All this swimming with whale sharks went down in a tiny town called Donsol, and not even really in the town but outside of it. The whole area would remained untouched if there weren't giant fish swimming around off the shore. There was only one small road, sparsely spotted with tourist resorts and restaurants. These two terms are used lightly here. Most of these resorts are tiny clusters of cement or thatch houses, and the restaurants match. After our boat trip out to see the whale sharks we wandered along the beach until we came across a restaurant and bar called BARacuda, and we got the royal treatment from the chef and owner, a Filipino/German/American who cooked ridiculously good food, was quite hospitable (we were the only guests), and even accepted Jesse's offer to bartend for the evening in exchange for free beer. There weren't many people besides one large dinner she was having for investors, so me and Sean just made Jesse bring us beer and played cards while he was working, and got another meal of fresh-caught fish and prawns and pasta with homemade pesto sauce. Both Jesse and Sean insisted it was the best food they had had in the Philippines, and I believe it, especially after I tried a typical Filipino snack called balut. This is what I looked like after I ate balut:
For those of you fortunate to be ignorant of what balut is, let me ruin your appetite for the next week. To put it simply, balut is a hard-boiled duck abortion. In more detail, you can order this innocent-looking egg by how mature the fetus is; I ate an 18 day-old balut, which I am told is a standard age. Then you break open the end where the fetus' waste juices have accumulated, and you drink them. Then you continue to remove the shell until you hold some standard-looking hard-boiled egg yolk that is topped by a duck fetus the size of your thumb. You can see the little head, and the eyes that will never open, and then you shove the whole thing in your mouth and chew if you can, trying to ignore the random crunchy parts that may be a tiny beak, or maybe underdeveloped bones, or maybe just stray pieces of shell that you didn't notice since you were too busy trying to cope with that fact that you were going to put this abomination in your mouth. As for the taste, I'm not really sure, I think my brain blocked out sensory data from that experience. I do remember that the yolk that the fetus was sitting on tasted like normal egg yolk, and fortunately there was a fair amount of that compared to the fetus itself, but other than that I don't really know. I think most of my revulsion was psychological, but I don't plan on trying it again to be sure. I have Jesse, who refuses to eat one, to thank for this experience, as he ordered it for me.
To be honest though, since hearing about balut on my first night in the Philippines, when I met some of Jesse's friends that were in Manila, I did sort of want to try it just for the experience. "Be careful what you wish for." Yeah yeah yeah. That culinary disaster occurred as we were sitting outside a restaurant, waiting for dinner in a small city called Legaspi on a Sunday evening, where I first met up with Jesse and some of his other friends the previous night. It was a pretty fun little city actually, although I think for too much longer than the two days I spent there, it may get boring. In two days there we: shot each other with pellet guns in some random park while hordes of Filipino kids looked on, went to an Australian Day (?) party, sang videoke at some random bar, at chopped pig face at the same bar, went on a mountain-top zip line, played The Settlers of Catan, the best board game ever, and looked at some ruins of a church below an active, never-before erupted, and perfectly cone-shaped volcano that you can apparently only hike half way up because any further and your shoes would melt to the steaming rock and you would die from the noxious gases. A cool little city, but I think I got the most out of it.
Boracay is a much more famous destination than Legaspi. I guess it's probably the most famous destination outside of Manila. It's a small tourist island with a long white sand beach lined with palm trees and beachside bars and restaurants. You can get hour-long massages for under ten bucks or ice-cold beer for under fifty cents. After my first two days in Manila, I flew here to meet some teacher friends of mine from Korea. I spent about three full days here, and much like Legaspi, I think I got the most out of it, despite much of my initial time being spent running around to various airline offices and tourist centers trying to get a flight off the island to Legaspi. I guess I'm just retarded for leaving my flight plans for two days before I wanted to leave, like I did in Manila getting a flight to Boracay. Pretty much every flight anywhere in the country goes to or from Manila, so I had to fly back to Manila from Boracay in order to get to Legaspi, and after exhausting every option for two days, I finally found an open seat that would get me to Manila, except it was too late to get the connecting flight to Legaspi. It all worked out in the end, and I've already gone into too much detail when I can just say it was a fucking debacle.
Anyway, outside of laying on the beach, getting massages, boat tours, snorkeling, and eating and drinking to your hearts content, there isn't a whole lot to do on Boracay. I thought it was going to be a built up perpetual shit-show like Cancun, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it much much quieter and small scale. There are a lot of smaller secluded beaches that are practically empty and only a short trike ride away. I went to one called Puka Shell beach with Eric, one of my friends from Korea, and apart from a couple boat tours that stopped there, there were only about six other people laying on the beach. That evening, back in the more populated part of the island, we went to a bar that serves a 15 shot challenge. If you can finish all of them, you get your name on a plaque on the wall, and one tally added onto the international scoreboard - Philippines was in first of course, with Korea, USA, and Canada all near the top somewhere too. One group of Western teachers on vacation from Taiwan I was with did this that night, and though I left, apparently they finished, and were drunk enough to think they could do it again. One dude apparently got pretty sick, big surprise. I also knew a hot Taiwanese girl that was on the island whom I met in Manila a couple days before. Being the small place it was, I ran into her a few times, and she was super flirty with me, but after hanging out with her a little, I found out that she had some serious ex-boyfriend issues, namely that she used to date the dude that got really sick doing the shot challenge, and though she would act really interested in me a lot of the time, she would end up running off to hang around him at other times. I felt it a better decision to leave her problems to her.
Jesse had his own problems with women in the town that he lives in. More specifically, he's not married, and there's a woman in his office who is the same age and also not married. This pair of coincidences seem to be the Filipino equivalent of a proposal. The three days I was in Sagnay with Jesse, he was constantly pestered with questions on when he was going to get married, that he was going to be on his "final trip" soon - this is something having to do with the fact that a calendar only has 31 days, and after you turn 32 you're off the calendar or something like that. As a spectator, this was quite fun to watch, but it sure sucks for him, hearing the same jokes and innuendos for the past six months, and presumably into his next 18 in that town. Also during my time in Sagnay I followed Jesse around while he was "working." By that, I mean on the first day, I went into his office, met people, got head-butted by some grizzled 75 year-old Filipino, heard jokes about him being single, left the office, watched a cock fight, and drank some instant coffee before going to a barkada (drinking circle) where we passed around a bottle of cheap brandy with one shot glass until the bottle was gone (an activity known as tagay tagay) and then went to the only bar in the area which just happened to be a stripper/hooker bar run by baklas, or lady boys, or tranvestites, depending on your preference for nomenclature.
The second day consisted of taking a boat out on the local river/bathroom to get to the ocean, then going to a sparsely inhabited island a couple kilometers off the coast where Jesse is working on getting a new fresh water reservoir installed. The settlements here were devastated by a typhoon a few years back and haven't had electricity or much fresh water since. I took a lot of pictures since I was a professional photographer due to my possession of a brand new and impressive-looking camera. A bunch of kids followed us around as I took pictures of the water system they currently have, and some scenic stuff for potential tourism ads. We also tried to find some cave that was on a different part of the island, but that just ended up being a wild goose chase across a jagged swath of wet and ridiculously dangerous rocks alongside the ocean. It was so dangerous that when we finally gave up looking for the cave, Jesse decided to swim back to the shore, and me, a pudgy and jolly man in his late 30's named Noly whose hobbies are sleeping and eating, and a woman in her 50's named Hilaria, both Jesse's coworkers, decided to scale a hill made of mud and take the high road through the jungle back.
We had another barkada that night, but with a videoke machine I had so graciously rented for everyone. It cost only about $10 but seemed to be a rare event. We went through three bottles of Matador brandy between six or seven of us. The song singing went on into the wee hours of the night, ensuring a fun day of work early tomorrow.
Day three at work: Since I was a professional photographer, we were granted the services of a van and a driver to drive around and take more pictures for tourism posters and websites and so forth. Apparently having a driver is big deal since almost no one drives anything larger than a scooter or a trike here. Jesse, Noly, Hilaria, myself, and Ninette (Jesse's single coworker who is the same age) drove south down the coast, in the direction that Jesse is normally not allowed to enter due to the infestation of rebel militants called the NPA hiding in the hills. Our first stop was to check out a waterfall that was a couple kilometers from the road.
"Hey Jesse, we aren't gonna get kidnapped are we?" I joked.
"Nah, not here."
Apparently we hadn't gone south enough to make our hike a bit more exciting. A guide from the local neighborhood brought us up the trail along a stream fed by the waterfall and past some small huts. When we got to the waterfall I had time to take about five pictures before we turned around. We had planned to eat lunch but whatever. On the way back the Filipinos were yakking amongst themselves and walking out of distance as I was stopping to take photos.
"Hey Ethan, they say walk faster and don't stop to take pictures. We need to leave now."
"Okay. Wait, seriously?"
"Yeah."
It turned out that there actually was a chance of getting kidnapped. Our guide had seen someone or something of the NPA around the waterfall. Jesse said that you know it wasn't good if Filipinos canceled their lunch plans. We drove on further down the road that Jesse was never supposed to go down, stopping at a few scenic lookout points, snapping a few photos, and driving past the scorched frame of a box truck that had been firebombed by the NPA within the last week. We went all the way to the next town for some halo-halo at a famous halo-halo place. If you're wondering, its a sort of nasty desert involving ice, fruit, gelatinous blobs, and shredded cheese. I slept on the ride back, so I didn't get a picture of the burned out truck, but I don't think that would've been the best sell to potential tourists anyway. The rest of the day we went to various beach resorts in town and took photos of the thatch open-air huts and rooms they offered for the future Sagnay tourism website. We even graciously took photos of the resort I was supposed to stay at, except they tried to overcharge the hell out of me. I wound up staying with Jesse's host family, and Jesse made sure the people at that resort regretted it after they realized he was giving all the resorts free publicity and threatened to blacklist them. They even went so far as to come to his house to try and apologize and offer him free rooms whenever he wanted them. That was pretty much the end of the third day at work, a day which had been full of marriage jokes due to Ninette's presence with us all day, and Jesse teasing her about being his Valentine's date. This all fueled the gossip around town that was to come in the following days, of course.
Only about an hour away from the gossip-saturated, internet-bereft town of Sagnay is Camsur Watersports Complex. This is a world-class wakeboarding park with artificial lakes with cable systems that pull you around a wakeboarding and waterskiing course. People come from all over the world and stay here for months at a time and just wakeboard all day. It's a pretty rad place, and super cheap. I'm sure an equivalent facility in the states would charge about 10X as much. You can rent a wakeboard and equiptment for like five dollars, and do an hour of wakeboarding for three. This is also where rich Filipinos come to hang out and watch the silly white people either face plant in the case of beginners, or launch like 10 feet in the air and pull all sorts of crazy flips and spins if you're one of the pros or semi-pros that lurk around CWC. I wakeboarded for about two and half or three hours even though I only paid for one. I guess they just don't check. Thanks to my long years of snowboarding, I was able to stick 180s and boardslides pretty consistently by the end of the day.
I paid for it over the next few days though, as I was so sore I couldn't believe it, though I knew it was coming every time the tension on the line jerked me around a corner or off of the start platform, or when I caught an edge or nose-dived off a jump and landed ear first while my body twisted in all sorts of unnatural positions above me. Take, for example, this photo of Jesse to illustrate the level of exertion needed to control the tension of the cables that pulled you around:
CWC also had the nicest accommodations I stayed in during all of my time in the Philippines. Two beds, made up everyday, cable with movie channels, a flush toilet with toilet paper - much better than simply a bowl and a bucket of water to flush/clean yourself with - and hot water and AC. All for around $25 a night, about what a hostel in Europe charges for a flimsy bunk-bed in a dorm room with a bunch of strangers.
I'll end this on the subject of Manila. Nevermind about the the great cover band in Naga, or the questionably oriented Filipino known as Mr. T, the marriage inquiries on a a jeepney or any of the thousands of details that filled in every minute between everything mentioned above. I started and ended my trip in Manila, naturally being the capital city and having the biggest airport. I stuck to one neighborhood called Malate, on the western edge of the city, by the bay. There are a fair amount of tourists around that area, and a ton of Korean restaurants and shops. I guess they come here to learn English. One old white guy I ran into that had been living in the Philippines for ages told me, when I mentioned I was a teacher in Korea, that I should teach them to stop coming to the Philippines since Koreans apparently "buy everything up". He was weird. Anyway, not far from the hostel I stayed at was a mall that's normal by Western standards, but upscale enough by Filipino standards to require armed guards and security checks. This fit with the armed guards in front of banks, travel offices, Seven Elevens, and so on and so on. It's nice knowing that when you take out from a ATM what is a fortune to most Filipinos, you won't be robbed (immediately). There is all sorts of shit going down in Manila. The traffic is hard to believe, and if there are some traffic laws in theory, there are none in practice. Any number of varieties of vehicles get from here to there however they can.
There is a huge sex industry, and I figured it was safe to assume that 95% of all Western guys with a Filipino girl who had the frame of a twelve year-old on his arm was a certifiable dirt bag on a sex holiday. One woman stopped me on a corner to chat me up in English for a good five minutes before delivering the proposition which we both know was coming:
"Are you looking for a woman? I know many."
"No."
"Are you sure? I can get you a good price."
"No." I begin to walk away as she calls after me,
"I can get you very young...!"
I was a little disappointed I only got that one proposition, I guess I'm not as handsome or rich-looking as I think. Although I guess there was Jolie, the bakla on Boracay, and some random hookers hanging around the doors to bars I walked by, so maybe there were a few more, just none that put forth as much effort.
The second day I was in the Philippines I took the train to the Chinese Cemetery on the recommendation of an Austrian guy I met at the hostel. I brought my brand new $500 dollar camera to get some pictures, and as evening was falling, and I was lost, wandering through random neighborhoods looking for the entrance, I thought dangling said camera around my neck wasn't the best idea, but oh well, I had already begun. Some of the neighborhoods were actually really amazing. Poor, certainly, but there were kids playing in the street, and music coming out of the doors and men and women sitting around chatting, and bright colored clothes hung everywhere. They were truly lively, and when a bunch of kids pointed me down some random alley after they correctly guessed I was looking for the Chinese Cemetery, and some old dude even escorted me partway there, I realized they were actually pointing me in the right direction and not even trying to rob me or beg money off of me for their help, which I certainly appreciated.
On my way back from the cemetery, well after dark, I figured I would walk to a different train stop from the one I first got off at since I had to walk a long way away to get to the cemetery and I thought I might be closer to a different one. I was wrong, and I wound up walking maybe two kilometers in the dark down some filthy road getting called "Joe!" and "Hey Joe!" every time I passed groups of shady Filipinos. I thought for sure the robbery bait hanging around my neck was going to get snatched, and maybe I'd get a knife in the stomach for good measure, but I made it back to the neighborhood I was staying in with no problems. When I got back to Korea after my vacation had ended, I did realize I was missing my older, compact, digital camera however. I guess if something had to get stolen from me, it might have well have been that piece of shit. I suspected that the cab driver who brought me to the airport had been a little too friendly, and suspicions had already been cast upon his character thanks to the broken seal on the meter, the attempt to start the meter too high, and his suggestion to take a route alternate to what I knew was a direct way to the airport. Let him have it though, and good luck trying to sell it: the flash doesn't work, the battery doesn't last, the case is coming apart, it's scratched to hell, the memory card is tiny, and half the time the lens doesn't retract automatically. I know that during my time in the Philippines, I overpaid for a fair amount of things that still wound up being cheap to me, but just for the sake of getting even, I'm glad that whoever thinks they got a nice camera off a tourist will find out it's a piece of shit and maybe they'll feel screwed too.
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