A great escape, the Villa Escudero

Villa Escudero is on the grounds of a working farm, but you wouldn’t know that without reading a bit or wandering off the carefully groomed grounds. An engaging hostess met us at the well appointed reception area, arranged (nonalcoholic) welcoming drinks for us, provided a bit of background, and collected our entry fee. I think spending a few days would be the best way to enjoy the resort, but our friends’ travel schedule didn’t allow for an overnight stay. We opted for a “day use” package at 1200 PhP (about $25) per person. That’s expensive by Filipino standards, but we thought the price was well worth it. Admission included use of the facilities, carabao cart rides between points of interest, and a wonderful nine-course lunch. That’s right, 9 courses! My wife did the counting, I was too busy eating.

Lunch was served in an outdoor restaurant at the base of a dam. Water pouring over the 30 foot wide spillway falls around 20 feet into a shallow pool with a concrete floor. Adventurous diners can eat at tables in the pool with water rushing around their feet, but my wife (remember her? She counts courses) was wearing good shoes so we ate in a shaded alcove overlooking the pond.

After lunch, we wandered along the lake formed by the dam. Many guests stay in rustic appearing cabins along the lake’s edge. Shaded verandas at each cabin extend over the water and I would have been happy curling up with a good book, or two. More conventional lodgings are set back from the water and tastefully screened by luxuriant plants. Recreational opportunities include bamboo rafting and an appealing three pool swimming area with water slides and a Jacuzzi. We also found our way to a small chapel, a couple well disguised meeting areas, and another restaurant or two. I hedge on the numbers because activity areas are separated by well tended plant walls and I’m not certain that we saw all, or even most.

We finished our visit with a stop at the family museum. I found it to be a disappointing hodge podge of collectibles without unifying themes or interpretation. However, none of my companions shared my reaction and I’m probably over thinking things. Forgive me, at one point in my career, I oversaw a graduate program in museology and critical thinking is an endemic fault among retired professors.
For more about Villa Escudero, visit their web site at http://www.villaescudero.com/
Now, the horror story. We finished our visit around 4 PM and planned to stop for a relaxing dinner on the way home. Instead, we found ourselves in a driving nightmare. The brilliant blue skies of the morning had been replaced by ominous clouds, streaks of lightening, and heavy thunderstorms. Open roads that we followed in the morning were now endless miles of bumper to bumper traffic. Busses and trucks tried to bully everyone while tricycles and jeepneys filled every open spot. In developed areas, even pedestrians were moving faster than we were.
The stress filled drive home took more than four hours and our relaxing dinner was replaced by take out pizza from a roadside stand. By the end of the day, I was grateful for the bottle of bourbon waiting for me at home and my “cool down” time gave me a chance to reflect. Not even the nightmare drive dimmed my fondness for Villa Escudero and I think I have discovered the secret of an enjoyable visit. Drive there in the morning, spend a night or two in one of the lakeside cabins, drive home … IN THE MORNING, and pray for good weather.

In a bad mood, thanks to "WeRoam"

Today has been a rather annoying day, mostly because I’ve been fighting with an unreliable Internet connection.
As I explained in an earlier post, telecommunications lines have not yet been laid in our subdivision. PLDT, the Philippine phone company with rights to the subdivision, doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to wire the area. Only about 100 homes are occupied so far and the remaining 700 or so will remain vacant for a few months yet while the “finishing touches” are added. Besides, Filipinos make extensive use of cellular phones anyway.
Unfortunately, this situation is hellish for those of us who live and die on the Internet. In the interim, we’re relying on a 4G wireless service called “WeRoam.” My guess is that the name comes from their technical service people who always seem to be somewhere else when needed.
We’ve had a week without Internet service and I’ve worn a groove in the roadway between our home and the nearest Internet Café. In my spare moments, I’ve called all of the customer service/support numbers provided by PLDT and have gotten nothing but recorded messages saying the “number can’t be completed as dialed.” I’ve also emailed customer service from the Internet Café but they haven’t responded.
Today, in desperation, I stopped by the local PLDT office. The pleasant woman at the desk said she couldn’t do anything and suggested I call the customer service number. I looked pathetic and convinced her to make the call for me. She was able to get through on an inside line, but the technician hung up as soon as I said “Hi, I’m having trouble with WeRoam.”
I must have snarled louder than I realized because the receptionist smiled, said “get the technician’s name first,” and redialed for me. Good strategy, this time Arcelee took notes before hanging up on me. Now I’m sitting waiting for a call back. It’s been 7 hours; maybe I should stop holding my breadth.
My wife—a patient and forgiving woman—recommends that I “think positive thoughts” so here goes:
• It’s nice to have time to chat with my family, walk the dog, and watch television.
• I’m glad to have a chance to catch up on some pleasure reading, four novels this week and counting.
• This situation gives balance to my otherwise glowing accounts of life in the Philippines.
• This is the least reliable Internet service I’ve ever experienced—woops, better make the statement positive—the most unreliable Internet service I’ve ever experienced.
• I’m positive customer service will improve—how could it get any worse?
Ahhhh, life in the Philippines.

How I cope . . .

As you know by now, I love living in the Philippines. But, like every foreign environment, there are things I miss. I’ve rambled about several of them in an earlier blog that concluded that most of the losses are manageable.
Of course, finding solutions has taken a bit of time, but my life is almost whole now. I say “almost” because I’m still finding “work arounds” for some things.
I’m a heavy reader and a bit of an information junky. Creating or finding new information sources has been a bit of a challenge but many things are now falling in place.
Larger metropolitan areas like Manila have pretty good cable television networks. Unfortunately, we live in a new subdivision that hasn’t been wired yet and we’re getting by with satellite television. Our provider, Dream Networks, has a pretty good lineup and many familiar channels are available. We get the History Channel (Asia) and Discovery as well as Star Network which carries many of my favorite shows and a movie channel. Movies are a year or two out of date and I’ve seen many of the “first run” movies before. But watching them again is a mindless past time when I’m too tired to do anything else.
Dream Networks also has a good selection of news channels. I watch the NBC nightly news whenever I can tear my wife away from Filipino soap operas and both CNN and BBC News are available around the clock. We get neither Fox News nor the CBS evening news, but I’d largely weaned myself off them before moving. Don’t be offended Katie, but I prefer more substantial reporting.
DSL is a popular Internet solution in the Philippines and a few folks are coming to think of Internet access as a fundamental human right—at least I do . Sadly, our subdivision is yet to be wired. After promoting an “integrated wireless community,” our developer has reneged on the promise and says we’ll have to wait for broadband to the home. Effectively, that means waiting until PLDT lays lines and the developer says they will be in place by the end of November, 2009. Curiously, the local PLDT folks apparently know nothing about the promise so we’re temporizing.
In this case, “temporizing” means relying on a 4G wireless service called WeRoam. It sort of works, sometimes! Typical connection speeds are on the order of 10 kbps. Know how long it takes to load a typical web page at 10 kbps? I hope you never have to find out. And, there are a couple other kickers; the phone number we were given for customer service is out of service, they don’t respond to emails, and even in the best of times the service cuts off every few minutes requiring a reboot to reestablish a connection. Of course, the clock doesn’t stop clicking when the service disconnects so we’re paying for connection time while playing solitaire.
Sorry if I sound a little grumpy! I’m offline now because the modem cannot connect and I don’t know when I’ll be online again.
Ah well, there’s one good thing about WeRoam. I’m spending more time walking my dog than usual.
Seriously, we do have an Internet connection occasionally. In addition to checking my emails, updating my website, and posting an occasional blog entry, I catch a lot of news when I can. WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com, and LATimes.com fill my need for news and left-leaning commentary but I balance things with Fox.com and Yahoo news.
In moments of connectedness, I also download a variety of podcasts. From PBS, I get Bill Moyer’s Journal and I’m also fond of NPR’s Science Friday along with NBC’s Meet the Press, This Week in Tech, and This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
I’ve also grown fond of my e-book. It’s an older, RCA model nearing the end of its life, but continues to serve me well. The only real deficit is that it uses RB formatted texts and only a handful of publishers that still support the format. I’ve just about exhausted the selection on the Baen Free Library, but I’ve recently purchased a handy program, ABC Amber PDF Converter. ABC Amber converts PDF documents to the RB format and I read now a lot of classic literature digitized by the Gutenberg Project as well as archaeological literature from the Internet Archive.
Oh well, that’s life in the Philippines. I see the contractor next door has decided to dispose of refuse on my lot and its time to go vent my frustrations on him.