Negros: Dumaguete Part 1: Harold's Mansion

After grueling week at the chalk-face (not really – I spent a lot of time observing and the most taxing thing I had to do was re-familiarise myself with the principles of decimal divisions and attempt not to fail a trial run of my friend's maths exam) it was time for another holiday. The Salesians raved about the town of Dumaguete on the island of Negros, so to Dumaguete we did go. We took the fast ferry from Cebu, which according to the guidebook was a 2-hour crossing but turned out to be four and a half – things change fast in the Philippines, as we were to have confirmed later in the trip …

As a result, we arrived late and hungry at our hostel, which luckily was conveniently located just ten minutes’ walk from the port, meaning that we had to disappoint the crowds of taxi drivers who descended on us as soon as we stepped off the boat. Harold’s Mansion (motto “Any cheaper and we’d be sluts”) was another Lonely Planet pick which, despite a couple of initial shocks, turned out to be a great choice. Being a little of the “any cheaper…” persuasion ourselves, we had opted for the cheapest of the selection of very cheap rooms, attractively sold as being on the roof terrace.

The roof terrace was something of a building site but it did have great views down towards the sea and up to the mountains. Unfortunately I couldn’t really see these in the nine o’clock darkness and the first thing I noticed was the toilet block - attractively situated outside on the terrace.  A quick glance at the inside of the huts almost had me running back to the front desk in search of an en-suite upgrade.

Note the squat toilet with bucket flush and the shower head conveniently located in the immediate potential splash-zone of the toilet. Summoning up all my courage, however, I decided to check out the room first and was pleasantly surprised by the immaculate, freshly painted interior, complete with a large fan and reassuringly free of insect life. I was also pretty chuffed to have a room to myself for the equivalent of 7 euros a night.  And closer inspection of the toilet block revealed it to be spotlessly, spotlessly clean despite its primitive fittings. I realized afterwards that what the hostel lacked in infrastructure, it definitely made up for in upkeep, because labour is cheap in the Philippines, while amenities are not always easy to come by. 

My Bedroom Door (You can't see the outdoor urinals from here!)

The food was also tasty and cheap at Harold’s and they provided 30 minutes of free internet every day, along with an extensive lending library of Lonely Planet guides (which proved invaluable to me in planning what to do for my stopover in Hong Kong on the way back). Having survived the showers without too much pain at all, I would definitely recommend it as a place to stay. And if cleaning your teeth over a concrete basin in the open air isn’t your thing, you could always stay in one of the “expensive” rooms, all of which have en-suite bathrooms.

Cebu City Part 3: The Carbon Market

The Carbon Market in Cebu City has everything that makes the Philippines fascinating about it. It's a colourful, cramped maze of dirty alleyways and piles of strange and delicious looking food filled with exotic smells and the occasional stench. Children and livestock wander the narrow paths between the stalls and the vendors observe you as you pass but never stare, just shout the occasional "hello". It's an intensely foreign feeling and you know that you are thousands of miles from home but nobody makes you feel out of place. It feels like a place that could absorb you but as you come out the other side you realise that you have not been absorbed. For that, you would need more time, always more time.

It's a place where the pictures tell the story best, so here are some of the best pictures (with thanks to my friends, who actually remembered to take their camera!)

Cebu Part 2: Seeing the Sights

The first thing you need to know about the sights in Cebu city is that, officially, there aren’t many. The second thing you need to know is that this doesn’t matter in the slightest, because just by walking down the streets you will see sights far more interesting than any historical monument or tourist trap. Nevertheless, a couple of things are worth visiting.

We started our sightseeing trip with the cathedral. Apart from a few ugly statues, I quite liked the architechture and the interior because I'm a sucker for light airy buildings with lots of gold, but more interesting was the schedule of masses outside. Colonised by the Spanish from 1571 to 1898, the Philippines is overwhelmingly a Catholic country, and the evidence is everywhere.

Our local parish church in Cebu attracted up to 20 000 worshippers on a given Sunday, so the pressure on the cathedral must be immense. We had a little chuckle at the idea of weddings being carried out on a “first come, first served” basis but presumably this does mean when you book in advance!

The man in the picture is about to become only the second-ever saint from the Philippines and his beatification is clearly a very exciting event. I love the lack of cynicism revealed by "with more priests" being touted as a unique selling point.

After the cathedral, we went to Magellan’s cross. It was Magellan who brought Catholicism to the Philippines and he seems to have done an excellent job of implanting it in the culture before being killed by a tribal chief after he invaded Mactan island in 1521. The cross you can see in Cebu supposedly contains fragments of the original cross that Magellan planted when he arrived in the Philippines.

The final stop on our tour was the Basilica del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño is a statue of the boy Jesus dressed as a Spanish prince, and was presented by Magellan to Queen Juana, wife of the Rajah of Cebu after her conversion to Catholicism. While not officially the patron saint of Cebu because it represents Jesus himself, the locals are devoted to it and queue up to pass in front of it and touch the bullet proof glass that protects it from attack.

Then, having done our duty to official tourist, we headed back out into the streets to experience some more of the endlessly changing sights of everyday existence in Cebu.

Teaching!

After our relaxing mini-break in the jungle, on Tuesday it was time to do some work. For me, this meant being a teaching assistant for my friends' classes in the vocational education centre where they work. The students are all on practical courses, for example to become electricians or carpenters, but they also have weekly classes in English and Maths. As the classes were large, I spent some of the time just being an extra pair of hands, but I also worked on an individual basis with some of the students, consolidating concepts they hadn't understood, and carrying out mock job interviews. I was there for too short a time to make any great impact on their learning, but it was extremely rewarding nonetheless, mainly because it was so enjoyable getting to know the students themselves. In some ways they were boisterous and confident, calling out jokes in class and cheering each other on, but on a one-to-one basis, they were often either very shy or very charming, or sometimes both. I had the opportunity to talk to lots of them and also to read some autobiographies that they had written, which gave me a real insight into life in the Philippines that I wouldn't otherwise have had.

There were a few things that I found striking when reading the autobiographies and talking to the students about their experiences. Many of their concerns were the same as those of young adults the world over: friends, relationships and their place in their families and in society, but others were a testament to the differences between growing up as a poor, or even very ordinary person in the Philippines compared to most people in Western Europe. Many of the students, for example, hoped to graduate from the college and to get a job to be able to support their parents or to allow brothers and sisters to go to school. Lots of them had jobs in addition to full-time school, not for extra pocket money but to fund their education or even just to be able to eat. Some had seen dramatic reversals in their family fortunes when a parent fell ill or lost their job, which really brought home to me how fortunate we are in Europe to have a welfare system which, flawed as it may be, provides a safety net to protect us from the worst when something unavoidable happens.

Another thing that struck me in their attitudes to life was the central role played by religion. The school is Catholic and the programme places a strong emphasis spiritual as well as academic education and growth, so it's hard to say how much of this is part of the national culture and how much was specific to that particular school, but many, when asked to describe how they had solved a problem, would talk about praying to God for help and explained their goals for living as good Christians.

Having this insight into their lives, their plans, their hopes and their dreams felt like a real privilege and I would have loved to have been able to do more, but time was too short (on this trip at least!).

Cebu City Part 1

In Cebu city, the green hills behind the city merge gently into the smoky horizon and the turquoise sea laps softly at the dirty shore. Tower blocks look down on the mazes of the shanty towns and wooden shacks sit precariously among solid concrete. Advertising shouts down from every wall and roof top and rubbish builds up in silent piles in every corner. The traffic roars, the engines splutter, the crowds swirl and in the midst of it all, the people sit by the market stalls and on the kerbs, staring out at it all in quiet contemplation.

In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.

What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.



A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.

Bohol: The Loboc River and the Tarsier Sanctuary

We were fairly lazy the afternoon of our arrival at Nuts Huts, but the following morning we rented kayaks and paddled our way up the river to a nearby waterfall. It wasn't very far, but gliding over the green water and admiring the coconut palms up above, you could imagine that you were an intrepid jungle explorer. My friend was even intrepid enough not only to jump in for a swim but also to get back successfully into her kayak afterwards.

We had to leave Nuts Huts that morning, but on our way back to Tagbilaran, we stopped off at the Philippine Tarsier Sanctuary. The Philippine Tarsier is a rare animal about the size of your hand that used to be thought to be the world's smallest monkey until its zoological classification was changed. The tarsiers generally sleep during the day, so the guides at the sanctuary go out and locate them in the morning, then take visitors to the correct spots to look at them during the day. One of the ones we saw was actually awake, so we were able to see that they really can leap three metres from branch to branch, as well as rotating their heads through 180 degrees.

Bohol: Loboc

The alarm went off early the next morning. My friends had decided that I was not to be allowed to waste a single minute of my time in the Philippines and, as they had two days off over the weekend, we were going on a trip to the island of Bohol.

The island of Cebu is part of the Visayas, which make up the middle part of the Philippine archipelago. Cebu city isn't really a touristy place but the rest of the Visayas are highly recommended in the guidebooks and Bohol is major holiday destination for the Philippinos themselves. I had my first ever jeepney ride down to the pier, then it took a couple of hours to make the crossing from Cebu to the port of Tagbilaran.

Stepping off the boat, you could tell straight away that this was a tourist hotspot because we were immediately descended upon by a crowd of insistent tricycle drivers demanding to take us to wherever we wanted to go. My friend negotiated a price with one of them and off we went. Our first port of call was the shopping centre to withdraw money and have lunch, then all we had to do was walk over to the neighbouring bus station. Except that as we were eating, it started to rain. And when it rains in the Philippines, it really rains. Within minutes, the streets were awash and I suddenly realised that wearing socks and trainers was a really bad idea.

The most common footwear in the Philippines seems to be flip-flops, and because it's so hot and the rain is so heavy, an umbrella is a better bet than a waterproof jacket. You live and learn.

Luckily the rain had more or less stopped by the time our bus left the bus station, so we were treated to stunning views of the coast as we travelled from Tagbilaran to Loboc.

Loboc is famous for having the second-oldest church in the Philippines. Unfortunately, it wasn't famous enough for the builders of this bridge to remember that it might be something of an impediment to their construction plans.

The town is also the starting point for cruises up the Loboc river with opportunities on board for dining and of course, videoke. We decided not to indulge this time and instead walked through the jungle to Nuts Huts, our accommodation further up the river.

Nuts Huts is a total backpacker experience and owes its success almost entirely to being “Our Pick” in the Lonely Planet guidebook, but that doesn't make it any less of a cool place to stay. You are ferried across the river and on the other side, almost entirely hidden amongst the trees, is a small group of jungle huts on stilts that you can book for the night. You have to flush the toilet yourself using a bucket but the huts are extremely comfortable, and where else could you sit on your own private balcony and admire the banana tree just outside your front door for 800 pesos (about 8 euros) per night? And if you climb the very steep steps up to the reception area, the restaurant, complete with terrace tables and hammocks, serves delicious food as well.