Anilao Art

Recently, my eager yet perfectly illegitimate representation of the sports magazine Action and Fitness brought me to Batangas – a four-hour ride and many nipa huts away from the city streets of Manila. (And certainly a site of a number of attractions in the Philippines!) As the unofficial photographer of the publication for the event "Caltex Coastal Cleanup" (it was International Coastal Cleanup Day), I’d been led to the lush but not lavish Aquaventure Reef Club Resort. My hotel room was called “Computer Room” for a reason outside that which has to do with computers, because it didn’t have anything remotely electronic outside of the mosquito killer laid out beside my bed.

Since I and the most of the media partners weren’t certified scuba divers, we all gathered to form the team that wouldn’t get to go underwater. We were assigned instead to pick up trash from the site’s rocky shores. And it is, I tell you, the most unbelievable thing in the world to be picking up trash from wet sand while the rest of the people dove to explore the beauty beneath the crashing aquamarine waters. I was part of the Juniors Team that was benevolently allowed to join the league of pros. I even discovered several gems: a stray racing shoe, a rubber pork chop, a hairy coconut husk, a message-less bottle that spoke volumes of how interesting the mission was for team paparazzi.

The night, of course, served as nothing less than an occasion for vindication, and for mingling alternately with tanned pretty Filipinas and free-flowing Jägermeister (“Achtung wild!”). Wearing my inappropriately foreign white floral exotic shorts (which would not have gone unnoticed in an otherwise sober atmosphere), I joined new friends and divers in coughing out a chorus of cheers and plumes of cigarette smoke.

Even though at the end of the day, I got no wetter than having a pack of Marlboro Lights soaked by a boat ride and inadvertently plummeting like a fool into a deep muddy puddle of garbage, sand and water (“for photography’s sake”, I shrugged the embarrassment off with artless nonchalance), I must say the experience was happier than the event itinerary suggested. I hadn’t been allowed to dive, but for the name of advocacy and all things aqua, I nevertheless had a splashing good time.