Well my day started off with a phone call letting me know that my breakfast was ready. It was very nice to have a breakfast made for me, but I really didn’t want to wake up. I certainly couldn’t refuse though especially being as Jennifer, who had cooked it for me was such a nice person, and I knew she had taken time out of her other responsibilities to do so. After the call I took a shower and got out just in time for them to deliver my breakfast to my door. I finished breakfast and took the plate and glass back to the main building. Jennifer was there taking care of something behind the counter, I placed the plate and glass on the counter and we talked for a few minutes. I asked her how she was doing, and a bit to my surprise got a truthful answer that was not “oh I’m Fine or good”. Her answer was I am sick and tired. Being the person that I am, I said oh, I’m sorry, but what’s wrong. She told me that her mother is sick and needs treatment or medicine, and they cannot afford it. She was also tired of working so hard and getting so little for it, she was tired of not being able to have her son with her because he could not stay at the resort with her but had to stay with a relative, and she was sick and tired of everyday being the same with nothing changing and nothing getting better. So yep I guess I can understand why she is sick and tired, I think would be too. She and her husband both work at the resort and both live at the resort which is why her son cannot stay with the father, any more than he can stay with her. Life is hard for many of these people, and in many ways I feel guilty because I earn more money in a month than most families earn in a year. When I go to a restaurant and pay for a meal I usually have more money in my pocket than most earn in a week, and my meal costs more than some people earn in a day, and I’m not talking about going to a fancy restaurant, I am talking about the street corner restaurant. What I am spending on hotel fees per day is more than some earn all week, and I’m only spending about 800 pesos per day, or roughly $16.00. I often feel as though I am just carelessly throwing money around because I am spending it so much more freely than the people that live here, but really I am trying to budget myself and not pay too much for things. The economy here is sort of strange. On one hand it is cheep, on the other it is expensive. The best way to put it I suppose is that labor is cheep, while materials are expensive. If you are paying for someone’s time then you don’t pay much. For instance I had a guide take me into a cave today, (I will tell you more about that later) the tour so to speak lasted about two and half hours, all they wanted me to pay them was 200 to 300 pesos, or 4 to 6 dollars. Well I gave them 500 pesos, which was severely overpaying them. On the other hand buying food runs about the same price as it does in the states, buying materials can run you a good bit more than it does in the states. If you use local materials produced here in the Philippines than your cost will be significantly less, but so will the quality. If you buy imported materials then you are paying more for the same product you may buy in the US. There really doesn’t seem to be much in the way of standards here, but if you want something built to the standards that we are used too, we would be paying much more for it here, and you still probably wouldn’t get as good of a finished product. Primarily because the workers here aren’t used to and don’t use standards so very much. Also the products that are sold here aren’t made to the same specifications that our products are, that being true for everything from plastics and glass to wood and concrete. To add another thing in here, electricity costs the same here as it does in the states, mostly because the electricity comes from the same sources, that being oil and with the global market going ever higher and higher, electricity prices keep going up and up. Anyways back to how my day was going. After talking and listening to Jennifer for a while, I let her get back to work because I knew she had better things to do, than to stand around and talk to me. Not to long after, Joel showed up and I grabbed my camera bag and we left for town. First we stopped at the Fuji center and I dropped off 4 roles of film. Then we got a couple of bottles of water, and expecting to be back not to long after noon we didn’t get anything to eat. The previous day the man that was to be our guide told us that we should where pants and long sleeves and so both Joel and myself did so. The guide lead us through a local villa of nipa huts that was only connected to anything by dirt paths and what may have at one time been a dirt road but was now just two dirt tracks through the grass. Behind the villa the path began slowly ascending the mountain going through sparse patches of jungle and small glades and the occasional rice field. After about15 minutes of fairly easy walking the path began to ascend more quickly and I was quickly out of breath. After perhaps another 15 minutes of walking, and climbing we reached what the guide told me was Cathedral Cave. After being in the cave for a few minutes, I personally would have named the cave Guano Rain Cave. On the outside the cave was a concave curve into a cliff that formed part of the side of the mountain. The entrance is quite impressive as much of the entrance to the cave is part of the cliff but as it curves inward there are many stalactites covering the walls to the entrance. The cave itself is not so very large and has 4 entrances that I could see. Two of the entrances could be walked in and were side by side, the other two entrances that I could see were both in the ceiling of the cave, one about 40 feet up, the other perhaps 60 to 80 feet up in a different chamber. The cave itself is really just one big chamber and only takes a few minutes to traverse. It is fairy well lit from the outside sun, but it takes your eyes a while to adjust to the dimness. Probably the biggest obstacle that you face is that the thousands of bats that live in the cave have covered the floor with guano which makes it slippery mess, also there is a tremendous ammonia stench to the cave which irritates the eyes and offends the nose. Now bats dropping guano on you is fairly annoying, but what I disliked the most is that there are so many billions of aunts that if you stand still for a few seconds they are swarming your legs and biting you. I of course learned this the hard way. When I got to the entrance to the cave I stopped walking to take a break. It took about 2 minutes for me to realize what was going on. The aunts didn’t start biting at first, they waited until they had climbed up into my shirt and pants fairly well and then in unison started biting me. I then of course started doing my little kill the aunts dance and noticed that Joel was sort of doing the same dance. Neither one of us stopped moving for very long after that. It didn’t really matter so much though because moving or not, there were so many aunts that they got on you anyways and just bit into you anytime they felt like it. Inside the cave the aunts were just as bad, but here there were also million and millions of roaches, and in the guano rain, water dripping, and pools of water with guano in it and you really have a pretty miserable environment, for humans anyway, I think the roaches and bats rather liked it. There were a couple of local men at the cave when we first got there. One local was a bat hunter and another, a snake hunter. The bat hunter was preparing there meal of roasted bats, while the snake hunter had his snake in a sack ready to be taken back into town and sold for someone’s dinner. The snake was a rather large one being a bit longer than I am tall, though it is a non-venomous snake. I was told that it as a constrictor, and later in the day boa was mentioned in reference to it so I am putting the two together for it being a Boa-constrictor, though I truthfully couldn’t tell you what kind of snake it was. After taking several pictures of the cave, the bats, and the cave entrance, and having lost several pounds to the ferocity of the aunts I decided that it was time to head back. Now still being a bit warn out from the trip up the mountain my feet aren’t perhaps as steady as I would like them to be. In fact I provide a good bit of amusement to the locals as I am the only person to trip on the way down the mountain, but I didn’t do it just once, I had to go and do it three times. Yeah for clumsy fat white guys. After coming out back into the villa I was completely soaked head to foot in sweet, and having warn pants and a long-sleeved shirt didn’t really seem to have helped with anything except making me hotter. Joel and myself returned to MLG resort and took a break for a few minutes. I told Joel to go ahead and take off for the day; I was not going to do anything else. Then the most essential thing was taking a shower and drinking water which I did both to great length. Earlier in the day when I was talking to Jennifer, she had told me that Jacky would come see me at the beach resort at seven. To put that last sentence into context, I was checking out of the MLG resort, and into Leopard’s beach resort at 2:30 for no reason other than I wanted to check both of them out. So far I like MLG better, the people seem friendlier, and the resort is more natural such as trees and grass covering everything, where here at Leopard’s if it isn’t a building or the beach its concrete or gravel. At MLG everything is open for use, here at Leopard’s all the sheltered huts are supposed to be paid for if you use them, the pool isn’t open for general use, but is fenced off, and to top it off, there isn’t any hot water. Anyways so having gotten situated here at Leopard’s at three or so I was more or less waiting around for Jacky to show up, really just hoping that she would. She did show up a few minutes after 7 with another of her friends, though this girl didn’t seem to speak a word of English, where as last night, her cousin LynLyn spoke and understood fairly well, and was not shy about speaking at all. Again I spent the time talking to her, just trying to get to know her a little better. The conversation is always a little strained at first, but as like last night and the night before she seemed to get more comfortable after a while. I have been asking her questions about her life, things like how she lives, and how she does different thing. Take for instance; she does not have running water. They have to use a hand pump, but she says that this is good, because the people that have running water have to pay for water and so do not use very much. But her family can use as much as they want because it is free. Truthfully I had never considered trading the efficiency of running water for quantity, but being as this is a very poor country with very little money to go around I can see where that makes a great deal of sense. Being as they don’t have running water, they also don’t have hot water, or a shower. But they do have a tub that they fill up to bathe in, and as Jacky put it, it never gets cold here so the water is warm. Its odd me being here, even though I am surrounded by what is everyday life for these people I am still so far above or detached from it because I am at hotel where I have running water, and flushing toilets, if I need my clothes washed, I hand them to the lady at the front desk and they get done. I know that they are going to wash them by hand, and they will probably charge me 100 pesos to do so, but it seems such a trivial amount for the work they are doing. But even in this hotel that I would not give even one star I am still living so much better than those that truly live here. We also talked about other things like what does she want to do, and her family. The night eventually wore on, and before she left for the night, I asked if I could come over to her house tomorrow. She is very nervous about what to fix for me to eat, and I have told her several time not to worry about it, but she has not listened. She wasn’t sure that she wanted me to come over because she didn’t know what to fix, so I asked her if I could take her to the grocery store and the market and we could find something. She agreed to this, though she still seemed a bit nervous and she insisted that she doesn’t know how to cook for foreigners. I keep telling her, just cook for yourself and don’t worry about me, but she doesn’t seem to be able to do that, worrying that I won’t like what she fixes. Anyways, its 1 am now and I am fairly tired so I need to get going. Well enough for now I could keep going but I need to sleep.

This lovely snake will be taken into town and sold to make someone's dinner.

Roasting Bats for lunch

t is kind of hard to make them out, but there are thousands and thousands of bats flying in the air and roosting on the ceilings of the cave.