It is easier to describe this place by telling what isn’t here.
There are no condos, resorts, blue water swimming pools, water slides, fancy cabanas with fully loaded bars. There aren’t people wearing sunglasses and expensive thongs. There isn’t a paved road to get here, or fountains, or water features.There aren’t staff moving from room to room cleaning, maintaining grounds, loading luggage into taxis.
Ulong Bay is where locals go to cool off on hot days.
It is a fifteen minute bumpy ride in a tricycle from Mogpog, and, for a moment, you wonder if the sea is really out there. You walk over a rickety bamboo bridge, down a small path, and then you see water to the horizon, as flat as a surfboard.
This evening kids ride pieces of plywood on the slippery beach, dogs swim, families play in the sea as the sun goes down. Fires have been lit and our sun begins it’s swan dive into the sea.
There are better beaches and clearer water in the Philippines, but those cost one hundred to two hundred a night and come with tourists, high prices, and New World extravagances.
Ulong Bay is attractive for what it isn’t, and what it is isn’t bad.
There are fires burning in Mogpog.
They are kept simmering all day and into the night, started with the skins of coconuts peeled and shredded to make tinder, reinforced with dead coconut tree trunks, branches too small to be used for anything else.
You see smoke as you stroll,smell it as you take a shortcut through a back yard with a pen full of chickens, stop to see what your Uncle Fernando has been drinking last night.
There is never a straight line here anywhere. Point A and B are connected by a wavy line that leads you through the brambles like a pirate’s map.
All family and friends here are tied on a charm bracelet wrapped safely around your wrist, and you visit them as often as possible.
Smoke from these fires keeps mosquitoes at bay.
Insects are at the bottom of the natural world, simple, basic, enduring, omnipresent. We take them into account wherever we travel.. Small, out of sight, insects live close to mankind, largely invisible till they bite.
Mosquito’s have much to do about giving pests a bad reputation.
Typhoid fever isn’t something anyone wants to dance with and keeping a fire going is a small price to pay.
Mosquito’s may be small, but they pack a big punch.
Pigs are popular on Marinduque.
They are particularly popular for large family get together’s and celebrations. Like Ecuadorians and Mexicans, Philipino’s like pork and many households have a pig or two staked out in back yard mud holes. On this day, the man who makes his living cooking pigs over a fire, on a spit, comes to get one for a family wedding. After looking in Alma’s pens, he chooses the right sized pig for the celebration, then lifts it out of it’s cage.
The pig squeals and hollers but is no match for this big man.
The pig man grabs one pig foot and ties it with a piece of line, then grabs the other three feet and wraps all four together. Finished, he lifts the squirming squealing pig and carries it to his tricycle. Tomorrow, this pig will be lunch. After a life of indolence, this well fed boy only has a few hours to live and he hasn’t even had a fair trial.
Pigs get slaughtered.
The most important thing to remember is not to name them, and not to get attached. It is hard to love your pork chop when it used to be your pet.
Rice is a staple.
The rice plant grows about a foot high and then men with machetes separate the part of the plant with rice grains from the rest of it. The rice grains are shaken from the leaves, gathered, then laid out in the sun on mats to dry in the intense sun, turned with a rake to bake evenly.
When dry, the rice grains are loaded into bags and taken to a machine that separates the husk from the rice inside each grain.
Rice production is labor intensive and men standing in water bend over all day wearing broad hats and long sleeved shirts to bring it out of the fields.
Rice is served here three times a day with vegetables, chicken, fish, pork, and, occasionally- beef. What is not eaten is dished into food bowls for dogs and cats,and pigs.
Coconut trees are also a staple.
Coconut shells are burnt in little fires near houses so the smoke keeps mosquitoes under control. Coconut water is prized in European and American health food stores. Coconut is used to make culinary masterpieces and give texture and color to cosmetics. The leaves from coconut trees make roofs that keep heads dry and kids sleep in bunk beds made from the trunks of coconut trees.
Rice and coconuts leave their fingerprints on everyone here.
In a world of nearly eight billion people, and growing, we often have to wait our turn.
On a Tokyo runway, our jet backs away from its boarding dock, follows air traffic control orders, gets in line with a string of jumbo jets to take off for Manilla.
Thousands of planes land and take off from major international airports, 24/7, and behind technology is people making quick decisions that try to keep us safe.
From the air,at night, there are huge spaces of darkness all around us, then darkness with scattered lights, then, as we close on Manilla, millions of lights for millions of people. From space, astronauts can see continents, the Amazon,the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. At night they can see large metropolitan cities sparkling and know that home is down there when they get back and someone has left the lights on for them and is planning a ticker tape parade.
The things I know about the Philippines are that in World War 2 men died in jungles up to their knees in mud, banana trees cut in half by bullets and coconut trees sent up in flames. The islands are rural and poor and wicker chairs on Uncle Steve’s front porch were made here. Most shells in gift shops come from the Philippine archipelago.
When Ali met Foreman, Manilla was put on the map.
Tonight, the third leg of this flight is finished and the Philippines turn real. You never know a place till you have been there.
You never know people or places till you spend time with them.
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