The Philippines: In Summation

As you may be able to gather from our last several posts, we've become something of experts on the Philippines: we've ridden atop a Jeepney, we've eaten balut...well, that's pretty much it, but that should count for something, surely.

This was our second experience traveling in a developing nation (though I do so hate using terms like that), and I have to say, it went much more smoothly than our time in Bali.  We still grapple with the guilt of being so much more privileged than everyone around us, of course; to put it most succinctly, this means that we would feel outraged and ripped off when we were being charged double or triple the local rate for a meal or transportation, then feel dumb when we realized that it was only a matter of about $4, then feel guilty when we realized that that much money could well be a day's wages for the merchant in question.  After our time in the Philippines, we are better at dealing with haggling (barely), with beggars (somewhat), and with exotic toilets (if necessary).  We did go a bit overboard with spending, sadly...with everything so very cheap, it's easy to spend much more than you mean to.  BRIGHT SIDE: WE ARE CLOSE TO NO LONGER HAVING MORE MONEY THAN GOOD SENSE.

The Philippines are clearly a very special place, and I don't think we've seen the last of them.  I mean, we still have about 695 more islands to visit.

In summation:

People -- Awesome!
Food -- Meh
Sights -- Beautiful if poorly located
Transportation -- Thrill-a-minute
Beaches -- Please!
Poverty -- High
Urchins -- Yes
Would Visit Again? -- Hell yeah

Siquijor: As Fun to Visit As It Is to Try to Pronounce

Having had our fill of landbound fun (and having played enough games of chess to wear the board into pieces) (for real!) (also I finally exhausted my supply of parentheses), we decided to spend our final day in the Philippines visiting the nearby island of Siquijor, renowned for being the home of mystical healers and witch doctors.  Jenn and I thought we'd rent some bicycles and see if we couldn't spend a day at the beach, then maybe bother a few witch doctors on the way back to the port.

Unsuitable vacation plans.
Source: http://www.smashbros.com/

Siquijor is a gorgeous, clear-watered tropical paradise, though admittedly we'd been getting a bit inured to tropical paradises after a month in the Philippines.  As is the custom of this country, we were accosted by several touts as soon as we set foot off the boat, most of whom were offering accommodation or motorcycle rental; when we put it to them that we wanted a couple of mountain bikes, a weird, awkward silence descended on the men.  Eventually, after some dispute, consensus was established that the only place that would rent bicycles were some of the island's resorts, and they would only rent them to guests staying the night.  We again got many hearty recommendations of places to rent motorcycles, but we turned the men down politely; my driver's licence is still in the mail, and my only experience with motorcycles was Excitebike, and even then I kept falling over.

Sadly, with no bikes available and only five hours until the last ferry back to land, we just had to rent a tricycle to drive us to the beach like a couple of tourists, ugh.  Our brains soft from the warm sun and coconut water oversaturation, we agreed to the driver's exorbitant price; he claimed that there would be some tariffs that needed to be paid on the 10-minute trip.  Now seems as good a time as any to explain Harry's Patented Haggling System, Patent Pending:

1. Merchant: "That costs 300 pesos."
2. Harry: "Hmm...I'll give you 275."
3. Merchant: "Deal."
4. Harry's Brain: "Yessss, I got a bargain!"

The driver took us to Palitan Beach, Lonely Planet's pick of the island for stunning white sand and excellent swimming.  Neither Jenn nor I had been to the beach many times in our lives -- not too many of those in Kansas or Missouri -- but we were hoping to spend our time in the Philippines hanging out in places that looked exactly like this.   We walked across the sugary sand, donned our bathing suits, and hopped into the water.  Three hours later, when the driver returned for us, Jenn had stepped on a sea urchin, at least a dozen seaweed-green jellyfish had appeared to terrorize us, and we were burned bright pink.  Truly, this "beach" is a dangerous business.

The most horrifying beach in the world (except for that DiCaprio movie) (oh, I found some more parentheses).

Another island visited!  Let's put it up on the big board and see how we fared in our thorough, month-long exploration of the Philippines:

...Aww, nerts.  Image may appear more impressive if you
haven't cleaned your computer screen lately.

Dumaguete 2: SCUBA Boogaloo

Our first day of SCUBA certification was fine, if somewhat less thrilling and more pun-filled than we had expected.  The day was taken up with rigorous study of the ins and outs of diving, by which I mean we watched videos and took quizzes on the videos.  Among the PADI Open Water Certification video features:

• Stunningly well-preserved early '90s visual effects recreated with computers in 2002.
• Continual references to equipment we would not be using and test dives that we had not paid for and would not be experiencing.
• A comic relief mime who made us all extremely nervous -- presumably, after falling over in swim fins, failing to plan his dive, improperly disassembling his equipment, and eating a peanut he found in his toolkit, this mime died a horrible death of the bends.  Educational!
• Amazing facts given as bumpers between segments, including "Fact: divers are 'under' achievers" and "Fact: divers are always happy."  BONUS FACT: this "always happy" business is an effect of nitrogen narcosis.  Laffs ahoy!

Another fascinating point of this class, which was taken at a location I will not disclose here: our teacher's name was "Snoopy."  Snoopy was a very nice guy, though a bit hard to refer to in conversation with a straight face.

Day two of diving involved some actual diving, and it was just as magical as the video made it out to be.  Most of the equipment didn't fit, but Snoopy reassured us with helpful information such as, "But it's OK."  We soldiered on through our first dive, descending to just a few meters, but having a grand old time.  Education without speaking presented a unique challenge, but Prof. Snoopy was pretty good with gestures; the impetus of "pay very close attention to what I'm telling you or you might die" is a pretty neat pedagogical trick that I may have to parlay into the English classroom someday.

On our second dive, Jenn was unable to breathe correctly out of her regulator, and Snoopy offered to mend the problem by "taking a break."  When the equipment had not magically fixed itself in  a few minutes, Snoopy took charge of the situation, announcing that we were finished for the day.  Jenn and I protested gently, saying that we would still like to dive, but the mask and regulator had to be fixed first.  He would have none of it, though; something we had learned about the culture of the Philippines at this point was that things could either be "Okay" or "Not Okay."  Riding on top of a Jeepney up a mountain, barreling through town on a tricycle without seatbelts, all of this was "Okay" unless something bad happened.  Snoopy evidently took our protestations that Jenn couldn't, y'know, breathe as a protest that things were "Not Okay," and so everything was off.  He led us out of the water and we took off all of our gear that we had just struggled into 10 minutes before.

Now we were presented with a difficult dilemma.  We still had to complete our third day of dive training to earn our certification, and now we would have to make up half of Day Two in addition to our other required dives.  And now that we had determined that Snoopy was perhaps not the best teacher in the world and used some somewhat suspect equipment, it would be a feat to get ourselves to trust him enough to even get ourselves into the water.  On the other hand, we had already invested some money and time into diving, and the first half of the day had been so much fun!  What were we to do?

Fortunately, I solved this problem in my characteristically dynamic manner: by smacking my head into a TV.

Thus hastening my transformation into Harry Potter.

This, coupled with the fact that we decided to attend our guest house's Free Oysters Night (incidentally, "free" is one of the words words to precede "oysters"), the decision got pretty much made for us.  We remain uncertified.  The next time we have the opportunity, we'll take the course again, but this time we'll 1. confirm that the instructor's equipment is in good working order, and 2. not study with someone named for a comic strip character.

In the meantime, we'll just have to find something else to do in spots like this.  Ho-hum.

Since this post is a little short on photos, I'll include this gem found on the pet shop in front of our guest house that apparently specialized in birds:

Quite an endorsement!

Dumaguete: More Fun Than Falling On Slippery Rocks

Dumaguete, our next destination in the Philippines, is just a short taxi ride from Bontoc.  This taxi ride is followed by an extremely long bus ride, which is then followed by another taxi ride, an hour-long flight, and a final taxi ride.  It's not as small a country as one might think, the Philippines.  Dumaguete is a charming city that possesses a quiet, relaxed, coconut-heavy dignity not easily captured on film.

Having spent the past week or so resting and recovering from our subterranean adventure, we were all set to embark on another exciting, action-packed excursion, after only a brief period of mental and physical preparation.

We'd learned our lesson from Sumaguing Cave; from here on out we would stick to physical activities of a level of intensity somewhere between "pinball" and "Facebooking."  It was important not only for our level of fun, but for our readiness for the next day's scuba lessons, that we pick an excursion that wouldn't leave us too terribly tired out.  Luckily, our guesthouse in Dumaguete offered a trip to Casaroro Falls that was graded as "Easy to Medium."  Man, it's like they knew us!  Y'know, and then decided that we really, really like stairs for some reason.

The guide had warned us at the top of the stairs (which was a Jeepney ride up the mountains in the first place) that, due to the recent typhoon, the path to the waterfall was somewhat damaged, and consequently, we would need a guide to show us the way.  Did I mention that the Casaroro Falls Tour was supposed to take "about two hours"?

"Damaged" didn't begin to cover it.  It was like frolicking through the postapocalypic ruins of a jungle that was already plentiful with ruins.  There were remnants of a nice concrete path crushed into rubble with twisted strands of rebar splayed everywhere.  We scrambled up creaky bamboo ladders and squeezed between jagged rocks and rotting tree trunks.  A wide creek ran beside us.  "Maybe this is the waterfall," we both thought hopefully.

After the rocks grew more slick and the acrobatics required of us more dramatic, Jenn had decided to stop and have a rest.  I soldiered on, reassuring myself that this was only somewhat like the time we almost plummeted to our deaths in a cave.  Then, of course, the guide instructed us to take off our shoes and begin vaulting across the river.

This is usually where one's life flashes before their eyes, but since most of my life has been spent playing video games, I just couldn't stop thinking about how many oxen I killed while fording rivers in "Oregon Trail."

In the end, we came to many excellent, insightful conclusions about the Philippines, but the only one we can remember now is that they should fire whoever's been grading the difficulty levels of their tours, or at least stop grading it on the Batman scale.

Tam-Awan:

Tam-awan Village is mentioned in Lonely Planet as well, and it has some of the same hallmarks of being a tourist trap like Sagada.  Just over the mountains, in the outskirts of Baguio, Tam-awan offers lodging in traditional Igorot-style huts with decidedly non-traditional hot showers and WiFi, and all for the low, low price of “more than anywhere we’d stayed outside of Manila.”  We were lucky to get a last-minute room, though we were told over the phone that we could only stay for one night.  Deciding we’d make the most of what we could get, Jenn and I packed up our things at our Couchsurfing host’s home and caught a cab to Tam-awan.  Though it was a bit pricey (especially compared to Couchsurfing), we would take a few art workshops and leave the next day with new skills and good memories.

Upon arrival, we were told that nearly all of the village’s artists were away opening an exhibition in Manila, and that there would be no workshops offered that day (except for Dream Catcher Making, but as Jenn is from Lawrence, Kansas, she already basically has a PhD in Dream Catcher Making).  Disheartened, we decided to spend the day making whatever art we could on our own and integrating ourselves into the community if possible.  The next few hours were spent happily drawing and taking photos.

Pictured: the inside
of Harry's head at 3 a.m.

Pleased at our artsiness, we cleaned up our supplies and headed back to our hut, which we were told was the fertility hut and was outfitted with bunk beds.  Passing by the village cafe, we were beckoned to come over and have a drink by a soft-spoken Filipino man with dark eyes and a long, wispy beard.  We took him up on it, opting to skip dinner in favor of drinks, snacks, and more drinks with the few artists still at the village: Alfonso, the bearded painter who had invited us, who possesses unfailing comedic timing; Arvin, a scriptwriter and actor who picks up money doing finances for the village; Louis, a French photographer-cum-crêpier who sounds for all the world like an American mocking a French person; and Ronnie, who works in the cafe and happily informed us that we could reserve our hut for the rest of the week.  Jenn and I downed a few bottles of Red Horse, the local extra-strong brew, in lieu of the sugarcane gin that the others were drinking, but as the sun went down and our courage went up, we began taking shots of GSM with the rest of them (but not, as it turns out, with the best of them).  The pride over being a beloved part of the community on our first day lasted right about until I passed out at 10 p.m..  Our rest was interrupted only by visitations by the vengeful spirit of Ginebra San Miguel, the patron saint of dry heaves, and by a cover band that played outside our window from 4:30 until 7 a.m. (whose skill and amazing song selection was only slightly undercut by my wishing for death with every note).  The next day, Louis and the rest informed us that mixing Red Horse with gin was always a terrible idea.  Sadly, I had independently found this little nugget of wisdom at the bottom of the fertility hut’s toilet.

We spent the next five days as a part of Tam-awan: Australian tourists, Japanese families, Korean university students came and left, sometimes staying for a drink, usually keeping to themselves and leaving after one night.  We took lessons in portraiture and monoprint, we played everyone some blues to much excitement, we revisited GSM after a brief separation.  We took in the fog that rolled in every afternoon, belying Tam-awan's selling point as a vista from which you can see the China Sea.  The traditional dance troupe came and went with the weekend, as did Louis' crêpe stand.  We met Jet, the (possible) owner of Tam-awan, with a penchant for high-fives and a laugh that shakes the bamboo awning and warms the soul.  We met James, a painter who loved to fake us out, i.e., “Your singing was not good.  It was...veeeeery good!  Hahaha!”  We met another bearded painter whom we were told was Alfonso’s twin removed by three years, a portraitist named Jenn, and a dozen other artists whose names I couldn’t begin to guess.  Alfonso taught us how to make a tornado in a bottle of gin, and we taught him to call it a “Kansas twister” instead.  Arvin got us some betel nuts, and Ronnie taught me how to chew it and spit the red goo out onto the ground (video forthcoming).  We felt more at home than we had in months, and began to daydream about moving to Tam-awan, teaching knitting or writing, collaborating with James or Alfonso, maybe taking the Jeepney down the mountain to take French lessons in Baguio and commuting back to drink and play music in the afternoon.

And yet...for all of the fun and the spirit of community, we were still paying customers.  During daylight hours, we were called “sir” and “ma’am” and offered room service by people who had been laughing and slapping us on the back just twelve hours before.  There was the unshakeable fact that, for all the fun and spirit of camaraderie, we were just tourists like all the others, sure to leave after a brief visit and rack up a sizable bill in the meantime.

When it came time to leave, everyone expressed their regret to see us go and extended us many invitations to come and visit again for the festival in May, the annual bike trip in December.  Jenn and I have every intention of coming back again, and keep rewriting our future plans to involve an extended stay at Tam-awan.  For now, we have to get back to full-time touring, but Tam-awan remains a dream that we hope to revisit someday.

Pictured: one extremely kick-ass T-shirt (made by Harry, modelled by Harry)
 and some equally kick-ass people.

"Guy Sitting Next to Me," by Jenn

You Ate WHAT?: Fear Factor Edition

From Sagada it was six hours to Baguio, all downhill.  We fought steep mountain roads and motion sickness, stopping at a roadside store to use the comfort room and try balut (perhaps not as comfortable, but decidedly tasty nonetheless).  The rest stop offered few options for food, and after we’d tried the Mr. Donut shu mai, we were ready for a challenge.

Side note about Filipino food: we are so bored of Filipino food.  Two weeks into our Korean vacation last year and we couldn’t get enough of the barbecue, the garlic and the chili; two weeks in the Philippines and we’re dying for a nice salad or something.  We’d never tried or even heard of Filipino food of any kind before coming here, and, if you haven’t been to the Philippines, I’ll bet you haven’t, either.  Our friends and Lonely Planet (which is kind of like a portable, frequently unreliable friend) warned us that Filipino cuisine isn’t really anything special, which is why it hasn’t made it overseas.  It’s been hard coming to a different conclusion, try though we might.  Every meal involves an extremely fatty cut of meat and a scoop of gummy white rice that makes us pine for the Japanese rice we’d complain about.  Filipino food is fine, generally speaking, but extremely heavy, the kind of place where “snack” means “cheeseburger” and “dessert” means “all the desserts mixed together” (and this is coming from an American, mind you).

Halo-Halo, no relation to a certain BBC comedy.

As mentioned, one point that’s stood in the way of our enjoyment of the food here has been a constant, paralyzing fear of contracting constant, paralyzing diarrhea (closely linked to our fear of Filipino toilets).  The rule that we’ve been advised to adhere to while traveling in the Third World is “Cook It, Peel It, or Forget It.”  There are many, many more such rules, of course: don’t drink the tap water, don’t order anything with ice in it (because it’s probably made with tap water), don’t eat anything that’s been sitting out all day, don’t eat raw vegetables (because they’ve been washed in tap water).  However, these rules have really cramped our style; following them strictly would rule out a good 70% of the food in this country.  It got to the point where we decided to throw caution to the wind and just eat some balut already, diarrhea be damned.

A typical balut vendor.

Balut is hands-down the most notorious Filipino dish: it’s defined as a “pregnant egg,” meaning a hard-boiled egg with a fetal chicken inside.  In America, it is most famous for being featured on the culinary showcase “Fear Factor,” a point about which one of our acquaintances had much dispute (“Man, no wonder you think that’s nasty, man, you gotta put some salt on that shit!”).  It is prepared in the traditional Filipino fashion of sitting by the side of the road in the sun all day.  Balut is eaten by cracking open a small hole in the shell, sucking out the salty, soupy liquid at the top, then peeling away bits of shell to reveal the mushy gray insides.  Needless to say, we had to try this shit; we have a reputation as eaters of the exotic and the cray-cray.

Balut is...pretty good, actually.  Like a soft, almost yogurty hard-boiled egg with a definite livery taste to it.  As we ate, we drew praise from the old ladies next to us.  “You eat balut?” one asked approvingly, dripping some of her egg-juice on the concrete.  “Oh yeah!” I replied, even as Jenn said, “First time.”  The blackish chicken-fetus wasn’t anything near as noxious as I’d expected; frankly, I’d been expecting feathers, a beak, visible eyes.  In its gooey vagueness, it resembled the innards of a frog or goldfish in the dissection pan, the ones that looked nothing like the clearly labelled organs in the biology textbook.  But, and I cannot stress this enough, however it looked, it was tasty.  Surprisingly, balut isn’t really anything to write home about (mudda, fadda, kindly disregard dis lettah).

Dig in!  Source: http://caryle.blogspot.com/

The bottom quarter of the egg was mysteriously hard, inedibly so, even, so we threw it away when nobody was looking and boarded our bus.  When our stomachs started to turn as the bus jostled down the road, we were 90% certain that it was the greasy shu mai.  Damn Mr. Donut.

Sagada 2: 600 Feet Under

Jenn and I had been spelunking before.  One of the precious few things to do in Missouri (if you don’t like baseball and meth is too rich for your blood) is to explore one of the Show-Me State’s many caves, caverns, or assorted holes.  I’ve been to Onondaga Cave a number of times and had a generally very pleasant experience appreciating the stark beauty of limestone rock formations and naturally-occurring gift shops.  “Onondaga,” of course, is an Iroquois word for “well-lit, with professionally maintained footpaths.”  In short, we considered ourselves old hands at caving and fully prepared for the two hour tour of Sagada’s Sumaguing Cave (you think we’d have learned by now not to trust any time estimate that we’re given, especially ones that end in “two hours”).

We entrusted ourselves to a guide named Patrick.  Patrick, as will soon be revealed, is an intensely trustworthy guy.  He’s been taking hapless tourists into the caves for nearly fifteen years, and presumably, all of them made it back out alive (though given the preponderance of coffins hidden within, a cave-related death would probably approach The Perfect Crime).  We were well-equipped for a spelunking expedition: the man in the tour guide guild office advised us to wear flip-flops and cautioned us that, while long pants were acceptable, shorts would make us look better in pictures.  I carried the nice camera, trusting that the combination of a zipper and good intentions would add up to something close to “watertight.”

Thus readied for a pleasant jaunt into the hellish bowels of the earth, we sallied forth down the hill towards the cave.  We had a brief break when Patrick went to exchange his kerosene lantern for one that he thought would have a chance of working better -- as far as I’m concerned, this decision qualifies Patrick for instant canonization.  While we waited, we took pictures of some far less camera-shy hanging coffins.

The first stop was the Lumiang Burial Cave, which involved only a brief stop to gawk at an collection of non-hanging coffins.  Up to this point, caving seemed to be little different than hiking, in that I seem to be ill-suited for both and also I forgot to bring water.

Take note of the gear worn by Action Hero Harry.

Pictured: Jenn's last known photo.

Patrick talked us through the caving agenda: as we preferred the two-hour tour (hahaha) to the longer six-hour Cave Connection, we would be encountering three distinct stages.  The first, he told us, we would be scooting down steps on our butts.  The second we would be getting wet up to our knees, and the last would be our choice of the Hard Way or the Easy Way.  Clearly he didn’t know who he was dealing with, this Patrick, and has no idea for our predilection for never, ever doing anything nice and easy.  As we walked to Sumaguing Cave, we passed some rice terraces that were as spectacular as they were downhill.

Down hundreds of steps, really rocks placed in a vaguely step-like pattern, we walked in the officially-recommended flip-flops, one of which Jenn promptly broke.  We passed under several hundred bats congregating on the ceiling of the cave -- I don’t know the proper term for a group of bats, but I’m going to go with an “eew” -- and Patrick helpfully advised us to stop using our hands to steady ourselves on nearby stones lest we coat our hands in guano.

In front of one of the famous limestone formations.  No, I won't tell you what it's called.  All SFW guesses welcome in the comments section!

There’s no easy way to convey the kind of fear that begins to settle into your chest when you’ve descended into an unlit cave in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of feet below where the bats deign to live, the ceiling gets lower and lower, and your guide tells you to leave your shoes behind from this point.  It is a good way to reacquaint yourself with all of your childhood fears, this Sumaguing Cave: fear of the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, and fear of guano.  When it came time to squeeze ourselves through a narrow mouth, a river rushing down our backs, camera bag held desperately overhead, Patrick shouted back to us, “Oh, I forgot!  We started the third stage a ways back.”

In his description of the cave experience, Patrick had neglected to mention the Pitfall Level, in which we were instructed to hang on to a rope that was suspended from the cave wall and to walk ourselves over a deep, possibly bottomless pit filled with stanky cave water (and possibly man-eating salamanders).  “Ha ha!” I suggested.  “Seriously?”  Patrick demonstrated by scrambling to the other side with the casual ease of a Batman.  Jenn and I exchanged a look.  Shit, we thought, shit.  We're in way over our heads here.

There was some dispute over whether the properly gentlemanly thing for me to do would be to allow Jenn to go first, or for me to go first and test the water, as it were.  Jenn decided to attempt it first, summoning all of her courage, and as I fiddled with my flashlight, I suddenly heard a mighty splash!  I looked up into the dimly-lit corridor and Jenn was utterly gone, disappeared into the pit below.

My mind flew to all of the things that would never happen now.  There would be no cycle tour in Japan, no traveling through Cambodia and Thailand.  No children.  She hit her head on the rocks, I thought, she hurt her spine.  Best case scenario, we're going to spend the next ten years getting her walking again.  I was too terrified to say anything, even to call out to her.  All I could do was kneel on the rocks and pray for her to rise again.

Patrick shot his hand into the water and pulled Jenn up by the shirt, clutching her glasses in her hand.  “Can you swim?” he asked coolly.  She nodded, and before I knew it she was back up on the ledge, sopping wet but miraculously unharmed.  Somehow she hadn't hit her head on the stone wall, she had turned herself right-side-up and taken a breath before falling in.  I breathed again.

At last we reached the bottom of the cave.  Patrick invited us to enjoy the pleasures of the cave’s “Swimming Pool,” an offer that we wryly turned down.  We had done it, we had accomplished what we were sure was impossible, it had nearly killed us, but we had successfully made it to the end of the cave!  The smell of kerosene filled the room, and Patrick let us have a break while he smoked a cigarette.  “Are you OK?” I asked Jenn for the thousandth time.  She still was in high spirits, though the prospect of scrambling back over the sheer, slick cliffs quickly filled us with a gnawing sense of dread.  The feeling of success was immediately gone.  There was no way we could make it back up all those sheer rock cliffs, not with how shot our nerves were already.  We didn't have anywhere near the strength of arm to get ourselves back up to the top.  Panic set in.

Really, what carried us out of that cave (besides Patrick) was the knowledge that the alternative was dying alone in the dark.  Each time Patrick had to leave us to grab his bag or to scout out the way ahead, visions danced in my head of whether we would asphyxiate, freeze to death, or be eaten by bats first.  Gone was the confidence that led us down the California coast; all I wanted was to be back at home in bed with a grilled cheese sandwich.

I’m making jokes about this experience here, but that’s by virtue of being dozens of miles away from Sumaguing Cave.  To get some feeling of just how terrified we were at the bottom of the cave, just take a look at this photo.  There were no handholds except invisible crannies in the slick rock walls (which, remember, we were climbing up in bare feet and shorts).  There were many, many occasions when Jenn’s or my hand slipped and we were just a Patrick’s Awesomeness away from death or disfigurement.  If our hand missed its mark, if our toes couldn’t hang onto the rock, there would be no easy transportation out of the cave to a local hospital: we were hundreds of feet down impassable rock, half an hour’s walk from the local (hospitalless) town, six hours from the closest big city.  An error, be it due to nerves, lack of fitness, or simple bad judgement, would be fatal.  Like, no-backsies-fatal.  And we were scared that we wouldn't make it back out of this cave alive.

I mean, look at that.  That's 9 feet of rock and the only way out of Sumaguing Cave.  In rough patches, Patrick advised us to take turns boosting each other's butts up the cliffs or stepping onto his knee.  Not to brag, but we've eaten breakfasts bigger than Patrick -- I was 100% convinced that putting my weight onto his delicate limbs would result in a hospitalization.  More than once our fingers clawed at the top of the rock, struggling to haul our bodies up the ledge or else fall back to our deaths.  We were blindly, pants-wettingly afraid.

Bruised, sore, sopping wet, we trudged back up the rocks, past other tour groups going the other way.  Until that moment, I never knew how happy I could be to see a broken flip-flop and piles of guano.

Once again, we rose through our plight and arrived back at the surface world, thus rising from Mighty up to Mighty Mighty.  I recalled all of the Dungeons & Dragons games I ran that took place in caves and chuckled at the thought of an armored, 300-pound dwarf dodging traps and doing battle with goblins in anything like what we had just gotten through -- 10 minutes in Sumaguing Cave would be enough to off any adventuring party.  Having accomplished the impossible, or at least very difficult, we proceeded to celebrate by not leaving our hotel room for 36 hours.

Toilets of the World (Flush Up Your Life!)

As Jenn and I have wandered this great big Earth of ours, visiting cities exotic and familiar, world capitals and remote hamlets, mountains high, valleys low, rivers wide, and basements damp, two things have followed us wherever we have gone: our deep and abiding love for one another, and our need for a bathroom.  Yea, it is truly an inescapable truth of travel.

This may not seem that big of a problem, but when you’re exploring a new place, some extremely basic questions are pretty hard to ask about.  For example: “Excuse me, how and why should I eat this entire fish with a head on it?”  Or, in this case: “How do I use this toilet?”  It really contributes to the feelings of being completely lost when you’re unable to take care of some simple functions that a three-year-old would mock you for not knowing how to do.

Of course, some cultures are considerate enough to leave such information lying around. (Source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/)

And sure, we could have stayed right at home in the Midwestern U.S. and never needed to carry a spare roll of toilet paper, never looked for a museum or a Starbucks only so we could use the bathroom, never opened a door with crossed fingers, muttering “please be a Western toilet, please be a Western toilet.”  But if we had, we wouldn’t have learned a couple of truths that have made us better people.  The first: no matter how scary the bathroom, your body will deal with it.  The second: American toilets aren’t even that great.

Seriously!  Research has shown that the human body is more suited to a squatting position than a sitting one anyway, but that’s not even what I mean.  I mean that in the grand scheme of toilets, the standard Western toilet gets a solid B to B-.  Let’s go to the data:

Our old toilet from our apartment in Osaka.  We call her "Widowmaker."

1. Japanese super-toilet -- an entirely new bathroom experience, with volume control, heated seat (excellent for cold winter days), and Magic Fingers
2. Any non-super toilet with multiple flush settings -- standard in Japan and much of Europe
3. Regular ol’ American toilet (or “Old Glory”)
4. Japanese squat pot -- once you remember what direction to face (towards the plumbing) and what to do with your pants, it’s still pretty hard to make yourself use (at least it was in my case, but then, I’m a giant whiny baby, and Jenn got over it just fine).  Though holding a squatting position is obviously less comfortable than sitting down, the human body really understands what’s going on and hurries things up to compensate.  So again, once you figure it out, it’s just fine.
5. Standard Filipino toilet -- see below
6. Pit toilets -- *shudder*
7. Toilet from “Trainspotting”
8. That one public pit toilet we found outside Providence, MO (Population: 36) -- had clearly been written off as unsalvageable just before the glaciers swept the country (seriously, Jenn still has flashbacks to this one)
9. Nasty hole in the ground  -- not yet witnessed in the field by the Gaijin Patrol

A bit of explication about number...uh, the second item in the list (sorry) (seriously, I’m so, so sorry): typically in Japan, even toilets of the non-heated-seat-singing-and-dancing-variety can be flushed with either a large amount of water or a smaller amount, depending on what is necessary.  It may not seem like a big difference, but, hey, save the earth, ride a toilet, right?  I’m still sorry.

Now, Filipino toilets are a new thing, and they leave something to be desired:

For instance, a "seat."

Somewhere between a Western toilet and a squat pot, it’s too tall to squat over, yet too not-having-a-seat to sit upon.  It is flushed by scooping water out of a bucket with a smaller bucket, then pouring the water into the toilet.  The water gets cleaner, and the water level never rises due to the scientific principle of Magic Toilet Elves (mathematically rendered as Ψ).  The only thing we don’t yet understand about Filipino toilets (besides everything) is whether toilet paper can be flushed as well.  We have had experience in Italy, Korea, and some older buildings in America where TP can really do harm to a septic system, and where a trash can is provided for disposal.  However, toilet paper is never to be found in the stalls of the Philippines, nor are there trash cans next to the toilets.  More research will follow this question, whether we want it to or not.

UPDATE: As of press time, Jenn no longer has a problem with Filipino toilets.  Harry remains unconvinced and somewhat uncomfortable.

Sagada: The House that Lonely Planet Built

"Off the beaten path" in the sense of "there's some chickens wandering around."

Sagada was clearly a very different animal from Bontoc.  Lonely Planet sings its praises at great length -- great enough that every tourist who wanders down the main street seems to be leafing through an identical copy of it.  It’s described as hippy-oriented, laid-back, unspoiled by tourism, chill, off the beaten path.  Most of all, it is supposed to be very un-touristy.  In retrospect, I find that I have to applaud the devastating sarcasm of the good people at Lonely Planet.

Pictured: not at all Filipino food.

Indeed, after a week in Manila and Bontoc, Sagada feels like a traveler’s paradise, and it is very much built to be so.  Gone are the Filipino toilets and the cold showers taken with buckets, and with them the prices we had so gotten used to.  Here the hotels are extremely comfortable and cheap...just not as cheap as Bontoc.  Here every restaurant has vegetarian options, a full bar, and excellent coffee.

Our first night, when we were too exhausted to rouse ourselves from our luxurious cottage, we pampered ourselves and ordered take-out pizza from a local place run out of a tin shack on the main drag.  Its proprietor, a presumably Italian man who made some decidedly non-Italian pizzas, had much to say about life in Sagada.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Forty days.”

“Oh, wow.  How’s business?”

“Pfew!” he exclaimed, pantomiming something extremely vague that I took to be a rocket taking off.  “But I think I will leave soon, I don’t like it here.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.  Why not?”

“Envious people.”  He excused himself to shoo away a Filipino mother and child who had come to order pizza.  “I hate envious people,” he continued.  “Envious and stupid.”

The next day we had our first bout of traveler’s diarrhea.

We glutted ourselves on free WiFi and homemade yogurt for two days, finally tearing ourselves away from the groovy (if decidedly touristic) scene long enough to visit Echo Valley and see some of Sagada’s famous Hanging Coffins.  “Mysterious!” we thought, though the term “hanging coffins” is deceptively non-descriptive.

We trekked all the way across town, literally hundreds of meters (which, my fellow Americans, is actually not too far), past the native basketball court and around the corner from the traditional cell phone tower, and were greeted with a breathtaking afternoon view of a valley that seemed shockingly bereft of coffins.  We eventually sighted a few coffins that were, in fact, hanging horizontally from the limestone cliffs, though their stubborn refusal to show up on film leads me to conclude that they contained vampires.

UGH, WHAT IS THIS COFFINLESS GARBAGE?

We rewarded ourselves for our efforts with one of the world’s rarest and most expensive beverages: Kopi Luwak, also known as kape alamid or civet coffee.  Basically, most coffee beans are fermented, washed, dried, roasted, ground, and drank by human beings or particularly civilized apes.  Civet coffee goes through exactly the same process, with the added steps of being eaten and pooped out by the Asian civet cat.

This cute little guy!

Jenn and I found civet coffee to be strong, smooth, and tasting not at all like cat poop (which is, incidentally, how I prefer my women).