Where's Ron?
Philippines, 28 December 2017 - 28 February 2018
Ron in Philippines, January 2018
Cabugan on Guimaras Island and Boracay
15 February 2018
Afton, Virginia, USADear family and friends,
Ron continues his island-hopping in the Philippines. I continue dealing with winter at home - although the temperatures have moderated somewhat. No sign of the bear returning, but I bring the bird feeders in each night and put them out again in the morning, so if the bear has returned during the night to check for them I have not known about it.
Love to all,
Ellen
13 February 2018
Cabugan on Guimaras Island and BoracayHello, my dear,
Reading my last reports you can remember I have been avoiding typhoons and running from the rains. I am also getting more adventuresome and experienced in the ways to travel in the Philippines. I am getting move confident in finding a place to stay and I think Iloilo was the last reservation I made in advance so I have stopped using the internet and companies like Agota, Hotel.com or booking.com. I found them selling me something and the hotels delivering something else.
Cabugan Resort on the southern tip of Guimaras Island began my transition to getting on the tourist and backpackers trail. I got to know a French woman living in Spain who was closer to my age than any traveler I have met in quite a while. She has been to a lot of places I have not been and I to some she has not. She was a cancer survivor and had lost her long term partner to breast cancer and is now taking a much longer trip by herself, traveling much longer and faster than me.
I had read on the Internet, or perhaps in the Lonely Planet about the Cabugan Resort and someone had commented on the sunrise bungalow. My friend arrived a couple of hours before I did and was given the sunrise bungalow I was told was available when I had called to verify they had rooms and to get directions, so I was given another bungalow in the main area on the other side. We managed to discover the local fisherman had some large shrimps in a netted area close to the resort and arranged our dinner with the resort. These were really very large shrimp like those we had in Na Trang Vietnam many years ago. [Note from Ellen: large in this case means ~6 inches/15 cm long]
The next day my friend left for some small islands off the northeast coast of Panay Island and we discussed perhaps meeting again three days later in Roxas on the north coast.
There were a few travelers passing through our resort but were mostly couples including a young couple from Romania. Listening to them I realized how much Romania has changed since I was there [1999] and my friend (now in Canada) sketched out on a napkin a route I followed to NE Romania instead of continuing my bicycle trip down the coast of the Black Sea.
When my French/Spanish friend left I moved into the sunrise bungalow and enjoyed my solitude for a couple of days including taking a long walk up the beach to a nearby village, discovering a cement road, and learning I could walk to the light house.
On my way back along the beach I met an English man and as I drew him into conversation I learned that he was married to a Filipino woman but they were now living in England. He pointed out the property that he had bought and which he planned to build a resort telling me the story behind the buildings (he built and I could see), and how they would have fit into his plan. But a few years ago an oil tanker crashed off the coast and spilled its cargo of oil which destroyed the area's beaches. To reclaim the beach they removed a couple of feet of sand from the entire beach which made the beach smaller. He gave up and sold the property and moved to England. Not much was done by the new owner. The man with him was a relative of his wife and involved with real estate in the area. It was an interesting conversation especially with my interest in oil, pipelines, and alternative energy back home.
When I left Cabugan Resort I reversed my direction back to Iloilo and took a bus traveling north through the Island Panay like my trip south through the Island of Negros. Through texting I stayed in touch with my Spanish friend and I got a room at the resort along the beach in Roxas where she was staying and that night we shared a fabulous dinner of fish, clams and oysters at one of the many seafood restaurants along the beach.
While she had planned to go south on the west coast of Negros, she changed her mind and came with me to Boracay Island.
We took a tricycle to the van station, stopping along the way at the large shopping center for me to upgrade my internet service for another month. As long as I renewed before the plan expired I could carry forward my gigabits of data and access to the internet, and now was providing a hot spot to my computer and other travelers phones when WiFi was not available.
When we arrived at the dock in Caticlan it was a mad house and confusing. There was a continuous series of small boats and a larger ferry taking people to and back from Boracay Island which was a major tourist destination in the Philippines. I had met a young couple in Cabugan who gave me some tips about Boracay, so I knew to take a bancas (small boat) to Boracay and then a tricycle to Station Three, the southern part of the coast which was older and less upscale for tourists. As we wandered around looking at places we finally found Moreno's cottages where my friends had stayed. We liked the place. It felt like what Boracay must have been like many years ago when all the back packers would have been going there. The cottages were wood, lots of bamboo, with large balconies with hammocks, tables and chairs. Large bed with a the most massive mosquito net I have ever seen as well as wood floors. I took one with my back to the construction of the 5 story concrete hotel being build next door, and looked across the pathway covered with plants and trees to the bungalow on the other side my friend rented. We met on our patios for tea.
While we did not have a view to the beach, we walked through the next propriety's bungalows to another small path between buildings to the beach where there was a major crowded sand walkway up the beach with the hotels and restaurants on one side and the beach on the other.
I did find a small older hotel along the beach with a number of concrete rooms around a small long central courtyard with a small room with AC, TV, glass windows, breakfast and a sliver of a view of the beach from the court yard for just a few dollars more - but I opted to stay in my bamboo bungalow. It just felt more authentic. The perpetual choices between cost, comfort and view and now an additional consideration: authenticity. Again there were many choices that offered it all for hundreds of dollars more. There were elaborate condos on the north end that rented for thousands per night.
The night scene on the beach is beyond my descriptions. Many of the upscale hotels/restaurants would set up their part of the beach with fancy lighting, stuffed chairs around glass candle-lit tables on the sand, with shows including singers and fire dancers. They were full of Chinese tourists in their finest clothes for the beach, long flowing dresses of beautiful colorful fabrics. I say Chinese but I am sure some of them were Koreans also.
Further up the beach there were elaborate hotels/resorts with a wider beach and the restaurants were more included in their compound so I didn't have as much access. I guess this was stage 1.
At the end of stage 2 there signs to "D Mall". As I followed one of them I realized there was a very large area between the beach walkway and the road running parallel to the beach with little traffic other than motorcycles and some tricycles. Lots of stores, restaurants, bars, etc. covering a large area that I explored by wandering around. The road that ran parallel to the beach walkway was crowded, slow and difficult to walk on with all the tricycles and motor cycles. But you could catch a tricycle at inflated prices that was not much faster than walking.
I finally had enough and caught an early morning bancas from the dock area back to Caticlan along with some locals I had met on the Island. There was a festival at a city to the west but no place to stay so I returned to Caticlan for the night. My friends organized a dinner for me at a private house where I was served fish grilled in front of the house with rice and vegetables. It was an extended family with two or three difference houses, one of which was covered in tattoo art as one of the sons did tattoos for a living. I learned a lot about how the people worked in Boracay and commuted each day by bancas boats. By the time their commuting costs were paid they only made a few dollars a day for their work, not much to live on. They worked as waiters, cooks, construction, maids and other low skilled manual work. The contrast between their lives and the way the tourists were living was vivid.
I realize the ability of most of the people from the Philippines being able to speak English makes it so much easier for me to get to know the local people. When I consider all my other trips in Asia which were wonderful, I try to imagine what they could have been like if I could have spoken their local language. Of course in India many people spoke English but I still had difficulty understanding and being understood.
The next day I went to the docks and caught a larger ferry to Bulalacao on the south west coast of Mindoro Island where I understood (correctly) I could take a bus or van over the mountains that run north-south over the length of Mindoro to a small town of San Jose on the west side where I could catch another ferry to Coron where there is another ferry to El Nido on the north tip of Palawan Island. I wanted to go to Palawan Island at the end of my trip to meet up with a lady I met in Fiji a few years ago who was biking from South America to Alaska. But I was concerned about returning to Manila by air in the last couple of days of my trip. So this story will be continued in my next report.
Having a wonderful adventure and meeting interesting people.
Love and miss you,
Ron
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Last updated: 24 February 2017
