We briefly considered doing a Pinatubo tour but decided to save money instead. The tours just went through the "bizarre" canyons in the mud and ash that flowed down from the mud after the 1991 eruption.

Turns out we made the right choice. Later that morning we got our own free tour of the same thing. Just north of Angeles, the highway is under construction where it crosses some of the mud and ash flows. Instead of building a detour road while they worked on the main road, the Philippine transportation workers simply directed traffic off the road into a desert landscape of dirt. The drivers have to make their own ways cross-country through this dusty, fine, and sometimes slushy soil, twice fording streams! This went on for about two km. We saw one stranded bus up to its rear axle in mud. The successful buses got a rolling start and crashed through the fjords.

We were a complete mess. We got soaked crossing the streams, and then the fine dust created by the buses coated everything, including us, with grit. It was so bad I had to laugh.

Just before and just after the construction area, the road was a perfectly fine two-lane highway. This was not the worst detour we would encounter in the Philippines.

The rest of the ride was good. Several people helped us find Uncle Ciano's village of Mayantoc, in the province of Tarlac. Everyone took direction giving very seriously. They often drew maps using landmarks. Sometimes they got a little carried away and repeated the directions several times, even after we understood and wanted to go. It was hard to get away. Mostly the directions were quite accurate, though the distances were often in minutes or pesos--jeepney traveling times and costs. Three pesos--can be as long as eight kilometers (At the time, the exchange rate was 43 pesos to one U.S. dollar, so three pesos was about 7.5 cents).

The towns were filled with a chaos of shiny, neon-decorated Jeepneys and tricycles (motorcycles with two-man sidecars). The tricycles had day-glo decals too. Few towns had stop signs or traffic lights. At intersections everyone just converged until someone backed down and let some else go. It was like institutionalized games of Chicken. We learned to just keep going and depend on other vehicles missing us. "Don't hesitate," we thought. Attempts to show courtesy only screwed things up. (Joan: actually my personal mantra was 'He who hesitates has lost.').

Some towns decorated for the June 12 Centennial (100 years of Philippine independence from Spain) using plastic bags. Ten or 20 parallel strings would run above the road, with plastic bags in white and blue attached every foot or so. They looked kind of like the triangle streamers you see at used car lots. They looked great.

As we got farther from the main road the riding got nicer. Much of the way we could ride side by side. The fields were very green and in the distance we could see the mountains. Of course it was still very hot.

We arrived at Uncle Ciano's village ("barrio" as they say here) Mayantoc, at about 4 p.m. Uncle Ciano is Joan's Uncle Leo's brother. Uncle Leo married Joan's Aunt Jane, so Joan is not actually related to Ciano by blood. Joan lived with Aunt Jane and Uncle Leo for a year and a couple of summers when she was a kid. Uncle Leo died in 1986. Joan remembers Uncle Leo as a strict guy, and a sharp dresser.

WE looked quite messy after the dust and mud in the morning, so we planned to get a room in the town hotel and get cleaned up before meeting Uncle Ciano. Joan didn't want to meet Uncle Leo's brother looking like we had just had a mud bath.

We found the hotel but no one was at the front desk. Downstairs was an "Agricultural Reform Office" and a fast food restaurant. We asked at the restaurant and someone went to find someone who worked at the hotel. In the meantime we ordered cold drinks but they couldn't serve us because the power was out and the fountain drink machine wouldn't work.

I sat down and a friendly man named Salcido started talking to me. I told him where we had ridden and so on. Then he told me he was the postman. Who better to ask about where to find Uncle Ciano than the postman? In the meantime the power had come back, and Joan had just sat down with a cold drink. I rushed over to her. "He's the postman!"

We told Salcido, who like just about everyone in the Philippines has a sister in America, that we were looking for Ciano De la Cruz. He got very excited and insisted we follow him next door to the Agricultural Reform office. He introduced us to a young woman who didn't look at all like I expected 85-year-old Uncle Ciano to look like. This was Ofelia, one of Ciano's daughters. She just happened to work there.

Her work day was just ending so we chatted with her a bit, introduced ourselves, and then walked with her to Ciano's house. We were total stink bombs. Still she invited us to her house for the night and ignored our insistence that we stay at the hotel.

The walk to Uncle Ciano's house was just about 100 meters. His house sat below the road. A few old concrete steps led down through a gate to a small yard. The yard was filled with potted plants and bushes. The house hid inconspicuously behind the plants. Inside Ofelia introduced us to her older sister Leticia and her mother (Ciano's wife of over 60 years) Petronila, (the Miss Mayantoc beauty queen of 1933!) Uncle Ciano was out and about in the barrio.

Leticia, normally called Lety, knew all about Uncle Leo and his family. She and Aunt Jane have been keeping up a correspondence for a long time. I found Lety very lovable. She's smart, quick-witted and easy to talk to. She seemed a bit sad. She mentioned several times how it had been 24 years since Uncle Leo's "first and last" visit. She told us about Uncle Leo's and hers and Uncle Ciano's family's teary-eyed separation at the airport after Uncle Leo's visit in 1974. She told us about Joan's cousin Curtis, who visited with Uncle Leo, and how Curtis wanted to come back with the whole family. But in 24 years no one ever returned.

Lety was very thin. It turns out she had serious influenza 10 years ago and nearly died. After that Uncle Ciano forced her to retire from her teaching job.

Uncle Ciano arrived about half an hour after we did. Even at 85, and with a slight stoop and the help of a bamboo cane, he carried himself with the pride of a Supreme Court justice. He greeted us very warmly with a great smile. He made us immediately comfortable. (Bear in mind that this is a man who got absolutely no advance warning we were coming and never even heard of us, since we are distant relatives, until we introduced ourselves in person that day.)

He told us his life story, using exact dates from 50 years ago. He was especially familiar with the dates because he is in the midst of writing his memoirs.

Next: Uncle Ciano's story.