27 September 2005

I start off today again about 8:00am and take a shower. Leopard’s doesn’t have hot water so it is a cold shower, not what I want when I first wake up but I suppose it will do. Showered and having eaten, and Joel shown up we take off. Today we aren’t going very far, Joel is just going to show me some rather local things. The plan is he will take me to a villa along a beach where there is another small island located not to far from Leyte, and if I feel up to it we can hire one of the local fishermen to take us out to the island. Then we will see the local airport, and then on to a road built into the mountains by Japanese contractors. It seems that the Japanese have a lot of contracts to build roads, at least on Leyte, and they are usually the better built roads. It takes us 20 to 30 minutes to reach the first villa, I can’t really tell, and I wasn’t paying to much attention to time. Its quite a neat road going there, it is a dirt road that wanders along the beach with small nipa huts on both sides, and the sea to the right, and fresh water fish farms, and rice patties to the left. When we reach the end of the road it is just more of the same that we have been seeing along the road except that there is a small bamboo pier built out onto the beach. It is low tide now so there is only a few inches of water at the base of the pier and it presents a rather picturesque scene. With any luck I may have even captured what I was seeing, though I’m sure not as well as I would have liked to. After a little while I walked back up to Joel who was talking to the locals, and he told me a little about the island from what the locals had told him. There is a light house on it that guides the ferries and ships between the island and the beach. According to the locals there were a lot of rocks around the island and far out into the ocean from our shore but it was safer for the ships and ferries to pass between the island and shore because the other side of the island was even more dangerous. They said that they could take us out to the island, but the sea was rough and didn’t know if it would be a good idea. I didn’t want to go, not because the sea was rough, but because I was already sunburnt from the previous days so badly that I didn’t want anymore sun. as for the sea being rough, I wouldn’t have called it rough the waves were like those you might find at a lake when a speed boat passes buy, but it seems that the locals are so used to the sea being so calm out here amongst the islands that they considered it rough. The day I had gone out on the boat to the Quatro Isias the sea had been so calm that it was almost like glass with gentle waves that just barely distorted the light giving the ocean a pleasant rippling effect. That seems to be at least as far as I have gathered what the norm is, and what they expect. I on the other hand having seen the oceans along Florida, California, Okinawa, the Mediterranean sea, and out on the island of Diego Garcia had never seen a ocean quite so calm. High and low tide came and went seamlessly without a wave. Well enough about waves. I snapped some pictures of the beach, the fishing boats, some of the people, and the bamboo pier, declined going out to the island, and let Joel know that I was ready to go when he was. We traveled back in the direction we had come from, for a ways and Joel turned down another dirt road that he said went to the airport. When we arrived at the airport it reminded me of what the airports in the U.S. might have been like long before I was alive. There was one building that said that it was the airport, an orange wind sock, and a flagpole with the Philippine flag on it. The runway was a 5 kilometer grass runway that looked as though it hadn’t been cut in months and after much distance couldn’t really be distinguished from the surrounding rice fields. There were two maintenance workers there, but they didn’t seem to be maintaining anything except a few feet of grass in the front of the building. With not much else to see there and as far as we could tell no planes scheduled to arrive in the next month, or two, or three, we decided to move on. Joel said that planes do fly into and out of the airport. Their mostly private planes, military planes, or the occasional emergency rescue plane. But you never know if or when one is coming, sometimes two a month, sometimes none. Next Joel took me back to the road that he lived on, and also the road that MLG resort was located off of. He said that later this road turned into the road that the Japanese had built. After quite a little ways we came out at the bottom of a valley where a bridge was built across a river bed. The bridge was low and flat, and built so that during heavy rains the water would flow over the bridge and not pile up against it. There were short thick concrete posts about 9 inches high lining both sides of the bridge so that if you were to try to cross the bridge when it was flooded you would know when you were near the edge and it would be hard for you to drive off. The road continued up out of the valley and ever higher into the mountains offering glimpses of the surrounding mountains but rarely if ever a good unobstructed view. As we climbed further into the mountains the turns got sharper, and the grades got steeper, and it became apparent that Joel’s little motorcycle was in fact not built for this kind of terrain, or to have two full grown men riding on it going up these steep grades. If it had been just Joel, or myself the motorcycle may have done fine, but it’s just really one of the scooter type motorcycles with a very small one cylinder engine. It ended up making it up the mountain with both of us on it. Joel had to use the bottom gear a lot and at some points we probably could have walked faster but we made it. At the end of the road there were a few buildings. A school, a multi purpose public building and a nipa hut set among plowed fields and flower gardens. There was a trail the led further up the mountain through one of the fields. We thought that we would walk the trail and see if we couldn’t find a good view of the surrounding mountains and the valley we had just come through. As we were walking the path through the field it started to rain, and Joel hurried back down the path the nipa hut set amongst the flower beds, knocked on the door and hollered back at me to common and get out of the rain. Now I don’t know custom here in the Philippines, but I didn’t think it polite to just go up to someone’s house knock on the door and go in, especially when you’re a complete stranger. I a bit more hesitant than Joel made my way down to the nipa hut and Joel still at the door ushered me in. He introduced me to the man inside and told me that this was one of his friends, and a neighbor back in town. Well that made me feel a little better; at least we weren’t both bursting into a complete stranger’s house uninvited. As we sat there waiting for the rain to stop the gentleman of the house and his wife began setting the table for lunch and invited us to eat with them. They had prepared three types of fish, none of which I am terribly familiar with except for the sardines that came out of a can. One was a baked or fried fish perhaps an inch and half long and no more than quarter inch thick. Not knowing how to eat the thing I watched the others first, but they all went at it different ways, so I decided I would just bite into the thing. If it were cooked well I figured that the bones would be soft enough to eat. That method seemed to be working well enough for me it was a little crunchy but I couldn’t really tell the difference between the bones and the rest of the fish so I figured I must be doing ok. Apparently this drew a few looks from the rest of the table, but I didn’t notice as I was enjoying the food to much. Joel leaned over and said to me don’t eat the small bones. I didn’t see how to avoid the small bones, everything except the head was a small bone and you couldn’t really get the meat without the bones, so I just didn’t eat the head, and the tail, and hoped that that was a close enough approximation. The second kind of fish they served was fried in oil with herbs and was quite delicious, though once again I haven’t a clue what kind of fish it was. The fish themselves are perhaps 9 inches long and when fresh a blue sliver color. To cook them they had sliced the fish body diagonally several times which allowed the oil and herbs to better absorb into the fish as well as cook the fish faster. This was served with cooked white rice and your option of a soy sauce mixture or a seasoned tomato mixture that came with the sardines. I went with the tomato mixture, and too this point, I think this has been one of the best meals I have had while here. It had stopped raining while we were eating lunch, and we decided that it was time to head back home being around one in the after noon, and I wanted to be back to Leopard’s beach resort by about two. The little motorcycle made it down the mountain much better than it had made it up and Joel dropped me off at the resort.

            Jacky was coming over at 4:00pm to pick me up so that we could go to the market and pick up some items for dinner. I guess she had finally managed to come up with something to cook, because she knew what she wanted and we went straight to the vendors she wanted, got what she needed, and were on our way back to her house. Once we were at her house she set about cooking and I asked her if she would like me to help. Her answer was no, so I asked her if I could I could be in the kitchen to visit with her as she cooked. Again her answer was no, but a few minutes later one of her elderly aunts came into the living room and sat down on the couch with me. Her English wasn’t as good as Jacky’s but we managed to have good conversation telling each other about ourselves, and where we had been and things we hade done. After about an hour or so Jacky came out and set up the formal dinner table for two. Not wanting to be rude, or for that mater or exclusive of the rest of her family, I asked where the rest of the family was going to be eating. She said in the kitchen, so I asked don’t they want to eat with us. She said no, it was ok they eat in there and we visit. I kind of felt bad because it seemed that she had banned the rest of the family from the living room and formal kitchen while I was there, so I felt more like an intruder than a guest. After we had finished diner Jacky cleared the table and we sat down on the couch to talk. After not to terrible long the rest of the family began to trickle into the living room and the TV was turned on to provide some entertainment for the rest of the family and momentary distractions for us. It takes Jacky a little while each day to begin to open up and become more comfortable. The first two or three days she seemed tense, but last night she loosened up pretty well just before she went home, and tonight she was just becoming comfortable so the conversation was flowing a little better with her willing to talk and tell me about herself. As we were talking and jesting and watching the TV I checked the time and noticed that it was going on 9:00. I suggested that maybe I should go so she wouldn’t get to sleep too late. She asked me if I wanted to go, and I said no I don’t want to, but I think that I should. Her father was already asleep, and her aunt had left and hour earlier, so it was only her, her sister, and her sister’s two children that were still awake. I knew that as soon as I left the sister would go to bed, and put the children down and Jacky would go to sleep when she got back so I figured the earlier I left the better for her. With that she took me back to Leopard’s and so my evening ended.

Joel's Friends house that I ate lunch at. The upper room is where they sleep, the back room is the kitchen. The rest of the open area is where the eat work and do everything else. If you look at the walls you will notice that bottom portion of about two feet is concrete while the upper portion is just lattice. The lattice does a surprisingly good job of keeping out both the rain and sun, but lets the wind blow through keeping it at a moderate temperature. The sleeping room is elevated so that even during the worst storm the rain will not bother the sleepers as the bottom of the room is of the same approximate height as the side walls.