I awoke on a cement floor and didn't remember going to sleep there, but it was a dry cement floor, so I was glad for that. It sounded like it was raining, so I tiptoed around the other dozen people I found lying on the floor and hurried down to the shore to get my camera from the tree where it hung in a plastic bag. I hoped it hadn't been raining all night, because my camera would be ruined.
As it turned out, it wasn't raining at all, and I'd just heard the sound of the ocean, but when I checked in the bag, I was alarmed to find that my camera wasn't there. My dad was sleeping in a hammock next to the tree, and my rummaging woke him. "What are you doing, Jason?"
"I'm looking for my camera," I said. "It's there with you," he muttered, before closing his eyes again. My dad is prone to waking abruptly and spurting out random, meaningless combinations of words, and I assumed this was one, so I ignored him. I gave up the search a few minutes later and returned to the open-air building where I'd been sleeping. As I lay back down on the floor, I found my camera, nestled securely in the front pocket of my shorts.
I don't remember how yesterday ended, but I remember how it started. "We're going to Puro today," my dad informed me. Puro is an island a few miles off the coast of Borongan. Actually, as I recently discovered upon commenting that there seemed to be a lot of islands named 'Puro,' puro means island in Waray. Today, we'd be going to Puro Haliput (short island), not to be confused with its neighbor Puro Halaba (long island).
Around noon, I hopped onto a tricycle driven by one of my uncles, and we drove a few houses down the street to my Uncle Piden's house, where two aunties and eight kids piled into the vehicle. Once loaded (I won't say fully, because I'm sure we could've fit a few more kids on the roof of the sidecar) we took off, stopping about 20 minutes later at a little barangay of bahay kubos by the side of the road. While we waited for my dad and uncles to arrive, I met some of my cousins. One of them was Norlin, and when we saw each other, we both smiled and nodded, as if to say, "You got long hair. I got long hair too. Cool. There's not many of us here."
I chatted with my aunties for awhile, communicating through a choppy mix of Waray, Tagalog, and English. My dad's brothers and sisters all speak English pretty fluently, but the further out you go on the family tree, the less anglophilic they become, which is why it's good for me to branch out. There was a little white baby with curly brown hair walking around the barangay. "Italiano ang tatay niya," I was informed, his dad is Italian. Italian, they said, but a poor Italian, although he runs a "resort" in Mindoro--of course, in the Philippines this could mean he charges people a few pesos a night to sleep in the back room of his house, but still I wondered why he left his child to live in a nipa hut hundreds of miles away. Does he send money? Or did he just make a baby in the jungle and split? I wondered these things, but I didn't ask. He was the cutest little kid I've ever seen though; I was half tempted to say, "well if his dad's a deadbeat, I'll take him," but thought about how he would be a lot less cute if I had to take care of him.
Once everyone arrived, we climbed into the catamaran and motored off.
As you get further from shore, the water becomes the deepest, most beautiful shade of blue you can imagine. Not the exotic, tropical turqoise that you see along the beach, but a more profound shade that makes you want to hug a dolphin and tell it bedtime stories. We landed on the island about thirty minutes later and found out that, being Friday, all of the little picnic tables covered with thatched rooves (they call them 'cottages' here) were reserved. Fortunately, Filipinos are much too resourceful to be deterred by something so trite, and so we found a nice spot in the shade of a few trees and they brought out a plastic table and some chairs for us. Within minutes, my uncles had a makeshift grill thrown together and fresh fish cooking.
While we waited for the food, I took the opportunity to engage in some ghetto spearfishing. I say ghetto because everything was homemade, but my set up was actually pretty legit. The goggles looked like goggles, but they were carved out of wood instead of rubber, and the lenses were taken from flashlights and glued in place, with a rubber strap to hold the whole shebang to your head. The speargun was also carved out of wood, with a short piece of thin metal tubing tied at the end to guide the spear, a rusty metal rod. Propulsion was provided by one of those thick rubber automotive strap thingies. All in all, the set up worked pretty well, and I'm sure I would've caught something, except that all the fish I saw were both very small and very fast, so I gave up and instead paid 25 pesos (50 cents) to snorkel with a rented mask and snorkel. And yes, I saw plenty of clown fish, which is what Nemo is, and if Nemo were bigger and slower he'd have been my dinner.
I spent the rest of the day eating, drinking, swimming, snorkeling, playing guitar, and eventually singing karaoke. Apparently the brandy and cokes caught up with me at some point, because I don't remember anything after singing my first karaoke song and then smoking a cigarette with my feet in the ocean and being amazed by how many stars I could see. I woke up with a hangover, but as it turns out, swimming in the ocean is an excellent cure. Cockadoodle doo.
p.s. - You can see the rest of the photos by clicking here.
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