Thurs, August 13th: Subic Bay

Much like Wednesday, Thursday had laid out a considerable amount of traveling in front of me, so this traveler was up and moving at an hour even his mother could be proud of. After saying goodbye to the sweet old hotel owner and promising not to do anything stupid with my money (outside of paying $75 bucks for a 20 minute boat ride on a vessel that could barely be labeled a boat), I was off. I hopped into a motorcycle for the ride back to town, then caught a bus for my return trip to Manila.

Once back in Manila, my tummy a-started a-rumbling, so I set out on a quest for lunch. What haven't I eaten in a while?, I thought. Answer: Korean food. Now, you can all laugh all you want, but I seriously hadn't had good Korean food in months and hadn't had any whatsoever since the school semester and its lunches ended a month earlier. I also hadn't seen loud, obnoxious simpletons making asses of themselves on television (also known as Korean TV) for several weeks, so I was able to feed that hunger as well. Completely full on Korea, I moved onward to Subic Bay.

But first, I had to get out of Manila. To get to the bus station required another cab ride. Too bad I happened to find the most expensive cab in all of Manila. Somehow my 15 minute ride cost more than my earlier 45 minute rides from the airport. That's what I get for choosing the "nice" cab that came with windows and something more recent than a record player for music (I kid, I kid). Seriously, take the crappy looking older cabs. Ohhh, and that 3 hour bus ticket to Cubic Bay? A fuck ton cheaper than the cab ride. Just saying.

Subic Bay was unique. But first I had to wade through the muck that was Olangapo. Olangapo and Cubic Bay were similar to the set up in Moalboal and Panagsama Beach, where you arrive in the dumpy town and then get the hell out as fast as possible. Dank, dirty, with nothing to do. You know how I know? The locals all walk over to Subic to hang out/do stuff. They don't even stick around. Exactly. After passing over "Shit River" (my guidebook said that's what it's affectionately called, though I didn't see any shit in it, just lots of garbage) and through the Gated entrance, I was in Subic Bay Freeport Zone (the official name for the area). What did it look like you say? Ummm, in a word, Oshkosh. Disappointed? I was too. Though I shouldn't have been surprised, given the area was started/built/run/controlled by the US military up until 15 or so years ago. Literally, it was like I had fallen through a hole in the earth and popped up in Oshkosh. Nicely paved wide roads, lots of park/green space, little 1 or 2 mini mall structures, traffic signs, as well as terribly American architecture. In other words, nothing like the areas of the Philippines I had previously seen. It felt exactly like a quiet, peaceful and as a result, terribly boring American small town.

As I arrived in the early evening, I had no chance of seeing any of the forests before dark, so I just wandered around the area looking for a hotel. I laughed when I stumbled upon a Korean Catholic Church as well as a hotel that was self described as "catering to Koreans" with its Korean restaurant and Korean signboards. There really is no escaping Korea, no matter how hard I may try. I should probably just give up trying at this point. You win Korea, you win. I also laughed when a peddler tried to sell me Viagra while I was walking the beach. That would make damn near a baker's dozen worth of times where I was offered Viagra or similar products. I must look really desperate and in need of serious help. Please, please, please, don't answer that. Eventually, I found a hotel that had a children's playground on the premises. Now, I'm not saying it was the sole reason I chose the hotel, but it didn't hurt. Sadly, it was a bit small for me. Once settled in, it was off for dinner, then bed. I clearly classed up the Italian restaurant attached to my hotel upon my entrance. The other patrons? Suits, ties, dress shoes and clean. Me, not as much. Dirty smelly t-shirt with armpit sweat stains and presumably sweat stains on the back from lugging around the backpack all day? Check. Unwashed, sweaty, greasy hair? Check. Cracked, old sandals and funk-emitting monstrous feet? Check and check. God, I love vacation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbuxXEpwF8M

Pics: Album 1, Pictures 185-190

Wednesday, August 12: Taal Volcano

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Tuesday August 11: We're going to Manila......eventually

Tuesday morning saw our little group (just Mary and I again) head off to Manila straight away. Or that was the intention. Jamie, having lived like a cat for the last day (at least 18 hours of sleep), was healthy once again, so off we headed to the nearby mall to pick up plane tickets back to Manila. Now, maybe I've been sheltered in my life and haven't ever gone to a mall in a less than ideal, but this mall was a first for me. Why? Well, I've never seen a security screening and bag search entering the mall by guards packing automatic rifles. Course, that wasn't that unusual in the Philippines, as there are automatic rifle-packing guards at all the banks, and most fast food restaurants, bakeries, pawn shops, or any other place that might have money employ security guards. It took a little getting used to, the whole enjoying yourself during your meal when there was a man with a very big gun possibly standing right next to you.

Once inside The Most Fortified Mall in the World, we made our way to the travel agents. We were given two choices for flights that day. Take a flight in 3 hours (2pm) and pay $75 or wait till 6pm and pay $25. Hard choice. Course, now we had to occupy ourselves for several hours in a city that has nearly nothing to do. We settled on trying to get in a quick 9 holes at one of Cebu's golf courses and go from there. We found a book store and (gasp) used their city maps without buying one. I'm so bad. Although, I did walk out with a new book, as I had finished all of mine.

How was the golf course, you ask? Well, we didn't play. We were all hyped to go and caught a taxi to the course and found the reception desk and then stopped cold. You are going to charge us the same for 9 holes as 18 holes? We have to get a cart and caddies? How does that even work? What the hell would the caddies even do?? We are in the Philippines and the golf costs how much? In order to play we both have to bend over and have the burliest greens keeper "clean his club" in our posteriors? Thanks, but no thanks. We had a rough amount that we wanted to pay for golf and this place was asking double that, so we left. Which, meant we had to sit at the airport for a long, long, long time. In on of those "Did that really just happen moments?", I was reading Murakami's book, "Norwegian Wood", named after the Beatles song of the same name, when the cafe we were sitting at began playing "Norwegian Wood". Surreal, man.

We eventually found our way to Manila and settled back into the same motel we stayed at last time. We were starved, so we headed out for grub. I, knowing that Jamie won't eat something if it isn't a huge slab of some type of meat and it doesn't come with chips, suggested that he choose the restaurant. He waffled and said that I should pick. I agreed and then chose the Japanese restaurant, where I knew he wouldn't be able to eat, well, anything. Sure enough, he whined about his food and then gave me near all of it. He fell right into my trap. Eeeeexcellent.

Monday August 10: In Travel Limbo

Monday saw our group finally departing from Moalboal/Panagsama Beach and heading back toward Manila. We didn't make it there, unfortunately, and spent the day in Cebu, half way between Manila and our old resort area. The travel back to Cebu was much smoother and easier this time around, as our entire group chartered a van to take us the 3 hours back to town, rather than taking the public bus for just a few bucks more.

Once in Cebu, though, our movement came to a complete stop. We had planned to hang out the new friends we met in Moalboal for the evening and then move on to Manila the next morning, except they ended up just staying at their hotels with their lady friends. Can't really say what they did all day. Well, I could say, but I don't need to, cuz you already know what they did. Too bad we were waiting around the phone at our hotel waiting for him to call. Well, I was. Jamie was sleeping, cuz he was sick. Mary was smart enough to drink in excess every day of our trip all the way up Saturday (a full week) when he (surprise, surprise) started feeling sick to his stomach and just slept on Sunday and Monday, eating very little and throwing up occasionally. The little time he was awake he spent complaining about how shitty he felt. Somehow, I couldn't really feel bad for him. Not sure why. So the other group was "busy", Jamie was out of commission, but where did that leave me? Well, Cebu doesn't have shit to do, unless you wanna troll around the fancy western style malls, which I clearly didn't want to, so I sat in my hotel room all day. I wanted to get to Manila as quickly as possible because there was no reason to stay in Cebu, but I was outvoted. Shit happens. I did enjoy the enormous variety of television in my room. Korean programs, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, whatever you wanted. I spent most of my time watching the UFC pay-per-view that some Filipino channel was broadcasting and got to see Anderson Silva beat the hell out of poor Forrest Griffin. Yep, slow day when your highlight is T.V. The UFC event was televised on a network called "Balls". Their slogan: We got 'em. It might be the manliest channel I've ever seen. Pretty fucking extreme too. We're talking at least 4 X extreme. XXXXtreme. Can you handle it?

Pics: Album 1, Picture 113

Saturday and Sunday August 8th and 9th: More Beach, More Books, More of the Same

As you might have guessed, the weekend was more of the same rush-rush, busy-busy chaos that had filled the last few days in Moalboal. Wake up around 8 am, read for 2 hours, swim and work out on the lawn, grab my meals, fit in some more reading during the afternoon, then head "downtown" for drinks, pool and dinner around 7. Man, I don't even know how I managed to keep up. Kidding aside, we did manage to make it back out to White Beach again on Saturday and had a much better time of it than previously. We immediately moved to the clean section of beach to avoid the coconuts, flip flops, needles and other goodies. Again, the weather was perfect so we couldn't complain. We even managed to make a new friend, as we met an American guy originally from California, but who now works in Singapore, who was also on vacation. We discussed various things but mostly just what the hell the others country of residence was like. From everything he said, Singapore sounds like a kick ass place. Not like I didn't already know. Someday Singapore, someday.

The evening saw our group awkwardly joining the town disco. Basically, every Saturday evening all the locals and any tourists that are interested wander down to some dirty open air bar/stage or something and shake their respective stuff for several hours. It was certainly convenient for the tourists as the party took place not even a 5 minute walk from our resort or any of the other resorts for that matter. Panagsama Beach and the resorts are situated up and down the coast for a mile or two. Our resort was on the quieter end, down in the south, while the bars and restaurants made up the loud end (understandably) about 15 minutes on foot up the beach from our location. The disco weaseled its right into the middle between the bars and resorts. I originally had zero intention of going to the disco, as I can not, should not, and dare not dance in front of others, as I've been told it causes blindness and sometimes cancer in young children. Ohhh, and I don't like socializing or meeting people. But I was literally (and I'm not being figurative here, he really did grab me by the arm and pull me into the disco) taken into the disco by Graham and told to have fun. I am that lame that a man twice my age is telling me to have fun and enjoy myself. Yikes. The disco was everything that we had expected: dirty, loud, frantic and really really sweaty (which really makes no sense because it was mostly open-air). Despite my best efforts, I did receive some attention, but I sadly didn't reciprocate. As I was wandering past the bar, I had my shirt pulled on several times by I assume interested parties. As much as I approve of and love women being the aggressors (mainly cuz I'm a coward and I'm lazy), I was very hesitant for two reasons: 1) I had no idea whether these ladies were just girls from town or if they were those certain type of females that request cash for their services (and I certainly had no intention of flushing large sums of money down the toilet) 2) Several of the women seemed to have something caught in their throat, perhaps an Adam's Apple (yeah, you never know here), and I also wished to avoid that group. Ohhh, and none of them were attractive. So after a few minutes of standing around awkwardly and wishing I was home reading some book, any book, I hightailed it out of there and went home. To read. It was a close call but I made it out.

Friday August 7: Absolutely Nothing Part 2 (Notice a common theme?)

Hell, after the drama of the previous night, I needed a day or two to recover myself To bask in the my victory (or wallow in my own shame, depending on how you look at it) after the excitement the night before. Good thing the rest of the group obliged me there. We were too disappointed from the beach yesterday that we didn't even bother leaving our resort area. I made the most of what was available. I was finally able to check my email after about a week to find it overflowing with 6 or 7 new emails, most of which were from my parents. What's it like being so god damn popular, Eric? Well, its a lot of work, but I manage. I manage. After several hours of going through emails and responding (okay, 20 minutes later), I moved over to the pool for some swimming and some capoeira poolside. The group was impressed with my ability to do a bridge (yeah, tough crowd to please) and my ability to hold a handstand for more than 10 seconds (take that Sundaram!!!). After lunch I caught some sun (and I clearly mean I entered the sun for a matter of seconds while passing from my cottage to the restaurant and was severely burned as a result....gotta love that hearty Northern European complexion) and read some more. I'm pretty sure I blew through Murakami's "Wind Up Bird Chronicle", which is 600 something pages long, in 3 or 4 days, I was reading that much. That's about it for the day.

Of course, as one might imagine, this was the point in the vacation where I started to get antsy and wanted to do something, rather than just sit and relax. Unfortunately, I was a bit tied down at the moment. Jamie, having found Brits and much more accessible booze, was content to settle down here for the remainder of the trip. He had even stopped whining, well at least about being bored. He was still moaning about those damn mosquito bites. Plus, there was very little to do outside of plopping yourself along the beach at our resort area. So I stayed, for the time being.....

Thursday August 6th: "But I just wanna talk..." or how Wallin met a prostitute and escaped to tell about it

So, as our first full day at the new digs, Jamie and I had a busy day planned....yeah, right. I did wake up early at least, though that had more to do with the fact that I passed out at 10pm the night before, burned out from too much travel and too many rum and cokes. Obviously, I was the only one up in the group at 6:30am, as everyone else stayed up much later than me and made it a habit of never waking up south of 11, so I amused myself till they all got up. No, not like that (dirty bastards!). I hit the pool for a while. Not much to say about the pool. Umm, it was filled with water and was nice? After reading for a bunch more and grabbing breakfast, the rest of the group joined me in the land of the living. We settled on a trip to the neighboring White Beach some time in the early afternoon.

White Beach was another resort area near our Panagsama Beach, but was a little bit pricier and upscale and actually still had a beach (Panagsama's washed away thanks to all the construction of resorts along the shore). How truly "white" the beach was was clearly up for debate. 20 minutes cruising on the Bat Bikes and we were there. One of the Brits we were hanging out with had been here before and spoke highly of it. Cept he came in January, when it wasn't monsoon season. We had perfect weather, no heavy monsoon rain or anything, but we learned that the currents or winds or something change and thus deposit a whole shit ton of junk along the beach. Also it was high tide, so we had about 4 feet of good beach sand before the line of coconut remnants and then a foot more of beach before you hit the water. The water was lovely and we were enjoying ourselves until we left the water and discovered some presents along the washed up junk. I assume the thought process went something like this: "Hey, that stick looks an awful lot like a syringe! Hey, that is a syringe!" "I found another one!" "Me too!" I could handle the flip-flops and scattered wrapper or so, but multiple syringes (3 to be exact) really took the buzz out of our beach trip, not to mention our concerns with swimming/ walking in the area. We settled for taking in the sea breeze from a local restaurant/bar. We were only too happy to get back to our resort area so we could start doing stuff...or not. More reading, more pool time, more relaxing, more eating.

Now we come to the point in the evening that I'm sure you've all been waiting to read about, namely my encounter(s) with those particular women who work at night and service men (and possibly women, but realistically just men) for money. I had left the bar scene earlier than the rest of the group because I was sick of drinking and losing at pool and was just innocently reading on my balcony when the midnight bell rung. Soon after a woman walked up to my balcony (my balcony overlooks the road that traverses the whole beach) and tried to strike up conversation. "Try" being the key word. Now, I instantly knew what she was looking for, despite having never encountered anyone of her occupation before. Nobody is just randomly walking through the resort area at midnight wearing that much make up and dressed up that nicely. She tried striking up a conversation with me, but she was no match for my awesome (read: hella awkward) social skills around women. I really had zero intention of conversing with her and wasting her time, but I tried to politely tell her to leave, rather than simply telling her to fuck off. I don't understand either. She eventually asked if I spoke English. That's right, my responses were so choppy and strange and unintelligible that she thought I couldn't speak English. That or she thought I was retarded. Soon after she left. Whew. Crisis averted.

But my victory was short lived, as another lady came by soon after and she simply wasn't interested in taking no for an answer. This time I was ready for her, as I had somehow gained some confidence from the previous encounter (again, I don't understand either) regardless of how disastrous it was. This time I politely insisted that I just wanted to read and eventually she went away. I finally understood why Collin swears by the "Stone wall". Not the same circumstances, granted, but it feel damn good to shut her down nonetheless. Satisfying, satisfying.

But still, I was not out of the proverbial woods. After some period of time, the second girl came back again and tried to win herself a sale. At this point it was around 12:30am, I wasn't tired and I was really bored, so I invited her up on the balcony to chat. Yes. You heard right. Look ye one and all upon Eric Wallin, who talks to prostitutes and does nothing else because he doesn't have fuck else to do. Sometimes I amaze myself. I guess I thought the whole thing would be amusing and enlightening. Soon after we began conversing, I realized that this woman was not the Rhodes scholar, Salman Rushdie enthusiast, Ornette Coleman aficionado, or social critic that was forced into this profession due to the deplorable conditions and lack of jobs that I had hoped she would be. Yeah, I set the bar pretty high. To start off, she didn't even get my name right. She kept calling me Sam, which was the name of one of the British fellows. I don't know how they got our names, but I assume it was in cooperation with the bar, as they called Jamie "Jimmy" and nobody did that except for the people at the bar cuz he signed his name on the billiards challenger board as "Jimmy". I didn't bother to correct her, as the whole thing was some amusing little joke to me, I guess. The conversation, if you could call it that, shifted back and forth, from actual talking (or what is commonly referred to as a "conversation") to points where I just stared off in the distance and hoped she would get the message and just leave. I really can't explain why I decided to talk to her in the first place, but as soon as we started conversing, I realized that I just wanted the whole thing to be done with. She really sealed it early on, when she tried to shift the conversation towards discussing my book (a Murakami at the time) and couldn't even pronounce his name correctly. Rule number 1 for getting a literary enthusiast going: You must, must, must pronounce the author's name correctly, or else you are just wasting your time. Learn how to pronounce Dostoevsky, Satre, Murakami and any of the other hard ones. Eventually, the person staying in the cottage next door to me came back from the bar, and the young woman took the opportunity to move the conversation to "quieter" environs, even though outside of the neighbor and his date, there wasn't a soul around. So we moved from the well lit environs of my cabin porch to the considerably less well lit surroundings of the restaurant/bar along the sea. By this time, I had almost completely clocked out on the conversation and really wanted her to go away, so rather than man up and tell her to leave, I went the terribly indirect route of staring off into the gorgeous night and saying not a damn thing to her for minutes on end. In my defense, I'm not really sure what she expects me to say to questions such as "What type of women do you like?" and "What are you thinking right now?". I understand that many people open up and share many private things with prostitutes, but I'm not that desperate that I have to be sharing my darkest secrets with someone I pay to have sex with. Those shall remain in my head for all of my days. It's not like she wasn't good at what she did, though. She put on quite a show. The frequent eye contact, the occasional and slowly increasing physical contact, the various body positionings while we were talking, the self deprecation designed to get the guy coming to her defense and telling her that she's not ugly, not old, etc but really quite beautiful. All professional moves, but to no avail. After some time along the shore, I realized that I had to leave now and quit being polite otherwise I was gonna end up sleeping with this woman solely because I didn't want to offend her by telling her to go away. Yes, I am that pathetic. How did I make my grand escape? Like a smooth motherfucker, obviously. I abruptly stood up in the midst of our "conversation", pushed in my car, stammered something like "Ummm, this was nice and all, but....uhhhhh....I'm tired and I have to go to bed now....Bye" and then ran away quite quickly. Like I said. Smooth. Like a god damn pimp. When Jamie got back, he dealt with the ladies in a different manner. He asked one of the girls if she could go get him some smokes, then when she returned he promptly paid her and then shut the door in her face. I believe he took the direct approach. Different strokes for different folks. Final Tally: Packs of cigarettes (1), Hours Wasted (1.5), Sexual Intercourse (zilch). Looks like somebody pitched a shutout. Nice.

Pics: Album 1, Pictures 84-112

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw2-VG43bPc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akyQ8cj6t-8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89t1bpgKv8k