For weeks I had wanted to get out of the tourist zone and I certainly did in coming here.  Stepping off the boat ramp and catching my first glimpse of Dapa, the main city on the island, was enough to convince me of that.

Oh, the usual array of touts accompanied me out of the ferry terminal, barking "Where you go!  Where you go!" and trying to grab the handle of my duffel and usher me into their tricycles, the motor-scooter-type taxis.  But after following the tourist trail for months in Vietnam and Thailand, I walked the streets for a while looking at this and that, wheeling my duffel behind, trailed by a few of the more persistent drivers.

What I couldn't get over was how untouristy the place was.  Instead it was people doing plain ol' everyday stuff -- going about their lives.  No one was pushing tours to scenic overlooks or waterfalls, there were no guest houses or hostels with cutsy names like Sleepy Sams or the Velvet Banana, and, even more unusually perhaps, no white people.

In fact, the whole tourist or spectacle thing was turned onto its head -- now I was the scenery of note.  I was the curiosity or the exotic, mainly because of the color of my skin.  People pointed me out as I walked by; children exuded into smiles as I passed and exclaimed "Hi, Joe!  Where you go?  What's your name?"  Most everybody paused and said hello.

I was so taken with the place that I spent the night at a pension house or hotel before pressing on to the other side of the island, where Jack and Ferelyn McCormick run a beach resort.  Jack hails from Long Island where he was a school teacher.  For a while he had a vacation home in the Poconos, of all places.  Ferelyn, his wife, is a Filipino and an excellent guide for getting about the area.

The trip over to their place was a relative feast of untourism as well.  Although a lot of the roadway was concrete, it was a real teeth-rattler, almost the entire 30 km (18 mi.) of it.  I hopped a ride on a motor scooter and even zipping right along it took about an hour.  

For stretches we weaved in and out, back and forth, and it wasn't all just dodging potholes and mudholes.  The roads have no shoulders and people laid canvases covered with rice or copra onto the surface to dry.  It's as if they claimed the right of way (or should I say "rice of way") and through-traffic had to yield.

In addition, pigs, dogs and water buffalo were sprawled out, resting themselves on the roadway.  Indeed, water buffalo are still much in use here, especially in rice paddies, and I even saw some dragging pole-type sleds, similar to those used by the Plains Indians in the U.S. 

Wow, I thought, this was real down-home stuff...Life with the natives.  I was jazzed at the idea of spending some time there.

I was even more jazzed when I arrived at Jafe Resort, run by Jack and Ferelyn. The place is flanked by coconut and banana groves with the surf booming practically up to the back yard.  Green-clad hills rose in the distance and waves exploded into smithereens onto black lava formations just down the beach...It was like a scene out of South Pacific.

During the week I spent there, I hired local teens as guides (see photos) to take me into local caves, to watch the harvesting of coconut (called "buko"), to visit rice husking mills and to show me different aspects of the ocean.  I took to carrying a straw with me because just a few whacks with a machete (even children use them here) and they were handing me another buko, complete with handy little hole for sipping carved therein.  I drank so much that my belly hurt. 

It wasn't all paradise, of course.  Like in a lot of countries here, it's distressing to see the locals flick garbage into ditches or into the ocean, which is so pristine and beautiful.   The children often get dressed up in their uniforms and troddle off to school, only to have teachers call classes or some ridiculous reason or another and send them right back home.  When I mentioned any of this, I generally got a shrug of indifference -- evidently it's "cultural" or just the way they do things.

Many of the locals get red-eyed and raucous from Tanduay Rhum, the 80-proof local rot-gut.  More than once I saw men, obviously fathers, passed out in doorways with children crawling playfully over their legs and torso.  All in all, the island may have aspects of paradise but it's still real life, with real life problems and sicknesses. 

When it came time to leave, I had a hard time packing.  If one could make a living here, this would be a good place to park and let the world go and do whatever it's going to do.  When I mentioned the massive health care bill making its way through the U.S. Congress, Jack wasn't even aware of it, he watches so little news.  "Am I really missing anything?" he inquired.  After pondering a few seconds, I had to admit, "...Probably not."

At any rate, the Philippines is a big country, spread out over thousands of islands and I only had three weeks.  I was heading north to Leyte to see where General MacArthur landed during World War II and then possibly to climb the Mayon Volcano on Luzon.  I've long had a shine for volcanoes, geological wonders that they are, and this is a big 'un.

Seeing my reluctance to move on, Jack reminded me, "Hey, don't forget, now you know the way here."  As hard as it is to travel in the Philippines, I've learned, that's half of it.

Day At A Time, dragging myself back to the ferry terminal, the adventure continues.