Once I’d paid all my fees, I left the tourism office and followed the Filipino woman and a boatman out into the street. She walked up to a big white van that was crammed with people. I thought I was expected to get inside the van, but I knew the boat couldn’t be far and I preferred to walk to the water’s edge. The boatman was going to walk there, and I decided to walk with him. He walked through the main market of Matnog and then out onto a beach that was covered with dozens of bangkas. We walked along the beach until we got to his boat and I climbed on board. We got there long before the people in the van did, and I had to wait for a while.

When the group arrived, it was clear that they were all part of one family. There were no men at all – just women and teenagers and children. My heart sank a little bit more at that. I had hoped the group would be made up of several sub-groups and I wouldn’t feel like such an outsider and intruder. It was clear, though, that I was completely out of place and not really that welcome. I had assumed that things would operate similarly to the boat trips in El Nido on Palawan. There, the boat trips were superbly well-organized from a Western (ie, logical and common sensical) point of view. Westerners show up in El Nido either as individuals or in small groups of two or three. People sign up for the boat tour they want on the day they want and their name is written down on a public list on a blackboard. When enough people sign up to fill up the boat, the trip is confirmed and you are told when to show up to meet everyone in your group and be led down to the boat. It’s a great system.

The tourism market in Matnog catered to Filipinos, and they don’t come individually or in small groups. They come in large family groups. So I found myself in the uncomfortable situation of being a lone outsider tagging along with a family of 11 people! Worse, this family wasn’t interested in island-hopping. They were there to have a picnic and as such had brought along massive amounts of food and drinks. Their idea was to go to Subic Beach, rent a big picnic table and then sit down and eat and drink! Suddenly, they had a giant (and probably somewhat scary) lone foreigner on their boat. The last thing I wanted was to be adopted by a strange family and have to spend the day with them. Yet, being the sole outsider on the boat and going to a place where you will be stuck for five hours, it was inevitable. They felt they had to include me and I would have felt uncomfortable to distance myself from them. I didn’t want to impose myself on their family picnic, but the situation was such that to separate myself would have been equally rude. In the end, we all had to bow to the inevitable and co-exist for the day.

Our first stop was the tiny island of Tinikling. Tinikling was actually visible from the Richwell resort and was only a ten or fifteen minute boat ride away. By this point, I still had no idea what the tour would consist of. I assumed, naturally, that we would spend an hour or so at this first spot swimming, snorkeling, and walking around and exploring. The boat pulled in to a beautiful sandy beach. The Filipinos jumped out of the boat, lined up on the sand for a group picture and then climbed back onto the boat. And that was it for the beautiful island of Tinikling. I had instantly dived into the water and was swimming around, and then I saw they were all back on the boat and waiting for me. I had no choice but to get out of the water and climb aboard. We had been there for perhaps ten minutes total. It didn’t feel like a friendly place anyway. Right behind the sand of the beach was a very large sign that read, “Private Property! No Trespassing!”

From Tinikling, we went to a fish sanctuary. This was a very quirky kind of place made up of bamboo pens in a shallow lagoon. There were bamboo platforms above these pens. Two of the platforms were connected by a raft that a man used to ferry us back and forth. There were a few varities of fish down in the water and we could buy some fish food and tiny fish to feed them with. The most interesting for me was a pen of very large lapu-lapu fish. They hung in the water right below us unmoving and somewhat threatening in appearance. When we threw a fish into the water, they would explode into action and the fish would go down a lapu-lapu throat in the blink of an eye.

It was possible, I learned, to get into the water in one area and swim with some of the fish. I had my snorkeling gear with me and lowered myelf into the water. Unfortunately, the difference between Filipino and Western sensibilities surfaced here as well, and people from my boat and other boats leapt into the water with inner tubes and other devices and splashed about and screamed and yelled like they were on a water slide at a theme park. I don’t suppose the fish were too bothered. They simply wanted to be fed and were probably used to the craziness, but I found it all to be a bit distracting. The scene didn’t fit with my idea of a marine sanctuary and interacting with wildlife.

Still, I enjoyed my time at the fish sanctuary and I was disappointed when in what felt like just a few minutes we were being hustled back onto the boat. From there we drove to Subic Beach, the last stop on the tour. Subic Beach would have been the perfect location at which to stop for lunch in the middle of a series of interesting places. It was a beautiful beach and had some half-decent snorkeling if you were willing to go swimming a fair distance to find it. Unfortunately for me, Subic Beach was not just a lunch stop. It was THE stop and the whole point of the island-hopping tour and we stayed there for a goodly number of hours. My group was met by a woman with a register book. Their names were written down and they were assigned a picnic table for a certain number of hours. By this point, some hesitant introductions had been made and my group knew my name and had made moves to adopt me. There was really nothing else to be done. I could hardly just go sit in the sand for five hours by myself and wait for the boat to come back. That would have felt rude. So I joined the happy throng and answered all their questions about why I had no companion.

I found myself puzzling over this question. I understood that Filipinos would find it startling and confusing that someone would travel alone. However, I didn’t understand what kind of answer they expected when they asked, “Why don’t you have any companion?” What possible answer is there to that question? I went over them in my mind as I snorkelled around Subic Beach. “I had some companions, but they all died in a bus crash.” “My companions were kidnapped by the NPA.” “I hate all people and want nothing to do with them.” There was no answer that could be given.

Luckily for me, there were snorkeling possibilities at Subic Beach and I spent a lot of time in the water swimming around. I imagined that my companions were a bit worried because I ended up swimming far out into the ocean – very far when you consider that no one else ventured more than about fifteen feet from shore. It was certainly the best beach I had been on to date in the Philippines. The beaches on Catanduanes were not very good. The water was shallow and full of rocks and seaweed. Subic Beach was your classic tropical paradise beach with beautiful soft sand, and clear deep water. There wasn’t a huge amount of marine life, but I saw lots of beautiful coral, sea snakes, clown fish, and even a few large schools of fish moving together as if they were one large organism.

When I took a break from snorkeling, I walked along the beach with my camera in my hands. I had set up my Olympus camera to record four different versions of each picture I took, applying a different filter to each one: natural, dramatic tone, key line, and monotone. The results were wonderful and I happily shot away. I had put on my 24mm wide angle lens and was very pleased with the results. It is a very sharp lens. It was the first time I’d used the wide angle on the trip, and I enjoyed the new perspective it suppled.

I had been told by the tourism office people that it was possible to stay overnight on Subic Beach. The possibility was very attractive to me and I planned on doing that. I thought it made economic sense, too, because I would save on a night of accomodation. I was sleeping in my tent anyway. Why not sleep in my tent on a beautiful and remote and deserted beach? The problem with that idea, I soon realized, was that Subic Beach, beautiful as it was, was hardly remote and deserted. There were fees being applied everywhere and putting up a tent there would have cost three or four or five hundred pesos. Plus, the tourism office charged an extra 500 pesos for the boat trip if you stay overnight. I pictured myself lounging on my tropical paradise beach and enjoying the quiet and solitude, but the beach was more like a Club Med. So I ended up being glad I hadn’t gone to the trouble of trying to stay overnight. Before I went on the trip, in fact, I was thinking of my first trip as something like a reconnaisance. I saw the boat fee being divided amongst all the passengers equally, so it would not be expensive at all. I thought that I could go on the trip one day and get the lay of the land. Then I could go again the next day after spending the night in my tent at the Richwell Resort. The “foreigner price” quickly ended my dreams of doing that.

My adopted family had gone all out when it came to their picnic lunch and they were kind enough to make sure that I joined them for all of it. They had lots of rice, chicken adobo, fried chicken, many, many liters of soda, several trays of homemade brownies and some cake and lots of other things. I had been fine with the idea of just eating my few bread rolls for the entire day, but it was great to join them for their picnic and have all that good food – particularly the rice and chicken adobo.

At long last and not a moment too soon, the boat man came back to pick us up. We swung by some rocky cliffs and caves along the way, and I looked down into the water and wondered how great it would have been to swim and snorkel through that area instead of just sitting on Subic Beach all day.

I had my camera out on the routine trip and I snapped pictures of the ocean and the sky. It was nice to be moving again and I found that I was, despite all the problems, fairly happy with my day. I had had a lot of interesting experiences and seen some beautifu places. It was also nice to go for that many hours without actually being soaked in sweat.

Tags: El Nido, fee, Legazpi to Matnog, NPA, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Subic Beach, tent