last Sunday I ventured out to one of my favorite local watering holes. Not
for imbibing but for watching.

Badjiogan is little Barangay, or neighborhood that is known for it's beach.
It has not white sand nor clear water, but, instead has cold water. Cold
springs. The country is littered with them. Hot springs too.

In the lot of a hotel that never got finished you can park and walk a little
row of shops selling this and that passing them by while you walk to the
beach. The closer you get to the beach the harder it is to walk. Where the
mangroves haven't grown lay the only spots of vacant ground and they too,
are occupied by shops which are called Sari-Sari stores here. You have to
watch where you walk. Roots and holes and rocks and such.

When you finally reach the black sand beach the Sari Sari stores give way to
waiting sheds or cottages as the bamboo and palm roofed picnic shelters are
called here. All are full. It's like a daylight tailgate party where the
whole family is invited. Where the shelters end is is cold stream of water
entering the sea. Fresh clear, clean, cold water in spite of the many people
washing and bathing in the half kilometer or so upstream where it flows from
the ground.

Why, it is truly an artesian spring, an underground river. Where is a better
place to put a table than to sit under the tropical sun and have your feet
in cold water. The water is under such pressure, as on many mountainsides
out in the province as the country is called there, where they just drive
pipes into the mountain and the water comes forth clear and clean and cold -
like the pipe on the path to the Snowbird in the North Carolina High
country - they have driven pipes right into the seafloor, if it 'is' a
seafloor being only a foot or so deep at high tide. And the water comes
forth clear and cold.

I like to sit there until I am parched under the sun and have a beer. I
bring my own. Cold beer can't be found unless you consider things cold when
only slightly cooler than the ambient temperature.

Now....think about the pipes. The water is not so clean out in the sea and
it's salty. Pipes gushing clear, clean, cold, fresh water. It's a veritable
all day wet t-shirt contest. The place of the mythical bathing Amish maidens
but the religion is different. Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth but only in
my dreams. Few are braless but all are worth looking at.

And it is quite the way to spend Sunday.

I pulled over and parked and had not got fifty yards before I was hailed by
a breathless young man. My bike is well known around here - there being none
other like it - and someone had seen my bike and ran to tell Jerome who ran
to see me. Jerome being the breathless young man before me.

Jerome is a fine young man, and age doesn't matter so much here until it
gets past my bedtime of around 8:30 or so, and he invites me over to his
place to drink some Tanduay. Tanaduay Rhum being a rather nice if somewhat
sweet - as all things are here - at the hefty price of a buck fifty a
bottle. It's been the ruin of many a poor boy.

I tell Jerome he's crazy to drink Tanduay at 11:30 in the morning and I buy
a couple of liters of San Miguel Pale Pilsen beer and we walk to his place
across the creek on fallen trees and through the bananas trees until we are
on the farm.

Jerome is drinking his with his brothers in law who speak as much English as
I do Swahili, so went spent our time mostly head nodding and smiling and
gesturing and toasting to things I didn't understand and things they'll
never understand. We enjoyed each others company there by the fish pond.
Yes, this 'is' about fishing.

The fish pond is about 15 feet by 30 feet. Pretty good by the standards of
damming up a drainage from a far away rice field and throwing in a few
talapia fingerlings who seem to survive quite well in a variety of water
conditions. Like carp.

One of the fellows brings out an eight inch stick with line wrapped around
it like kite string and has some worms in his hand. I stop him. Miming a
look at the hook, which appears to be a number 12 or so I also mime the
actions of sewing. Requesting thread.

Cock fighting here is a beloved sport and virtually everyone has a rooster
and it is nothing to try a find a few feathers on the ground. Usually some
pretty hackles.

So I whips up a fly, a quickie streamer that I know won't last more than a
few casts and take a cast. I didn't wet the fly first and it spent most of
it's time on the surface with the fish oblivious beneath and by the time I
had it in it was nice and wet but I never got a second cast. Those boys took
over and had a blast with their long swinging arm casts and caught lunch
during much laughter, rhum and beer.. Natural born fly fishermen.

They cooked the fish. I don't eat fish. I went to the beach. End of story.

john