By Lucy

Wake up, get ready, walk down to Paolo’s. He’s annoyed at me today and charges me 65 instead of 50 for the champorado. Not that I care. I understand I am requesting something special, I don’t mind paying extra for it. Even if he charged me 100 for it, Rose makes breakfast for 200 peso, so I’m still ahead.

When I wake back to the hostel, Rose is awake. “Where you go, Paolo’s?” She asks.

“Yes.” She smiles coyly at me, so I add, “He makes me champorado.”

“Ah, you like champorado?!” She exclaims.

“Yes.”

“I should make some…” She says wistfully. “I just need cocoa powder, I think. And salty fish.”

“Tuyo.”

“Ah, you know the words!”

“Mhmm.” The dog tries to eat my backpack again. “Tudy! Tama na! (Enough!)” The dog sits down. “Salamat.”

Rose looks at me with fresh eyes, “You speak Tagalog?”

“Well, I learned enough phrases to yell at the dog, anyway.” I blush.

“And you like champorado. You are a real Pinoy!”

I feel like the bar should be higher than that.

“The tuktuk will come at 8:30. It’ll be 200 peso.”

“Ok.” Why is that not included?

“He’ll drop you off at the highway, and then the van will come by and pick you up, so just wait.”

Ugh, really? If I knew it was an extra 200 peso just to be driven to the highway, I would have told her not to bother. I could walk there, a lovely early morning walk. But it was too late now.

At the appointed time, the tuktuk shows up and drives me down the highway. I’m waiting almost half an hour before the van shows up. At one point, a pick up truck pulls into the lot and a baseball cap falls out when someone hops out of the backseat. I chase the guy down, but he denies the cap is his and refuses to accept it, so I put it down on a table. I imagine someone will be missing that soon.

What a ride. Worst. Tour. Ever.

The thing that really annoyed me was, they refused to go 6km down the side road to pick me up or drop me off, but after they grabbed me, we drove 23 kilometers past the turn-off for the underground river to grab a family of rich Filipinos from Astoria. Because it’s “on the way”.

The van was also overfull. There was 4 of us on a middle bench seat designed for 3, so no one had a seatbelt on. I was seated next to a French man named Matteo. There was a couple of Filipino families, and an Icelandic man who was married to a Filipino woman and knew nothing about the Philippines. Hell, he asked if they have volcanoes here! Me and him got into it a few times, and before they dropped me off I told her she can do better than him.

The road out to the river was nice, when I could appreciate it. At one point, we drove through a community where everything was decorated with painted purple tires. I’ve noticed they use tires for things like plant pots a lot in SEA. I wonder what the effects of that are? We can’t do that in Canada… the tire shops get paid to send them to hazardous waste.

The switchbacks were wretched. I get that it’s hard to pave a road on a mountain prone to landslides, but there’s often a sense of “good enough” in the infrastructure.

Eventually we got to the pier for the underground river. We were there for an hour, waiting our turn. We got there super late because of the detour to pick up the rich family. I ended up ordering an ice cream from a vendor because I was hot, thirsty and hungry. I noticed the waves coming in were infrequent whitecaps – we were in for a bumpy ride.

They also sell Tamilok there. Tamilok is a shell-less oyster that crawls up inside dead mangroves instead. It’s considered a delicacy, but the search for them has been destructive for the mangroves, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

After a short boat ride, we arrived at the second pier. Here we had to wade in to the shore and go through a second line-up, including to get a hard hat that would protect us from the bats shitting overhead. If that’s all it’s for, I have a rain jacket… can’t I wear that?

At 12:30, we finally got into the boat to go up the river. To keep the noise to a minimum, we all get headsets with audio guides, which they sync up so the guide can point to stuff as we pass it. The guide also has a flashlight, because otherwise you can’t see anything.

The underground river here is super interesting. It’s the longest underground river in the world, at 8km. It’s also rare because it flows into the ocean, which means the water is brackish and the tide influences the flow. Allegedly they’ve found three mineral compounds unique to this cave system. They’ve found an entire ancient fossilized dugong inside it. There’s multiple species of bats that only live in this cave, and they were constant; not recommended for anyone with a fear of bats.

For obvious reasons, it’s hard to get photos inside. My phone can take decent photos in the dark, but it uses long exposure, which is impossible when the boat is always moving. I resorted to taking short videos and screencapping them.

Here and there was some graffiti. The audio guide said no one was quite sure where it came from, but they think it’s from some spelunkers in the 1930’s. Prior to white people discovering the cave, the locals didn’t really explore it; it was considered sacred.

It takes about 45 minutes for the tour, culminating in the guide turning the light off for a minute so you can experience total darkness. You don’t go the whole 8 km; for one thing, you’d run out of oxygen, as it drops off further in. For another, all the humidity and bacteria from tourists’ breathing was altering the cave.

It was super cool and worth it, but the whole day was a miserable experience.

On the walk back, I got to chatting with Matteo. He’s doing the same thing I’ll be doing in a week; flying back to Manila to take the overnight bus to Buscalan. He’s never had a tattoo, but he wants one from Apo.

He then asks me; how long do you have to wait after a tattoo before going swimming?

I facepalm. “Like 6 weeks, especially if you want to swim in the ocean!”

I will add, it’s not just for infection control. Think about it, if you got a papercut, would that actually stop you from going swimming? It’s also about making sure the tattoo heals well and the ink doesn’t fade or move.

I never confirmed 100% if Matteo went or not, but when I got to Buscalan, they have a log book they make everyone sign. I checked and didn’t find his name in the book, so I think he changed his mind.

The whitecaps are constant on the boat ride back to the pier. We all get drenched by waves breaking over the bow.

We go to an all-you-can-eat place nearby. They start packing up at 2, we barely make it in time and the dishes are mostly empty. I grab what I can eat and sit by myself at the back. Matteo joins me for a minute, but he quickly gets hustled away by the guide. They’re throwing him in another van so he can make it back in time for his flight.

Around 3, we all get back in the van and head out. It takes over an hour to get dropped off at the turn-off, since we have to detour back to drop off the rich family.

Whatever. I start walking down the road. At least lunch being late means I’m not hungry.

I walked about a third of the way before a bike stopped next to me. It was a man dropping off coffee at the French patisserie next to Paolo’s place, who offered me a ride. I accepted, and when he stopped to drop off the coffee, I kept walking. It didn’t save me a lot of time or distance, but something is better than nothing.

When I got into Paolo’s, he jumped to his feet. “You looked tired!”

“Well yeah, I just walked in from the highway.” Plus the long van rides and waiting around in the heat, the late lunch, just… what a long day. It was 5PM and the only thing I’d done was the hour tour.

“Sit, sit.” He ushered me into a chair and brought me food. I told him how my day had been while I ate. When I was finished and paid, he ran around back and came out with his bike. “Come, I’ll give you ride. You look so tired!”

So he dropped me off at the hostel.

“How was it?” Rose asked. “You look tired.”

Good to know.

After I told her the story, I excused myself for bed.

In the morning, I woke up to a surprise. I’d been trying to reach out to the Puerto Princesa club, including tracking them down on Facebook. I hadn’t heard back and had basically given up on reaching them, but I finally got a reply. Nanette asked if I wanted to go out around 3 and I said sure.

My arms hurt from all the swimming. Maybe I should cool it.

I walked down to Paolo’s. He didn’t have champorado waiting for me and I was tired of arguing with him about it. I ate whatever was ready and we talked about our favourite episodes of Chef’s Table.

While I was walking back to the hostel, I noticed this guy unloading a front loader by driving it off the end of the truck. The poor suspension groaned and snapped.

When I got back, Rose gave me some chocolate sticky rice she made with the cocoa powder she just bought. She was also warming some bananas up in the oven.

It started raining heavily.

I asked her for a shot glass with some vinegar in it; the salt water was stuck in my ear. Using all these cheap earplugs has probably caused a buildup of wax, and sometimes the water will evaporate and leave behind the salt in your ear. I stood over the sink for a bit, trying to clean out my ears, and then I hopped in the shower. I’m starting to develop salt acne as well, from the saltwater drying out my skin.

As I was standing in the shower, Rose knocked on the door. “Lucy, your visitor is here.”

“What?!”

I’d told Nanette it was fine if she was early because I had no plans for the day. Apparently she took one look at the weather forecast and ran down to pick me up.

We were about to be hit by a typhoon.

I ran back to my room to change into my nice clothes, but Nanette is less formal than Minda. I was somewhat hoping to convince her to eat here, and then maybe we could recruit Rose to the Soroptimists, but Nanette wanted to go to Viet Ville, so we went there instead.

She ordered a bunch of food and we sat there chatting for two or three hours. At one point, the lights flickered but came back. She mentioned her love of Christopher Plummer and The Sound of Music and I told her about the time I saw him live on stage; he played Prospero at Stratfest in 2010.

She ordered some Vietnamese drip coffee to go with dessert. When the waitress came by to drop it off, she said something in Tagalog to Nanette, then turned to me and said, “You’re beautiful”, before walking away.

Alrighty then.

We headed back to the hostel around 3.

As we drove back down the road in the pouring rain, Nanette says, “How are you getting back to Puerto on Monday?”

“I was going to get a tuktuk.” Rose told me she could get a tuktuk for me for 1’000 peso.

After thinking about it for a minute, she says, “I’ll send Earl to drive you. What time?”

“1PM?” That should get me there around check-in.

It’s very kind of her, but less gracious than it may sound. Private drivers tend to be salaried, so he’s getting paid regardless.

When we got back from lunch, the power was out. It must have gone out when the lights flickered at the restaurant, but the restaurant had its own generator and so we didn’t notice. The power was out for the entire island, as well; the only means of generation is a diesel plant in Puerto, and there’s no connection to any of the other islands. Since that meant the wifi and cell towers were down as well, we had not much to do for the afternoon. The power didn’t come back until 6:30. Locally, the storm was known as Doreng, but it hit Japan days later as typhoon Jangmi.

Rose had been cooking some champorado, so we had some of that. I dunno why, but the fish she served as tuyo were not salty, and she’d also tried to warm them up, which hadn’t worked out and they just tasted slightly burnt. Juan had to send his employee home – he’s still making flutes in his hostel room – and we all sat around chatting and eating champorado and playing cards.

At 5, I walked down to Paolo’s. I wasn’t really hungry – since people had been force-feeding me all afternoon – but why not hang out.

“Hey Lucy, where you go?”

“Well, since the power’s out, I thought I’d go for a walk.”

“Want company?”

“Sure.”

He hopped off his stool and started walking with me.

“Don’t you have work?” I smiled and glanced backwards.

He shrugged.

We walked about a kilometer up the road. He showed me these blue flowers that are edible and told me the hot gossip about every house on the way. He pointed out every place he wanted to buy and painted a picture of how he’d renovate them. We passed quite a few people hanging out outside – since everything was down – and they all stared at me, slack-jawed. They called to him and he talked back in Tagalog and puffed his chest out. Look at Paolo, he’s got a white girl!

I got back to the hostel around 6:30. Rose had finally turned the diesel generator on so the freezer things wouldn’t thaw, but as I walked in, the wifi came back to life.

That was the last time I saw Paolo.

Since I knew Rose had champorado made already, I didn’t walk down to Paolo’s in the morning. I sat at the bar and waited, the rain still bucketing down. There was some bug in the area making such a loud noise I thought it was a flood siren.

At 9, me and Juan were sitting at the bar chatting while he waited for Rose to cook him eggs. Some man walked up looking for Joel – it’s his day off – and requested a Red Horse. Maybe 20 minutes later, that was gone and he ordered a second one.

“That’s early to start.” Juan says quietly to me.

“Look at the marks on his face. He’s been doing that for a while.” I hop off the chair and head back to my room. I don’t want to be around this guy. At 10, I wandered down to request Rose do my laundry and he’s on Red Horse number 3.

“I can’t do it, Lucy, it’s not sunny.”

“It doesn’t need to be sunny, as long as it’s on the line it’ll dry.”

She looks at me skeptically.

“Look, if it doesn’t dry, I won’t hold it against you. But I need clean laundry.” I need clean underwear, if nothing else, but I also wanted my towel washed. I doubted I’ll hit the sea again and I needed to wash the salt out of it so I could use it to shower. I’d just been air drying. And I really doubt the laundry won’t dry if there’s no sun; the breeze should dry it overnight, if nothing else.

“Alright.” She says, after a long moment. “Leave it on the patio and I’ll do it.”

I sit on the patio and work on my word search while listening to the birds. Juan comes to join me; his employee didn’t show up. I show him the welding I did at school and he shows me how he improvised a soldering station for his flutes.

For lunch, I walk down to the shawarma place. I feel like shawarma. I talk to the Filipino wife this time. It finally stops raining.

I get a bunch of happy-making emails. My Rotary dues are due. My Soroptimist dues are also due. And I have to renew my PO box. Money money money.

Rose’s two sisters are back. The other two don’t seem super chatty, but I guess there’s no point in getting to know each other.

Around 3, me and Juan go to the beach again. It takes us over an hour to get service; all the staff at the bar are just sitting on their phones. I order a Pina Colada and Juan asks for a sip. He confesses to ordering a beer and a margarita before, so he could pour the margarita in the empty beer bottle and pretend he wasn’t drinking a girlie drink. I tease him about it and he concedes defeat and orders a Pina Colada for himself and a second one for me. We eat and talk and the sun goes down. Once we’re done, we go for a walk along the darkened beach.

Juan wants to buy land here and build a house. He starts trying to pick my brain about building and I point out he needs land first. But hey, maybe in two years, he’ll have some land and I can have a working holiday building Juan’s house.

When I get back, I go around the side of the house and grab a clean pair of underwear and my pajamas.

Moving day.

I’m sad about it. This was the closest I got to some kind of home away from home.

I have breakfast here. I’m too busy packing and organizing to walk down to Paolo’s place, and I’m pretty sure he won’t make me champorado. Rose folds my laundry, concedes that it did dry, and then gets slightly nervous because she was worried my pajamas grew legs.

The dog goes running down the road full tilt chasing some pedal bikers. I’m not sure what impresses me more, that he chased them all the way or that they were fast enough to evade him.

Around 11, Rose and her family head out. They’re going sightseeing for the day. Rose stops by to say goodbye.

“How are you getting back to Puerto?” She asks.

“Nanette is sending her private car to get me.”

“Oh?” She tilts her head, “You’re very mysterious.”

Now I’m all packed up, I walk down to the carinderia. Paolo isn’t there. I order a quick bite to eat and head back to the hostel. Nanette texts me; we’re having dinner tonight.

At 12:30, Earl shows up. I feel special as he loads my luggage into the backseat and Juan watches from the patio, perplexed. Lucy, international woman of mystery. They’re gonna be talking about me for a long time.

“Hi Earl, how are you?”

“Well, and yourself, ma’am?”

I’m loaded into the car and away we go.

I don’t want to leave. Maybe I can come back, but it won’t be for a while.

Earl’s not much of a talker. And it starts raining again.

I end up at the hostel too early. It’s not a long drive. This time, I booked in at the hostel the German girl was staying at; it seems nicer.

“I’ll be back at 5 to pick you up for dinner, ma’am.”

“Ok, thanks Earl.”

This hostel is nicer. It’s very… vertical, though. There’s this bridge between the bar and the bathroom that doesn’t seem fair to any drunk people.

I wander down the road. I don’t feel like going far, but I do need food. I grab some baked goods for breakfast and some instant coffee. On the way back, I stop and watch a procession of schoolkids practicing a routine. There’s some holiday coming up that I’ll miss.

I make sure I’m outside waiting at 4:50. Nanette doesn’t come until 5:20. She jokes about Filipinos always being late and I assure her I came prepared for “island time”.

She takes me on a tour of the town, since we’re early (and late?). We drive by the new town hall, with the mascot for Puerto Princesa out front, the indigenous peacock. Legend has it, when the Spanish landed on Palawan to found a town here, they saw the peacock on the shore and mistook it for a beautiful princess.

We get to the restaurant as it opens. It’s called Ka Joels; Nanette tells me Ka means “sir” in Tagalog (Tita means Aunt, which explains all the carinderias called Tita so-and-so). Paolo later tells me he has a friend who works as a chef at Ka Joels.

It’s very nice, so lavish it’s hard to imagine it’s just a restaurant. Filipinos don’t do things halfway; it’s either 4 walls and a table, or wall-to-wall opulence.

There were 8 of us for dinner. They also spent much of the night talking to each other in Tagalog, but I felt more included this time. They ordered a seafood platter that was quickly stripped bare, except for the crabs. Ironically for the most expensive thing on the table, but they were annoying to crack open for such little meat, no one wanted to.

I ended up chatting a lot to Adelfa, who has wanderlust like me and has been everywhere. We made plans the next day so she could show me the milkfish farm she owns.

China was a theme of the night. One of the ladies, into her 60’s, is still a member of the reserves. They did a 10 day practice exercise circumnavigating Palawan, and they got buzzed by some Chinese ships. Adelfa mentions part of the reason they started farming milkfish is because Chinese fishing boats have been intruding into their sovereign waters and overfishing, collapsing the stocks. I knew China was intruding onto Japan’s space and doing things like making artificial islands to claim more territory, but I didn’t think they’d be harassing a country as far away and poor as the Philippines.

Back to the hostel and to bed.

The hostel is fine but my room isn’t. It’s next to the kitchen, and the soundproofing is not great. The AC is also way cranked and I get up in the middle of the night to throw more clothes on because I am freezing. Someone also gets up at 4, presumably for a flight, and wakes us all up.

I get up at 7, feeling exhausted, have my breakfast, and am waiting at the curb at 8, as instructed. Earl is on time and whisks me away to wherever Adelfa lives.

Adelfa lives at some sort of long term living community, but no one is currently there besides her. She runs around for a bit, asks me if I want coffee, and finally comes to get me so we can hop in an outrigger.

A man paddles us out to her farm, called Hakuna Matata, because that’s her whole vibe. We feed the fish for a bit as she explains to me more about the process, how she got into it, etc, as she takes photos and videos of me. Then she changes her mind and we hop back on the boat and head to a bigger fish farm owned by someone else.

They have so much food here I regret getting breakfast. Noodles, buns. Once they started hauling up the fish, they grab a couple off the top of the pile, still flopping, and throw them on the grill without killing or gutting them. Doesn’t get fresher than that!

They throw 4 tons of fish into this big container and dump ice on them. One of the guys explained to me – not that I needed it, but confirmation is nice – that the ice kills the fish by melting and turning into freshwater, which suffocates them while also keeping them fresh. It still takes a while for them to die and a couple manage to fling themselves off the top of the pile, so we grab them and throw them back in. At one point Adelfa suggests filming a Tiktok, so we film ourselves dancing with a fish in hand. She’s got a portable speaker pumping out tunes for most of the trip.

After about an hour, the enthusiasm has bled out a bit. I’ve talked to everyone who speaks decent English about the farm. I’m also fading, so tired. Adelfa suggests I should get some rest and summons the boat. We head back to her place and she drives me home, stopping on the way to grab some pineapple. We exchange contact information so we can hangout later, but she’s so busy she never does pick me up again.

I have a nap and head out in the mid-afternoon. I walk down to the boardwalk, watching the ocean from the safety of my rain jacket as everyone else runs for cover. I find a mall and buy some things I need. Some kids try to beg me for money. I’ve learned that yelling “Tama na” works on them as well, if for no other reason than startling them with the fact that I know some Tagalog.

I don’t sleep well that night. My period shows up, on time for once, oh joy. As I pack up, I realize I’ll need some more cash for my trip to the mountains. I wander down to a bank and grab some.

I really liked it here. I kind of regret heading back to Manila for the trip to the mountains, but I can’t change my mind now.

I check out and sit in the common area for a bit. It’s a domestic flight and it’s not that far to the airport. It occurs to me that I need my bus tickets printed out and ask at the front desk, and she prints both of them for me for no charge, which is nice.

I manage to summon a tuktuk just by standing outside the hostel. The driver is really chatty. As he drops me off at the airport, he tells me he hopes that the next time I come back to the Philippines, I’m not “alone”.

I’m annoyed at the whole “being single is a flaw to be corrected” thing, but it occurs to me he might be right. If nothing else, I’ll back back in two years for the SIA conference. I invited Kevin to join me, but if he’s busy, I’ll probably just pay for Vlad to come with me. Assuming I don’t come back to the Philippines before then, I won’t be back alone.

The airline annoys me. Presumably because the cost of oil is biting, the staff at the counter fight me about my carry-on bag. I manage to win this time.

Next destination… chaos.