Homeless Diver

A guy lost on Boracay

RSS

Ever had hard-boiled eggs numb your tongue like a taste of cocaine would?

I went for a change in diet and boiled up a handfull of eggs from the sari sari store next to Red Pirates. Being drunk at the time, the numbness didn’t surprise me as much as it should have so I lost interest after Googling turned up mostly food allergy issues.

Next day, before having the breakfast rum, I chowed a leftover hard-boiled egg from the fridge and was shocked at the numbness that I’d forgotten about. It was distinct and strong.

Does anyone know of chicken farming practices here involving chemicals? They still use cyanide for fishing around here and I know this because several fisherguys told me, but I cannot fathom the usage of cyanide around chickens. Egg shells are very porous and pretty much anything gets absorbed…. I wonder what it is?

So, there I was early on a Sunday morning, about 4am making plans for leaving Boracay on a weeklong hiatus. Sometimes ya just need to get back to civilization with decently cooked food, drinkable water, and most importantly… electricity.

My whole point in leaving is the frustration of daily brownouts lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to 7 hours and during my jolly plan making and bag packing, a new outage befalls me: Water. Water outage. No water.

This one pissed me off so bad I took a light and the baseball bat to see if someone had turned off the wrong meter again…. which happens here. Why a baseball bat? In case some old ladies try jumping me from the shadows, you gotta problem with that?

They’re prone to turning off waterlines until getting the correct one, failing to restore the others. While I didn’t see the malfunction at the time, they managed to outdo themselves by simply shutting down the main for the entire complex rather than a single line. Great. Time to drink.

Now I’m grumptimacatin’ and decide to catch an early flight outta this hillbilly paradise; earliest as possible. Hmmmmm, oddly all of the airlines have changed their numbers once again. Soooo now I’m about to get online to look them up when….. Go ahead… Guess….. BROWNOUT ! now, where did mama hide them corn squeezin’s…?

We can summarize from here:

Inebriated
Water outage
Power outage
Up all night
One airline says no seats exist (in low season) and the others dont answer phones
Hot and windless before sunrise
Generator issues where they run it but dont throw the switch

I spent the entire electrically-challenged day plastered to sweat-soaked towels on a sweat-soaked bed that had fresh sheets just a day before. At some point the water came back in time for Montezumas Revenge to stress test the porcelin fixture I hold in such high regard.

We did not leave Boracay that day, or the next, or the following. Two days to recover from feeling like a wallbangin’ diving dolphin so now the aircon stays on high to keep a nice chill on the walls….a little meat-locker effect to pre-empt a brownout.

Gary knows where his bread is buttered. Never ventures to the floor for long before coming back for succulent fruit rinds and water.