PHILIPPINES #2 - DONSOL
Here’s a little tale I forgot to relate from the previous assignment to the Adventure Park….
The was a 40-something year old woman at the organic farm where I was staying who had been working for the owner’s family for around 20 years and she was dedicated to serving the family (and me) meals each day and doing my laundry (something that I’m used to doing myself while in the shower when on assignments). I jokingly said to the family matriarch one day that, because she was so wonderful, I should take her home and marry her!
I thought no more about it; but a few days later I was taken aside and told that there had been serious family discussions and that approval had been given for me to ‘propose’ the prospect.
It shocked the daylights out of me at the time - BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY IN JEST!!
Some impressions of Manilla - not much traffic really (where I was located anyway), and I was just not accustomed to seeing only cars. I’m more used to a predominance of small motorcycles buzzing around, with up to six persons per vehicle, or a driver with three or four huge, live pigs strapped to the pillion, or a veritable mountain of baskets…or something.
Then there were all those guns. It’s still a novelty where I come from in Australia to see even police with a handgun. When a group of dignitaries turned up at the Adventure Park there would be a covey of police, plus a contingent of what looked like army, plus the tourist police - all wearing handguns and several carrying automatic weapons. There was a sign at the entrance of the Park telling visitors to leave their guns at the gate. In Manilla, even shopping centre guards and parking inspectors had a weapon on their hip.
Guards at the shopping centre also wafted wands to wave over customers and they checked shopping- and hand-bags. When cars entered the car park: a guy with a mirror on a stick looked underneath, drivers automatically popped the trunk for guards to look inside and another guard checked inside the vehicles.
I was booked into a second-rate ‘condotel’ in Manilla for a few days between assignments that was not really a good quality for a major city. They had an area on the top floor (25th) they rented out for functions - I was waiting for someone in the pokey little lobby one evening and local people were heading for the two elevators dressed in 1920s outfits - some of the girls in particular had gone to a lot of effort and really looked the part.
There are local and national elections in the Philippines next May, so all politicians are in electioneering mode. BUT - the biggest drama (you may have heard about) was in the south in Mindanao, which is heavily Moslem. A couple of families have virtual political dynasties down there and a guy from one of the minor families decided to stand against the sitting ‘king-pin’ mayor. He was warned off in no uncertain manner and decided to send his wife and a convoy of vehicles (including media) to place his registration to stand; reasoning that there would be safety in numbers and taking comfort in the belief that ‘Moslems would respect a woman’.
A group of guys with automatic weapons stopped the convoy and murdered all of them: including the man’s wife, all the media and every single person who happened to be there or was just passing by. Then they buried them in pre-dug graves (including some of the vehicles) with earth-moving equipment. Some 57 people were killed in all.
BUT - on the other hand, there was a consistent level of politeness to an aged Caucasian (me). As I walked around Manilla, even guards at the entrances to malls and outside many stores would say ‘good morning/afternoon [as the case may be], sir’ as I passed - they were not even talking to any locals!
I would occasionally see another Caucasian - usually a male accompanied by a Filipino ‘wife’ … never saw a Caucasian woman with a Filipino ‘husband’!
SO - onto the next assignment…..a new hotel (opened in April, 2009); in an area touted as THE place in the world to see whale sharks in their natural environment.
I was to do this assignment with another volunteer from the same organisation (Joost) - I was covering management, housekeeping and front office and he was to concentrate on food and beverage. Not really an ideal situation for such a small hotel as our duties tended to overlap; fortunately we tended to agree on what was needed.
We met up in Manilla and flew to Tagbilaren where we were met by the client (Raymond) who owned the hotel with his brother (who lived in America).
Raymond took us to see the Mayon Volcano, which (at 2,462 meters or 8,077 feet) is the Philippines' most active volcano and is considered to be the worlds most perfectly formed, for its neat symmetrical cone. The second week we were there, they kept raising the alert level; it was at 2, but as thousands of small quakes a day occurred and lava kept bubbling out, they raised it to level 4 - out of a maximum of 5 - which meant that an eruption was imminent. 50,000 people were evacuated. Official reports stated that there were hundreds of ‘volcanic earthquakes and harmonic tremors’ every day. It has had forty-nine eruptions in recorded history. The first recorded was in 1616, two major eruptions happened in 2006, another in 2008. We were located about an hour’s drive from the volcano - when the sky was cloudless, we could see it clearly from the roof of the hotel.
The first tour we did was to see the fireflies. This was a night (of course) cruise along a river in a trimaran type of craft (a long, narrow canoe with outriggers each side. Amazing to see the little guys flitting about and glowing merrily away; the theory being that they are trying to attract a mate. We went aground a few times - but they used long poles to dislodge us from the mud. Rather a relaxing little side trip!
We went for a wander one night and came across a series of gambling endeavours where locals were waging bets using 1 and 5 peso coins (about .02 and .12 cents). One consisted of a flat surface with the 52 cards of a deck (each card bordered by a timber edging) and surrounded by sloping sides. There were representations of the 52 cards around the top edge and punters would place their coins on their choice of card. The operator would release a small rubber ball which would run down the slope and bounce around until it stopped on a card - bit like roulette.
Another was like the Australian two-up - where you throw two coins in the air and you bet on if they will be odds or evens (two heads, or two tails, or one of each). In this version they had a yellow square and a blue square painted on a board in the centre of the area with two large squares (yellow and blue) where you placed your coins to bet. Above the centre of the table was a large metal funnel - they would drop two tennis balls into the funnel - the balls bounced around and they waited to see if they landed both in the same colour, or one in each.
A memorable element was the amazingly low the age of the ‘gamblers’ - many around 10-years-old, and younger!
The hotel was going through some ambitious expansion, a new swimming pool and doubling the number of rooms from 8 to 16. Talk about an ‘education’! A heap of guys were working on the site (paid direct by the hotel) and it was a ‘health and safety’ nightmare: the workers were in bare feet or ‘slippers’ (flip flops), welding was usually without the hindrance of goggles, ‘scaffolding’ was roughly assembled timber (at least it was not bamboo as often is the case in this neck of the woods), and the guys laying concrete blocks were sometimes using their hands to place cement, nothing as gauche as a trowel …!
Take the pool for instance: they dug a huge hole - by hand with shovels and plastic buckets - then decided it was too deep and filled most of it in again. Then they started building the ‘wall’ of the pool in concrete blocks / decided that the shape was wrong and knocked it all down. Then had another go, decided it was too low … and started to construct what looked like the Great Wall of China.
The rooms (and pool) walls were constructed of hollow ‘concrete’ blocks. I say ‘concrete’ but they were made in the street with black volcanic-looking sand and a pinch of cement, shovelled into a mould, tamped down a few times by a whack with a stick and ejected onto the road - you could easily crumble them with light pressure between thumb and forefinger!
OK - the rooms…there was no ‘plan’ as such: just rough sketches on A4 paper. The concrete floor was ‘poured’ using a small cement mixer pouring onto the ground, whereupon a guy shovelled it into small plastic buckets which were conveyed hand-to-hand by a chain of some 20 men, poured out and the empty buckets went back down the chain.
The guys were merrily building away and the owner came from Manilla to have a look. He decided that the bathrooms were in the wrong place and the wrong size - so they knocked them all down and started again.
They would build walls using the ‘concrete’ blocks, then decide that they’d forgotten a window or a door and use an impact drill to crumble it all down again.
The steel reinforcing was being ‘constructed in situ with steel rods and wire, held in place with lengths of 2”x4” timber and guys were welding by balancing on jerry-built timber structures or plastic buckets, raining sparks down on others walking underneath!!!
Isn’t it ‘funny’, the things you notice? A guy was painting the walls of the existing reception area and I watched as he laboriously painted AROUND a painting hanging on the wall!!! I suggested to another staff member that it would be a good idea to remove the painting to paint the wall - it didn’t happen!
Another time I was amazed to see a guy removing some concrete from an old wall by the, under construction, new swimming pool. Water kept seeping into the ‘pool’ because of the low water table and before any concrete had been poured. The guy was using an electric-powered impact hammer: standing in water up to his knees, the cable in the water and operating an electrical implement!
Reminded me of one of the jokes in Papua New Guinea: ‘What’s black and hangs from a power pole?’ Answer: ‘A PNG electrician’. They would climb a power pole (usually at night), wrap wires around the live power cables and feed the wire straight into houses…!!!!
In my dotage I’ve developed a strong objection to noise - much preferring peace and quiet. BUT this hotel seemed to be a hotbed of constant decibels assailing one’s auditory tracts. All the public rooms were concrete (floor, walls, and ceilings) so that every sound bounced around and reverberated - plus: doors were constantly being slammed. When a hand-dryer outside the pubic toilets in the restaurant was used, it necessitated customers having to suspend conversation, or shout.
Staff had music at speaker-bouncing amplification, playing ‘modern music’ (translation: ‘noise’). At night they had karaoke and the resultant amplified ‘singing’ permeated and polluted the surroundings - including where we were in the guest rooms upstairs. To be heard about all this, staff seemed to be constantly shouting to each other. Adding to the ambience was the construction going on, like impact drilling to remove concrete which reverberated around the building with such a high level of noise that you could not understand someone in the same room shouting at you. I dedicated an entire page in their Business Plan to the sources of NOISE!! I described the noise the vacuum cleaner made as ‘like a thousand screaming banshees’.
As is my usual inclination, I arose around 6am and was working by 6.30am. One morning the night security guard came to me at 6.30am in a panic: a guest was in a hurry, he wanted breakfast and there were no other staff around. We rustled him up a ‘continental breakfast’ by scratching around the kitchen - but they did not even have a toaster!
Still, it was much easier than a previous episode many years ago in London when I moved to a 100-room hotel. The very first morning, at 6am, staff were banging on my door to tell me that the breakfast cook had a hangover and was too ill to work. [The guy in question was as ‘camp as a row of pink tents’.] We had a full house - around 200 people - and no one in the kitchen!! He’d done some preparation and the one that had me fooled was a large conical-shaped container of whipped-up egg that I assumed was ready for scrambled egg. I had no idea of how to prepare it and was getting desperate enough to hunt around for some cornflour to thicken it up - in the end: I ladled the gloop into a small fry pan for each order of scrambled egg. The kitchen was in the basement and orders arrived down and the meals went back up in a small ‘dumb waiter’. Anyway - I turned out about 200 full English breakfasts in two hours!
This is a predominantly Catholic country so, as you would expect, there was some reflection of Christmas. Some homes were lit up with flickering lights, etc. One aspect of what seemed to be traditional was setting off fireworks in the streets - resulting in loud explosions: day and night … if it was happening in some other countries you would be hitting the deck or cowering under the bed, anticipating gunfire!
Local children would be roaming the street doing their version of carolling and expecting to receive money. They’d ‘sing’ a semblance of a carol in some obscure form of ‘English’ - (someone described it as ‘pseudo-English’, that they’d tried to decipher and learn from hearing on the radio) … while banging tunelessly on tin cans and bottles. The result was just a raucous and discordant noise - still, they tried, I guess?
We used to have meals in the restaurant sitting by a ‘window’ (no glass) onto the street and sometimes felt like an exhibit in a zoo as there were not many other Caucasians about.
What a great leveller music is - locals with very little English would wander around trying to sing English lyric songs; often popular songs from the 60s and 70s; similar music would emanate from houses - rather surreal to hear Beatles’ music while strolling along a deprived street in a remote village in the Philippines!
It obviously ain’t easy to make a buck in this environment and the level of poverty is blatant. You walk past houses which consist of one room - some on stilts over the sea. Water was obtained from communal pumps in the street; Lord knows where the sewage went? There are small businesses by the dozen trying to eek out a living. If you have a house fronting onto a street: it automatically becomes a shop, usually offering the same products as every other similar enterprise. Although, I did see some variety: a ‘shoe exchange’ was unique, a barber shop consisted of a tiny structure which could barely hold a traditional barber’s chair, etc. People are wandering the streets, ringing bells, and trying to sell their wares like ice cream; people set up a half a 44-gallon drum on a stand in the street, fill it with charcoal, cover with netting and start cooking shish kebabs, or chicken feet, or coils of chicken intestines - voila: instant restaurant.
I touched briefly on the conundrum of learning unusual names previously; at this one, the housekeeper was called ‘Angel’. Now, I’ll just bet that you are visualising a female? Wrong, nope, ‘twas a guy!!!
I was supposed to be training in hotel management, but there was no ‘manager’ to train - the hotel was operated by remote control by the owner in Manilla. But, the other volunteer was having more problems than me - Joost was (not) coping with a recalcitrant chef. After a month, of clashes, lack of cooperation and Joost planning to just go back home; the owner sent the chef off on leave (to return after we had left). Then there was a clash and resignation from the assistant ‘cook’ (Richard) while Joost was given a ‘security guard’ to train as a cook - and he was doing remarkably well.
In the midst of these conundrums and multiple phone calls from the owner to Joost, the guys working on the new rooms were removing concrete from the solid slab of the flat roof with an impact drill and the entire building was vibrating and completely submersed in deafening noise. So: I went out for a stroll around ‘town’ (well: it’s a fishing village) away from the mayhem.
Who should I come across but the unhappy, possibly ex-cook, Richard; sitting at a table by the street eating and drinking beer with two friends. The food was a dish of cold coagulating noodles and some mixed vegetables, being consumed with a communal spoon; the beer was in a jug with a large chunk of ice and one plastic cup between them.
Well, you can’t be rude? They got me a rickety chair to sit on while I repeatedly declined offers of the food - but they did send someone away to get me my own bottle of beer.
Richard spoke fractured English and he tried to explain his feelings; his friends spoke virtually no English at all. So: there we were: sitting on the roadside, drinking beer, noisy motorbikes dodging past us, trying to have an intellectual conversation!!! Life’s full of interesting interlude….!
New Year’s Eve was noisy - constant very loud explosions of fireworks all around us, all bloody day and into the wee small hours of January 1 - plus: loud music emanating from a house a few doors down until 5.30am!!! The female receptionist came in next morning with a huge burn/welt/bruise on her thigh from a firework - lucky, eh, could have been a lot worse?
The Housekeeper established that I was happily a bachelor, advised me that she was ‘single’ as well and kept suggesting a ‘partnership’. No matter how the ‘joke’ proceeded, it seemed to be getting more serious, plus comments like: “When you go, leave some money under the bed”. But she then said “just include me in your will”; I told she would have an argument from Melanie. She also had a daughter - about seven years old. One daughter is enough for me…but she’s now 40-years-old - just HOW is that biologically possible? I cannot really have a daughter who is 40….can I????
Like other Asian countries, the locals liked to ask how old I was. Of course when asked to ‘guess’, people will always err on the side of caution and flattery. Even so: it’s kinda gratifying to be told that you look ‘fifty’ and you are about to hit seventy!!!!
I’d been planning on having a haircut and was going to use the barber in the ‘shed’ that features in the photographs, just around the corner from the hotel.
Joost went to a different guy in extremely grungy looking premises; but his haircut was OK.
I went to the ‘shop’ I was going to use, but there was no one around, I asked people in the street, but they did not know where he was.
So: I went to the guy that Joost had used, he was busy so I stood in the very tiny shop for a while, and then stood outside where he could still see me. After about ten minutes a woman and her son came along and sat on a bench outside, I assumed it was the wife of the guy having his hair cut.
The barber diddled and fiddled around with a razor blade, I kept thinking that I’d go elsewhere, but reasoned that I’d stood there so long, that I might as well see it through.
After over 20 minutes, he finished and the customer dawdled around, examined himself in the mirror from all directions and, eventually, started to exit the shop. I fronted up to the open window and asked if he was ready for me. Whereupon, he got out a box, put it on the chair and the boy walked in and sat in the chair. I was flabbergasted and just walked away.
I walked back to the original choice - still no one around.
I found another, vacant, ‘hairdresser’, and then found the owner, who was gambling nearby. I told him that I wanted a trim, not too short … he went ZOOM - and in seconds I could have (almost) joined the US Marines and not be out of place.
At home I never let a hairdresser attack my beard - but this guy asked and I said “OK, just a light trim please.” ZOOM and the right side of my face was suddenly bald. I objected, but then had to turn the other cheek (so to speak) - or I would have been walking with even more of a limp - so he could even it up - voila: magically - I had a goatee!!!
I haven’t had a bald face for over forty years - I have now …. Well: the cheeks are feeling the sun for the first time in all that time!!!
BUT - what can you expect of a haircut for 60 pesos (around $1.20)? Actually, I usually pay more than they ask, but a ‘haircut’ is usually P30-40, but he reckoned that he’d given me a shave as well and wanted to charge P60 - I said that P50 sounded fair and he just smiled and said ‘OK’.
Some interesting observations of the ‘road rules’ in the Philippines from a web-site…..
Riding Conditions
Driving is on the right-hand side of the road (at least it’s supposed to be).
The first rule-of-the-road in the Philippines is "might is right". As a motorcyclist, you now know where you stand.
Believe it or not, they do have traffic rules in the Philippines. It is just that they are rarely enforced. This leads to a rather wild-west approach to riding conditions.
What makes it exciting about riding in the Philippines?
Expect other traffic to suddenly stop for no apparent (to you) reason at any time, anywhere. To increase the excitement, expect the stopping vehicle's stop lights to be out of action.
Vehicles travelling at night without any lights.
Vehicle indicator lights mean "watch me; I'm going to do something stupid".
Animals and people walking, standing, sitting or sleeping on the road, particularly in the provinces.
Overtaking is done on either side.
Traffic lanes are only painted on the road to give employment to the lane markers.
The main purpose of traffic lights appears to be to brighten up the landscape. Potholes big enough to swallow a bike appearing out of nowhere on what seems a perfectly good road.
Some observations of Filipinos on my first visit to the Philippines….
I’m a great believer in the fact that you cannot generalise about any race, but …..
Filipinos are basically very friendly people with a good sense of humour and a most welcomed understanding of ‘irony’. They seem to have a high sense of cleanliness and appearance - unlike some Pacific islands were you need to stand upwind of some inhabitants in order to keep breathing. I would constantly see people checking and preening themselves in: shop or car windows and (rather often) mirrors on motorcycles or cars. Even local people of obviously diminished circumstances would walk out of what is basically a hovel looking clean and neat - actually: you’d wonder how they did it?
Some photographs are on .... http://picasaweb.google.com/BevanLibya/PhilippinesDonsol#