Part V - A detailed Account of a Bat-Cave and its Inhabitants, the unfortunate Incident of the Dog and the Trike, and a last minute Literary stab revealing Sentiments by Ameen attempting some kind of Meaning from the Holiday.
If anyone is still reading, what do you think of when someone says "bat cave"? Notions usually tend to sway towards comic book ideas, but bury those prominent associations in the flymo grass compactor of your mind, and one will realise that a bat cave is actually a cave full of bats. And shit, and other such unpleasentries. There are many things one can feel when entering someone elses lebensraum. When you go into one of those homes hosting pictures of naked men cradling babies and ornaments of teddy bears climbing over countryside stiles, usually one tends to feel shock marinated in a thick layer of revulsion. Sometimes it's facsination and horror, much like stepping into a emotionally repressed married couple's household, where cold stares now replace the warmth that was generated by touch. A bat cave is a tender and sexual marriage of the two.
The terrain to the bat cave was classic Jurassic Park territory. Tall lush greenery, small meandering paths slippery with brown/reddish clay like mud, and a threateningly dark cloud in the distance on that particular day. The entrance was foreboding, sorrounded with jagged volcanic rock, and all that we could see was darkness, soundtracked by the whooshing of either a multitude of bats or the moving sea tide at the bottom. The climb down could easily have claimed many lives - the slippery sharp rocks, the visibility narrowed to reliance on small columns of torch light from the two guides, the precariousness of barefoot climbing, as our flip-flops would surely have been our executioner.
The bat shit stank of an acrid herb or spice being slowly cooked giving off that nose rapey stench that sticks in your nose long after the source is gone, but as we were walking through shit, touching it and rubbing it over our faces, there was no complaining. Once your in the shit, you just have to go along with it. We were not intentionally rubbing shit over ourselves mind you, but inevitably your shit caked hands do touch parts of your body to the extent that once in the clear light of day, we did look like "exhausted refugees, just come through to the other side".
At the bottom were a whole host of natures undesirables; large crabs, spiders and snakes in deceiving repose, coiled tubes of blue, white and black. Some weren't so stationary, slithering off into some dark crevice. Only catching the tail end of a snake moving somewhere before it disappears is, I assure you, a rather unnerving feeling. Where the fuck did it go?
"Are these snakes poisonous" someone asked. Of course not, I thought.
"Yes." was the short response from the guide. Great. Of course. Typical. Here I am walking barefoot in the dark, with poisonous snakes. Of course the natural chain of events in life, cause and effect, would find time to place me and my new friends in this life threatening situation. Thoughts of my own retardedness was however curbed by the thrill of it all, and how we were all loving it. Well I was anyway. I'm not sure about the Finnish girl who had a panic attack when a massive spider crawled over her foot, but hey, its a risk when you do this kind of stuff. Panic attacks, stuffy and stinking cloyiness, sweat bathing your body, possible death, then the dive in the dark into the sea at the back of the bat cave. An impossibly refreshing remedy to our discomfort, one that took you into the deepest recesses of Baywatch territory, diving under rocks to reach another enclave in the water, room enough just for our heads, with the rising tide speeding things up.
The journey back, still high on the rush of fear and near death, rubbed off with playful fancy upon the drivers, who raced each other down a clear stretch of road. It was a close race, and as each trike levelled, fell back, pulled forward, we kept on taunting each other. Injury finally found its claim upon not us, of which we were probably more deserving, but instead on a dog caught under the wheels of the trike I was not in. A yelp, then a bump, as it went under. The trike stopped and everyone looked back at the dog. It got up and limped away.
On my last night I went to bed at around 6am. I had to wake up at 8am for my boat to the little airport, from there to Manila, and then from Manila to Seoul. All with the worst hangover one can find enough alcohol to conjure. I had to give a Filipino worker a wake up call for me, insistent on my missing the flight if he forgot. He didn't of course. It is part of his job I suppose to rouse late night drunks in the morning for their departure. As soon as I reached that deep unfurling and velvet blackness of comforting deep sleep, I simultaneously felt the hands of the worker rocking me awake. He was awfully respectful. Fearful of incurring my displeasure at being woken up he apologised and gave me a wide encouraging smile. Just fulfilling his orders of which I was very grateful. Did I manage to say thank you? I am not sure my mouth could perform such a taxing task. And if swinging my legs out of bed was the hardest thing to do, the rest of the days travel would not bode well. A headache that pickaxes your temples and back of head (A.K.A. The Trotsky) with a disorientation that clouds your vision and makes you literally sway and walk into walls, is not the best condition for international travel.
When knowledge of an "end" exerts its invasive presence upon a mind too rich with pleasure, an occurance of contentment can sometimes find contest with feelings of sadness. The sadness builds bit by bit, with every final thing you do on holiday (drink, massage, swim) to the physical steps made towards the trike, boat, and plane, so proudly and mockingly expectant, ready to perform the functions that your feet are so reluctant to do. And when you finally arrive home to be met with demands of a normal life, the weight of your return truly find its stride. Although in time, a reversal comes about, one that soon finds you forgetting that sharp feeling of despair when you returned. Soon this is embalmed with memories that only grow in strength, bringing with it anecdotes and thoughts so powerful they are palpable. The sadness passes, as do all emotions, and like the retreating tide we are left with fragments, small but very real, fragments from which nothing is lost, fragments from which our memories are found in, fragments strongly formed in the past from which we can use for the future, susceptible to distortion and unreliability as time wanes on, but never wavering in the comfort it provides, both in the precarious world of nostalgia and the unpredictable world of speculation for the future.
And a month on as I was munching on a ginseng boiled sweet that tasted like an old ladies cardigan, I could still feel my flip-flops in-between my toes, peculiar that in their absence I felt it stronger.
