Fighting with Spiders, and Other Creature Stories

To wrap up my posts on the Philippines, I have a couple of stories.

Our first morning in El Nido, we were signed up to go an an island hopping tour that began at 8 am. When the alarm went off, Dan hit the 'off' button and drowsily stumbled out of bed. He turned on the bathroom light and then before entering, turned around, probably to tell me to get up. Instead, he froze.

He said, "Don't move."

Which scared the hell out of me, obviously, because I naturally assumed that immediately behind my head lurked a massive and ferocious monster poised to devour me whole - or something with a similar terror value. Then, in a squeaky whisper, he said, "THERE IS A GIANT SPIDER ON THE WALL!"

It's watching you...

I sat bolt upright and followed his stare: high in the corner of the room, a jet black spider with a leg-span larger than my palm and huge, glowing eyes was staring right back at Dan. Who backed out of the room to get help (after snapping a picture of course). I did not move. I'm proud of my reputation as a fearless lady, but I was not about to mess around with an enormous murder-spider.

Dan reappeared a moment later, followed by the receptionist. He looked at the spider, looked at us, paralyzed by fear, and grinned. He casually strolled over to the spider, reached up with his bare hand, and shooed it from the room - touching it in the process.

I'm sitting there thinking, this man deserves a medal of some kind. And maybe some antivenin, just in case the monster's fangs dripped on him. But he just says, "You don't need to worry. Not poisonous. That is a Filipino house spider!" And then he wanders off, chuckling to himself about the sissy tourists.

We managed to put it out of our minds for the rest of the day. But when we returned from our tour that evening, I bent down to rummage through my pack for something, and out from behind it scuttled - to my horror - another spider. But slightly smaller. Slightly.

Dan and I both jumped backwards in terror, but in a moment of either supreme bravery or extreme idiocy, I decided that for the sake of my pride, I couldn't call on reception again. Who knows why pride mattered at this point. But I mustered all of my self control, and I reached out (absolutely without touching it. I shudder at just the thought.) and began to shoo it towards the open window.

It ran below the window and under our bed. We left the room immediately to drink as much as we could afford and for the next several nights we upheld a ban on looking under the bed.

This is Dan's big mitt in the photo, so it is a sizable bug.

As for other insects, we saw some big cicadas and beetles and ants and the like, but the largest bug we saw was a giant grasshopper. He showed up on our bathroom door while we were hanging out in Sabang. I thought he was a bit cute, really.

The other story:

Dan was swimming in the waves at Sabang's beach on the second or third day we were there, and a local guy approached him. He said, "You shouldn't swim right now. One of the boats saw a crocodile!"

We didn't think much of it until, a few hours later, we were sitting on out porch and playing cards, and a couple of boys ran top speed past us on the beach, largely remarkable because as we were at the end of the beach, no one ever walked past. Let alone ran. A couple more ran by, and as we watched them go, we noticed something in the water way out behind them.

Something long and large and a bit lumpy.

So, we donned our sandals and climbed up the jagged rocks just past our little stretch of beach to get a better view. Turns out there WAS in fact a salt water crocodile lurking in the bay! Sadly, our pictures aren't worthy of putting up. But we got a couple views of his snout and his tail, and he was at least three, if not four, metres long.

As it turns out, although nearby Puerto Princesa has a commercial crocodile farm, wild crocs are almost unheard of around the Sabang area. So within twenty minutes of us scaling the rocks to check it out, half of Sabang's small population had raced down the beach and climbed up to get a look.

For the rest of the week, all of the locals employed in the tourist business denied the croc's presence until we told them that we'd seen it ourselves, because they were worried about the town gaining a reputation as unsafe. When we left a few days after the sighting, the local opinion was that it had probably swam up the river and into the mangroves in search of food.

And to cheer you up after the stories about scary creatures, here is a picture of a cute beach dog.

The jeepney: the best vehicle going. I think that tube either a snorkel or a gas line. Or both?

We went to the Philippines on a bit of a whim, and despite the crazy creatures, I am so glad that we did. The people are fantastic, always smiling and happy. The mangoes are the sweetest I have ever tasted. The landscape on Palawan is unbelievable. And they drive in jeepneys. Amazing. I'd go back in a heartbeat.

S.