Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Monday 3 August 2009

Philippines 1995: Part 3


Note: this trip was made at Christmas 1995. In the time since then I'm sure much has changed so it may not be a great idea to treat this as a guide. Treat it as a memoir, which - give or take some editing - is exactly what it is.

We took a public bus for Batangas which is a port in the South of Luzon and is several hours away along the South Super Highway. I passed the time in a mixture of conversation wih the guy sitting next to me, looking out of the window and reading P.J.O'Rourke's 'All The Troubles In The World'. Jim was, like almost everyone on this sort of trip, extremely well travelled. He also painted such a glowing picture of various parts of the United States that for the first time since the Florida Fiasco I found myself thinking about visiting it again. P.J. O'Rourke on the other hand alternately fascinated and appalled me with his blend of humorously and cogently argued and hideously plausible fascism. I couldn't tell whether he intended to be serious or not so that whenever his latest defence of pollution or totalitarianism or whatever started to irritate me I took the option of gazing at the view.
We passed through an endless sequence of almost identical towns, the sort of places that look as if they were made from the debris when all of the real places had been finished. Buildings were jerry-built of wood, concrete and odd pieces of corrugated metal. Occasionally they gave way to more substantial, if no prettier, constructions. There was a half built building which a sign claimed to be a College of Accountancy. In another, completely empty, plot a similar sign declared
"On this Site Will Rise the Saint Thomas Medical Centre".
In themselves the towns seemed to consist mainly of Doctors, Dentists and Clinics mixed in with Auto Repair Shops with yards full of rusty gas cylinders. There was a difference between these towns and others I have visited in similar parts of the world which was the greenness. After six weeks of constant rain, which was still continuing now in a constant oppressive drizzle, everywhere was lush and verdant instead of orange, dry and dusty.
In Lipa City there was a drive through McDonalds at which we turned off the Super Highway and went along a winding uphill road. As we ascended, it became ever more twisting and simultaneously lost whatever Tarmac covering it had ever had. Much of it had been washed away completely and in places teenagers stood on the points of the bends signalling to traffic to come ahead or stop to prevent collisions. Eventually we reached the outskirts of Batangas and ground to a halt in the heavy traffic.
Batangas is the provincial capital and the point of departure for the ferry to Puerto Galera on Mindoro. It is a largish industrial zone which the Philippine Government was trying to develop into the centre of a greater industrial zone. There were plans to extend the South Super Highway all the way from Manila to Batangas. To my eye it had the look of having been thrown together hastily about ten minutes ago and of being likely to fall down again in ten minutes time. As the bus made its painfully slow way to the harbour there was plenty of time to see Batangas in all its glory. It seemed strange to me that even here there were buildings with painted signs outside advertising courses in Wordstar, Windows, Quatro Pro and a host of other familiar computer products.
At the harbour we boarded the Si-Kat ferry, a trimaran vessel, that runs the route to Puerto Galera. The rain had stopped although it was still overcast and dull and we were soon approaching our destination through the beautiful Batangas Channel which takes you between a series of emerald islands with bamboo and palm huts and eventually leaves you in the town's beautiful natural harbour. The harbour itself is filled with bangkas, unseaworthy looking boats resembling canoes stabilised by long bamboo crosspieces ending in struts, parallel to the hull which lie at the waterline. In use these boats are surprisingly stable as the crossbeams act in much the same way as a tightrope walker's pole and the parallel struts skim the surface of the water keeping the boat upright. The come in every conceivable size from tiny one man vessels to large and relatively luxurious passenger craft.
The other ubiquitous form of transport in the islands is the Jeepney and we had our first encounter with one of these almost as soon as we disembarked. They are a kind of stretched jeep and look about as road worthy as the bangkas look seaworthy. They are inevitably painted and decorated in the most garish fashion imaginable. They usually have slogans such as "In God We Trust" or "Have Mercy On Us Miserable Sinners" or "The Fear Of The Lord Is The Beginning Of Wisdom" featured somewhere prominently on them to further terrify their already frightened passengers.
Our Jeepney was to take us to Encenada Beach., about one and a half kilometres out of town along deeply rutted and muddy tracks. Inside the uncomfortable vehicle the roof was decorated with glued on Toblerone packets and empty yoghurt cartons. We bounced our way up one side of a hill then down the other hanging on to our seats with a dogged determination that would turn into a sort of fatalism as the weeks passed without any serious transport mishap.
Encenada turned out to be a hotel resort of a reasonably clean if basic standard. We stood around on the veranda drinking coconut milk from green gourds and waiting to check in. The view out over the beach was splendid in spite of the intermittent drizzle and, after dumping my things in the small but serviceable bedroom, I went out for a swim. In the water the algae caused a constant stinging sensation like thousands of repeated tiny electric shocks. I swam out until the warm coastal water met a sharply colder cross current and then lazily trod water and swam around in aimless circles for a while. When I got bored with that I swam back to the beach and fell asleep on one of the sun beds until the cooling weather woke me up and forced me indoors.

No comments: