Personal E-mail to Karen and Sierran

Greetings to oregonians. karen i am going to ask you to give Sierran a call and let him know that i am reading his e-mails—as well as yours—and have very much enjoyed his detailed last email. i don’t want him or anyone to think i have not been able to make the time to write back. i would love to write back, but simply can’t, though now that i have figured our how to use the blog as a form of email, i can make more personal responses. But i am quite limited.

Tell Sierran to contact Doron and Aria and explain why they have not heard from me. Again, anyone who wants to know how this trip is going must go to blogs. my computer is basically shot. nothing is working, But i don’t want to spend nearly $2000 here in the phillipines just to have something else go wrong. karen, i like the idea of getting away from mac products and go with cheaper but efficient products that can blog, post photos, email—things that don’t take tons of charge to operate. i think your chrome book may be the way to go. i can probably find something for 15 percent the cost of the Mac.

yes, Sierran, our last trip to luzon and palawan were special. And i can see why that trip meant so much to you in regards to Don for the tattoos. Wow, what an interesting trip. none of us will forget the long journey with our driver, the kind, humorous, and qualitative driver, Aries, up into timbuctoo luzon to get our Tattoos. And what were the odds that we would get such grand weather!

yup, the dogs are your priorities for the next 10 or 12 years. you can join me then—i don’t think i will be more than 82-84 years old.

We are currently skirting southeastern luzon, a wild and wooly place i never would have guessed is so unsettled and untamed. you have no idea how backwoods this part of the world is, unless you think about the Luzon we experienced when we did the rice padi’s of central luzon. Luzon is a big place; vast, mountainous, primitive, and poor. Limestone mountains rise verdant and as ragged as shark’s teeth out of stormy sea. i understand it will be at least 6 more weeks before the tourist season of calm and sunshine. in the meantime, we dodge rainstorms. yesterday the four of us drove to some remote place on a remote highway in the late day, taking hard bouts of rain, and climbed 770 steps up jungly mountainside to to visit a huge statue of the Virgen mary. And we went to beach where there were boundless stretches of bangkas beached because of the weather. We wanted to island hop.

Sabang, 2023 (Latter Jan) Part II

…SO as i began to say, i am standing in the primary pathway, with my rotissiere chicken and who should come out of the dark but my old acquaintance, Wally! i hate to refer to him as the fellow, the vendor with one eye, but that is the best way to bring his memory back. Wally! Finally someone who played kind of a special role while i was here in Sabong. We had run into him in puerto Galera one night years ago and went to his ‘house’, a cardboard box on crowded hillside. his wife and he lived in this little box with a corrugated tin roof. no bathroom, no kitchen, no shelves really. And they were so proud to have us over, Mikee and i, the girl i was falling in love with. That was a whole nother story which i blogged a million years ago.

So we visited with Wally and his quiet, perhaps slightly mentally handicapped wife. But oddly, she was not an unattractive woman, and she was certainly kind. it was intriguing to me, i.e. the relationship. So, there was Wally, a blast from the past.

i am rushing in my story, skipping ahead because there are tons to catch up on and we are kinda rushing around, in this case eating breakfast between bouts of downpour. there was so much that happened in Sabang. the primary event was Monette finally made it to Sabang from Paluan. She only lives 3 hours or so up the coast, but she lives in an isolated place and communication is next to impossible. For two years we have scarcely maintained communication—it’s been extremely difficult. So she caught a ferry from Abra de Ilog, 1 hour 30 minutes up the coast, but there was no boat going straight down the coast as in the old days—pre pandemic; she had to catch a ferry across the strait to Batangas, three hours, then back across the Strait to Calapan, then catch a van up the windy mountain road to puerto Galera, and from there, take a trike to Sabang. It was an incredibly long and complex journey of about 12 hours, just to cover what used to take one and a half hours by banka. But, Covid, surprisingly knocked out all transportation for the poor. And naturally she hadn’t a peso to her name, being as poor as a country mouse. And she was not going to ask for a peso so I had to guess what it was going to cost to get her there. I was told “100 pesos is plenty”. Well it wasn’t. So it was explained to me how to send what I finally settled on via “G cash”, the Filipino way of moving money around affordably as opposed to Western Union that takes up to 10 percent to take money and move it IF it even gets there—the bastards!

She finally arrived 12 hours later as dark settled in. it was so nice seeing her and catching up, but it was only a 36 hour experience. i am going to break here to send, just to keep certain people informed of what is going on—anyone who is still reading the blog.

Sabang, 2023 (Jan. 25) Part I

Gretchen, Gordon, and myself arrived back in Sabang around noon yesterday. The trip from Makati went as smooth as a snake across pond water. On the one hand, everything seems much as it has always been since I have been coming here in 2015, yet in another sense everything is subtly to obviously different, as though it is a parallel world, with parallel people and buildings (and/or businesses). It’s kinda strange, almost metaphysical. I can’t really say it is good or bad—just different. I guess it would be really strange if nothing ever changed. Maybe I am looking for the Old Sabang, a continuation of old friends, with a few changes (to allow for time), otherwise my world would be as I expect.

Let’s begin with the obvious. Me. I am older. My values as well as my physiology is not quite the same. So if you have changed, so has everyone else to greater and lesser degrees. New people have moved in and old people have moved out. I took a stroll through the town yesterday evening, looking for a draft beer, a decent meal, and to check out some of the changes. On the surface there was that certain hustle and bustle, girls palavering, , vendors selling fruits and vegetables, the smoke of cooking meals, wafting up the alley of the main street, tricycles and vehicles trying to move around one another, people interacting for every reason. Get off the main road, and go down the side streets, the narrow alleys, and there are dive shops everywhere, restaurants, bars and girly bars alike, shops selling their miscellaneous gifts and trinkets, small-time markets with a very special cool aid and pine pitch smell that reminded me of something innocent, kindly, that everyone deserved somewhere back in the 1950’s, something that seemed like I could breathe it all day long for the tunnel of nostalgia it carried me through. The stage was set with strange people, alien faces.

I meandered. There were some big changes. New streets were in the making. New businesses. The town was bracing for a new era. Was it my energy that was gone? The things that motivate me? Familiar faces? I was an alien in an alien world.

On my way out of the village center, I stood at what could have been considered the heart of Sabang. It was just past twilight, I had my roasted rotisierre half chicken in a small plastic bag, and