Friends

Shoe store madness

I woke up after the Buglasan competitions and was bitten hard by the loneliness bug. Part exhaustion, part depression, part existentialism, it took me a really long time to get motivated to get going in the morning. About two hours. Once I finally broke camp, I headed south and finally found the sandals I'd been looking for. The shoe store was crazy! There were people upstairs and there's a little hole in the ceiling. Workers call up shoe requests through a microphone, those upstairs knock loudly and the shoes fall through the hole, sometimes caught on their way down. Such a funny way to do it, and I felt bad for those upstairs. It was a small space. I asked my way to where the jeepneys leave for Valencia (a random section of street), hopped one and headed away. Made friends with a woman and her young daughter instantly by giving an extra plastic bag to hold her very bloody beef so that the jeep driver would let her ride. She gave me the information I needed to get where I was going: Casaroro Falls.

Casaroro was in the Daily Planet book too, but the book I have is out of date, and there was a reason for people's lack of knowledge of this particular tourist attraction. After the jeep ride, I found my way to the right road up to the falls. Four kilometers up, a woman passes me on her motor. I turn the corner, and her front wheel is stuck between bamboo that are laid across a drainage ditch in front of her home. I helped her pull it out. Four old men across and just down the street saw me and invited me over to drink. I had finished my water and was looking forward to filling up at the falls, but I was glad to fill up with them. We ate bananas from the house-owner's farm, I pulled out Josephine and we all sang songs (we have an open relationship - I don't mind if Josephine gets played by other men),.we drank water, Tanduay (the very cheap but quite good "rhum" drunk everywhere in the P.I.), and the strongest tuba (too-bah, fermented coconut water).I've tasted since I arrived. I was even more apparent how the women keep their distance when men are drinking. Here, men drink together, and women drink together, and really only in very progressive circles in usually urban centers is this tradition not strictly followed.

After 2 hours of a gay old time, feeling very welcome and cheered by these locals whose English was just good enough to welcome me as a dear friend, they threw me in their van and drove me the rest of the ride up the mountain to the falls, nearly destroying the van in their attempts to get up the horrible road. I walked the last stretch, and eventually found the strangely marked stairs down. There was an abandoned little hut with an old sign posting the entrance fee of 10 pesos. The ~350 stairs down are steep, widely spaced, and slippery, and even worse on the way back up. At the bottom, the cement path up the river is destroyed part way along. Daily Planet's a 2009 copy, so there must have been a serious flood since then. The quite robust construction of the pathway was completely destroyed, the rubble still connected by rebar in parts and bones of the path lay everywhere. I left my pack at where the path ended, figuring no one else would be coming along since I hadn't seen anyone at all for the last km up. I hopped my way over to the falls, not an easy task on the slippery rocks, and was stunned when I got there. Gorgeous the way the falls had carved out the rock. Quite cold, very clean, I filled my water bottles, and headed back the way I came. On the way back, I met Tony and Andreina.

Tony is 25, from France but he's half French, half Italian and a beautiful man. He has done extensive travel in the P.I. and Asia over the last 8 years. Andreina is 21, from Venezuela, living with her sister on Bohol Island for 6 months, just venturing out for the first time, but very passionate and strong, and gorgeous of course. They travel a little differently than I do. Tony has money, and he likes to spend it on wine, food, and treating his periodic girlfriends. He always travels with a girlfriend. Andreina's English is about as good as my Spanish, so we traded back and forth. Tony knows a little bit of a lot of languages. We chatted and hit it off, and they offered to take me back down the mountain on the motor they had rented in Dumaguete for the trip up to the falls. We climb back up the difficult, slippery stairs, and squeeze onto the motor, me careful to keep my burn away from the exhaust pipe. Almost immediately, we hit a rock and lay down the bike.

I gave her that hat as a consolation ; )

Tony and I are completely fine without a scratch, but between us, Andreina's knee is scraped and she's having a lot of trouble walking on her foot. The fall scared her, and I knew instantly from the way her ankle shaked, where the pain was, and how she reacted to the fall that she either bruised or broke her foot. Her toes moved fine, and she seemed to walk it off okay, but understandably wouldn't get back on the bike at least until paved ground. Tony was the typical man, half encouraging, half mocking, and I tried to play the middle ground, saying the words Andreina was feeling but not saying, wounded by the fall. I felt the fall was largely my fault because I added Ozwald and I, both topheavy to the load, and Tony wasn't used to that kind of load. I insisted that I walk and they go down on their own, but they insisted I stay with them, so I jumped on when I could. It takes a lot of muscle to hang on to the back of a bike when all that weight is pulling me backwards. Every time I do it here, my entire abdomen aches the next day.

We made it down to the gas station, and both Andreina and I hobble off in pain. She's much worse off than before, holding back tears and having a lot of trouble walking. So I put on my EMT hat, ask her if it's okay to help her, and doing a quasi-full assessment. I'm certain at this point that it's broken, but not bad. I pull out the first aid kit, wrap her foot, clean her scrape, give it a dust of black pepper, and bandage it with gauze. Then I tell her what will happen if she goes to the hospital that night or waits to get back to Bohol (her boat was the next day), trying not to push her too hard to to the latter option, the one I know is easiest and best. After some thought, and some impatience on Tony's part, we decide to load she and I into a tricycle, and go to the hospital. I play my guitar softly in the ER, keeping my more gory and more Spartan-dressed burn out of view of the nurses for fear that they will converge on it and force me to pay to get it cleaned up "properly". Meanwhile, Andreina goes through the process step-for-step the way I predicted. Long wait, vitals, take an X-Ray, change my wrap with their own same wrap, clean off the pepper and clean with iodine, reopening her scrape and then bandaging it, waiting for the doctor, same advice, then out with a big bill. But she felt a little better KNOWING it was broken, it was her very first time in a hospital, and I'm pretty sure she was glad I was there with her for it, someone familiar with it all, as well as Tony to make it no big deal.

Full on ER experience for her too. While we were there, a man was dying, they kept doing CPR off and on for 2 hours to keep him going enough for the family to arrive and say sorrowful goodbyes. I have to confess, it was the first time I've witnessed someone die. It left me with lots of indescribable emotions and thoughts for the next few days.

After the hospital, we go to Tony's favorite, truly Italian restaurant in Dumaguete to pig out. We have lots more discussions about the importance of money, places we've all been, ways we've all traveled, lives we've lived and work we've done. We were eventually forced out around closing because the dishwashers wanted to go home. Then back to their hotel, a fancy 900-peso place, took a hot shower, and administered some of our own medicine. After some more chatting, and feeling a lot less lonely than I had that morning, I pulled a fast one and pulled out the extra bed in the hall, sleeping right there in the hallway for free.

My original plan that day was to go straight from Dumaguete to a beach/bay/pirate's cove called Tambobo to sleep, but it didn't work out that way, and the new location seemed less important than new friends. Woke up the next morning, gave my goodbyes, and walked to the bus depot bound for Bacolod and Mt Kanlaon.