Yesterday included another walk to the harbor to check on the navy ship. Marie, my main contact, was at the gangway shack this time and I was glad to see her. However, it didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t very friendly this time – probably tired of seeing me – and she had no information about when the ship might be leaving to go to Cebu. I hadn’t been expecting anything different, and I took it in my stride. My problem with this situation isn’t that the ship hasn’t left yet. I wouldn’t mind if the ship left two weeks from now. I’m still staying for free at the pension house, and that makes all the difference in the world. The problem is the uncertainty. Uncertainty drives me crazy. I like to know when things are going to happen. I like having advance notice so I can plan and organize. I’m worried that after waiting for this ship for two weeks that I will get a text message saying they are leaving in two hours. I want to get a message saying that they are leaving in three days. Then I can look forward to it and get prepared.

I had my camera with me, and I planned to walk to Anibong and do some photography. I had the 25mm lens on it, and the idea was to take people pictures as much as possible rather than pictures of the destruction. Unfortunately, it started to rain. It began raining even before I got to the ship, and it continued to rain for a long time. I made it as far as the new fish market building, but I eventually gave up and turned around. It’s no fun taking pictures in the rain.

Then, as I was walking back through the city, I was suddenly hit with intense stomach cramps. Something I ate in the last couple of days hadn’t agreed with me and it wanted out of my body RIGHT NOW! It was touch and go whether I would make it back to my room and the toilet before nature’s call became an imperative. I was in a lot of pain, and I walked all hunched over and stiff. Things were getting desperate and I started counting steps up to a hundred and then going back to zero. I told myself that I’d only have to count to one hundred X number of times before I got back to my room. It was a close thing, but I made it and I did not have to rush into an alley somewhere and drop my pants – something I’ve had to do on more than one occasion in my long life of a delicate stomach and poor food in faraway places. It’s funny how that situation is practically commonplace for me.

Before the stomach cramps had hit in earnest, I stopped at a small street stall and purchased a copy of the Philippine Inquirer newspaper. With my Kindle KIA, I needed something to read. After a certain period of agony and discomfort in the bathroom, I emerged (to go back in several more times during the day) and lay down on my bed and read through the paper. I read the entire thing from the first page to the last. By the end of it, I was little the wiser. The news never changes. I read that Israel was concerned about Iran’s nuclear program and was disagreeing with the US about how to deal with it. No news there. Mandela had died and the world’s leaders were descending on South Africa for a memorial service. No news there, either. Someone we’ve decided was a “great man” is always dying and being honored in elaborate ceremonies. All the politicians in the Philippines were bickering about who did what during the typhoon and who was at fault for this or that. Electricity rates were being raised and “users are shocked” about it. Only two articles caught my eye and interested me. One was about the University of the Philippines (UP) campus in Tacloban. It is just down the street from my pension house and was very badly damaged by the typhoon. It hasn’t reopened, of course, and the article was concerned with whether the UP should be rebuilt there at all. Perhaps it would be better to relocate to somewhere inland and therefore safer. The other article was about poverty rates in the Philippines. It said that despite some goal-setting about reducing poverty levels, one in four Filipinos still lived below the poverty line. This poverty line was set at something like 7,900 pesos per month for a family of five. That’s about $180 US – for a family of five. That works out, since I understand that the minimum wage is around 300 pesos per day. Working six days a week, that works out to almost exactly 7,900 pesos.

That’s not a lot of money even here in the Philippines. And it’s certainly not a lot of money in post-typhoon Tacloban, where food prices have risen considerably. I was made aware of this last night when I ran into the man that used to run the fried chicken stall near my pension house. I purchased chicken at his stall many times, and we ended up getting to know each other a little bit. He’s a nice guy and speaks a reasonable amount of English.

I ran into him on the street as I was walking back from Mark’s house in the dark last night. I was very surprised to learn that this man was currently working for UNICEF. There was no way for him to restart his fried chicken stall right now, and he needed to make money for his family and somehow he got this gig with UNICEF. I thought that would be a great thing for him, but he was being paid the minimum wage of 300 pesos a day. He had a family to feed and with the food prices having doubled (he said), it is impossible to make ends meet on 300 pesos a day. I assume there is something strange going on here because I can’t imagine UNICEF paying that little. My guess is that they are being supplied with workers by some local government agency, and it is that agency that is paying them. That’s the only explanation. It’s not like UNICEF doesn’t have any money. This man said that at his first opportunity, he will reopen his fried chicken stall. He made a lot more money doing that than he can make working for UNICEF. He was pretty annoyed – as he should be – at these low wages and was doubly annoyed at some Danish logistics worker getting 500 dollars a month. I’m fairly certain he got those figures wrong or the Danish guy lied about his salary. I can’t see a full time expat working for UNICEF making as little as 500 dollars a month. But even that figure of 500 dollars (22,000 pesos) seemed like a fortune to my fried chicken-selling friend. It works out to 850 pesos a day based on 26 work days a month.

It’s interesting that in a place like Canada I never give a thought to businesses. Businesses seem like massive organizations requiring millions of dollars and investors and all that to start. When I think of business, I think of IBM and WalMart and BlackBerry and Ford and that sort of thing. But in the Philippines, I find myself pondering small businesses all the time. It appears to be very simple to start a business here. And people are living so close to pure survival levels that every little bit helps, and just about everyone runs a business in some small way. Witness the millions of sari-sari stores. They operate on a very small level but bring in a bit of cash for the family. Witness this fried chicken outlet. It consists of no more than a tiny wooden stall (so small that you can pick it up and carry it around) and a single wok filled with cooking oil. The guy sets it up at the side of the road and then fries chicken and sells it, and he manages to make more money than he could working at a salaried job. A very high percentage of Filipinos can probably be termed business owners. In Canada, the number would be extremely small.

In a strange way, I can see myself as more suited to the environment here in the Philippines than the one in Canada. I actually have something of an entrepreneurial spirit. I like doing things on my own and being in charge and having freedom and independence. And I like implementing new ideas and projects. I’ve always had crazy dreams about projects, and I always drift in the direction of just working for myself – as I did in Korea as a freelance teacher and then a freelance writer and editor. The problem is that I’m very much an idiot when it comes to anything practical. I’m good at the dreaming and the planning and lousy on the follow-through. My laziness and procrastinating also get in the way. Well, I’m not quite dead yet. Perhaps I’ll find a rhythm and groove someday.

Throughout the day, I was getting a steady stream of text messages from the young maid at Mark’s house, Dulce. She had asked for my cell phone number and I gave it to her. I replied to all her messages in my usual verbose way, and soon learned that whatever need this text messaging meets for her, it wasn’t one of communicating anything. The best she could come up with was “Hai Doglaz…” and “am OK” along with lots of dashes and dots and triangles making smiley faces. She also seems to do mass text messages to everyone in her contact list. So I’m now the happy recipient of these gems saying good morning and good night to all her friends. Considering her total inability to text in English, I have no idea why she wanted my cell phone number to begin with.

I went back to Mark’s house in the late afternoon. I was hoping to see his father’s video of the typhoon and storm surge. Like everything else in the Philippines, this is probably a lost cause. I can’t count the number of times that a person makes a wonderful offer of some kind and then just can’t follow through on it. This happens all the time. Mark himself had told me that he shot a lot of video of the typhoon on his cell phone. I got very excited when he said that he would show it to me. I waited a long time and kept asking about it and then it came out that he doesn’t know where the memory card from his phone is. It’s in his mother’s room or something and he doesn’t know where. I doubt it will ever surface. And now his father tells me that he has video of the actual storm surge – the three waves – heading for land. I asked if I could see it, and he says no problem. I can see it easily. But nothing emerges. Then the stories begin – the video is on this card or that card or on this phone or that phone and the phone is at the hatchery or the farm or this son has it or that son has it. It’s no problem he says. Tomorrow, his son will bring the phone from the farm or hatchery. So I went to the house hoping to see this video. But there was no phone there and no video. I doubt it will ever come to light.

Yesterday, I ran into Liv. She’s the woman who lives across the street and who hosts couch surfers. She had left town for a while, and just came back. I chatted with her and found out that she and her family had gone to Cebu for a while. But after a few days, they found the bright lights of the big city a bit much and yearned for the quieter simplicity of Tacloban. It’s amazing to me how mobile Filipinos are. They go anywhere and everywhere at the drop of a hat whether it is across town, across the country, or around the world. They often wonder why I don’t do the same. People will say that I should go to Cebu or Manila or Ormoc. But it’s not so easy for me. These people seem to have easy access to all kinds of transportation and then they seem to have places to stay when they get to wherever they’re going. They appear to be able to just show up in any city and move into a house there whether their own or a relative’s. I would be faced with having to find a hotel.

Liv – in her usual rapid-fire fashion – said that I should go with them when they visit some community outside of Tacloban. I was very happy to get this offer and told her that I’d be glad to go. I’ll go anywhere. She told me all about this place and how we’ll go there and how wonderful it will be for me to see a new place and what happened there. But I’m almost 100% sure that this will never happen. It’s another offer that will simply disappear into the mists.

I also stopped by Hayward on my wanderings. This was at night. It was dark at first and then the Japanese turned on their big generator and lit up the place. It was very pleasant to sit there in the light and watch the hustle and bustle of the store. I got to chat with the pleasant young daughter and then with Manny.

Just a quick thought: I’m also puzzled at how horrible the houses are even when people are rich. Mark’s family obviously has a lot of money and yet their house is simply awful – a concrete block. In terms of comfort, it is terrible. It isn’t even close to the cheapest of apartments in Canada. But it must be comfortable to them. They build them, after all, and they have enough money to buy whatever they want. Why not make something more comfortable? No idea.

1:00 p.m.

With no Kindle with which to read someone else’s words, I guess I just have to pour out some more of my own. I took my bike out this morning to see how it would function after trying to true the wheels myself. I was just curious what would happen. It was a bit of an annoying ride since it rained heavily yesterday and all through the night. So the roads were full of the usual giant puddles and thick mud. One can get very depressed after living with this mud for so long. Traffic was also as bad as always. It was worse in many ways because of all the debris and downed power lines that still litter the streets. It’s a real obstacle course.

I made my way along the coast road and then made my first stop the harbor. I was waved through the security gates, and I found yet another young sailor at the gangway shack. He knew nothing about me, their intention to take me to Cebu, or when they might be leaving, if ever. He was totally clueless, and I left there with a rather negative feeling about the Philippine navy.

I chatted with the guards at the gate, and they suggested that I just give up on the navy and take a bus to Cebu. I had been thinking that myself, and I asked them where the bus terminal was. It would be as good a destination as any for this test bike ride. The guards were just as good as all Filipinos at giving directions, meaning totally hopeless. The only direction I’ve ever been given here has consisted of “Go straight.” If I believed everyone, then the entire country would have to be something like Flatland, existing in only one dimension on a single very long and straight line. To get anywhere, I just have to go straight.

I rode my bike “straight” for a while and then I asked some more people for directions. They waved me forward in a straight line and then sort of curved their arms off to the right. I kept along the road and came to an intersection and I turned right as the arm wave told me to do. Then things sort of fell apart. The traffic on that road was very heavy, and there was so much debris still on the road that it was very hard to keep to the side of the road. There were deep puddles everywhere as well as thick cables cutting across the road. The traffic consisted of big trucks and jeepneys as well as the usual assortments of pedicabs and tricycles and private vehicles. It was crazy. People were honking their horns like insane creatures, and I found myself giving a very dramatic finger to the driver of a Philippine Red Cross relief vehicle. He had gone over the line with his honking. I like to think the driver was rather startled at my rude gesture. I hope so. I couldn’t care less what the dude thought of me. I wanted him to stop and accost me. I’d have given him plenty more of my state of mind.

I didn’t see the bus terminal anywhere and I stopped to ask for more directions. These people pointed back the way I had come and said, of course, “Just go straight.” I was a bit annoyed with that bit of help and my expression must have told them that because they then dug deep into their brains and came up with something that was actually useful. They said I had to go straight and then turn left when I got to the first set of traffic lights. That was remarkably clear, especially when they went on to explain that the traffic lights weren’t working, so I had to keep my eyes peeled. And then they really blew my mind when they added that the traffic lights were about 600 meters away. If there were awards for giving directions, these guys would get first prize. And I found the bus terminal without a problem. “Go straight” indeed.

The bus terminal was about what I expected and far less than I’d hoped. It was a nightmare of confusion and dirt and chaos and crowds. It was the perfect embodiment of all the reasons I avoid buses and ride bicycles.

I rode around the bus station for a few minutes and pondered going inside to check out schedules to Cebu and prices and that sort of thing, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In the end, I just rode away, more determined than ever to either take the navy ship, or, as I’d been thinking, actually take a chance and ride my bicycle. I realized as I rode away that I was quite irritable and much of that was due to not having had any breakfast beyond two cups of coffee and four small buns. So when I saw a little roadside eatery (so little that it consisted of one table, two chairs, and one umbrella), I stopped to have something to eat. The food was good and I had the usual set of dishes and rice coming to 95 pesos. It was fun eating there. Everyone was surprised if not astonished to see a foreigner eating at a place like that. It’s one of the small joys of this type of travel. I put a smile on hundreds of faces (passing by in vehicles) just by doing the normal thing of sitting down and having a meal. It’s so surprising to them to see a foreigner doing that that it makes them happy.

I had my own funny moment while there. While I was eating, a bunch of people emerged from the house behind me with a big load of suitcases. A big fancy air conditioned bus with onboard video and all the rest of it had pulled up right outside their home. All they had to do was cross the road and get on board. And their destination? Cebu. If you know how to go about things, life can be very easy here. You can just sit at home and the bus will come right to your door. Me, if I tried to take a bus, it would be a nightmare as evidenced by my inability to even find the bus terminal. I just always find a way to make things as difficult as possible.

I ran a few other errands while I was out. I happened to pass a small hardware store with open doors. I popped inside to see if they had any denatured alcohol, and to my delight, they did. I probably won’t need it, but I bought an entire gallon – just like the gallon I got during the initial typhoon days. Then I saw some spaghetti sauce for sale, and I bought a big bag of that. Finally, I stopped at a place for a haircut. It was the first hair salon in Tacloban to open after the typhoon. In fact, it was one of the first businesses to open period. I had chatted with the hairdresser back then when I first saw the place and said I would be back.

So today, despite being a bit hot and sweaty from my bike ride, I pulled in. The hairdresser was one of the typical Filipino hairdressers – a guy but dressed as a woman. She was quite nice and somewhat flamboyant. She gave me the standard haircut, and I believe it only cost 50 pesos. But she also asked if I wanted a head massage. I’m usually quite shy about such things, but I thought a head massage would be nice and I agreed. The massage was okay and it involved more than I expected. She put some kind of gel in my hair that had a very strong menthol component. It was very cooling – almost too cooling. It was so cooling that it started to burn. She gave me a long head massage, but then she wrapped my head in a long strip of absorbent paper (no idea why) and then said that I should just enjoy the cooling for fifteen minutes. Then she would rinse it out. As I sat there, I felt more than a bit foolish. I hardly dared open my eyes and look at myself in the mirror with that stupid paper around my head. I sat there for considerably longer than fifteen minutes, and I kept my eyes firmly closed also to avoid any kind of conversation. When my eyes were open, I was grilled mercilessly about my age and lack of wives, girlfriends, and children. Before we got to all their suggestions about how I should change and live my life, I just shut my eyes and stopped answering any questions.

I had a hard time relaxing into the whole haircut and massage experience partially because the chair was so uncomfortable. It pressed against my back terribly, and I had to tense my back muscles to relieve the pressure and that made it hard to breathe. All this physical effort kept me overheating, and I was sweating badly underneath the sheet they draped over me. Then when I lay down at the sink for the rinse, I found that place equally uncomfortable. The place where I had to rest my neck was really hard and sharp. I couldn’t relax there either. And then it was over and I was told that the grand total was “400 pesos only”. To be honest, that is a fair price considering the length of the massage and all the fancy stuff they used. But had I known it would cost 350 pesos, I would not have gotten it. All in all, it isn’t a place I would return to. A bit too personal in their approach.

Finally back at the pension house, I got a bucket of water and rinsed all the mud off my bike in preparation for doing some more wheel maintenance. After riding it for a while today, I heard all kinds of disturbing clicking and clanging and grinding and squeaking noises. I checked the wheels and I noticed that lots of the spokes were really loose. Just riding it kind of worked out the spaces in the wheels and it was obvious now which spokes needed to be tightened. And I’ll true the wheels bit by bit as I go. I have no idea at this point whether the bike can survive a trip to Cebu with a full touring load. Nor do I know if the spoke nipples really need to be replaced or not. Perhaps the spoke nipples that broke just did so because there was too much tension on the rim. Maybe they weren’t weakened at all. It would be nice to be able to ride it. I’m going to do some more amateur wheel truing this afternoon and then if the weather is nice, I’ll go on another ride tomorrow and slowly see if the bike is at all roadworthy – at least roadworthy enough to get me to Cebu. Then I can be independent again. It was certainly nice to be able to ride on it today.

On my ride, I also stopped at a place called JRS Express Delivery (or something like that). I thought they could ship my water filter and other things back to Canada for me. I went in and asked the women at the counter if they shipped boxes internationally. She said she didn’t know and had to ask the manager. Very strange, but okay. She came back and said that they did ship internationally, but they didn’t know what the rates were. The rate sheet had been washed away in the storm surge. And she just smiled at me as if that was the end of the matter. I pressed a little bit and she said that they could get a copy of the rates from their office in Catbalogan. If I returned tomorrow, they could tell me what their rates were. All very funny. And it probably doesn’t matter. It will almost definitely be very expensive – like a courier service. But I’ll keep looking into it. One more trip around the world for my Katadyne. The darn thing is better travelled than I am. I’d probably be better off just leaving it behind with someone. It’s too heavy to carry with me. I had my brother throw it into a box to Taiwan just because I figured I could sell it if I didn’t want to use it. But I didn’t try to sell it and brought it with me. Now I’m stuck with it. I definitely didn’t need it in the Philippines. The water here is fine for drinking. And getting this Waterine from the Davao team has made me more confident that with some effort, I can get water purifying chemicals. Just that one bottle of Waterine can purify 570 liters of water. That’s a lot. So I think it’s time to lighten my load a tiny bit. Circumstances are already helping with that as I’ve lost my super wide angle lens, the Kindle, and the two heavy duty tubes. Now if I get rid of the Katadyn and my big Petzl flashlight, my load will be that much lighter. For now anyway. I’m sure I’ll find new things to add to my load to make it even heavier than before. I’d really like to get my BOB trailer to help with that. This all assumes, of course, that I’ll ever be back on my bicycle and riding again. My brief ride today was certainly not encouraging about that. It was horrible to be out there on that busy road fighting with traffic. But if I want to travel at all, it would be even more horrible to be in a bus and at bus stations. So you pick your poison.

I’ve been burning mosquito coils in my room while I’m gone. I let the coils burn all day with the doors and the windows closed, and that seems to keep the mosquito population down a bit. My throat ends up burning with the smoke from the coil, but hopefully it isn’t killing me in some insidious fashion.

7:00 p.m.

I got lots of odd text messages from Dulce.  Then I get a phone call while I’m getting my hair cut. I ignore the call and this person calls back two more times. I finally texted to that number this evening just to find out who it was. I was concerned that it might have been the navy people. Then I got a text message back – a very bizarre and disjointed one – but from a different number. It’s not entirely clear if this person was the one who called or not. A text message goes back and forth between us, and at the end I still have no idea who this person is or why they called and/or texted me. They just signed off with “but anyway take care and have fun.” No idea what that was all about.

And I get a text message from an unknown number. The message reads “hai hOw are u?” I text back and say that I am fine and ask who this is. This person writes “ah are u speak English?” I write back. She finally identifies herself in this manner: “mai name is jOevelyn mai friend is edmarie she’s give ur nOmber?”

That was all well and good except that I had no idea who Edmarie was. I sent back various messages to try to figure out who this person was, who Edmarie was, where I met Edmarie, where this person was and why she was texting me. She sent me a grand total of 24 messages, and after all of that, I still had no idea who she was or what she wanted. Of course, I know what she wanted. She wanted to find out if I was marriageable material and then if I would marry her. But the way she went about it was totally insane. She did ask me straight out how old I was and whether I was married. But since she still hadn’t identified herself, I didn’t feel that I should tell her anything.

It’s a weird thing to be overseas. You start to wonder if you are the insane one and everyone else is normal. That’s what happens when you have no contact with people from your own culture. You start to doubt your own sanity.

A weird thing is that the security guard showed up at the pension house a couple of nights ago and took up the night shift. He said that the agency sent him. So I guess he works for an agency. I chatted with him that night and the following night, and he told me that he was working again, but he wasn’t getting a salary. This puzzles me because why would he work if he wasn’t getting paid? I tried to ask him about this, but I got no sane answers. Once more. I just saw him a few minutes ago out on the verandah. He was eating his dinner and he annoyed me right away by telling me that foreigners don’t like to eat rice. I stopped him dead, and I said very clearly, “That isn’t true.” He just nodded and kept talking. He, like most Filipinos, doesn’t listen to anything that I say to him. He just talks and pretends to listen. I went on and told him straight out that in the Philippines, they believe many things about foreigners and Americans and NONE of those things are true. They are all wrong. He just nodded and said something about how Americans don’t like rice.

This security guard mentioned the owner of the pension house showing up. I asked him what the owner had said, and he said that he hadn’t spoken to her. But he really does need to speak to her about his salary. He said that he needs his salary because he needs to buy milk for his children. So I asked him about that: Who pays him? Does the agency pay him or does the hotel pay him? He again said nothing that made any sense. I took my leave and went back to my room to write in this journal and vent a little bit. There have to be sane Filipinos out there. I just never seem to meet them.

I finally asked Grace about the flashlight that I had lent her and Jeffery. She said that she would look for it. Of course, the last I saw of her was her walking out the front gates with a packed bag. And she never looked for the flashlight or mentioned it. Of course not.

I spent some time this afternoon working on my bike. I first worked on the front wheel. I took the tube and tire off. Then I tightened up all the loose spokes. And then I methodically went about trying to true the wheel. I did okay in terms of getting rid of right to left wobble and getting the spokes to an even tension. But I wasn’t able to get the rim perfectly round. And I have no idea if the spoke tension is the right tension. How can you know?

Then I did the same thing on the rear wheel. The weird thing is that all the spokes on the freewheel side were tight and all the spokes on the other side were really loose. I went through a methodical process of tightening up all the loose spokes. But it was then quite dark and I didn’t have enough light to true the wheel. I guess I’ll do that tomorrow morning when I wake up and then I’ll go for another test ride. That should shake out more spoke problems and I’ll go through the whole process again until the wheels settle down. And hopefully, the spoke nipples don’t break. Then if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to cycle away from Tacloban on my own and not have to depend on anyone else. That will be awesome.

 

 

 

Tags: bike, job, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Super Typhoon Yolanda, Tacloban, typhoon, UNICEF