Whale Sharks, Day 2 and The Filipino "I want to fuck you" handshake, May 17, 2009

Photographing a Giant Jellyfish
photo, Courtesy of Duncan Murrell



Berend and I, Chasing Jellyfish & Hoping for Butanding
photo, Courtesy of Duncan Murrell



Duncan, Photographing Jellyfish with a Proper Camera
photo, taken with my Kodak disposable plastic camera, can you believe it?



After an amazing day yesterday with the Butanding (Whale Sharks), I decided to go again with a Dutch guy named Berend. But as luck would have it, today the water was blue, there was less plankton, no krill and therefore no Butanding or Mantas. We decided to drink our sorrows away by joining Berend’s friends from the Peace Corps who had just flown in from around the country to help another Peace Corps worker with her project to reduce turtle egg poaching. After a night of margarita drinking and heavy conversations on politics, idealism, and the third world Berend and I hit a local dive bar that was blasting karaoke versions of 1980’s love songs—a Filipino favorite. Except for the tranny running the place, the bar looked no different than any other—full of straight looking, drunken, working class men drinking beer and cursing. But as the night progressed things starting getting…well,…a little different.

It is worth a pause here to explain that despite being an uber conservative Catholic country, the Filipinos have a very liberal outlook on homosexuality between men—in particular, on transsexuals. Trannies, are EVERYWHERE in the Philippines. Every little village no matter how small or remote has at least one or two flaming, skinny jean and make up wearing trannies with MTV hairstyles and kafiyah scarves. And unlike in Western countries, the straight men don’t seem to be threatened by them; they treat them as one of their own and joke around with them as if they were just another one of the boys. The folks in the Peace Corps had explained that in the Philippines, sex between men wasn’t necessarily an indication of gayness and that there was even a secret handshake to indicate the urge—the “I-want-to-fuck-you handshake” is a handshake between one man and another that involves the middle finger of one man tickling the inside of the palm of the other man. If the tickle is returned, the deal is on.

So as the night progressed and the men became drunker, they started to Karaoke to cheesy love songs. The men all started dirty dancing with each other and coming up to our table. Of course, I was expecting that I would be the one to get hit on but my friend Berend was most definitely the hit of the night. He even got his palm tickled with THE handshake. Well, at least we can say the boys had good taste.

When we were walking back to the hostel around 1:00am, we ran into the boy that works there who had apparently just broken up with his boyfriend and was heart-broken. He dragged Berend and I to the middle of a shanty-town neighborhood in Puerto where a dance party—complete with disco balls—was happening on the street and we danced the night away to Rihanna with the locals, the kids and the dogs.