From the Villa to the Farm

 

After three nights on El Nido, we had the waiters float our breakfast on the tiny pool just so my daughter could get a pic for her feed and then they carried it inside where we ate it and then headed out the door with our bags. Julie our van driver was already waiting for us to take us to the airport. We arrived about 15 minutes before our flight's listed boarding time which turned out to be about 10 minutes more time than necessary to get through the check-in process. I could get used to life in the islands. We waited for ten minutes and then were boarding the plane and after verifying there was no caribou our chicken on the runway, we were in the air and heading back to the main island of Luzon and the former Clark Air Base, now known as the Clark Freeport and Economic Zone.

As we neared the coast, we flew over what appeared to be huge fish farms and indeed, in the coming days I would drive near this part again though I really never got a good photograph. Photography has always frustrated me in the Philippines. There are no sidewalks are really good places to walk short of directly in traffic on the road. So I find myself in bouncing vehicles trying to take photos out of a dirt streaked windshield or from the parking lot or pullout where we stopped where there is never anything scenic to look at. I thought many times on this trip that if only I was driving a motorcycle that I could stop on a little sliver of the edge of the road and not inconvenience a van full of people, I would have a lot more pictures to show for my trip.

The former Clark Air Base used to belong to the United States and was created by us shortly after the Spanish-American War of 1899. It remained in U.S. control until 1991 except for three years when the Japanese occupied the base and installed the anti-aircraft guns seen all around (and like the one above) for defense against the returning Americans. It might still be in U.S. hands if not for the huge eruption of the nearby volcano Mt. Pinatubo which erupted in 1991. As it happened to be the time for renewing our agreement with the Philippines, the U.S. decided an airbase now covered in many feet of ash was not worth the money and let it lapse back under Philippine control. It was subsequently abandoned and looted until the Philippines decided to invest money in it again.

As part of that investment, they built a museum that we visited upon our exiting the airport proper. It consisted of seven or eight rooms in a large building though only one of those rooms really had anything to do with the history of the base and then, it was mostly about the geology of the base and not much on the miltary history. The rest of the rooms were just cultural displays of local art, apparel and one room that held only banners of other places around the area that a tourist might want to visit. The Filipino museums seem to be fast and loose with their historical facts but I'll go into that with another post down the road.

Before we left the Economic Zone, we made one more stop to get some halo halo which is probably the national dessert of the Philippines. It is made of shaved ice, sweetened milk, sweetened beans and fruits and is quite delicious though I have only eaten it once 23 years ago on my first trip to the Philippines. Later I learned an important lesson that ice is indeed often made from contaminated tap water that doesn't sit well with my gut health. However, this time we made a point to visit the national chain known for their halo halo and my children risked it and beat the odds, enjoying their halo halo with no repercussions later. 

With some time to kill, we headed north to SM Tarlac which in the Philippines is a series of mega indoor malls. Originally they were Shoe Marts, hence the SM moniker these days, but grew into a mall, then a huge mall and are now found in major cities all over the Philippines. The one in Tarlac probably had four or five floors above ground and a half dozen parking floors underneath it. While it was pouring rain outside (still rainy season), we had lunch, poked around a tiny fraction of the mall and then headed for our final stop which would be our home for the next too evenings.

One of my wife's first cousins works abroad in Saudi Arabia where he makes some good money. Over the years, he has invested that money by buying a farm and improving it by doing such things as building a house on it. Above is that farmhouse which the last time I was here, was mostly just a dried in shell. This time it was a notch above a dried in shell. It has windows and doors but they were always open the entire time we were there. The bedrooms though had doors and small underpowered window air conditioning units in the walls. With the door closed and maybe four hours with the air conditioner set to max cooling, it got down to being a bit closer to comfortable as long as you weren't under a blanket or a sheet. Usually in the wee hours of the morning, it would finally get down to where being covered by a sheet felt nice.

The next day was a mini reunion of sorts with all the various first cousins and associated families arriving on the farm. We did a lot of eating and although I didn't participate in the national sport, there was many who sang karaoke on the covered porches of the farm house. The next evening as we were sweating and waiting for our air conditioner to get the bedroom cool enough to pass out, we though we heard some knocking on our door but because everyone was gone, we thought we had imagined it. Then a day after we left, we were sent the photo below of the visitor who likely had done the knocking and who had a home behind the refrigerator in the kitchen. A neighbor was summoned who dispatched the creature and we were told he was later made into a delicious meal.