Too far for discomfort

With Christmas now upon us, you have to wonder how the three kings did their toilet business as they traveled in search of the newborn king. They surely did not have porta potties or lay-by gas stations back then, so did they have chamber pots, privacy blinds and a latrine digger? Did they look for caves just like King Saul did and nearly got his throat slit?

This is the sort of trivia that many balikbayans and tourists coming to the Philippines during Christmas end up talking about as they discover the challenges of finding or going to a toilet in remote villages and islands all over the country. My friend called me last week to share how, after hearing so much about Palawan and the town of Coron, he finally found a reason to go.

A whole bunch of his family members had come home from Canada and elsewhere and so he suggested that they all spend a week in Coron to go island hopping, hit the beach and have a jolly good time just like everybody else who had been there and done that. Unbeknownst to relatives he apparently had a hidden motive which was to check out available properties to buy and develop. Having never been there himself, he apparently found his invitation becoming an over-promise.

For starters, having to get up hours before your flight, work through one to two hours of traffic to the airport and then sitting at a terminal for another two hours plus at your departure gate and then another hour and a half or more just to taxi, take off and fly, all ate about five hours of their first day. Given that almost all people in the group were seniors, they were all already exhausted even before reaching their destination.

They were all glad to arrive at the Busuanga Airport but only to learn that it would take at least another hour or more to get to their hotel in town. Lucky for them the roads are all paved, and the transport vehicles are all modern. Back in my pioneering days out there, there were only two jeepney-trucks plying the route mostly on Saturday or Sunday, taking two and a half hours because there were hardly any roads to talk about. They were simply compacted mud, sand and seashells driven over by graders and bulldozers. And in the rainy season