30 July. Far too early in the morning we are up and about getting our breakfast and putting our bags in the car to fly to Palawan.  Stephen Guptill, Wendy’s father will be driving us to the airport today along with his daughter who will be joining us for this part of our trip. I suppose to be more accurate Heather and myself will be joining Wendy. Wendy has lived and worked as a missionary in a remote mountain village called Kemantian, on the island of Palawan, and it was she that invited us to visit. The ride to the airport was just as long and just as bumpy as it had been coming from the airport. And it was just as entertaining while we sat nearby as passengers and watched Stephen dodge various obstacles such as parked cars, moving cars, children, adults, dogs, chickens, potholes, and an assortment of other miscellaneous debris.

A few hours later and we were on our flight headed to Palawan. An hour or so after take off we were back on the ground and looking for a way to get to Brooks Point, the closest town/city to Kemantian where we would be spending the night. Before catching a shuttle bus that would take us to Brooks Point we had a few hours to do something, as the busses pretty much leave at a certain time. Unless of course they are not quite full enough, which if that is the case they’ll just wait until more passengers show up. So thus having a few hours to dawdle around in Puerto Princesa we set out to find a place to where we could spend a night on our way back through when we were leaving. We also took the time to stop by a pizzeria for lunch, and a large Wal-Mart style store for any last minute items we may need.

We found a good place to stay on our return trip and made reservations, then we headed on down to the bus station. Now Wendy had informed us that we would be taking a bus to brooks point, so I thought that meant a bus being as I had seen large publics transportation buses all over the Philippines. This was not quite the case we would be taking a van crammed with twice as many people as it was designed for, plus their cargo and calling it a bus. Off handedly this might seems like its about to be a bad thing, not really so though. You see many of the vans that they call buses have air-conditioning, which in and of itself is a pleasantry, but having air-conditioning means you get to keep your windows closed which means no breathing dirt for the next four and a half hours. That is a luxury that many of the big buses just don’t have, plus it is easier to keep track of your stuff so no one runs off with it for you.

After waiting an hour or so next to our bus for more passengers to show up our driver finally decided that it was time to get going. This was around three or so in the afternoon. For all westerners driving, or in our case being driven in the Philippines is always an adventure and this proved to just as true this time as well. Not wanting us to get sick or otherwise suffer discomforts Wendy secured Heather and myself the front seats in the van next to t he driver, and herself took a seat right behind us. These were no doubt the most entertaining seats available in the bus. I don’t believe they were intended to be entertaining, but the way the bus drivers drive......Well it can be entertaining. And just in case the driving itself wasn’t entertaining enough we had two drivers, who both scrunched themselves in behind the steering wheal, this would have been more comforting if it were a pilot copilot type of system, but being as it is just a normal van it made me curious as to how well the van could be maneuvered with this type of arraignment.

We soon found out that a van could be handled surprisingly rather well with this two driver configuration, though only one of them really drove. The ride from Puerto Princesa to Brooks Point was certainly a ride I will remember for at least a couple of months. To say that it was haphazard is more than something of a misstatement. The route we were to take is not a route I would care to drive very often myself even at half the speed which we traversed it. The road was not just in a state of disrepair, but was in various state of construction. And to say that it was under construction was not to say that it was any better. No doubt that the sections of new road would have been wonderful to drive on vice the potholed dirt parts of the road that we did drive on. But the parts of the road that had been paved were being used to dry rice and other local produce, which made the new parts of the road completely obsolete for the use of cars. Thus you would have a two lane road condensed to a one lane road with traffic traveling both ways in the one lane. Now that’s not so bad in and of it self once you get accustomed to that, but now add in parked vehicles, carts, people, dogs, large piles of rocks and a million other things that have no business in a road being square in your way forcing you to swing into oncoming traffic to miss it, or oncoming traffic swinging in front of you to dodge something in their one half of the one lane. Now in order to prevent all this from becoming too monotonous go ahead and switch which side of the road is being worked on every mile or so, so as to make all the cars buses and vans that are already busy trying to not run head-on into each other swerve from one side of the road to the other.

We did muchly survive the ride to Brooks Point and arrived at the George’s House around 7:30. The George’s are the head missionaries at this particular mission that Heather and myself will be visiting tomorrow. The house is used, at least as far as I was able to tell mostly for logistics base. It also may not pass the test of what many a conventional westerner would consider a proper house, however by Philippine standards it could be considered quite good in comparison to many.

To give you a general idea, the house is constructed mostly of concrete, the floor was bare concrete, the walls are bare concrete. Aside from that the roof is tin supported by wood trusses and there is no ceiling to speak of. There is running wall, but not at all times during the day, if your smart you don’t drink the tap water without first running it through a filter to make it drinkable, and hot showers are something you take somewhere else. Sleep is facilitated with the help of a fan and a mosquito net, the mosquito nets are necessary as the windows don’t have screens on them, and even if they did it would make little difference do to the gaps between the roof and the walls and concrete blocks in portions of the walls designed to let air movement

into the house. The fans are necessary as air-conditioning is just a far off once remembered dream, while we are in a concrete house that gathers heat all through the day to keep you warm and sweating at night. But the house is simple, sturdy and functional which is its basic premises and what is required of it.

Chris another gentlemen working out here for the mission and being more or less the logistics guru for the mission had prepared a diner for us before we arrived. This was muchly appreciated by we three arrivals, and shortly thereafter we headed to our bunks for the night.

The next morning 31 July we ate a quick meal of oatmeal and prepared ourselves for the hike ahead. Today we were going to hike into the mountains of Palawan back to the village of Kemantian where Wendy worked as a nurse/doctor for the mission. Wendy had let us know well ahead of time that this was not to be a stole in the park kind of walk, she had also made our plans so that we would be hiking into the mountains in the morning when it was still cooler so as to make life less unpleasant for those of us not accustomed to hiking in the mountains everyday. She had also told us previously numerous times to bring cleats for the hike as we would find them highly useful in preventing injuries and embarrassments.

Chris took the three of us by truck out to the head of the trail that led back into the mountains. Arrangements had been made for our gear to be carried back to the village for us at a cost of 2 pesos a kilo, roughly 2 cents a pound. Chris waited behind with the truck and our gear as we started up the trail. There was no sense for us to wait on the carriers to arrive, even with our gear they would be able to move faster than we would. The beginning of the trail started out with a gentle rise as we walked through a grass covered glade, but it soon began to get much steeper. Even this early in the morning the sun was starting to beat down and it soon became apparent to me that this was defiantly not going to be a Sunday walk in the park. Wendy had told us that the trail climbed to about 2000 feet and that there were no switchbacks on the trail, she neglected to mention that the first 1000 feet was as near to vertical as the human foot can traverse without it being called climbing. Admittedly I am no longer in the condition I was once in, but in preparation for this I had walked 18 miles in one day just to see if I would be up to the task. It turns out 18 miles on flat land is a lot easier than 2000 vertical feet in maybe 3 or 4 miles of mountain trail.

Now we have all hiked mountain trails in the states or some other place, and the trails are usually “improved” or in good condition. This is not the case with this trail, as a matter of course it is internally left unimproved as it tends to help keep undesirables out. The cleats I found to of great necessity, the trail being greatly made of thick red clay and mud, and where it wasn’t clay or mud it was rock. After we had hiked for a while with many breaks for me, as I was lagging badly behind the two girls we finally came an area where the trail wasn’t headed in a near vertical direction. Here the path joined a small creek and the air became notably cooler and in general the hike became much more pleasant and to my liking. After following the stream for a ways the path separated again and headed up the mountain at a steeper angel again, though not nearly so steep as before. I no longer needed to stop every few minutes and was now enjoying myself quit a bit. And hour or so later we crossed the peak ridge and began to have spots along the trail from time to time where we could see out into the valley and or get a good view of the mountain range.

Along various places you would also come across areas of the mountain that were being cultivated by the Palawanos. The Palawanos cultivate the mountains in a different way than most of us are probably accustomed to seeing steep land cultivated. Usually if someone cultivates very steep land, and the mountains and land that these people are cultivating is very steep you would expect to see terraces. However the Palawanos of these mountains don’t terrace at all.  Rather they grow there crops right on the mountain side, including a special type of rice which does not require standing water that they call mountain rice. I also saw other things growing, much of which I didn’t know what it was, but things like corn and bananas were fairly easy to identify.

As we entered the first village Wendy told us that this is what a typical village might look like, but explained that this was not they one we were going to, ours was the next village. The village we were in had five maybe six small thatched huts each housing a family, a community open-air latrine, a few animals such as goats, chickens, dogs, and a pig or two, and a spattering of men, women, and children. The village was located on a gently sloping area of the mountain so as to make building their huts more practical and much easer. The Huts themselves were made almost entirely out of locally grown materials. The walls, floors, doors, windows, and supports were all made of bamboo, while the thatched roofs were made of reeds. The walls caught my attention most of all because of the way they were made. The walls were made of strips of bamboo woven together to form large sheets. The sheets of bamboo were then nailed or otherwise fastened to a bamboo frame that composed the structure of the house. Floors would be constructed by making a supporting structure of bamboo poles and then running strips of bamboo across the poles at a 90 degree angle spaced and inch or so apart making a slatted floor that would be very easy to clean. The roofs were made of thatching though I never thought to take a close look at how they made them, and a few of the houses used tin for there roofs when it could be afforded.

As we were walking through the village we stopped by one of the huts when Wendy greeted one of the local ladies. She introduced us, though we couldn’t understand a word beyond our own names. Wendy told us that she was one of the local basket weavers and asked us if we cared to see what she was doing. Sure enough she was weaving a basket, a very small basket that was more for decorative purposes than usefulness, but a very nice basket nonetheless. Wendy also informed us that many of the villagers in the mountains earned a bit of their income by making baskets and other arts and crafts for sale in the towns. In these villages though the baskets seemed to be the main items produced, which resulted in a great variety of shapes and patterns. In order to effectively trade or sell then one local gentleman would go to several villages buying the baskets from each weaver. In turn he would then take them into the towns and sell them to dealers or stores there. Heather and myself having been told about the baskets, asked Wendy if she could let it be known that we would like to look at and buy baskets from the locals. This she did, and as a result we had a fairly decent selection to choose from.

After that first village it was a fairly short walk down the mountainside to the next village that we would be staying at, and which was the mission proper. Here there were several huts though most of them were spaced a good walking distance from each other. There were two buildings/huts that were used for the school and church, a number of thatched hut homes for the missionaries and some locals, a clinic for treating sickness, diseases, and minor injuries, a crumbling inpatient ward, and a couple of outdoor latrines that were screened off for privacy. Much of the area around the village had been cleared of jungle and underbrush, and grass has been allowed to grow, giving the area a clean, open and manicured feeling. From just about nearly anywhere in the village you have a spectacular view of the sweeping mountain ranges, and from our vantage point villages, huts, and cultivated slopes can be seen dotting the jungles that cover the mountains. The Village we are in is situated along another large gently slopping area and surrounded by a mixture of jungle and cultivated mountain fields in which are growing rice, corn, pineapples bananas amongst other things.

Despite its remote location and lack of any commercial services, the mission is rather well set up. Many of the huts in the village have running water that is gravity fed by a spring further up the mountain. Most of the huts (if not all of them, I didn’t have the opportunity to go into each of them) have electric lights which are fed from a small microhydro power plant, that is in turn fed from a spring further up the mountain. Electricity is also available for other uses such as radios, battery chargers, medical equipment and other essential items. The huts that the missionaries stay in are equipped with gas stoves and small refrigerators that also run off compressed gas. The gas of course not being a local resource must be carried in, which is done by local villagers whom are paid to bring it in.

Shortly after entering the village we are introduced to the missionaries that live and work there as well as to many villagers although we neither speak their language or they ours. Wendy, as well as the other missionaries speak the local dialect and so are able to have regular conversation though they are forced to learn the language through interaction with the people rather than any sort of formal learning. After our introductions we accompany Wendy to her hut where within a short time lunch is provided to us and is a meal of rice and some sort of greens cooked in coconut milk. Much to my surprise it tastes nothing like greens that I am accustomed to and is surprisingly flavorful and good.

After our hike into the village the rest of the day was spent generally taking it easy and relaxing. Later that evening the Georges prepared special meal in celebration of Wendy’s return and we were cordially invited to attend. The meal ended with homemade ice-cream a rare and special treat particularly considering the resources it takes to make ice-cream out in the middle of a sweltering jungle. Later that night it after we had retired to our respective beds it began to rain and continued to rain all through the next day.

The next morning August 1 I woke up to the sound of roosters crowing and a small group of people softly singing Christian hymns outside the hut I was sleeping in. Though at first a bit disconcerting because I was still in a fog from waking up I must admit that I would take it over the sound of my alarm clock nearly any day. The morning was gray, the mountains covered in clouds, and my morning shower was brisk and refreshing, though not the least bit warm. It ended up staying mostly cloud covered and rainy most of the day, which kept many of the people form the surrounding villages away. This in effect did two more things, it meant that not many people would come to the missions clinic, and not as many people as we were hoping for would show up to try to sell us their baskets. The day went by pretty lazily with not to many people coming around. In the afternoon the school had a water game where the children would have teams and fill plastic bags with water and then try to douse the other team. This quickly digressed into a free-for-all which just made it more fun for the children, and much more entertaining to watch. As the game progressed it bemused me that even though it was a cool wet day and the goal of the game was to get even wetter, even though everybody had been trying to avoid getting wet from the rain. Many water bags later several of the smaller children were standing around shivering and watching the other children play, upon which Wendy remarked that they would all have colds tomorrow. 

That evening as the sun was setting the local gentleman that buys the baskets from all the surrounding villages invited us to come have a look at the collection of baskets he had. As we had not had as many visitors that day offering baskets as we had hoped due to the rain his invitation came as a great boon to our basket acquiring necessities. Heather got first choice of all the baskets as she arrived before I did, however it was certainly no downfall for me as there was large selection to choose from. Most of the baskets he brought were the more contemporary ones, and we saw very few of the more exotic shapes and patterns. Still though we were very pleased by the selection and equally pleased by the asking prices. There was no dickering or haggling over the price, as low as they were I almost felt bad, but not really he was free to ask whatever price he felt was appropriate. Most of the baskets I chose were between 60 pesos and 150 pesos, with the most expensive one being about 360. I ended up getting about 20 baskets of varying sizes and colors for a little over $35, not too shabby all things considered.

The next morning August 2nd we got up to the mountains still covered in thick clouds and a constant drizzle. We ate a quick breakfast, and packed up the few things we had brought with us. A little while later our carriers who would also be our guides showed up to take us out of the mountains, our basket gentleman also showed up as he would be hiking out with us. The trip out was much easier and about and hour quicker than the trip in had been, though it certainly was not down hill all the way. It was also a bit muddier and good bit slipperier due to the rain, as well as the stream we had passed though now had about twice as much water flowing though it, obscuring much of what we had used for path the first time, thankfully we still had our cleats. As we reached the bottom of the trail we radioed Chris to let him know that we were ready for pickup, a short while later we herd the rumbling of the 4 wheal drive truck as it was making its way up the dirt road to our location. As Chris showed up he welcomed us back to “civilization”. We then loaded our bags into the back of the truck, paid our guides and carriers being sure to give them just a little more than the weight they carried called for, and then bid them farewell.

Chris then took us back to the George’s house for a quick lunch, shower, and then helped us pack up our baskets for the flight back to Manila. He then took us back into Brooks Point and found a bus that would take us back to Puerto Princesa. We then made the very same mistake we had we had made on the trip out here and chose the front two seats. This time the bust trip was no less spectacular than it had been the previous time even though we know what to expect, though we were much more tired this time around and did manage to get a few minutes of sleep between the bumps and jolts caused by the various obstacles. We arrived at Puerto Princesa with little ceremony and found our way back to the Puerto Pension where we would be spending the night.

From there the next morning August 3rd we made our way to the airport and flew to Manila. When we arrived Dwain picked Heather and Myself up at the airport again and took us on a bit of a tour of the city of Manila, though to be completely honest there just is not much in manila to see. We then traveled by car back to the Guptill’s house where we would spend that night and the next Saturday. Heather had to fly back to Taiwan the following Sunday the morning of the 5th. Rather than inconvenience the very polite and kind Guptill’s any further I chose to ride back to Manila with them that day and stay at an inexpensive Pension until the seventh when I would be catching a flight back to Diego Garcia. Thus ended my vacation for the year of two thousand and seven.

Hay I think I forgot to close the door, do you think you could get it for me?