Pasungay!

It was a good Christmas. On the 23rd I went diving and camping at Nogas Island with fellow volunteers Lloyd and Chad. It was great day of diving but even a better night. Chad whipped up an amazing meal over our campfire and we relished our solitude of being the only inhabitants on the tiny island.

This is a shot I took while snorkeling the next morning at Nogas...it's a whole other world under the surface.

My plan for Christmas morning was to bike around the small peninsula that makes up the southern tip of Panay. I left before the sunrise at around 4AM since the ride would be around 80-100km. My headlamp was a little bit dim from the night of camping but I felt I knew the first portion of the road well enough until the sun came up. Well, apparently I didn’t since I crashed at around 4:15AM at a section undergoing construction. Luckily I walked away with only a bloody knee, a few scratches, and minimal damage to my bike. I headed back home with a few lessons learned. The most important being don’t ride your bike if you can’t see more than 10ft in front of you (seems rather logical but apparently it took a crash for me to learn). The discrasia turned out to be one of those Christmas blessings in disguise since I had one of the best days ever getting to know people in my barangay.

New Year’s was spent in Boracay Island – the vacation destination of the Philippines. It was my first trip to the island, which is just off the northeast coast of Panay. As soon I stepped off the boat I no longer felt like I was in the Philippines, or at least how I have come to know it. There was a variety of tourists from all over Asia, Europe and America. There were Greek, Indian, Japanese, Italian, Korean and Mexican food restaurants. The beach is said to be one of the nicest in the world and it was certainly the nicest I had ever been to. The sand was as fine as flour. As wonderful as this all was, my primary purpose for going was to get my hands on a Guinness Stout. Well it turns out Boracay not only has Guinness Stout but Murphy’s Irish Stout which I savored to the last drop. New Year’s Eve night included some fireworks and dancing on the beach with friends to a live Reggae band. As fun as it all was it felt good to get back home to San Joaquin where I could buy a week’s worth of dinners for the price of one in Boracay.

This past week was my town fiesta, which like all fiestas was full of good food and performances. San Joaquin is especially known for the bull, horse and carabao fights that is referred to as Pasungay. The animals square off until the victor forces his opponent to retreat. Like the cock fights, there is a lot of pisos bet on these animals but they don’t fight to the death. The carabao fights were the most impressive due to their sheer massive size. Probably the most exciting part of Pasungay was when one of these big fellas got loose and started heading to the surrounding crowd. I’m used to only seeing them plowing a field or wallowing in a water hole so it was quite exhilarating to watch one outrun five guys and then crash through a fence…No worries, no people were hurt.

This Picture shows one of the 8 performances put on by the highschools of San Joaquin. It depicts the 'Bartar of Panay' where the Malays firt came to the island and traded a golden hat and necklace to the native Atis for the lowlands...This is a pretty big part of history on this island and even islands more to the north where the Malays continued to spread out. The actual rock where the bartar took place is located in San Joaquin.