We have been traveling for fourteen months. We travel to chase wind and waves and adventure. We kite, surf, snorkel and freedive, and because of this we need to travel with a ton of gear and a pretty hefty first-aid kit. When you include all the gear, Tam and I each travel with two bags that weigh about forty-nine pounds. Yep, that is almost two hundred pounds of gear. This isn’t a huge deal generally, but when traveling with twelve other people – six of whom are kiteboarders – the mountain of gear gets a bit lofty.
I can’t see this fitting in a tuk tuk. We might need a dump truck.
And this is only the gear from four of us.
As an example, We left here at the Windrider’s Inn for Mindoro, and the trip involved a Tricycle (tuk tuk of sorts), a half-mile to a van, to the port where we got on a small ferry, to another port for a bigger ferry, to another van to get to our next location. That means loading and unloading the pile of gear six times to make that one move.
Just moving gear seems to be how I get my exercise every three to four days: lifting fifty-pound bags overhead over and and over.
This is tough on an old guy.
Eventually, it all fits in and on there.
Sometimes you get all the gear in there and there is almost no room for us. I am in there somewhere.
It’s not all about moving things on land. When we take a boat to an island kite spot we even have to form a fire drill line to transport another ton of kite gear to shore.
And then there is the problem with the tuk tuk mafia: When we arrived at the pier in Bulalacao, exhausted from another day of schlepping gear on and off of ferries and such, we ran afoul of the tuk tuk mafia, and it all went to shit. But, as so often happens, adversity turns to adventure, turns to a great story: On our arrival we were informed by the leader of the tuk tuk mafia (a very serious filipino man that introduced himself as the “chairman”) that we would not be able to take a van to the hotel where we would be staying, but instead would need to have the fleet of tricycle tuk tuks take us and our mountain of gear to the “terminal” five minutes away. They wanted five hundred pesos (ten dollars) per person to do this, and the consensus from our group was that this was unacceptable (yep, that is one hundred and forty dollars to move us all five minutes up the road). When we refused, the “chairman” got a bit excitable and things began to get a bit spicy, so we called the police. A very long, very incomprehensible argument in Tagalog ensued between our filipino friend Milo, the “chairman”, and the two police officers. The final decision was that the police would take us and our gear to the terminal so we could transfer to our van there. That left one problem: The police just had a covered pickup truck that they used as a paddy wagon, and it didn’t seem like our gear was going to fit in there with enough room for all of us, leaving half of our group to wait behind at the mercy of the tuk tuk mafia and the ever-unpleasant “chairman”.
I decided it was time to go full-filipino and I was determined to get our gear and all of our people in that truck if it was the death of me.
It fit!
I managed to jam a thousand pounds of gear in the center, stacked to the roof, and eight people in the truck (that is Avi and Michelle at the back. You really can’t see the rest too much). Unfortunately, that meant there was no room for Milo, Dan and I in the truck, so we took the next most obvious solution: we hung on the back of the truck and stood on the bumper with the second police officer. We made it safely to the terminal, only to realize that the “chairman” had followed us there, and was demanding the same payment for us to get to the terminal in spite of the fact that he hadn’t driven us there at all. Another long, equally incomprehensible argument took place, culminating in the police offering to drive us out to our hotel.
So, back in the truck for everyone, and back to standing on the bumper and hanging on for dear life for the four of us. The ride turned out to be forty-five minutes at eighty kilometers an hour on windy, steep, hilly roads in the dark, with us dodging tree branches and bushes the entire way.
Of course we needed video evidence of the trip so I sorted out taking a selfie video while hanging on with one hand and swinging around wildly on the back of the speeding truck. It didn’t really come out. I really do like the picture Tam got of Milo hanging off the side though. We were reminded of when we were all dumb kids in the eighties doing stupid reckless things and loving every minute of it the entire time. Nobody fell off the police truck and we all survived, so we will call this one a grand adventure and a smashing success.
In the end we all arrived, in one piece, and with the police officers at least as excited about the adventure as we were.
Good times.
Wind, Water, Waves, Wander 