Baybay Heaven

My Rough Guide calls the city of Baybay (pronounced "Bye Bye"), "a frenetic little port town".  The author must've been on a valium and vicodin cocktail to find this place frenetic.  As far as I can tell, there are two lazy boats that wade in and out of town each day.  Recently Baybay was awarded status as a city, a moniker that brings great pride to the locals as it affords them capital improvements like better roads and bridges.  I hope they get the structural changes they want without compromising the character of this 'city'.  For now, it's fetchingly sleepy, accessible and friendly.  There are few cars or motor-tricycles here.  People get around via the ubiquitous pot-pot (pronounced 'pood pood'), a sheltered pedicab that costs about a dime per person per trip, whether you are going one block or across the city.  There are no traffic lights and occasionally an amusing traffic jam occurs when several pot-pot drivers refuse to yield resulting in near collisions, quick stops and sharp words.  Life here is uncluttered, but holds some amenities that are nice for a western traveler.  The power grid is consistent which means hotels have air conditioning, the beer is served cold and internet is readily available.  There is a Dunkin' Doughnuts (read fresh brewed coffee!) but none of the other chain restaurants that riddle bigger cities like pimples on a McDonald's fry cook.

I've been lured here by friendship and food.  Sarah and I became fast friends on the ferry ride to Cebu.  She tried to convince me to visit, and ended my capitulation with the magic words, "we're known for our barbeque."

Barbeque!  Blessed barbeque!  I'm an aficionado of open flame; a lover of all things charred.  I play with marinades, rubs and mops with the enthusiasm of young boys discovering their nether regions.  I arrive at 10am.  Sarah whisks me away - "pot-pot!" - to breakfast on grilled chicken wings, pork, fish, squid and prawns. A thick slab of blue marlin costs a dollar-fifty.

Barbeque vendors in Baybay

Clockwise from upper left - Bbq seafood and chicken, sauteed ampalaya (bitter gourd), fish sinagang, kinilaw - my new favorite: it's Filipino ceviche with coconut milk.  What a breakfast!










The food is perfectly flavored and cooked, then we dip it in the sauce of sauces - calamansi - a small citrus that tastes like lime and tangerine had an affair, squeezed with soy sauce and chili pepper vinegar.  It's my favorite flavor of the Philippines.  I would slop french fries with this.  I would dunk cheesecake or styrofoam in this sauce and call it a feast.  We eat the food with hanging rice; a brilliant Visayan invention wherein rice grains are woven into small, enclosed palm frond baskets, then cooked in boiling water.  The sealed leaves keep the rice fresh for several days and make easy transport.  It's the perfect way to take your lunch out into the fields or on your fishing boat.  The restaurant itself competes with the down home brilliance of the food.  It 'floats' on stilts over the water, crafted completely from bamboo, palm and nipa.  We throw our bones into the ocean and watch little fish cannibalize the carcasses of their cousins. 

The trannies always find me.  In every rural stop in the Philippines there seem to be gaggles of glittering, giggling pixies in tube tops, flocking to me like vampiresses to a virgin with a paper cut.  I have a trantourage within minutes of my arrival.

The homosexual dynamic works differently here than in the west.  Bakla, a linguistic merging of babae, girl, and lalake, boy, tend to be very, even flamboyantly feminine.  They sashay, squeal and dress somewhere on a continuum from androgynous to Charo.   They date straight men, usually becoming a hidden or open mistress.  Its a hard life, full of heartache.  The rural bakla find me fascinating.  The bubbling babes in Baybay have never met an American gay before.  They are fascinated by my comfortable maleness - (I pause here for your snickering, you predictable a-hole) - by the fact that I'm attracted to other gay men, and that I've been in a relationship with another gay for eight years.  Only in big cities like Manila or Cebu does one find the more westernized notion of a gay man who dates other men. 

In the evening, Sarah, my triad of trannies, and I go swimming.  They strip down to their panties; small hormone pill induced breasts kiss softly back to the full moon.  Incandescent shrimp streak in green lights across the calm water's surface.  Silent lightning illuminates Cebu in the distance as we splash, we float, we squeal.  We redefine "frolicking".  I'm cavorting with mermaids.

Later, showered and gussied, they in short dresses, I in bermuda shorts, are quadruple seated on a motorcycle with a one-eyed driver.  The mermaids, Cyclops and I speed to a fiesta at a town close by.  The road is dirt and rocks and we shriek in fear and fun over each dip and bump.  We take a sharp right - into a parade of children.  Screams fly on both sides as the kids break processional decorum and dive  out of our path.  We dance the night away at a disco in a bamboo structure on stilts over the water.  It's almost too hot for dancing, but the beer is cold and an ocean breeze blows through this wall-less building.  One of my new friends is paying a lot of attention to me, dancing closer and closer with each song, each glass.

"You're beautiful," I tell her, "but I'm not available."

"You can be single here," she smiles.

"You're the most spectacular woman here.  I'm with a man."

She's slightly miffed, but keeps a more decorous distance.  We all dance until the morning, when, tipsy and tired, we devour grilled chicken and soup before I head back to my hotel.

Town market in Baybay