Deep Questions

B: "Ryan?"
R: "Mmm?"
B: "Is there really a WKRP in Cincinnati?"
R: "...I've never thought about it before."

Palawan

So I got to Palawan and headed straight for the jeepneys going to Sabang. Mine broke down immediately, which meant that I had two hours to kill at the market before catching the last one out of the city.
Mmm, markets.
Sabang was beautiful, and sunset isn't the worst time of day to arrive.
How pretty is this beach? The answer is so pretty.
Here's where I stayed in a nipa hut on the beach, for about $5 a night. I had electricity from 6-10pm, and the mosquito net was included. That's a bargain.
Here's a banca, which I decided not to take and hiked through the rainforest instead. If I get Japanese B encephalitis, I do owe Nurse Jane an apology.
I took the Jungle Trail, which is basically marked by spots of orange paint on the trees. Once again, I'm reminded that I'm not what you might call a hardy individual, as I tripped and sweated and cursed my way through 5 kilometers of dense foliage.
Here's the underground river, and nobody warned me that it's full of thousands of bats and swallows who screech and flap around as you pass underneath them. If there were pigeons, I would have leapt out and swam like hell.
See this look? This is relief at having a helmet and not being attacked by bats.

Good Morning, Manila

I'm back in Manila after a whirlwind end of the week - on Thursday, I went into the mountains outside of Cebu for a gay beauty pageant until 2am, went directly to the airport for a flight to Cagayan de Oro and - upon landing - started interviewing members of a group from a nearby town, skulking around the night market in Divisoria, and not getting beheaded or shot in cold blood all day Friday, then got a few hours of sleep before flying back to Manila on Saturday for a forum on trans issues in the Philippines. A bunch of the women invited me to hang out afterwards - and they were a blast, which is why I just got back. Now it's technically Sunday and 4am, and I should sleep, except that I forgot to buy groceries and (worse than that) deodorant, shaving cream, and shampoo to replace the set I threw out in my last hotel to make room for my books. That means I have to go to the mall first thing in the morning, which, at this rate, will probably be sometime in the mid-afternoon.

No, Now

This sounds absurd, but I need to know how the Day After Tomorrow ends. SuperCat showed it on both ferries this afternoon (on the way to Tagbilaran and on the way back to Cebu) and both times, the trip was ten minutes shorter than the movie. I got to the tearful reunion, but it was unclear whether humanity survived or froze to death, and that seemed sort of important.

PS. Who shows a movie like the Day After Tomorrow on a ferry in the middle of a thunderstorm? I guess it's cinematically better than Hellboy, which we watched on the bus to Baguio, but the theme is sort of upsetting when you're reading about the Princess of the Stars sinking and nervously bouncing from wave to wave.

PS. Today, I saw the Chocolate Hills, rode on the back of a motorbike across Bohol, swooned over a tarsier, ate carabao stew, and made it back to Cebu. And all this, in approximately six hours in Bohol.

Welcome to Cebu, Now Go To Hell

Boo, coming from Palawan to Cebu is hard. Yesterday, I woke up at 6:30 and spent the day island-hopping and snorkling in Honda Bay. I saw angelfish and coral reefs and played with starfish and got the worst sunburn I've ever had in my entire life. I ate a bluefin tuna and shrimp and rice with my bare hands, and for dinner, I went to KaLui and took off my shoes and had another fish, with oyster soup, seaweed salad. fried camote, and shredded vegetables, with a half-melon full of fruit for a (complimentary) dessert. Aside from my sunburn, which was already painful by the time I went to bed, it was perfect.

Today, I had breakfast in a cafe that was approximately 100 degrees, caught a flight and paid like four times too much for a taxi from the airport to the YMCA, found that the dorm reservation I'd made wasn't made and they only had doubles available, found a fairly low-budget pensionne that didn't even make the Rough Guide's cut, and then ate something involving green beans and what turned out to maybe be pig's ears for lunch thinking that the ears were vegetables.

I want my island vacation back.

Palawan!

So I'm doing all my traveling this week, which is how I spent most of yesterday bumping from Puerto Princesa up to Sabang in a way-overloaded jeepney full of vegetables, rice, cartons of nonperishable foods, and about thirty people. Still, when I finally got there, I rented a nipa hut on the beach for $5, washed off in the South China Sea, jogged down the beach for rice, grilled fish, and San Mig, and then went for a midnight swim. It was probably the most beauty I've seen in 24 hours, ever. I stood out on a sandbar for like twenty minutes just staring up at the sky, which is literally blanketed in stars and cloudy galaxies, which I don't think I've ever actually seen that clearly before. (I'd like to say that I slept peacefully afterwards, but that's not true. I woke up once in the middle of the night and had to pee and almost killed myself trying to get out of my mosquito net and almost woke up everyone on the beach when monitor lizards kept running over my feet en route to the bathroom and I almost screamed.)

I woke up at dawn to grab coffee and a banana pancake (yay!), then hiked through the rainforest (apologies to Nurse Jane) on the Jungle Trail to the Underground River. Somehow, I managed to get into the first boat that was leaving, tour the river, hike back along the Monkey Trail (and by hike, I mean periodically sprint), and catch a jeepney back to Puerto Princesa, where I'm spending the night before Honda Bay tomorrow. Also, there's a total 'mo working at the front desk of my inn. It's a good thing I brought a very damp version of my survey. (I got soaked in my own sweat hiking 5km to the river, then once again hiking 5km back.) And then I changed shirts and reapplyed deodorant, and then I got rained on and soaked again. Anyway, I'm going to polish off my shopping, because the outdoors isn't working for me today.

On Color Schemes and Gay Porn

I don't know how I just found this out, but the Red Power Ranger does gay porn for Sean Cody. Congratulations, your childhood dreams are either fulfilled or destroyed forever.

So basically, the pink one was the girly girl, the yellow one was Asian, the black one was the black guy, and the red one was the porn star. Um, fitting? (The blue one was just a straight-up geek, but you can't have a plaid Power Ranger, and anyway, it's probably a reference to the fact that he was depressed or drank a lot on Sundays.)