Food 2: Morning merienda

The morning merienda, or snack, shows up about the time when breakfast has made just enough of a gap in my G.I. tract to allow for topping up without spillage. If we're in a meeting or lecture, this is invariably served, though no break is taken to eat it.

Some of the morning meriendas I've been treated to include: macaroni salad, a hamburger, hot sweet thick coconut soup with sweetened fruits and yams, white-bread sandwiches with sweet mayonnaise and a thin shard or two of sweet-pickled cabbage or something meatish, and just once, fruit salad.

Merienda is washed down with coffee, sweetened and non-brewed iced tea, pop or juice (or more often juicelike drink, kind of like flavoured sugar water with some added juice; usually mango, pineapple, or coconut). Now, then. This should tide you over until lunchtime.

Hssst!

People here hiss loudly to get someone's attention. It's not seen as impolite, and has been very difficult for me not to bristle sharply at. It's taken me six weeks to get to the point where I can say that most of the time I can let go of the visceral annoyance almost as fast as it appears.

Food 1: Breakfast

I haven't really taken the opportunity to describe mealtimes here, so now seems as good a time as any to start. Overall, though, three key notions sum up my impression of Filipino food: sweet, fatty, and frequent. There's a lot to say about food, so I'll break this up into digestible blog entries so as not to overwhelm you.

First up: the most important meal of the day. The classic Filipino breakfast consists of rice, egg, and meat or fish. Garlic rice is not out of the question. The egg is scrambled, boiled, or fried, whereas the meat/fish is usually dried and then cooked in a sweetish sauce, actually much tastier than it sounds.

When I was staying at the hotel, there was a little buffet table by reception which served some other popular breakfast options, including sweet soft white buns (pan de sal), on which one spreads coconut or purple yam jam. Macaroni soup in an opaque white broth also made regular appearances. A lone box of sugary cereal was often left untouched as milk was usually absent. (Supermarket cereal shelves are nearly barren of non-sugary offerings. I think I saw corn flakes once at a western-style supermarket.)

Round this all off with a hottish Nescafe seasoned with coffeemate and lots of sugar (two spoons or envelopes of each seems to be the norm) and you're done. Hurry up and digest fast, though, because merienda is on its way.

Routine

Thanks for the comments everyone -- nice to hear from you.

Although I don't have a routine in the sense of 9-to-5 here, I'm getting used to things. The heat is merely background now, and actually it's kind of nice that it's never cold (outside at least). I went for a run last night for the first time, which was a sweaty affair, but it was wonderful to actually exercise. I've also been swimming in the youth centre pool at night, which is nice, especially with the dramatic sheet lightning at the horizon.

I'm also developing some strategies for dealing with all of the attention. People are always yelling out HEY JOE! and HEY BROTHER! and WHAT'S YOUR NAME? as witty conversation openers. Yesterday I had the following exchange with some boys across the street. By way of introduction, one of them shouted across traffic as I was invitingly walking away from them in the opposite direction, ARE YOU A FOREIGNER? to which I shouted back in a friendly way, HINDI, PINOY AKO (No, I'm a Filipino!), smiled, and walked on.

Busy with meetings, trying to get data from overworked underpaid civil servants, and interviewing all manner of people. We're trying to get and give some insight into the linked problems of transportation and land use here. I hope we manage to come up with something useful for them. The presentations are getting to be a bigger deal. First they were going to be for the planning department, then for anyone, and now they're going to be filmed by a local television station. We've already been interviewed on the radio twice, and in the newspaper at least once. Apparently we're quite the local event.

Cold, cut

Well, I'm definitely over the hump with my cold, so that's good. Meetings, meetings, meetings about transportation and land use planning in this city, which isn't interesting me very much at the moment but that's what my group of five have been entrusted with. I think I'm just mentally exhausted.

Do I look mentally exhausted? This is me as of a couple of minutes ago. My haircut is the cutting edge of Naga fashion, done by an old guy at Interpol Barber Shop, who spoke virtually no English. Not bad under the circumstances.

The Elections Commission have finally moved out of the Youth Centre so we've moved in. Glad I'm taking my malaria meds because I've woken up the past two mornings with dozens of mosquito bites. Turns out the window doesn't close all the way. Which also explains the ants. And why the air conditioning doesn't seem to work very well. I think I'll be forced to mobilize Operation Mosquito Netting. Or maybe Operation Move Back To The Hotel.

Raindrops on roses

I've had a cold for a few days now, and am generally getting mentally worn down by being here and how every little daily activity seems to be complicated by unnecessary delays and confusion. In order to avoid getting too bogged down in negativity I decided to make a list of things I like about being here and that I'll probably miss when I'm gone:

• mango trees
• hibiscus and bougainvillea
• Filipinos never seem to get angry or contrary
• most stuff is cheap
• pedicabs and tricycles are sort of cute and fun
• pedestrians, bikes, trikes, jeepneys and cars all weaving together on the road
• coconut and banana trees
• thatch roofs (rooves?)
• warm nights
• geckoes

Hot stuff

Well, time to really talk about the heat here. It's the end of the hot, dry season, which lasts from about April until the hot, rainy season comes sometime in June. After that I think it's monsoon and typhoon season, and then we're back to the hot dry season again.

So, it's hot. For example, it's just past noon, and according to the Weather Underground, currently 34 degrees, feeling like 42 with the heat index (which is like Humidex). This is, of course, in the shade. Apparently a heat index of 42 has the following effects:

Danger — sunstroke, heat cramps, and heat exhaustion are likely; heat stroke is possible

It goes down to about the mid-high 20s at night, I don't know what that is with the heat index. In any case, this can really take it out of a person, though I'm adapting a little.

There are people pedalling pedicabs out there in the diesel-exhaust-saturated furnace that is the street, which is an indication I think of how badly pedicab drivers need the money.

Touchdown

Well, this posting tells the story of my arrival in Naga City, where I and 20 other students from my planning school are taking a four-week course on participatory planning processes. Because Brian and I were in this part of the country already, I came directly here from the whale sharks, and Brian went back to Manila in order to have his passport stolen and stay an extra five days while waiting for his emergency passport to be issued, complete with run-around, bureaucratic apathy, and whatnot.

But I digress. So, I arrive in Naga City in the afternoon on the day before intended. It is about 35 degrees and the streets are choked with festive/chaotic motorcade-parades in anticipation of the election the next day. Before leaving Vancouver, I did ask where we were staying, but neither the organizer at UBC nor the organizer in Naga could give me anything more precise than the Naga Youth Hostel. Apparently they'd reserved a block of rooms for us. "Just ask anyone for the Youth Hostel. They will know where to take you."

Much to my delight, I discover that no one in Naga has any clue what a youth hostel is, much less where the Naga City Youth Hostel is. Hilarity ensues, involving many different kinds of citizens, several officers at the police station, and tricycle rides all over town, including this memorable scene, arriving at a churchlike building at the edge of the city.

Trike driver: Here, sir, Naga City Apostle.
Me: [It takes a moment for the penny to drop] Oh! Uh, no, not apostle. Youth hostel.
Driver: Oh, I thought maybe you are a missionary. Apostle?
Me: No, youth hostel. Like a hotel, for young people.
Driver: I don't know. [Smiling]

After some more adventure, I find myself at Naga City Hall at 5:00 pm on a Saturday trying to track down Our Man In Naga, Willy (who works in the planning department, and is the organizer of our stay at this end). More hilarity ensues, but, miraculously, Willy and I eventually connect.

It turns out that in fact it's the Youth Centre, not Hostel, we're looking for, but that it's irrelevant anyway because the Youth Centre has been taken over by the Commission for Elections so we can't stay there until later next week. Other arrangements have been made at a local hotel, to which the ever-friendly Willy drives me.

Postscript: Over a week later, we are still at the hotel. The Commission for Elections is overseeing the vote count, but now people are protesting the mayor-elect's eligibility, so the commission won't leave until that is settled.

Welcome to Naga.

See for yourself

I've uploaded some photos to my flickr page, to give you a taste of what I've been seeing. Have a look.

Whale sharks

Whale sharks, or butanding, are filter feeders with no teeth that gather in large numbers at this time of year off the southeast coast of Luzon. We spent another night in Manila before making our connection plane to Legaspi, minivan to Donsol, and then tricycle to the place were were staying at near the Whale Shark Bothering Headquarters. We, like others, had come to harass this wildlife, and had to get the safety video (including sad commentary on tourist behaviour like "don't attempt to ride the butanding").

We shelled out our pesos and by 7:30 a.m. we were on the water, again in an outrigger canoe. It's pretty much like finding needles in a haystack, as far as I can tell. But our spotter did spot a couple, and they are beautiful. They also seemed completely unfazed by us; they could easily have dived or sped away from our snorkel-and-fin paddling, but did not. We followed one for almost 20 minutes before it dived away.

Rice terraces

Fast forward: Flight to Manila, where we kill another gritty day waiting for our overnight bus to the north of the island. Bus trip highlights of which include subzero air conditioning, and a middle-of-the-night pee-and-snack break at the apparently all-night balut stand.

A couple of forms of transportation later we are in idyllic Sagada, where we decide to stay in a former monastery, now an inn with running water and a toilet with a seat. It's about five degrees cooler, has a ban on tricycles and a 9 pm curfew for jeepneys, and is generally more conducive to not having the will to live ground out of us than the previous 24 hours have been. We love it.

A couple of boys who look about ten follow us around for a bit and then end up leading us to:

• some coffins hanging from a high cliff
• a local waterfall and swimming hole, where other locals eventually produce a whole unplucked chicken which they roast over a fire
• a hut of a couple of weavers and their children, with whom we snack and gesture after buying some impressive products

Eventually we agree that we must move on, though we could easily have stayed a few more nights.

In the transport hub of Bontoc, we stop at a museum featuring human jaw bone ornaments, a basket for carrying head-hunting bounty, a photo of a man playing a nose flute, and a re-created Ifugao thatch village. Lunch at a place that I wrongly suspected would give us gastrointestinal distress, and then on to our next attraction: rice terraces. Our next few days feature:

• Banaue: 2,000 years old, mud walls
• Banga-an: Descending into this valley, wending our way through the rice terraces completely surrounding this (hamlet? what's the word for a collection of about a dozen thatch huts?)
• Batad: Amphitheatre-like rice terraces reached through a surreal rainforest/jungle hike of prehistoric-looking tree ferns and blue centipedes

The rice terraces are intellectually awe-inspiring and experientially mandala-like. The people here are extra-friendly. The countryside is extra-beautiful. The air is extra-less-hot. We could stay here forever. But the butanding beckon, and after a few days we clamber onto the bus for Manila again.

Islands, caves, snorkelling

This is what El Nido was really about for us: island hopping and snorkelling. And it was beautiful. Half a dozen or more people, armed with masks and fins climbed into an outrigger canoe (bangka) with a guide and crew, and out we set to float over coral reefs, wander along white-sand beaches, and scramble or swim into caves. At one point we were instructed to swim through a hole in a rock wall, and were treated to a "secret" lagoon and beach on the other side, completely enclosed by limestone at least 20 metres high.

The water was just pleasantly on the cool side, but still very warm by Vancouver standards. Underwater, the variety and density of corals and fish was such that if it were in an aquarium it would look absurdly artificial. The fish fall into several scientific categories:

• prototypically proportioned
• all conceivable other proportions
• in possession of long fluffy or filamentous or spiky outcroppings
• implausibly coloured
  
• even more implausibly coloured
• startlingly close underneath me before I realized they were there
  

And they seem to have little fear of humans; for example, at one point I was surrounded by hundreds of iridescent neon tetras. A spiky and poisonous lionfish was, unsurprisingly, completely unconcerned. A school of completely adorable cuttlefish, or perhaps completely adorable squid, were a bit more wary but still they flowed around us with less than a metre's clearance.

These surreal marine visits, which constitute the highest actualization of my childhood Jacques Cousteau fantasies yet, are one of my best memories of my time here.

El Nido

Our tiny prop plane (so tiny that the re was no room for a flight attendant; she got off after the safety demonstration) touched down at El Nido airport, which is actually a landing strip with a sort of wall-less thatch shelter the size of a two-car garage. Beside the shelter are a couple of rattan hammocks hung in enormous unidentifiable oak-ish trees. Bougainvillea provides a visual blast of hot pink here and there in the dusty scrubland surrounding the strip. It is even hotter than in Manila, but I would have been happy to have spend my entire holiday lying on that hammock in the shade; it was such a welcome bucolic contrast to that accursed city.

All we had to do now was wait. Before leaving home, we had gone on the internet and booked a modest thatch hut on the beach (it's still a mystery to me how they get internet access there), and they had e-mailed us to say someone would come pick us up. Which a young fellow with virtually no English does, in a tricycle, and we set off over a dusty gravel road to a dusty concrete road and finally into town. It feels like an Adventure.

Town is a collection of shacks. We are dropped off at the near edge of it and pay the driver. Another older boy/ young man meets us and says, "Come. Fifteen minutes." Okay. We follow him down a narrow path between buildings to the beach, which is a working beach with fishing boats and equipment up the length of the white sand. This picture is fairly sanitized but gives you an idea.

We continue following Jhun-Jhun (as we later find out his name to be) up the beach, around the base of a cliff, into a coconut-palm forest, that features a lone and enormous old mango tree, continuing along this dirt path past chickens running through a fallen-coconut-strewn cemetery of simple poured concrete tombs -- we're sweating heavily now, physically and psychologically -- past dry rice paddies, a few thatch houses on stilts, and finally we are presented at Hadefes Beach Cottages. This is not where we were booked. Wing, a young woman who speaks English, informs us that the place we were booked has run out of water and we have been transferred here, and will refund us the difference. Under the circumstances, we acquiesce. (We later find out that we are being charged over twice as much as accommodations right in town.)

Our thatch hut on stilts has window openings and no glass, rattan walls, a cane- or bamboo-slat floor with gaps you can see through (makes sweeping up a snap!), and a bathroom that seems disappointing at the time but in retrospect was above average. We also have a little porch, from which we can see the water about 20 metres away but semi-blocked by coconut palms and a couple of other huts. We can also see the ground, which is sandy dirt with orderly plantings or pottings of bougainvillea and hibiscus, and disorderly constellations of fowl and the skinniest dogs I have ever seen. All the dogs are the same breed, and possibly the same family. I think they are livestock; we saw them all over the Philippines and only once witnessed a Filipino petting or even acknowledging a dog. The people on the next property have some monkeys in a large cage.

Town is a bit more disappointment, mostly a poor-looking fishing village that seems desperately to want tourists' money but has very little idea about what tourists want. A notable exception is the grandly named El Nido Boutique and Art Cafe, run by a no-nonsense Swiss woman who speaks a local language. It is a million degrees. Brian and I decide to deal with our shock by taking a mid-afternoon siesta. We do not get out of bed until the next day, still in shock.

All of this remains the same for the trip, though we get more used to it, and more annoyed by being ripped off, but we are able to forget about it because for two days we go out on bangkas to island-hop and snorkel in the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Bacuit Archipelago. That's a blog entry in itself.

C.R.

Toilet facilities here are referred to as "comfort rooms" or simply "C.R.". How comforting.

However, especially in rural or poor areas, a C.R. can be an unlit shack with a dirt floor, two footpads and a hole, and no paper, just a bucket of questionable water and a scoop. Even ones with an actual toilet fixture frequently have no seat, and/or you have to pour water in (from the bucket) to the bowl to "flush" because it's not hooked up to a water supply. I have come to think of this comfort-room bucketed water as eau de toilette. It's more comforting that way.

O Japan, I miss your washlets.

I get around...

Before moving on, it might be valuable to explain the transportation options available to a traveller in the Philippines, as they will come up in my future entries. If nothing else, the Philippines, and especially Manila, has transportation choice. There's the usual taxis and metrorail and long-distance coaches and whatnot (though come to think of it I can't recall seeing any public buses), but also a few modes of transport that are different from back home.

Jeepneys. I guess when the Americans finally started to pull their troops out of the Philippines, they left a lot of army transport jeeps. These have been re-used as jitneys (hence the name) and are distinctively Filipino both as a mode of transport and in their decoration. People often ride hanging from the outside or on the top.

Jeepneys ply regular routes that are displayed on the outside of the vehicle; you flag them down as they go by. You enter from the back, sit along one of two long benches that run along each side of the back, hunker down with twelve to fourteen of your new closest friends, and swelter until your destination comes. When this happens, you have to let the driver know to stop, and this you do by shouting "Para!" (Stop!), hissing, or banging on the roof. You pay the driver if you haven't already, and you're a free human again.

Minivans. These function like jeepneys except they go further distances, for example from one village to another. They don't have a schedule; they leave whenever they are full. This can be over an hour. People usually wait outside, but because minivans are usually air conditioned sometimes the driver will leave the motor running with the A/C on so people can wait inside in comfort.

Tricycles. These are like a motorcycle with a sidecar, each of which is semi-enclosed, but sort of separately. A picture will be clearer than an explanation. You ride in the sidecar, or on the back of the seat behind the driver (usually sidesaddle). I've seen as many as seven people in a tricycle: three in the sidecar, two behind the driver, and two hanging on the outside of the sidecar. Tricycles are fun, but they are also built for Filipino-sized people: the roof above the sidecar is about 15 cm too low for me, and the roof over the driver would be perfect for me if my head did not extend above my ears.

There is a pricing system, but if you don't know it and you look western you will be charged two to ten times more than that unless you haggle them down. And if you get in before securing the price, woe to you.

Padyak. These are human-powered versions of tricycles found in some parts. They are restricted to lesser roads, and don't tend to travel very far. I like them more than tricycles (trikes are very noisy and polluting), but keep getting kicked out of them because I want to go somewhere they can't go. They drop me off at a jeepney route or a street frequented by tricycles.

Those are, I believe, some of the more novel transportation modes, at least for me. In Manila, there are about a thousand of these in some combination in every block, often going any direction in any lane all at once. Crossing the street is an adventure, and speaking of pedestrians, just to add to the fun they are often also walking in the street because the sidewalks are filthy, crumbling, overcrowded or non-existent.

Something that I like about Philippines traffic, at least outside Manila, is that I've noticed that jeepney and trike drivers tend to honk as they approach any pedestrian or person who might be in danger. It's calm and polite tooting, as if to say, "this is a courtesy notice to you that I am approaching". Also, the traffic tends to move fairly slowly, so it works well. Planner-types reading this will probably recognize it as a sort of unplanned macro-scale woonerf.

Manila is the Anti-Tokyo

Tokyo to Manila. What a change. Two enormous Asian cities, but that's where the similarity stops.

Tokyo: Clean, organized, visually intelligible, visible wealth. The people are polite in an anticipate-other-people's-needs-but-don't-impose kind of way. It's surprisingly difficult to get by in English. Weather: Warm and somewhat humid.

Manila: Grimy, filthy, polluted, chaotic, disorienting, with evidence of extreme long-term poverty dominating almost every view. The people are friendly in an approach-foreigners-constantly-with-greetings-offers-and-demands kind of way. It's surprisingly easy to get by in English. Temperature in the mid-thirties and very high humidity making it feel even hotter.

I'll temper my social observations with an acknowledgement that I haven't seen all or even most of Manila, but from what I experienced, the only good things I can say are in the category of "at least it's not worse." At least it's not actually even dirtier than it in fact is. At least more people aren't trying to rip you off even more than they already are. At least the smell of rotting garbage and urban decay only caused me to wish I would lose consciousness rather than actually making me lose consciousness.

But really, this isn't the whole picture. In fact, I caught a glimpse of two Manilas.

Manila #1: Outside

This is most of Manila, as seen from the neighbourhoods around both our hotels (one a lightly fortified compound in a slummy part of Pasay City, the other in the tourist-hotel nexus of Ermita/Malate), from our walks in what might loosely be termed as the tourist-friendly parts of the city, and all of what we saw from taxi and train windows. The main features of Manila #1 are essentially those I've described above.

Manila #2: Malls

Mall culture in Manila is like nothing I've ever seen. It's a major, day-long destination for (upper-)middle-class families, and is something like a hermetically sealed fantasy of actual and wishful consumption of global brands and American-TV lifestyles. I don't know where these people are when they're not in the malls, because I do not see them anywhere else in Manila. We did pass through some neighbourhoods with walled compounds, so maybe they live in there.

One of the biggest appeals of Manila #2, and one of the reasons we headed for the mammoth and more-or-less-nearby Mall of Asia almost immediately upon arrival, is that malls are air-conditioned. You show up at the entrance, are frisked for weapons and have your belongings searched or poked at with a stick, depending on the inclination of the security guard, and then are welcomed by lovely cold air like angels coming to envelop you in a cloud of love as they gently transport you to heaven. I've always hated air conditioning, but now I have learned to worship it.

Once inside the mall, it is of course the same hell of chain stores and Total Consumption Management as in any big North American city, but I am willing to put up with it, at least for a while. In one mall this took the form of braving our way through the in-mall Catholic mass (complete with chairs set up on two mall levels) in order to see what movies were on at the mall's cinema. All four screens turned out to be playing Spiderman 3, all day. (Perhaps there's another cinema in the mall? Yes, upstairs. Seven screens. Also all playing Spiderman 3. We saw Spiderman 3. Only fools try to resist their destiny.)

Back to the Mall of Asia. It's actually more a complex of mall buildings which are almost but not quite contiguous, therefore involving periodic micro-forays Outside, and then a new security pat-down and probe. Surprisingly, in the middle of one of the main mall buildings, there's an ice rink, which comes complete with periodic snowfall accompanied by a trite "Hooray! The snow is falling!" jingle from the loudspeakers.

Speaking of music, it is almost everywhere and there appears to be a heavy preference for extremely sappy love songs -- as in, Filipino popular music! Now fortified with 200% more sap! In fact, the internet cafe I currently find myself in is now playing a schlocky cliché-ridden ballad, *and* one of the staffers has produced a guitar and is playing and singing along either out of tune, or in tune in another and rapidly shifting key, depending on which half of the glass you tend to see.

But I digress. In sum: we arrived in Manila and were in shock. But no matter, we were off the next day for our tropical paradise: El Nido. At least, that's the way we were still thinking of it then. But that's another blog entry.

[I realize that right now you might be thinking, "Oh no! It sounds like your holiday was a disaster!", or perhaps, "Jeff, you're really being unfairly hard on the Philippines." Don't worry. The Philippines has also come up with its share of pleasant experiences and encounters. Stay tuned!]

Return from hiatus

Well, it's been a couple of weeks now. In a nutshell, Brian arrived in Tokyo, we had a few days of all manner of Tokyo fun, and then jetted off to the Philippines for more experiences and whatnot (especially whatnot).

I'm now in Naga City. Brian's delayed in Manila for a little while after having his passport stolen -- and after reading my next entry, you may appreciate that an extra day in Manila is arguably a worse life event than losing one's passport. You have my sympathy, Brian!

And I've got some blogging to do. I'll catch you up gradually over the next few entries. Our basic itinerary in the Philippines was this:

1. El Nido, a diving-and-snorkelling village on the island of Palawan.
2. The Mountain Province of northern Luzon island, site of 2,000-year-old rice terraces.
3. Donsol, in the southeast of Luzon, where whale sharks gather at this time of year, along with tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of them up close.

Because of the way that transportation is organized in the Philippines, this meant arriving in Manila and then returning to Manila between every step. So that's where I'll start.