I saw tatay together two weeks ago and I won’t have another chance.

So sad that I face having to go back home to the USA bukas! I thought I’d be homesick, looking forward to Massachusetts after 5 weeks away, but instead I’m wistful that I can’t be here always!

My many kaibigan here are already rattling off lists of places that we should see on our next visit. This evening is the monthly social of Long Yang Club so there is no doubt that the count of kaibigan will climb a bit more!

Today I’m in an interesting mood. As the day started, I had only two vague plans: to buy some Philippine food items requested by Luis, and to visit his tatay (father) one more time. I managed to get the food but everyone I know here was busy, so I will do the family visit bukas (tomorrow).

After a long afternoon nap (my first in weeks), I wandered down to the Baywalk just in time to catch the crimson sunset. One of the first things I noticed, as dusk transitioned into night, is just how well my eyes are working. No kidding, it was a surreal experience: looking at my surroundings on the Manila skyline, everything seemed to be in sharper focus than I can recall in years. That feeling persisted even as I wandered into the shopping mall to buy some videoke (local word for karaoke) discs that I plan to use for learning Tagalog. (Regular DVDs almost never have closed-caption titles in Tagalog, for some reason. But every videoke disc does.) Looking at the shelves of merchandise, my usual feeling of visual overwhelm-ment was gone. How bizarre!

I made a couple of notes about the Baywalk that might be helpful for future visitors:

• The Mall of Asia (opened 2 years ago) has fireworks every Fri/Sat night, if you are standing near the Aristocrat restaurant, they are visible over a Sofitel hotel around 7pm
• The restaurants set up and tear down performance stages on the Baywalk every day; live performances start around 6:45 or 7pm. (Some of the acts are amazing; I watched covers of Queen, Van Halen, and Donna Summer this evening. The first performance sounded like a CD of the original music from my college freshman year!)
• Don’t forget to avail yourself of those masseurs by the fountain on Remedios St – they start work just after dusk and stay until the fountain is shut off sometime around 11.

Well I’m posting this from a Netopia cafe in the shopping mall, they gave a 5-minute warning so I’ll sign off from now and encourage you to read on about my alluring adventure in Sabang! I’ll never get that excursion out of my head!

OK everyone, I did not get hauled off by Abu Sayyaf terrorists, gang raped, tied to a tree and left for dead! Sorry for the long delay since I last posted anything, my dear Luis got through on a frantic phone call yesterday after days of attempts. I was living in a thatched-hut village of 300 people with no Internet and one cell phone tower, in what felt like a whole different time zone. Electric generators power the lights from dusk (6:30pm or so) until a bit after 10pm: you get a little over 3 hours each day to try to charge up your cell phone battery.

Words will fail me, in English and all three other languages I’ve tried to learn (French, Spanish, Tagalog), trying to describe the indescribable experience I’ve had the past several days. This is a life-changing event for me, an epiphany which may lead me to reprioritize some of the things I’ve wanted to do with my life. I have been a drifter career-wise, and my mind is now filled with different views than before the trip.

Why did I wind up in Palawan? Well, I got frustrated with my guidebooks and with my attempts to get specific ideas for excursions from the people I’ve talked to here; for example if you want to go to Banaue or Baguio to the north, to Batanes in the far north, or perhaps to the southern parts of this island (Luzon), just try going into a travel agent’s office to get solid advice. You’ll get a sales pitch for a pricy tour package. You won’t find your own private paradise that way.

So I took out my mental dart board, looked at the airline map, and chose Palawan because its airport is in a city of about 100,000 which is big enough to provide services I’m familiar with but small enough that I won’t encounter the overwhelming many-bus-station problem of trying to get pointed the right way out of Manila on its overcrowded highways. My local kaibigan Ferdinand helped me get the ticket a week ago; finding a long line at the Cebu Pacific ticket office, we found a late-evening travel agent who booked me on a different airline.

Before the flight I looked at my Philippines guide book (the German one, forget the name, which is a year older but a lot more informative re: Palawan than the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guide that I’ve grown to detest) to figure out a somewhat hazy plan: see the Carlsbad-like caves at Sabang, head up to Port Barton, stay a couple days at El Nedo to go on a boat tour of the Bacuit islands which are supposedly like the Phi Phi islands I saw in Thailand, only better. My trip would start with either a night in Puerto Princesa, or maybe I’d try to hit Sabang the first day. At the airport tourist-info counter, I decided to skip Princesa and try to catch the 10am jeepney to Sabang.

Well, remember my complaint about not being among gay people in Boracay? The second person I met after stepping out of the airport at Puerto Princesa (capital of the province), after the tricycle driver from the airport to the bus station, was the friendly, guapo, gay 30-something jeepney driver who told me that I’d missed the 10am one but I could wait for the noon one. We chatted a long time, and I chatted with a European tourist in the seat behind me. I basically got seduced into taking that jeepney, which this driver (Romeo, can you just believe these Filipino names?!?) conveniently forgot to tell me would be departing two hours after the noon one I was hoping for.

Walang problema, I decided, I needed to readjust my internal clocks to a whole new “time zone” anyway. After the hustle-bustle of Manila city life, I could see this was a different place. Romeo insisted on parking my butt on the seat next to him. I wandered over to the fish market, discovered a stand selling pizza slices, so I shared pizza with my new kaibigan during the 3+ hour wait. The 75km jeepney ride is arduous, to say the least. A jeepney here is actually a medium-sized truck. On that route, it functions more as a UPS delivery truck that oh-by-the-way will haul passengers. I later learned that this particular dirt road, punctuated by occasional long stretches of concrete pavement, was opened in 1991. The jeepneys plying this route are important conveyors of commercial products to the various stores. I heard a tire blow out on another jeepney while waiting at the bus depot, so I recognized the sound when our own jeepney suffered the same fate en route. Now you know why there are so many vulcanizing (tire repair) shops scattered all over the Philippines.

I had not decided on lodging so I let Romeo drop me off at the Taraw cottages at the east side of the village. Check-in was a matter of getting pointed at a room: apparently this particular set of cottages was mostly rented out to a weekend tour group from Manila, whose 10 or so aircon vans materialized to spirit them away the next day. So the manager was clearly preoccupied, apologized for a brief delay to clean my room, and disappeared without requiring a guest registration card.

I wandered off to take pictures of the beach. Words won’t suffice to describe, I will add pictures to this when I get back sa (to) Boston. (This excursion served as an intensive Tagalog immersion class, among many other things.) Sabang is on the northwest side of the Palawan island facing the South China Sea (Malaysia lies 430km south, Vietnam 1100km east); at its center is a small pier, just big enough for jeepneys to drop off cargo and turn around. Aside from a couple dozen infrequently-used private cars, the only vehicles you see are a few jeepneys and motorcyles during the course of a whole day. (Next morning some wise guy busted my chops, saying there are “many aircon vans” heading toward the cavern area – not bloody likely over those mountain trails!)

The village started as a logging community circa 1949. The famous 8km cavern was discovered sometime in the 1970s, I think; tourists got there by boat until the road opened.

The coconut-palm lined beach area facing north stretches a kilometer or so in each direction; Taraw lies on the white-sand side to the east, and the other side west of the pier is dominated by a tidal reef and a cluster of the local boats (diesel powered outriggers, no sailboats). Two mountains lie behind the village; more mountains stretch to the east as far as the eye can see. Between the mountains lie fields of rice and other crops. At night the north star and big dipper lay low on the horizon. Already, one can see nourishment for the stomach and for the soul alike!

The nourishment started as I wandered back toward my cottage to see if the room was ready. A stunningly-handsome 20-something guy glanced at me and shimmied up the tree next to me (just like the one I reported here in Malate a couple weeks ago). I made a video of him harvesting a few coconuts. Noticing my interest, he took his knife and with a deft couple of slices opened the top and served me the buko juice inside. Satisfying my thirst long before the coconut was empty, I handed it back to him and with another 3 or 4 deft slices, cut it in half and made a scoop for me to eat the fresh buko within. He smiled and wandered off to carry out his other duties.

Tapos (then) I noticed something that gave me a bit of a jolt: the whole property is lined with slightly-modified rainbow flags, of the type you see in big-city gay neighborhoods of the USA (and occasional small towns like Juneau and one other place I remember from Alaska, just remembered that the shirt I’m wearing at the moment came from that 2002 trip).

I got a San Mig beer and then wandered around the village a bit at dusk (the jeepney got me there sometime well past 5pm). There are maybe 10 clusters of cottages, separated by refreshingly-long unbuilt vacant areas, most of which have a beachfront restaurant. I saw few other tourists: a couple of German guys, a mixed-race couple from Tanzania, maybe a half-dozen others among many dozen mostly-young local Filipinos. The entertainment I saw that evening was billiards and a gambling card game (pusoy?). After dark I sat down by myself to have a meal. My jeepney driver Romeo showed up with a couple of others, and pretty much from that point on I wasn’t alone in Sabang.

OK so it’s time to diverge from the chronology format because the essence of this excursion is the whole collage of amazing experiences. Here is a glimpse of what I will write about:

• A challenging hike through 5km of jungle hills, by myself save the macaque monkeys in the trees
• Dirty-dancing with about 20 of the native fishermen: 80s disco blaring on the stereo in their living room
• Going out on their bangka (motor boat) snorkeling to capture mussels and octopus, then hanging out for hours
• Lounging on the wreckage of one of the “big boats” that ply the El Nido route
• Feasting on seafood stew over the campfire, after catching it ourselves with bare hands and machetes at night by the light of a Coleman
• Watching the guys display their talent on the basketball court, guapo, shirtless and sarap
• Living life in the way of the village: no Internet, no aircon, less than 4 hours a day of electricity
• Watching boat-builders and hut-builders display their craftsmanship with bamboo and coco wood
• Getting embarrassingly wasted on the locals’ favorite drink, San Miguel gin

About 3 dozen locals (age 15 to about 50) adopted me at once and pulled me right into their community. It was love at first sight, in every way you can define the word love! When I finally had to leave about 30 hours ago, the mahal kitas (I love yous, in both languages) just couldn’t stop flowing!

By Monday morning I canceled the whole rest of my Palawan excursion and extended the date of my return flight just to have more precious days here at Sabang.

Ang ganda, mahal kita Sabang! You have stolen my puso (heart)!

[I’ll add more to this entry later, along with pictures.]

I’ve had a mellow day today, decided to post again because I almost feel guilty about my last posting, which doesn’t reflect my feelings about the Philippines at all. Scammers exist in Boston and every other city where I’ve lived: it could happen just as well at home as on the road. What makes us susceptible to scams is availability of free time (not being in a rush to get from point A to point B) and/or the need for information (being unfamiliar with the procedures to make something happen, such as the purchase of a transportation ticket, or a decision to move investment cash from one type of account to another).

I’ll point out something else about the scammer’s mind: there seems to be a point of honor among this species, that they never take something the way a pickpocket would – they enjoy the challenge of convincing their victim to part with money by their own action. This afternoon I got reminded of the honor ethic of all the Filipinos I’ve met: as I sat down in a park, a 4-year-old kid pointed out the travel-guide book that had fallen out of my pocket. Later, as I pulled something out of my pocket on the trolley, my trolley ticket fell on the floor: a 20-something guy picked it up and handed it to me. (Even the hustler I wrote about the other night had more than one chance to pick my pockets – never happened.) So my overall impression of the people here is more positive than the guide books suggest in their warnings about people on the streets.

OK enough said on that topic. Moving on to the day’s events, I had lunch at the Robinson’s Mall again. Noticed there is a 39-lane bowling alley on the 2nd floor, where you can bowl a game of tenpins for 85 pesos. Might try that if I have time after my next excursion.

Decided that I had enough time for a walking tour of Quezon City, so I took the LRT to the MRT to the Northern Ave station. It’s a long haul through the city, you get a real sense of the vastness of this place as you look out the windows sailing along the elevated tracks. A suggestion to the future traveler: if you’re going more than a few stops, make sure the aircon is working before moving into the train. Wait for the next train if it isn’t.

Contrary to what the guidebooks suggest, many things actually work better here than back home. Trains run more like 15 to 20 times an hour vs the 4 to 8 in Boston. Airplane flights that I’ve taken so far have run more like clockwork than anything back in the USA. Restaurant service is usually better, aside from a policy at some fast-food places of giving you a number placard and making you wait for food delivery at your table rather than the service counter. Overall I find that I can get more done, predictably, during the course of a day than I can back home.

Did I already point out enough just how vast the shopping infrastructure is here? When I got off at Quezon City, the first thing I noticed was a mall complex half the size of Crystal City (an urban district in the DC area in which I once lived) going up all at once at the edge of a shanty town that had obviously been pushed back to make space. Just past the construction project (one of the hunks waved at me and beckoned me to make a video of him, sarap!) is an existing mall. They don’t seem to tear down the old malls when they make new ones; they get grafted together like Greenbelt and Glorietta at Makati City. Every one of these is bigger than any of the malls in greater Boston. Yet there are so many of them that in the metro Manila area alone (population just over 20 million) there are probably enough to rival the size of the entire Simon Properties mall empire in the USA. Shoemart and Robinson’s are the names attached to most of them. I have already been in about a half-dozen of these malls, and have yet to explore even a tenth of the stations on the trolley system let alone the vast stretches of cityscape outside the reach of the 3-line trolley network. (Trolley tip: get a stored-value card a la the Charlie Card for 100 pesos, instead of single-fare cards. They don’t have fare dispenser machines and the waiting lines for single-fare purchases are ludicrous. Trolley fare is 10 to 15 pesos, as cheap as the Path trains in New Jersey were when I lived there, oh, about when the World Trade Center was first completed.)

Tomorrow I jump on a plane to Palawan and find out what life is like outside this big city once again. The city has been growing on me for the past 36 hours. Have I said how friendly and helpful the people here are? Good, I had to say it again!

Bess reported good news on the family front; her tatay (father) is settling into the new home (Paranaque City) and regaining his appetite.