My tradition is over to Denny's for coffee and writing a letter or two, recapping the year. Main points are I think despite all my oaths to the contrary, I really must consider going back to school. (What good is my 30 years experience of I can't program the computer I use everyday?)
Investment this year was a dud but I can report I still made something in the stretch were others lost fortunes. I attribute this to Muni funds and my habit of investing only in dividend-paying large caps (companies with huge capitalization). I feel if a company can't pay a dividend, it's being run funny.
Over at JP's yesterday, his father recited a quote about, "... all the armies which have ever marched, all the Navy's ever sales, all the kings and emperors together, have not changed the world as much as one man." Remind me to look that up.
[Author's note: don't take this to mean I can't program. I can do Fortran, COBOL, C+, RPG, Assembler, BASIC, and that is I can't even recall. But I got out when object oriented programming arrived. OOPs is a style of programming that allows morons to produce apparent results, the operative word being apparent. What OOPs really did was move the spaghetti off the flowcharts and into the programmer's brain. I heard that C+ is the average mark of the people who use it.
And how was your Christmas Day?]
I see that the description of events on Borocay Island were a popular item. Therefore I'm going to give you an extra long entry today. Have fun.
Late afternoon on the second day, we approach the flat island. The anchorage was a few hundred meters out and a relay of bongo boats commenced. It was about then we heard the ship ahead of us had went down (sunk) and the sharks got all but 20 people. I had noticed several times that there was a school of sharks trailing the steamer all along.
A bongo boat is an outrigger, but in reality the center pontoon is not hollowed out like a canoe. You literally sit on bamboo rods a few inches above the water trying to keep your gear dry. The local trucking is done by Jeepney, a World War II Jeep with the body made out of stainless steel so it can survive the Filipino climate. They mount cargo racks and planks for up to 18 passengers on a vehicle originally designed for a maximum of six.
We drove in land to an old Spanish settlement called Kalibo, and to this day I've met Filipinos who swear no such town exists. But it's there and it turns out Boracay is off the west coast of this island, so Pat and I had to spend the night in Kalibo. I found his rooms with a fan at a 10th the price of the only local hotel. It was Christmas time, so we walked through the market square to that Hotel for some cheer.
This is where I first mentioned an interesting treat. It is thin banana slices deep-fried in what appears to be a mixture of honey and possibly brown sugar over a little charcoal burner. It turns out I was far more willing to try a strange and local food than Pat, who was very susceptible to food quality, particularly fiery hot spices.
On the other hand it takes me forever to get through a marketplace. We got half way across before some local hooker decided I was her property. I couldn't get rid of her, which I dislike because it prevents me from meeting nice girls. I even stopped for a shave, what a treat, and she wouldn't leave. Finally I paid her to leave.
In the hotel bar, there was some hotheaded 24-year-old punk who'd married the local 32-year-old prostitute. Of course all her clientele would still approach her, and the punk was getting more and more jealous. We left around 9 p.m. and heard the next day somebody finally shot him to death.
I was up with the chickens and also you might say with a pig. Pat was the opposite, he sleeps in and could not seem to hit on women except in a bar, both of which I don't do. Wondering how big this city was, I walked past the police station and down a side road. A block later I was facing a rice field. The whole town was really a single ring of buildings facing the market square and behind them were farms.
As I turned around, this pig comes trotting toward me with a broken rope on her neck. I quickly grabbed the rope. The squealing noise opened every shutter in a block and soon dozens of families surrounded me saying, in fairly good English, "This is my pig."
I tore a US dollar in half and told two of the bigger boys they get the other half if they kept the pig until I returned. I trotted into the police station and four pairs of feet got off the desks onto the floor, splattering bullets all over from these curious plastic M-16 clips they use over there. There was a pause while I helped them pick up the bullets.
Nobody spoke English so I made motions and we hoofed it back just as a man in a suit, who turned out to be the Mayor, arrived holding the other end of the broken rope. This was his special Christmas pig he had been raising all year and it escaped from his yard. Now it was time to fill out police reports.
Earlier I'd stopped for coffee down the street, waiting for it to get light. The police station was so clammy I suggested we go for back there, to which they instantly agreed and brought along what I'm sure was a Tagalog typewriter. During this event I learned, in the dialect used only on this island, the name of a female pig is "Ba-BOO-ee”.
[Author's note: I'm informed years later this pronunciation is not accurate, but I leave it untouched as first written.]
After an hour or so of filling out these interminable reports, the police left. As I got up to leave I got stuck with the tab for everybody's coffee and pastry, ha! Hours later, Pat and I got under way and we boarded a larger bus for Boracay. This 50 mile trip was a unique experience. Everybody piles on as best they can. On the roof in burlap sacks was a load of smoked coconuts. Yes, smoked just like salmon. The aroma was so strong, Pat and I eventually crawled out the windows while speeding along and laid down on the sacks with our faces into the wind.
The road was a bulldozed jungle path, with the attendant potholes, ruts and washouts. The jungle was evenly about 15 feet tall and looked manageable. Progress was about 12 mph. There were no towns, but several times we passed walking funeral processions, with a band or drummer, then the pallbearers, then the family group. In the seeming middle of nowhere.
More unusual was every few miles, some fully armed teenage boys would step out of the trees. The Jeepney Bus would stop, nobody said a word, and these soldiers (probably Communist revolutionaries) hopped on the running boards without paying, and rode for a few miles. Another silent signal stopped the truck and they went into the bush again. All of which got Pat's mind overworking.
The sun was already low when we reached a small dock. By pointing and sign language I could just see Boracay on the horizon. At this point, the local "police" called everyone off the Jeepney and begin to go through everybody's luggage. Pat and I became the center of attention, for at that time I had long blonde hair past my shoulders and he looked like he just got out of boot camp. Fortunately I was traveling on a non-American passport.
We got "interviewed" by a top officer with a scared-shitless private sitting right beside us polishing his gun barrel, very slowly. My story is always the same, I'm a piano tuner. They had first planned to only likely question Pat, but he made some kind of joke about "working for the CIA". Whoops, no joke. Then they grilled me for an hour and got nothing.
I kept telling the police officer that I wanted to leave and he kept saying he would "be responsible" for getting me to the island. I finally pushed the gun barrel down, stood up and informed him that I was, one, not relying on him for anything and two, was not going to travel on a bongo boat after dark. He released me and I walked down to the waterfront in a very unpleasant mood. Pat spent the night in jail. And he got chewed out a second time when he got to Boracay the next day, by me. I felt it was necessary to impart a little traveling savvy on the guy.
The last boat was boarding in the ticket booth said “Pasaje 7 peso”. As I stepped up the operator said”Eets Chreesmass, ten peso, you Ba-Boo-ee”. Well I nearly lost it, and I said. “Eets Chreesman, five peso, your mother is Ba-Boo-ee”. He was stunned, stunned like a gorilla, while I plunked the money on the counter and grabbed the ticket out of his hand before he could start breathing again. I’ll wager to this day he still wondering how I knew that word.
It was past dark before we landed because the boat had to sail around to the west side of Boracay to an inlet. I kept seeing sharks.. Boracay is a long narrow island off the northwest coast of the larger island that the town of Kalibo is on. Automobiles are not allowed on this little paradise. Except for small-scale vegetable booths, the island economy is mainly Northern Euro owned.
(The downside was, although there were women on the island, most of them where they are because of outstanding arrest warrants. The Swedish ice cream lady had reputedly murdered her husband. I say reputedly because I've noticed when taxpayers leave certain countries like Canada and Sweden it seems they are often shortly afterward charged with some kind of serious crime. I don't know the correlation, but it happens so frequently that I write it off as government corruption. Always a taxpayer and always after they left and didn't file a tax return that year.)
Pat became a regular patron of the ice cream parlor because of his intolerance for other foods. There were small clubs and cafés. Like Colonia Tovar (in Venezuela) it was thrilling to see so many tall blue-eyed blonde women living in the jungle, in the middle of the tropics. I rented a beach bungalow (grass hut) with an "Asian Standard" (squat) toilet. If you've never used one of these, remember you have to take your trousers completely off before you squat, or you'll be fishing your wallet out of the hole.
Furthermore, Pat never adjusted to the foreign food and had to "blow his guts" up to eight times per day. Or make that night, yelling "Get out! Wake up and get out!" Ah, the adventures of travel.
One day I'll find all my slides. All the pictures you've seen here are photographs. I'm reminded of the local spiders. They are huge and spin equally huge webs. If it finds an open cabana it puts a web over the entire window opening and sits motionless at the center for months on end. The locals leave it there for decoration, it has a brilliant yellow pattern on its abdomen. Or is it a thorax, I can't remember.
Pat and I swam a lot, and collected coral, which is something I would never do today. Then we attended the Christmas pageant. The children could sing in English, but not speak at. We passed New Year's, sharing the cabin in shifts with several island girls. Pat often dated the Swedish lady, so I learned to make myself scarce. Pat was as painfully shy as he was good-looking, and the problem is that the ugliest broad on the island started after him.
(I don't usually write direct discussions of such topics, that's for guys who never get any. That broad latched onto Pat the moment he walked in. She was everything I detested in a woman. Felix was divorced, well over 30, opinionated, stupid, and overweight. There was no way I could pretend to like her around. This cramped my style, because Pat would only explore by tagging along with me, meaning she was always in tow, criticizing me in low whispers and insulting the women I spoke to. Felix was openly hostile toward me dating a different woman every night, although I suspect she was just jealous that they were so much younger than her. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?)
One morning Pat and I were snorkeling and we both saw a tiny purple jellyfish, which we had been constantly warned about. I skirted it but Pat swiped at it with his diving knife, not knowing he'd cut off the invisible tentacles. A minute later he was seizing up in some serious pain. I do not know how I got a waterlogged guy twice my weight onto the beach while he was throwing a fit, but I did.
The tentacles had begun to coil around his arms and legs like wet hair producing chains of walnut sized boils. This condition did not transfer to me when I touched them so I dragged him into the shade. Pat kept screaming that he heard the cure was to urinate on the boils, which I rejected because urine contains acid and because he seemed otherwise able to move freely and shout by now. So I said, "I'm sure Felix would be only too glad to oblige."
I turned around to see her standing right there. After that, she avoided me and my scoring average climbed back to normal. A week later Pat and I flew back to Manila, then Tokyo, then Bangkok, where we split. I went on to visit Delhi in India and on my instructions he went to Phuket Island to talk to Tom Moondon, and stay with her till he went home. I felt he got himself into enough for one trip.
