Wearing blue beach shorts and a light black jacket-cum-waterproof over my thin white T-shirt, I’m whooshing at 65kmph through a smooth, dark-grey road on my scooter. Riding pillion, Lily has wrapped her towel around her head, for it is raining, and the winds are chilly.
The green on both sides of the road reminds me somewhat of Goa during monsoon, my favourite time to visit the Indian coastal state. I’m six thousand kilometres away from Goa though, on an island called Siargao in the Philippines, and currently headed to a beach in the north called Alegria, braving wind and rain.
Even though most roads here are extremely smooth, it’s been a bumpy ride for me otherwise, since I landed on the island about ten days ago. The Internet, for one, is terrible on most parts of the island, and that makes it very difficult for someone like me who works online from a remote location. My hosts tell me that a typhoon in December 2021 destroyed most communications infrastructure, and the government hasn’t fully managed to rebuild yet.
For better or for worse, I had to worry about the Internet situation only for a week, during which I worked from my stay when there was decent Internet, from the beach where I could access 4G internet on my phone and use it as a hotspot, and a restaurant not too far away that had Starlink Wi-Fi that connects directly from the satellite, and is, therefore, more stable.
My stay was for a month. Why did I stop worrying about the Internet after the first week? That’s because I lost the gig.
My February pay had come late, and by the start of the last week of March, it was swiftly becoming clear that this company I had been working almost five years with, was about to close down. Despite the drizzle of resignations, some of us chose to work until the end of the month, hoping that we would hear back from the CEO, who had gone MIA some days ago.
We did not hear back from the CEO. We did not get paid for March. The business stopped operating from April 1.
Sitting in Siargao, I was among the ones least perturbed by the development. I decided to use this time to focus on a book I had been planning to write for a while but not making much headway, and just have a good vacation when I wouldn’t be writing.
Known as the surfing capital of the Philippines, Siargao became a popular tourist destination since it was voted the Best Island in Asia by a popular travel magazine back in 2021. The eponymous surf-romance film of 2017 also added to the island’s charm. At present, the local economy mostly revolves around tourism here and things are expensive, occasionally more than the major cities of the country such as Manila and Cebu, and even locals end up paying tourist prices for this reason.
On Alegria day, I woke up around seven-thirty on my comfortable bed and heard it raining outside. I sat up, switched off the air-conditioner and realised it wasn’t rain but the sound of the AC. I pushed aside the curtain covering the window at the head of my bed and walked out of the bedroom into the hallway to find bright sunlight streaming through the east-facing window. But then, the weather here takes only minutes to change completely.
I freshened up and poured a sachet of formula breakfast into a mug of hot water. The ingredients — oats and some other stuff that I don’t remember — sounded healthy, but I thought they put in a little too much sugar, so probably not. I’m a light breakfast person, and this is very little hassle. I considered sitting at the desk outside my apartment, but decided it was too hot and humid. I, therefore, switched the AC back on, sat down at the table in the bedroom, and resumed writing.
In an hour or so, I typed out approximately a thousand words, and then decided to leave. I had been hearing good things about Alegria since I got here, and had been wanting to visit the beach for a while now. It was more than fifty kilometres away — a ninety-minute ride on scooter.
A fifteen-minute ride from my stay in Santa Fe takes me to Consuelo, from where I pick up Lily, a local whom I had met a week or so ago and became friends, and we headed out to the north. We took a right turn from the road to Dapa, and in a few minutes were zooming through a drizzle and incredibly green surroundings.
Within ten minutes, we come to a turning, from where you get the view of a valley with thousands and thousands of coconut trees and looking right gives you the view of snaking backwaters through the mangroves.
Despite the rain, many people have stopped to take pictures. I decide not to stop now but do it on the way back. We ride on, navigating rain and sun (the weather changes every few kilometres amid the now hilly-now plain terrain), both hilly roads and brief parts that even remind me of roads I’d driven in Australia that stretched in a straight line to the horizon. We pass the popular Magpupungko beach and Pacifico Beach Resort before finally reaching our destination.
Like several beaches in Siargao, you have to pay an entrance fee to get to Alegria beach. But then, it’s probably a local body that maintains the beach, so I suppose it is fair.
The beach is not how I had imagined it. We park on the grounds of a resort with some picnicking parties stationed in the sheds along the beach, which to me, didn’t look vastly different from the rocky one in Santa Fe, which is the locality in Siargao I live in.
Lily, who had initially wanted to push back the plan due to the weather but decided to come along when I said I would be going anyway, is glum. She doesn’t like the rain and says she had imagined the water to be deeper and have more waves. The beach here, however, has bigger pools amid the rocks you can swim or just sit in. Despite the rain and dank weather, the water is surprisingly warm. A group of seven or eight people is already in the water, and I join them, with a grumbling Lily following in after a few minutes.
Lily tells me she is not from Siargao, but visiting family here. She is garrulous and has the exuberant energy of her twenty-six-year-old self, but I can occasionally see her youth struggling to deal with life’s adult problems — an absent mother, an ailing father, elder sisters who apparently don’t care about their father, a shortage of money to live the life she wants….
A bunch of kids join us in the pool, and Lily gets talking to them. They are the children of people working at the resort where we parked the scooter. The kids know exactly where rocks are and they jump violently into the water from the rocks above the surface that gives both Lily and me the heebie-jeebies. Lily asks why they aren’t at school on a weekday morning. Their teacher is having a baby, they say, and there is no one to teach them at school.
Lily tells me about the different dialects of Siargaonon, a dialect of Visayan spoken on the island. Since she has not lived here for a long time, she occasionally doesn’t understand some words in the local dialect, and asks the kids what certain words they speak mean.
Most Filipinos I meet have multiple siblings. Lily, for instance, has two elder sisters. The Filipino society, predominantly Catholic, is unusual in the sense that it is one of the only two countries in the world where divorce is illegal. The other country is, of course, Vatican City. Even though the law does allow for legal separation and marriage annulments, they are not easy to work out. Consequently, with no law to facilitate a process, it is common for people to move out of a broken marriage and start living on their own or with someone else. When it comes to a functioning family with parents and kids, both the parents and the society expect the elder siblings to pay for and raise their younger brothers and sisters. Social pressure, much like India, is a big thing.
This does not bode well with many late Millennials and Gen Z. Shep, a 24-year-old Filipino who works with the government, told me in a conversation a few days later after Alegria: “My parents didn’t ask me when they decided to have another kid. Why should I be expected to bear the expenses of my younger brother? It’s not fair!”
From my rocky pool in Alegria, I see half the horizon bathed in sunlight and dark clouds overseeing the other half. We have been in the pool for more than an hour now and decide to climb out, for both of us were beginning to get hungry.
The rain has stopped and we ride discussing what we want to eat and where. I give in to my craving for fried chicken and burger, and decide to ride down straight close to both our homes, and find the eatery near Dapa, one of the island’s larger cities. Even though hungry, I make a couple of photo stops.
Once again, we ride past the busy Pacifico Beach Resort and Magpupungko beach from the other direction. More than halfway along, I turn back to return to an isolated roadside eatery I had crossed a minute ago and decide to eat there. Lily, who is hungry, doesn’t object. She orders a fish sinigang (a sour and savoury dish with several vegetables and some kind of protein — fish, in this case) and a pork menudo, which is like a curry you have with rice, apart from a pork-sausage-in-sauce starter. They are delicious. My barbecued chicken is not as tasty, but I like the lemon-flavoured beer. We take our time and eat slowly. I take some pictures, update my diary and try to ignore the two dogs at my feet under the table. Lily, who is very active on TikTok, fiddles with her phone.
Satiated, we ride back, stopping to take pictures at valley of coconut trees. It’s hard to talk while riding, and all the riding has tired me out a little. I drop Lily back at Consuelo and we hug goodbye. My helmet makes the hug awkward.
I ride home, take a shower, and then a short nap.
Later in the evening, I wake up hungry, and ride out to a much-recommended pizza place nearby. The pizza, I find, is not as good as all the high praise made it sound. Additionally, even the smallest one you can buy is way too big for me, and I pack almost half of it to take away.
I brush and before bed, manage to churn out a thousand more words.
Happy with my productivity — writing wise — just as I am about to doze off, Lily messages me to say her father’s illness has taken a turn for the worse and she would be going back to her hometown early the next morning to take care of him. I feel somewhat bad because it would’ve been nice to meet and say a proper goodbye, but such is life. We bid each other farewell on text.
We would likely never meet again.