On the way to our destination we stop at a community rife with tourist economy. It is set on a mountain ridge. On the edge you can look down into a handful of the Philippine's "thousand Islands". The prevalent one is a old volcano- now colored as green as the islands around it. We find a place called "Bag of Beans." It is a coffee house with fresh baking plus. Although obscenely priced for the average Filipino, the Americano I order is by far the best coffee I've had since my arrival in the thousand islands. The beans, i learn, are grown locally. The testament to fresh being best is only confirmed when we take some freshly baked Cinnamon buns with us in the Toyota. They are complimented with cream cheese icing and instantly place stakes for the best Cinnamon buns I've ever had. Actually.
After wondering if we are going the right way for a long time we finally find our destination. Our accommodation is a bamboo house. It is not a "house," of course, in the way the conventional westerner thinks the word. However, it serves our intended purposes of sleeping, resting, socializing and eating, quite well. A large veranda offers an equally large dining table. Agreeably all our meals (more like feasts) and snacks (small meals) over the next two days, not including what we eat in the 'yota on the way home, will be outside.
The beach is a walk away and is covered with boats and rafts, with people, with vendors and the noise of too much happening at once on what in my mind should constitute the quiet sands of a beach. We walk until we are out of the major hubbub, but hatch a plan to rent a boat the next morning and have it take us to a beach that is secluded. This, it turns out, will be the best idea had all weekend.
After an evening of food, scrabble, and guitar playing, my bamboo bed puts me to sleep.
The boat trip is a venture in serenity. The thumping of the diesel engine barely matters when the openness of the ocean is speaking gaping voids of silence to ones soul. I am lost in thoughts when the sun starts a tall order for a ripe sunburn.
The beach is beautiful and even conductive to swimming (the only ocean I have met so far has been in Manila and considered unwise to swim in.) I take advantage of the opportunity to immerse myself in the clean and salty surf.
It might seem strange that the open space and swimming does not fill the part of my soul that longs for those respective characteristics of the west coast. I don't say it out loud, and if you see the pictures that I am taking at my leisure you might roll your eyes at me, but I prefer to wade in the cold March ocean of the Canadian West Coast than this paradisaical tropical location.
Now, before I start sounding all melancholy homesick, I'm not so bad. I surprise myself though. Somehow the things that should move the tenacious tourist to say, "Wow! Look! Snap Click" are a little lost on me. Maybe too much of me is left in Manila. Instead I find the ability to walk alone, to lie and hear nothing but the electric buzz of birds and water and the palm trees breathing heavily in the heat and to sit in the sand where the sand didn't burn me and read or make conversation and know that nobody was in a hurry to be anywhere else. I find these more elemental things to be what I value in this moment. I am enjoying not being in Manila.
Its funny. Filipinos are not known for being the "Go Go!" people that westerners are. I think i can safely say that they are generally, culturally less concerned with making deadlines and noticing minute placements of the minute hand than westerners. Manila, however, has a being of her own. She does not sleep or take marianda (break time). But she does eat. And one would wonder if everyone is running everywhere for no reason other than the avoidance of being swallowed by her.
Manila has, however, provided its places of refuge for me. I don't know how so for others. But one of these moments is found on the trip home from the beach and bamboo.
As we crawl through the traffic in a metropolis part of the city, i find something like peace. Perhaps my mind has finally caught up with my body; catching onto the idea of relaxing. Whatever the case, with the air conditioning on in the 'yota and the shouting traffic locked outside, the billboards (some as liturgical as others are lustful) have started appealing more like Christmas lights. Others might needed to get home at some time, but tonight Manila does not want to chase me. For now, backwardly, The lights are singing lullabies.
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