Dinagyang

In the town of Iloilo, there is a yearly festival called Dinagyang. It is in honor of Santa Nino, or the child Jesus, or something, it is all kind of confusing. Every town in the Philippines has a big yearly festival. Around the Visayas (the region I am in) the festivals are usually called the Ati-Atihan, which is also in honor of Santa Nino. Dinagyang seems to be a combination of Ati-Atihan and older tribal celebrations.

The festival lasts for about a week, all told, but centers on three days: the 25, 26, and 27th of January. Dinagyang is one of the largest festivals in the Philippines and draws people from all over the country. The entire downtown core is closed, probably about 20 times the area of Ottawa that is closed to traffic on Canada day. There are stages set up all over the place with dozens of bands playing. The larger intersections have four massive speaker walls blasting music at each other. It is by far the loudest music I have ever heard... BY FAR!! It hurts to go near the speaker wall. With your ears blocked it is still deafening and you can feel the vibrations all through your body and in your clothes. It was insane. But what was more insane were the crazy Filipinos who would dance in front of the speakers for hours! I assume alcohol diminished their ability to make wise decisions.

Snaking through all of this runs a parade route. The fourteen different tribes, or groups, are composed of dancers dressed in elaborate tribal clothing, followed by a team of drummers. The drums are extremely loud but in a good way, a bearable way, not the painful way. The tribes follow the parade route and stop at the various judging stations. After that is all wrapped up everyone eats BBQ and drinks San Miguel beer and listens to bands or insane walls of speakers.

It was quite a experience and really fun. I referred to Iloilo in an earlier post and may not have given a great impression of it. It was still a very smelly place but much less so during the festival, with some actual good smells, like pork BBQ. But all in all the town has grown on me, having been in it on three different occasions now. But the festival showed the human side of the city, the people

Coqs, coqs and more coqs... oh and waterfalls too!

I was recently in a small town called Guintubdan which is located high up on the foothills of Kanla-on volcano. Guintubdan is a very pretty, almost idyllic town, for the Philippines. It is known around the Philippines for prety much one thing: Coqs. Specifically fighting coqs. Coq fighting is the national sport of the Philippines, something I find quite odd as people can't participate. Like a small boy can't really grow up with dreams of being a world famous coq fighter. Coqs outnumber people in this town by probably a hundred to one. That is a high coq to human ratio by any standard. And one thing you learn fast about coqs is that the make a lot of noise... All the time. I gues every coq wants to be the number one coq, and they prove this by crowing... All the time!

They would probably rather fight, but they are tied up and kept in their own little areas, often with their own little coq houses to keep them out of the rain and little perches so they can be up high. Because Guintubdan is on the side of a mountain sometimes the coq farms are on very steep slopes and there are little terraces carved into the hills so the coqs can stand on flat ground. So just like rice terraces, which are famous in the north of the Philippines, Guintubdan has coq terraces. It is quite interesting!

As exciting as seeing all those coqs was, the real reason we were in Guintubdan was to hike part of Kanla-on volcano. We could not climb to the summit as you needed to organize a permit in advance, but there were some spectacular waterfalls a short hike away.

The water was so clean and clear, probably the first clean clear water I have seen in the Philippines. This is because of the fact that nobody lives above Guintubdan so the water hasn't had a chance to be polluted yet. Anyone who thinks the Ottawa river or the St-Lawrence is polluted needs to see a river in a third world country. My definition of polluted water has changed forever now. I would rather drink out of the Ottawa river than swim in some of these Philippine rivers. But the water on Kanla-on was so cold clear you could see down thirty feet.

The hike itself was quite treacherous, one wrong move and you'd find yourself tumbling down eighty feet on a near vertical slope to land in the rocky stream. It was pretty intense rain forest with tons of flowers, giant ferns, palms and massive trees. It was a really beautiful and exciting hike which culminated in seeing double waterfalls about two hundred feet high falling into basically a pit with fern covered cliffs on all sides except where the stream flows out.

If ever ever in the Philippines don't miss Guintubdan. You come for the volcano and the waterfalls but you stay for the coqs...

Filipinos love videoke

We stayed in a town called Sigay for a night. It was a small town with not much to do, really nothing to do... or so it seemed. There was a hair salon next to the hotel we were staying at and one of the guys who worked there said we could hang around there for a while. We did, and Kim, which was his name, offered to take us to his sister's bar after he got off work. We accepted and spent the evening singing terribly with some Filipinos. Filipinos are good singers, I am not. I sang: 'three times a lady," by Lionel Richie, "I shot the sheriff," apparently the Eric Clapton version, though i don't remember his solo sounding like a synthesizer, and finally, "Hotel California," by the Eagles. I actually got a round of applause for "I shot the Sheriff," but I think this is due mostly to the fact that I am white and not really a good singer at all... because I am not :) But if you keep your eyes and ears peeled around here you're bound to see or hear videoke all over the place. It was funny because the background videos playing while we sang were all of Canada. Shots of Vancouver and Rocky Mountains. I don't know if this was just coincidence or if they selected that video to try and make up more comfortable. Anyway, it was fun, in a way.

apparently

Iloilo - town of a thousand smells, well mostly urine.

A room with a view...

...Or that's how the people at the Canada Hotel described the quality of the cheap room we stayed in for two nights. And they were right, they just failed to mention that the view was of the putrid slums of Iloilo. Well, the slums were not that bad, not Cebu bad, but disgusting nonetheless. It is a very smelly town though, in that it seems to smell of sewers everywhere. Very notably in the lobby of the Canada Hotel, it really hits you when you walk in there. It seemed nice to stay at the Canada Hotel, which is apparently owned by a Canadian, but it just seemed like a sleezy sex hotel. There were a number of strip joints across the street, very convenient. The room also had a bug problem in the form of ants and cockroachs... I was not sad to leave that place.

Here I am standing near the port in Iloilo just before leaving for Bocolod. A town I passed through briefly about a week early but am now returning to to see some more of Negros Island, possibly a Volcano!

As gross and Iloilo is I will be returning there in about a week to experience the Dinangyang festival (I may have spelled that word wrong by the way), which is apparently a huge mardi gras-esq festival that lasts for three days. People come from all over the Philippines to see it. There is already a lot of practicing going on, which is really cool to see and hear. the drums below are incredibly loud when played in unison, it is quite something to hear. Hopefully we will be able to participate in the festival as well, which involves painting yourself black and wearing a big headress.. we will see.

Boracay

Boracay is to the Philippines what Cancun is to Mexico, or for what Moncton is to Canada... Ok well I guess Canada does not have an equivalent place but you undertand my drift. Boracay is extremely touristy and crowded, has a beautiful beach and a fairly lively bar scene.

The obvious problem with such places is the cost. Everything costs double what it costs elsewhere. Now this is all relative as in North American standards, it was still cheap, but in the Filipino context it feels like you are busting your budget.

Luckily on the bus ride up to Boracay we met a nice Filipino guy named Chian, or something like that, who guided us to the place we wanted to stay and got us and airconditioned room upgrade for free, he was a nice guy. We bonded on the bus ride when the song 'YMCA' played on the radio and we were both singing along to it. Apparently is is fun to stay at the YMCA if you are a young man. I must look into that when I get back to Canada. Later we were both singing along to a Lionel Richie song. As you can see, Chian and I both have great taste in music.

It was humorous how many Korean tourists there were in Boracay. It was thoroughly saturated with them. For some reason the Philippines draws a ton of Koeans, probably because it is fairly close... My powers of deduction are quite amazing I know.

It is interesting how different Sugar Beach and Boracay are yet how similar the activities we ended up doing were. Sleep late, sit on beach/swim, drink at night. It wa a fun time all in all but after 4 nights there it was definately time to be moving on.

Sugar Beach

I spent a few days at an out of the way beach, called Sugar Beach by tourists, Langub Beach by the locals. It was a hard place to get to but definately worth the effort. Once we reached the town of Sipilay we took a trike (motorcycle with sidecar) to a broken bridge. From there we walked for twenty minutes to where the road ended at a few huts by a river. We paid for a small boat to take us across the river and from there had to walk a small path carved in the rock to get around a cove and the the beach opened up. It was a huge and largely empty with only a handfull of places to stay. The swimming was excellent and in general it was quite a relaxing time. But as is the case with such places there was really not that much to do, swimming and sitting on the beach an get pretty tiring. There was some Scuba diving but I didn't feel up to it at that point.

The accomodations were fairly nice and relatively cheap, exept for the first night where we stayed at a Filipino resort. It was expensive and this seems counter-intuitive as it is a resort aimed at Filipinos but apparently when Filipinos travel they bring their extended families with them and they all stay in the one room which cuts down on costs. We split the room with a nice Dutch fellow we met and the next day got a much nicer and cheaper room at the next place over.

So the days at sugar beach were spent sleeping late followed by sitting on the beach and swimming. And the evenings were spent consuming alcoholic beverages. Leaving the place felt both sad and good. We took a boat back to town.

Even more culture shock

I went to a market yesterday, called Carbon Market. The Lonely planet makes an obvious joke about that in regards to global warming. It is, of course, not a carbon market but rather an incredibly slummy produce market. It stank so much it was ridiculous, offensive smells I have never smelt before. Seems to have been a combination of rotting vegitables, excrement and massive amounts of air pollution. Yes, I am fresh out of Canada, but I even saw locals walking around with clothes over their mouths. And in the midst of it all people live in sqalid dirt floor shacks. It is very sad, though the people seemed fairly happy, many were enthusiastic to get their pictures taken. They would yell, "one shot, one shot," to get you to take a picture of them.



The little place I was staying at was also something of a prostitution house. Older white men would just hang around and them prostituted would show up. Made me scared to think about the bed I was sleeping on... uhhhhggg.

There is a fear factor episode in which people have to eat a boiled egg that has a fully developed embryo in it. Turns out that is a Philippine delicassy. I don't understand how someone could eat a whole duck embryo, but they chow down on it, eyes, feathers bones everything. There are certain things I won't eat and that is one of them. I know people might say, "don't knock it until you try it," but i'm going to have to knock that partcular thing right off.

Today I got a ride acros an island for three dollars in a motorcycle with a makeshift side carriage. The driver had to romive the coq to make room. He had just come from a coq fight, which apparently went in his favour, so I guess that little coq will avoid being supper for a while, until he loses anyway.

I am wondering if all this will become 'normal' at some point, but i'm not sure that it will.

Culture shock??

It's great to travel, but what is not great are massively long flights. And add on to that taking buses and just waiting... soooo much waiting. By the end of it I thought I was going to go nuts. Getting through customs in Manila was aggravating, there was a massive line up. Line up is actually the wrong way to describe it. There was a solid block of people, trying to get through a limited number of customs gates, with no discernible line. It took well over an hour to get out of the airport, that was almost the breaking point as I had not slept in over 36 hours. Remember that guy who got tazer killed by the RCMP because he was going crazy in the airport... Try travelling like that and you can relate.

I did not spend long in Manila and am fairly happy for that. It is just a massive sprawling urban nightmare, with absolute poverty everywhere. It makes you sad but there is nothing you can do about it. Little children come up to you and beg for money... like 5 year old children. But giving them a few pesos isn't going to get them out of that situation. It makes you feel kind of helpless.

I am in Cebu now, another sprawling urban nightmare with absolute poverty everywhere, but not as bad as Manila. I haven't seen much of it yet and I don't know how much I will see. My main focus is to get out of cities, they just make you kind of sad. Like I am sitting in a fancy Internet cafe in a mall, more posh than any we have in Ottawa, yet two block away there are people living in shacks and washing their clothes in sewage water. I saw a woman sleeping face down on the sidewalk with her 2 year naked baby playing in filth beside her. Less than a block away from that was a Starbucks, exactly like any you would see in Canada... The class gap here is massive. Being homeless in Canada would be a blessing compared to here.

One thing i find particularly funny is the driving. The traffic is crazy all over but what is really funny is the honking. Everyone honks at everything all the time. I think it devalues the point of a horn. At first I was looking all over the place when I heard a honk. But you are literally hearing: honk honk honk honk honk honk... all the time, so you just stop paying attention to it.

I am just suffering culture shock in general.