Bohol, day 3
02:51 on Friday, January 30, 2004 • 4 responses
In order to give me enough time to get up the stairs and down the jungle path to the road to meet Nerio, I had to wake up at 3:30am. This of course wasn’t a problem since I didn’t fall asleep until about 1, when it started raining pretty hard. The comforting sound of a jungle downpour didn’t stop me, though, from waking up every 10 or so minutes thinking of the various ways venom works its way into a human’s bloodstream.
Turns out that even at the equator, mountain altitudes at 4:30 in the morning are really friggin’ cold. Especially when you’re not wearing a jacket. And when you’re on a motorcycle. In the rain.
I arrived at the chocolate hills, teeth chattering and goosebumps flaring, just as the sky shifted from pitch black to dark gray. Over the course of an hour the dark gray turned to a very bright, very intense gray. Turns out I woke up just in time for a sunrise that wouldn’t happen.
At times the fog was so dense I couldn’t see more than 25 feet or so. At some point a restaurant opened and I went inside, ordered a coffee for Nerio and a bottle of water for myself, and fell asleep at the table. I awoke about two hours later to find the sky somewhat cleared, but as has happened far too often on this trip, the very intense beams of sunlight filtering through clouds and the very wet, very shiny earth, coupled with the haze made for really difficult shooting conditions.
I did my best [1 2], but out of 300 or so pictures I like maybe three or four. Ugh.
The Chocolate Hills are these immense limestone bumps in the landscape. There’s a big plaque at the entrance to the Chocolate Hills complex (vaguely recognizable as a state park masquerading as a hotel) which explains the geological processes by which such hills are created, but I prefer to think that an immense melon baller was used. For a sense of scale, keep in mind that the foliage you see in the pictures is largely comprised of full-grown palm trees.
From sunset to the time I left I spent 4 hours at the Chocolate Hills complex, and since it began to warm up a bit I asked Nerio just to ride around…wherever. I hate motorcycles but one of the reasons I hired Nerio was because if I took a public bus, it just wouldn’t be possible to stop and pull over to take a picture or revel in the scenery. I told Nerio when I met him yesterday that I don’t like motorcycles very much and he said he’d drive carefully, which he did at all times, bless him, but his bike was pretty old and his rear suspension was shot, so my back was getting pretty bent out of shape. At one point, while stopped to eat a lunch the folks at Nuts Huts packed for us, and he asked why I didn’t like motorcycles. I told him that I’m named after my father’s brother, who died in a motorcycle accident long before I was born, and that I have a handful of friends who have been seriously hurt on motorcycles. He started to tell me some stories about friends of his who had been in motorcycle accidents and when he got to the one about his friend who ran into a bus head-on, I asked him to postpone telling me those stories until we arrived back at the hostel.
I don’t know if Nerio was driving with any direction in mind, but the scenery on Bohol is fantastic. At one point we rode past an old woman who was smoking a cigar, barking instructions to some farm workers in a rice paddy.
I think anyone who takes pictures regularly has a whole catalog of memories of things they wish they had taken time to photograph. Riding past the woman with the cigar was so remarkably cinematic that it was all I could think of for about five or so minutes, at which point I asked Nerio to turn around so I could talk to the woman I had seen. Concepcion, as she’s called, is a rice farmer whose husband died a few years ago. Our conversation was short because she had some workers to attend to on the other side of the paddy, and I only took two shots of her, but I’m glad this memory made it into the camera and not onto the list of “could have, should have” photos.
A half-day of riding around on bumpy mountain roads is apparently all the riding around on bumpy mountain roads that my back can handle. After speaking with Concepcion, I had trouble getting back on the bike and had to ask Nerio to take me back to the hostel, where I slept for the remainder of the day.
Through Nerio I’ve arranged for a boat to pick me up at the river tomorrow, which will take me downstream to Loboc, where I’ll meet Nerio for another ride around the area before heading back to Tagbilaran to catch my return flight to Manila. Should be a full day; I hope my back is up for it.
[This entry was written on December 23rd. Its date will be corrected after all entries and photos from my trip to the Philippines are online.]
