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Drying Fish Puerto Princesa<br />
Newly-built banca at Roxas<br />
Chance meeting with<br />
Andy aboard 2GO<br />
after 22 years<br />
36<br />
repair shop in a village area. They said we needed a<br />
new inner tube, and since they were going into the<br />
city later, they could buy us one and fix it later in the day.<br />
We were stumped, because we had to make it to<br />
the Underground River before they closed new<br />
entrants to the caves by midafternoon.<br />
We were lost in the<br />
realm of Murphy’s Law, but<br />
were rescued by an old bloke,<br />
who appeared like an angel,<br />
and offered to lend us his old<br />
manual chained bike to go to<br />
the Underground River! Off<br />
we set and arrived, booked,<br />
went by local banca (bangka)<br />
boat with a Czech couple and<br />
a Filipino Honeymooning couple to the unbelievably<br />
awesome trip for 1.5 miles underground seeing<br />
thousands of bats, swooping swifts, stalactites and<br />
stalagmites galore in all their natural thousands of<br />
years of glory.<br />
It was a consuming and mindboggling and superb<br />
adventure magnifying our minds in tuning in<br />
We were<br />
stranded again on<br />
the side of the<br />
road in the middle<br />
of nowhere!<br />
to the environmental wonders and opening our<br />
consciousness to the need to protect and conserve<br />
our natural world for the future of us, our children<br />
and their children to eternity.<br />
We were all smiles as we biked back to collect our<br />
rented bike. But, then, when,<br />
how, why and right there<br />
Murphy poked at us again as<br />
the connecting link on the drive<br />
chain snapped and fell out. We<br />
were stranded again on the<br />
side of the road in the middle<br />
of nowhere! Alfie turned up<br />
passing us by, turning back<br />
and stopping on his very own<br />
chained bike and asked us<br />
what was the problem. Murphy was our problem –<br />
big time! Alfie went off with Nessy, bought a new pin,<br />
went home, got his bike tools, returned to the scene<br />
of our predicament, rolled out his tool bag, refitted<br />
the chain, installed the new link pin and secured our<br />
borrowed bike back to road worthiness……..we<br />
were on our way yet again.<br />
Our rented bike was fixed and we biked back towards<br />
Puerto. We laughed together as we were passing the<br />
exact spot where we had had the outgoing puncture<br />
8 kilometres back towards Princesa. Murphy was<br />
listening in to our conversation, and the bike went<br />
into a fresh wobble, hobble and back tyre puncture.<br />
Our fourth in 3 days of biking – I thought it must<br />
be a Guinness Book of Records winner by now, and<br />
laughed aloud at our new predicament. Some guy<br />
on a bike stopped and told us that 1 kilometre up<br />
the road was a vulcanizing shop. I pushed the bike<br />
there, and we told our stories as they fixed the bike<br />
by flame burning and moulding the inner tube back<br />
to a fit ride-able state. It was night time, and we set<br />
out slowly and carefully for our hour trip back to<br />
the bright lights of the city. Nessy was overawed by<br />
the thousands of stars in the crystal clear night sky,
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