ABW Dec 2017

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