6 Week Gap Year

Today we are to visit Ludy’s property in Binangon, Rizal. But first we must travel to Central Manila to visit Ate Bever’s office and then the travel agent to pay for our short 4 day holiday within a holiday. Bever is co-director of a recruitment company specialising in providing skilled PI engineers and technicians for the overseas markets but mostly concentrating on Dubai. She is able to convert my left over SG$ to Peso and then we go and pay for the holiday. We have booked 4 days and 3 nights in Puerto Princesa on the island of Palawan at a good well recommended hotel including flights. I will post a map of PI and highlight where we are visiting. So now we make tracks for Binangonan and I can Tell Ludy is apprehensive. She has not seen the house for 10 yrs and her cousin and his family are living in it. She let them live in the property after her mother died so that it would not be left empty during her time in the UK. With a proviso that should she ever return they would vacate for her to resume residence. She left them money to continue building work and also bought them a motor tricycle for her cousin to have work and an income. She has written to him a number of times since she left but he has never replied. She is worried he has let the house down by not doing repairs or any other improvements as he was intending. Also she is concerned that he has not been paying the local house tax and if this is the case the council repossess the house to cover their costs. As we go through Binangonan Lu finds much has changed and that the town is now much larger and spread out than before. To me much of the “newer” area appears to be a lot of jerry built tin and creteblock shacks from which people run a small business and also live. I think that these people have a very hard time making enough money to feed their families let alone dream about enjoying what we might call some essentials. Bever and Lu have said that PI is very much a 3rd world country with poverty and overpopulation of the urban areas rife. Until you se it for yourself it is really not possible to truly understand what terrible conditions some of these people live and try to work in. Much of this could be helped by politicians who would implement the policies they so easily espouse during election time instead of using their positions for personal gain only. Sounds a bit like being at home really. A number of illustrations of attempts to help local communities can be found where for example you find covered community centres. These are used for markets or meetings or even festivals but when you see huge plaques bearing the name of the councillor who “with funding from the council and local community built….” you sort of wonder whether it was just built as a monument to the councillor as an ego trip and the fact that it benefited the community was incidental. There are the ubiquitous Jeepneys everywhere in all their finery of chrome, lights and bodywork art. Some are quite plain and some are truly the result of hundreds of hours of a labour of love. The school Andrea went to has been extended and improved and everywhere seems busier I‘m told. We turn off the main road and take a very small side road through what to western eyes would be considered very a run down and poor area. To be honest many of the houses are almost of a shanty town style and many are half finished or just plain falling down. We crest a hill and Ludy spies her house. From the plans I saw in the UK I expected a slightly larger house but I also expected it to be pretty run down. I was disappointed by the former but not the latter. The design of the house is quite good but the architectural dream does not appear to have transferred from the plan into reality. On closer inspection which one didn’t really need, the house is in extremely poor condition. The corrugated tin roof needs attention and all the guttering is loose and the down pipes and soakaways are missing. Where the gutter drain pipes are missing water has soaked into the cretebrick work. The wooden sofits and barge boards are weather worn and decaying as are the window frames and front sliding door. The interior is damp and musty smelling and all the wood ceiling panels need replacing. The outside toilet is little better than an old toilet bowl, which to flush, you swill water down by hand. I remember Lu saying that when she told Andrea we were coming to see the house she said “ but Mum, you can’t let Derek stay at the house because the toilet we used is outside the house and doesn’t have a flush!” Lu talks to her cousin and his wife and I think they come to some decision about the house. We take a little time to go and visit the grave of Lu’s mum, Aurora Ocampo Villegas who died 27 January 1997 and pay our respects. Now we head back to Metro Manila and do a little shopping for our 4 day expedition to the north part of PI starting at a large village or small town called Vigan (pronounced vegan). After shopping we head unexpectedly (by me anyway) to a eat as much as you like style restaurant which Ate Bever recommends. We sit down and are issued (again unbeknownst to me) with yellow plates. This means we can only choose our food from the Philippine buffet section. Problem is no-one told me. So we all get up and got to the starters area and choose various items. I chose Kangkong (fried green leafy vegetable, a sort of broad leaf grass), bbq chicken wings, ( I nearly picked up bbq’d chicken gizzards by mistake) and I few other quite western portions. Main dishes were arranged around the room and were not only very international, ie Japanese, Malay, Philippine and USA but varied and extreme. How about Ox Tripe kare-kare and pig’s intestine! Or pig’s face spicy stew. Or lechon which is mmmmmmm, roast pork. Problem with that dish though is I saw chef with the roasted suckling pig and watched him cleave its head off. I that is only me and not the others, then wandered over to the Japanese dishes and had loaded Khengis Kahn and spicy chicken kebabs on my dish when Lu came running over. “honey you can’t select from these Japanese dishes as you have only paid for yellow plate. So you can only choose from Philippine food. Japanese is blue plate” Luckily I don’t think any one noticed. We then are serenaded with 2 Filipino love songs by a quartet of Bass cello, 2 guitarists and a lady singer shaking her maracas! Highly inappropriate in a high class restaurant. After dinner we head home to “Hotel Encarnacion” (Ate Bever’s house her son and family live in and are making us very welcome.) and head for bed exhausted again. The heat is unrelenting but it’s the humidity that kills you.