Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (23 page)

In the morning I woke to the sound of a cock crowing, although thankfully this one hadn’t spent the entire night trying to bring in the dawn. Cockerels are prized here in the Philippines; cock-fighting is big business and on Sundays, while the women and children are singing hymns in church, the men are taking their birds out to fight.

There were a number of large birds wandering around the little encampment there on the beach. Benjamin wasn’t into it, not being a gambler, but lots of the other fishermen were and they kept a number of prize birds. I watched two red cocks having a go at each other - wings spread, neck feathers puffed, pecking and tearing and generally trying to claw one another to death. One of the men told me that in the actual fights a sharp knife is strapped to each bird’s left leg and it can be very bloody. They always fight to the death. The winning owner takes not only the money but the vanquished cock to eat.

We thanked our hosts and flagged down another tricycle to take us back to the docks. This was different from the one we had hired before. The driver was enclosed in a cab with the trailer behind him, rather than fitted as a sidecar. It was a sort of tuk-tuk I suppose, designed to carry six people although we’d seen them carry many more. It was called the
Mariner
and had been painted yellow and blue with a mural of a container ship on one panel. The driver sat on the Kawasaki it was built around. As far as I could see, the only difference between it and any other motorbike was the front tyre. Normally they’re rounded so you can grip when you lean the bike into a corner, but this was squared like a car tyre because you don’t lean, of course, you turn the handlebars. He told me his children had bought the tricycle for him - they all worked at sea, hence the name and the picture of the ship.

Back at the docks we boarded a ferry going to the island of Bohol. The ferry was carrying two cars and a truck loaded with watermelons. The crew were all young men, a couple of them stripped to their shorts and hosing themselves down right there on the cargo deck. They told us it was typical to spend a year working on the ferry before going on to crew for the bigger ships. On my last trip I travelled from Dubai to India on a container ship with a Filipino crew. They’d had a great time, and these guys were cheerful souls too, despite the basic living conditions. There seemed to be just one cabin where three of them would take it in turns to sleep - a metal door, metal walls, no porthole and a bed with a sheet of cardboard for a mattress. The others slept upstairs on the vinyl benches occupied by the passengers during the day.

It was a pretty monotonous life, but the skipper told us it was a way of moving to bigger and better things in other parts of the world. There is so little opportunity in the Philippines that many people work abroad for at least part of their lives.

It was all very laid-back and I spent much of the four-hour crossing flaked out on a bench, but when we finally docked in Bohol I jumped up, itching to get going. We were making the next island hop, from Bohol to Cebu, with the navy. Their gunship left at 5 p.m. from the north side of the island.

At the dockside we said our goodbyes to Inkee our translator, who was leaving for another job. We were supposed to be meeting another translator here, called Justine, but there was no sign of her. Standing on the concrete wharf with the sun burning my scalp, the only vehicle I could see was a police car and it was making a beeline for me.

‘Oh shit, Claudio,’ I muttered. ‘Here we go. They probably think we’re drug traffickers or something.’

There were two uniformed cops in the front and a woman in plain clothes in the back, all of them Filipino. They jumped out and the younger cop placed his cap squarely on his head, then adjusted the automatic on his hip. I waited, wondering what this could be about, while through the windscreen the older, more solidly built cop just stared at me.

The woman came over. ‘Hello, Charley. I’m Justine and this is Ramon. He’s come to take you across the island.’

Once my heartbeat was back to normal we drove through town and along the coast road into the mountains. This was a normal patrol for the two policemen, who went back and forth across the island, only today they stopped at the Chocolate Hills so that we could see them. There are 1268 hills in total and I’d been told they looked like breasts, which seemed fair enough. I mean, back in Indonesia we’d seen a mountain in the shape of . . . Well, anyway.

It was a bit touristy, with a million and one steps leading up to a viewing point where the world and his wife were gathered with their children. But it was worth it. The hills
did
look like breasts, and there were hundreds of them, stretching as far as the eye could see - all different shapes and sizes, not too big, but then they say that more than a handful is wasted, don’t they? Ramon told me that in the hot, dry season, when the grass turned brown, they really did look as though they were made of chocolate. Legend has it that thousands of years ago a giant fell in love with a mortal woman, who died. He spent eternity mourning her. He cried and cried; he cried so much that his tears washed away most of the land and left just these hills behind. It was a good story and they were spectacular hills, with paddy fields and little plantations carved in between them.

Back in the police car Ramon took us to the port on the north shore. By the time we got there it was close to 5 p.m. but I could see no sign of the navy boat. My heart sank; I thought we might have missed it. Luckily it turned out that the boat was tied up a little further along the coast. It was a patrol boat, a gunship, and it looked pretty ropy, to be honest. But the crew seemed pleased to see us. All save for one wary-looking guy carrying an M16 that was so old it might have seen action in Vietnam. He really liked that gun; in fact, he didn’t put it down all the way to Cebu. But then I suppose he wasn’t meant to, this was a military vessel after all, and just as Ramon and his driver had been on a routine patrol, so was the navy. The boat, built in 1971, was Korean and very rusty; I imagine that no sooner did they get to grips with one patch than another broke out. It’s in the sea all the time and with the heat here, it must be a nightmare trying to maintain it. We chatted to the captain - a cool, affable guy called Peter wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words ‘Team Navy’ - and he confirmed my hunch.

We cast off and were soon under way, smoke billowing in great black clouds from the exhaust. A little later I took a look in the engine room, which was unbelievably hot and noisy. The motor was a V16 that at 10 knots used 350 litres of diesel every hour. They carried 18,800 litres of diesel, mind you - enough to get us all the way to Manila if we wanted. Peter showed me the full extent of their armaments - 22 mm guns at the back and an old 30 mm in the bows that had never been in use. What were in use were two pairs of 50-calibres that could take out an oil drum at a distance of a nautical mile.

‘Who are you after when you’re out here, Peter?’ I asked. ‘Drug traffickers, people traffickers; that kind of stuff?’

‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘But mostly we’re looking for illegal fishermen.’

Glancing over my shoulder to where the guy with the M16 was patrolling, my thoughts returned to the boat we had planned to take from Sulawesi.

‘Illegal fishermen,’ I said. ‘Where from? Indonesia?’

Peter shook his head. ‘No, in these waters it’s local people mostly. Each island has a ten-kilometre zone where you’re not allowed to fish, and beyond that there are restrictions that we have to enforce. We rescue people from ships in distress as well, of course, answer mayday calls, that kind of thing.’

‘I suppose you must be out in some pretty rough seas?’ It was calm now but I could imagine these waters when the wind was up.

He smiled. ‘I remember one call. The weather was so bad that by the time we got to the boat half my crew were seasick.’

They carried out a couple of exercises - what they called general orders - which involved manning the big guns, swivelling them round to mark various targets to port and starboard. Then later they threw a lifebelt overboard and rescued it, with much shouting and pointing. Crewmen were leaning over the side with boat hooks, while another threw a lifebelt to the one already in the water; I was just glad no one had volunteered me to play ‘man overboard’.

By the time we landed on Cebu it was dark. I stepped ashore, taking a final glance at my friend with the M16. He really did love that gun. All the time they’d been hauling the stricken lifebelt aboard he’d had the rifle trained on it.

‘Just in case he’s an illegal alien, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Or a drug trafficker maybe.’

He didn’t say anything. Just gripped the gun tighter.

TODAY - ONE WAY OR ANOTHER - we would cross from Cebu to the island of Leyte. The more exciting possibility was to go by army helicopter, which would be fantastic. If not, well, there was always the ferry. Not quite as glamorous, but never mind.

In the meantime - breakfast. Cebu is famous for its high-quality pork and I’d heard there was a great restaurant near the market that served a roast at any time of day. A couple of furniture-makers agreed to take us over there. Sixty-seven-year-old Manny and his nephew Andi had created two incredible tricycles using recycled polyethylene - plastic, in other words, but they had designed it to look like woven bamboo. They had taken two Yamaha motorbikes and converted them to shaft drive, before attaching the back of a multi-cab just like the ones we had been in before, with the passenger section shaped to look like a traditional Filipino house on wheels. They were perfect, and a novel way of going to breakfast. Which gave me an idea.

‘Let’s have a race to the restaurant.’

‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘Two teams, then?’

I nodded, indicating the motorbikes. ‘We’ll have Andi, Claudio and me in one; and you, Robin and Manny in the other. How about a side bet, Sam? The loser has to eat or drink anything the winner says.’

I didn’t realise it then but before we even got going we were at a disadvantage, because Andi didn’t know where the restaurant was. It didn’t matter, though, because I was behind the wheel and I had a cunning plan - we’d stick close to Manny, right in his wheel tracks in fact, and as soon as I spotted the place, we’d slipstream him to the line.

So off we went through the busy streets. Every now and then I’d practise the slipstream manoeuvre and move up alongside Manny, only to drop back again when he thought I was going to overtake.

But then I stalled the bloody thing. I missed a gear and it conked out, and as I tried to kick-start it they just steamed ahead. I did my best to catch up, weaving in and out of the traffic, but I couldn’t get close and they made it to the restaurant before us. Gutted, I slowed for the entrance only to see that Sam was still in the back of Manny’s vehicle. Seizing my opportunity, I pulled right up to the door and we piled into the restaurant ahead of them.

‘We won!’ I declared as Sam followed us in.

‘What do you mean?
We
won. We totally won. We were here first, Charley!’

‘No, no.’ I wagged a finger at him. ‘You might have technically got here before us, but we were parked and in the restaurant before you.’

It was tenuous, I know, and in the end I had to accept defeat, which meant Sam would decide my culinary fate. I could tell from his expression he was already dreaming up something suitably unpleasant.

The restaurant was buzzing and clearly very popular. Behind a glass partition a group of young women were taking meat cleavers to entire pigs. They were really going for it - with one chop they were through the bone. How they missed their fingers I will never know. I wanted to have a go, so they gave me a plastic glove to wear on my non-chopping hand and introduced me to a pig that had spent four hours on a spit roast. I got the head off fairly cleanly, but the rest . . . well, I was worried about losing my fingers so I made a bit of mess. To tell the truth, I destroyed it - sawing instead of chopping - but regardless of the presentation, we each ended up with a plate of meat and crackling.

Just before I sat down to enjoy it, however, Sam handed me a bowl brimming with a thick, brown liquid.

I raised one eyebrow. ‘What is it?’

‘Soup.’

‘What kind of soup?’

‘Sort of oxtail.’

‘Oxtail? Sam, this is a pork restaurant. How can it be oxtail? OK, come on, what’s really in it?’

He had a gleam in his eye now. ‘Kidney,’ he said, ‘and liver . . .’

‘And . . .?’

‘Pig’s blood.’

Actually it wasn’t too bad. I had a couple of spoonfuls, but there was no way I was going to neck the bowl in one as Sam was demanding. It tasted salty, like liquefied black pudding. The pork was amazing though, very moist and succulent, and the crackling was perfect. If you’re ever in Cebu you have to try some; people come from all over the Philippines to eat here.