Travel: Batangas Scuba Diving

Summer of 2006

yes! we go back to 2006, It's been 3 years now since I tasted a little bit of what it's like to live underwater. We went there with my Godfather and his brothers and with my team is my older brother and father. Originally it was only my Godfather and his brothers who were going there but we joined in to add a little fun.

It was a 1 day trip we left manila at 4am and arrived at the port at around 5:30am... and then we arrived to Maricaban Island at around 7am. We got complimentary drinks from the resort, fresh buko juice! Then after we had our breakfast, we ate some hotdogs,eggs and rice, nothing fancy just a typical Filipino day breakfast. I swam around the beach, throwing some corals back to the sea.
the morning was just spent talking to each other, taking a walk at the coastline and enjoying the scenery. After that we ate lunch, seafood and some crispy porkchops and ice cold softdrinks to put it down to your stomach... I can't remember how much extra helpings I got but all I know is that I got a lot!

This is my Godfather or "ninong" in Filipino language term.

After having lunch we went to one of the surrounding islands to learn basic scuba diving. The european scuba trainor taught me the parts of the scuba gear, I also learned about the hand signals that they use it was funny because they have signals for "awesome" and "cool". The older people went on first and after an hour they surfaced and talked about how scared one of them is because while he was descending at the depth of the ocean he saw this blue shark sitting at a rock inches away from him was staring at him like he was a descending bait :)). They also saw this big turtle who was snobbish and it looked like that it didn't want humans entering his territory, my godfather's brother even joked "he must have been from his office, cause he looked like been scolded by his boss, he was not in the mood".



Finally! it was my time to shine and the first question I asked my diving instructor was "how deep will we go?" he said about 30feet below, and we went on decending to the coral reefs. I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and amount of fish swimming around. I saw different species, lots of sea urchins(dangerous but they said it was delicious) and sometimes curious fishes will go directly at your goggles as if they were asking "what are you stranger?". I managed to touch some fish.
In this picture you can see the instructor carefully assists me while we were wandering below the waters. Inspite of all the water surrounding you, I got thirsty because of the air I was inhaling from the oxygen tank. After 30 minutes we surfaced and it was already noon.


This picture shows the last moments before surfacing. That's me showboating my newly learned sign. "two thumb's up!" haha, I really enjoyed this. After that we had our dinner and then went back to the port by small boat, while we were at the sea you can see stars in the sky as many as the sand on the beach, it was just a magnificent scene. Then we got home at around 3am.

I hope that the future generations will still see what I saw that day.