UNDER A VAST blue sky that offered generous space for lively cumulus clouds to gambol and clash, the double-outrigger boat slid southward with little more than a faint burbling noise of bow wave against hull planks, and the occasional slap as the sharp prow reached out over a breaker and dropped into the trough behind it. The coastline to port gradually became more settled-looking, with radio towers breaking the profile of the coastal hills and occasional villages: mosaics of brightly colored tarps and awnings right along the waterfront, and birds’ nests of slender brown poles woven among frail pilings in the water before them and festooned with green fishnets. Hilltops had been denuded of trees in some kind of draconian logging campaign and left covered with a khaki-colored pelt of low vegetation gashed with eroded gullies that had stained the formerly white beaches below them with shit-colored muck. A point came when they could no longer remember the last time they had been unable to see any buildings along the shore, and then they rounded a small headland, a beat-up prominence of brown rock shaped like a clenched fist, and came in view of a town of some size: a crescent-shaped beach, still several miles ahead of them, lined with buildings as much as eight stories high, which they gaped at as if they were lifelong jungle dwellers, and, nearer to hand, the usual agglomeration of smaller habitations and makeshift open-air markets along the waterfront, interrupted in the middle by a big pier reaching out into the sea and connected by hinged spans of diamond-tread steel to a facility on the shore that was obviously a ferry terminal. Obviously, anyway, to Yuxia and Marlon, who saw them all over the place in their part of the world, and easy enough for Csongor to figure out even though he had been raised in a landlocked country. The road leading into it was wide, and congested just now with several buses and some smaller vehicles. The boatman gestured out to sea, drawing their attention to a larger vessel that was lumbering up the coast from the south, wreathed in a black nimbus of smoke: a passenger ferry from Manila. This explained the crowd of vehicles that had gathered at the terminal.
The crew struck the sails as the skipper got the motor started again, and a few moments later the boat’s prow was knifing into the sand of the beach, and local boys ranging from toddlers to teenagers were running up to it and putting on a great cheerful pantomime of being helpful, perhaps in the hope of earning, or at least receiving, tips. Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor vaulted over the gunwale into warm, knee-deep water and sloshed ashore and then went through an interminable ceremony of smiling and handshaking and nodding and good-byeing, which used up almost all of the time remaining before the large ferry pulled into the terminal. Finally they disengaged themselves and walked up the beach, followed by a fascinated crowd of youths helloing them, and clambered up a low seawall of broken-up concrete rubble and into the paved area before the terminal. The temperature had gone up by ten degrees, and suddenly they were all perspiring. For the first time in weeks, the smells of crowded human places—charcoal and diesel, incompletely treated sewage, cigarette smoke, garlic—came into their nostrils. Marlon raised the question of whether they should just get aboard that ferry right now and ride it into Manila, which was a place where he reckoned he could make connections with his cousins. But a look at the schedule told them that it would not be departing for some hours yet, and they had all seen, on their way in, that row of buildings along the beach south of here, which showed every sign of being hotels. Since they had no real plan and were in no particular hurry, they agreed to ride a bus into the town and find hotel rooms, which would undoubtedly be cheaper here than in the metropolis, and see if this beach town sported any Internet cafés where they might (if Marlon was to be believed) reap enough gold to pay for suites at the Manila Hotel and purchase first-class tickets to whatsoever destination they chose. So they merged with the crowd streaming off the ferry—perhaps a couple of hundred people all told—and tried to sort out which bus they should get on.
Among those passengers was a far higher proportion of Caucasians than one would expect in a somewhat remote provincial town, and it seemed reasonable to guess that they were headed for the hotels along the beach. Most of them acted as if they’d been here before and knew where they were going. These headed, not surprisingly, for the larger buses idling before the terminal. The smaller vehicles—colorful, largely homemade van/bus hybrids—drew a clientele consisting exclusively of Filipinos. Csongor overheard a white man speaking in English as he shouldered his way across a current of passengers toward a bus, and so caught up with him and asked him whether that bus was going to the hotel district. The man turned and looked him up and down carefully, then informed him, none too warmly, that it was so. Csongor nodded back to Marlon, who stood head and shoulders above most of the crowd, and Marlon relayed the news to Yuxia, who was lost in it, and they followed Csongor up the stairs and onto the bus.