21st April - Port Carmen (Cebu Island, Philippines)

Tuesday 21^st April 2015

10 degrees 34.055N

124 degrees 01.811E

Port Carmen

Cebu Island

4.8m depth

We have moved just a few hundred metres away from the shipyards.  It was very noisy there, and we were a bit in the way, as various rusty boats and ferries lumbered in an out.

This is nicer.  I can swim; the water is clean.  And at low tide we can see people walking on water, very biblical…

Pete has organised to have some stainless steel framing to be made by an efficient-seeming bloke called Alex.  This is for the solar panels – a more effective system, which Pete has been designing over many months, laboriously measuring angles and drafting designs.  Alex is certain that the materials will arrive this morning and that he will have everything made and ready to go in no time at all.  We will see…

In the meantime…well, I can swim, and read, and do various boat-y chores.  And we can walk up to the highway and catch a motortricycle to Danao, a fairly large city a few kilometers down the coast.

We enjoyed our few hours there yesterday afternoon.  The tricycles here are quite different – much more dilapidated than in other places we have seen this far.

There are also lots of fairly shabby-looking human-powered tricycles.  It looks like very hard work indeed, riding those old bikes with no gears, with a sidecar carrying many people and many goods.

We found a large shopping mall, full of things we hadn’t seen since manila.  Stationery items, cocktail shakers, luxury goods!  I bought: new tweezers, a new china coffee mug (my beautiful penguin one from Tasmania has split in half, to my sorrow) and two packets of clothes pegs.  The last of the big spenders!

We also bought some food in the supermarket area.  I was very tickled to find, in the canned vegetable aisle, a woman, in her fifties, happily shopping with a toddler, and singing along very loudly to the Cranberries.  I stopped her and said, “Good song!”  “Oh yes,” she said, “I love Zombie!” 

Upstairs was a huge floor devoted, mainly, to clothes.  And oh how some of the small girls in my family would have loved the dresses!

We needed a few vegetables so we left the noisy  airconditioned shopping mall and found a very large market just down the street.  There were dozens of stalls selling rice.  And there were dozens of varieties of rice!  We were quite astounded – who knew rice came in so many varieties??

Rice vendor and her beloved Pope Francis doll

Some of them have regional names, others are more esoteric – I really want to buy some Lion King!

The vendors were all very happy to chat, and were very keen to have their photos taken.  I bought some shallots from this woman, with a fairly shy little granddaughter, called Darri-Kay. 

A few minutes later I found Pete, engaged in spirited bargaining with a very cheery, loud girl at a stall on the corner on the laneway.  She was shrieking with laughter because he accused her of robbing him – five pesos was far too much, he said, for five tiny calamansis (weensy little limes.)  “AAGGHH!” She cried!  “You make me so angry I want to KILL you.  Let me go and get a knife!”  She and her cohort were thrilled to pose for the camera and a few seconds later, there was my shallot lady, with Darri-Kay, saying, so proudly!  “That is my daughter!  Which one of us is more beautiful?”

I think they would like Pete to come back to argue with them every day!