Christmas in the Tropics

Our Christmas vacation turned out to be a very nice couple of days. We started with cinnamon rolls from Cinnabon, and then opened gifts from each other and a few from our families. More are expected this week from Kathy and Carol; it will be nice to stretch Christmas out.

Turns out we gave each other some pretty cool gifts, I think.

I bought Shelly a couple of hand-made baskets/end tables that we'll take home

and she bought me the coolest gift I have ever received: tailor-made shirts.

Yes, I look like a dork, but I have never had a tailor-made shirt.

After opening presents, we headed to Makati to pick up John and Divina, Shelly's friends from Saipan, and brought them back to the house, where we all cooled off in the pool for a couple of hours before Shelly and I made a psuedo-American, psuedo-Filipino Christmas dinner. We had pork chops, after not finding any affordable American hams in the neighborhood, salad and a potato casserole, followed by Shelly's fantastic peppermint ice cream-frozen brownie Christmas dessert. After dinner, we all ended up turning in early: I had been up late going to church and wrapping presents, John and Divina were on Saipan time (two hours ahead of the Philippines) and Shelly, well, Shelly was just sleepy. Plus, we had an early wake-up call for our trip to Pagsanjan Falls, about 2.5 hours south of home.

***

On Monday, we got up early -- too early for a holiday, I think -- and headed south to Pagsanjan Falls, with a stop first to pick up Bobby to drive us through the province. Our destination was the site where Francis Ford Coppola filmed the final scenes of the movie Apocalypse Now, and a great spot for banca rides through the rapids on the Bombongan River.

Driving into town, a large road sign warned us not to "stop and deal with illegal boatmen flaggers along the road!"

Not far from the sign, we saw our first "illegal boatmen flaggers along the road!"

"Boss! Hey, Boss!"

"Boss!"

"Hey, Boss!"

Taken in by their compelling sales pitches, we stopped to talk to one of the flaggers, who thrust a pile of laminated photos of Pagsanjan Falls at Bobby. After a brief conversation, the flagger hopped on the back of a motorcycle, and we began to follow him, first down the main road, then a smaller road and then a smaller road still, until the motorcycle turned into the driveway of what appeared to be someone's house. Bobby rolled the window down about a two inches when the flagger came back to talk to us.

After another brief conversation that I couldn't understand, Bobby rolled up his window and put the car back in gear, leaving the flagger cursing behind us as we wound our way back to the main road through town. Another couple of miles, and we found our way to a hotel resort.

Several years ago, tourist numbers in Pagsanjan declined precipitously as banceros (boatmen) demanded larger and larger fees for the three-hour trip up and back through the rapids, so the government stepped in and set official rates for the trip: P580 per person, plus P50 for the mandatory life vest and P30 for a seat cushion.

We stepped into two bancas, or small, wooden boats, each with two banceros, Shelly and I in the lead, John and Davina trailing behind.

The trip started slowly. The Bambongan was slow and wide at this point, so the upstream paddling was easy for the banceros. And then we went around the bend.

The river narrowed and sped up noticeably as we entered an awesome gorge, with sheer cliffs towering overhead and rapids popping up every few meters. At the first rapids, we watched a downstream banca sail through, before our banceros hopped out and began to pull our boat over the rocks. These guys are experts: they know when to jump in to the river to push, and when to leap from rock to rock to pull. Through at least a dozen sets of rapids, they pushed and pulled until we were just shy of the falls themselves. (We had been warned that the water was too high for us to go under the falls, which is usually part of the trip.) We got out of the bancas and stretched our legs before getting back in and shooting downstream and back to the resort.

When we got back to the car, Bobby said he had done some investigating while we were gone and had uncovered the scam along the road: the unlicensed boats would take us part way to the falls, then demand more money to go the rest of the way.

On our way home, we stopped for what turned out to be a very good Japanese lunch at Hana, a restaurant we had noticed on the way into town. Of particular interest was the California roll which, rather than being made with crab, cucumber and avocado, was made with crab, cucumber and mango. The lunch, while delicious, must have been full of MSG, as all four of us slept most of the way home, and Bobby said he had been sleepy, too.

I somehow left the camera in the car when we went to the falls, but, fortunately, John had his along. Once he gets back to Saipan and e-mails the photos to us, I'll post them.