Ringo in Paradise

I have just completed a week of gluttony. As you can imagine, it was awesome.

Myself and Jen, along with our co-conspirators Fred and Sandy, were fleeing to a tropical island to escape the concrete jungles of Manila. However, flights to Awesome-Island are only offered 3 days a week. So we were forced to spend a night in Cebu. A friend of mine who grew up in Manila said that Cebu was, “Very trafficky.” This is sort of like Prince labeling a party as “too freaky.” Thus, I had low expectations. However, Fred’s liver has a strange property that it acts like a divining rod. It pulled us towards a German restaurant known as The Gustavian. It specialized in sausages and every European beer known to man. Over the past year, I had been drinking mainly San Miguel beer. It’s “the only beer for building true Filipino friendships.” Upon my first sip of Boddington’s Bitter Ale my neural pleasure center overloaded and I passed out. They let me finish the rest of my beer in the ambulance.

Eventually we left and made it to Camiguin Island in the southern Philippines. The airport was a single concrete building and received one flight every other day, so as not to overuse the awesomeness. The tiny volcanic island could be circumnavigated via road in about 2 hours. For comparison, Manila can be circumnavigated in about 2 weeks. Our first major activity was to immerse ourselves in every form of water on the island. We hired a driver to take us to the natural hot springs, cold springs, and bubbling springs around the island. Then we did some snorkeling on the “sunken cemetery” that slid into the ocean during the last eruption. This proved to be very disappointing, as we saw no ghosts, dead people, or even tombstones.

The next day we tempted fate by celebrating Jen’s 30th birthday on top of a volcano at sunset. Sandy had smuggled champagne onto the island by claiming it was “medicinal.” We poured a bit out to appease the volcano gods, so no eruption occurred. Unfortunately, the true eruption occurred the following day from Fred’s anus. Several aftershocks were also occurring, so Fred could not join the rest of us on the motorbike ride around the island. We discovered that amazingly, 60,000 people live on the island, and 45,000 of them are children. They speak English pretty well, but are extremely partial to the phrase, “Hello friend!” I have never waved to so many people since my Presidential candidacies in’96 and 2000.

And now I’m back in the US! Currently, I am all tanned and rested, and on my way to Space Camp at Kennedy Space Center. I’ll be sure to update you on this latest step for all of mankind.