Youngs Around the World

Departing early from Manila, we took a bus south to Batangas and then a bangka or pumpboat (a small wooden boat with bamboo outriggers powered by a recycled automotive engine) to Sabang, a tiny town near Puerto Galera on the island of Mindoro. The island was thickly covered with palm trees and the face of Sabang was a cluster of waterside resorts and restaurants curving around the crescent moon-shaped shore. As the bangka approached the shallows, a group of young boys climbed onto the sides of the boat and asked passengers to throw coins into the water so that they could dive for them. We threw a few and watched the boys excitedly scurry after them.

We checked into the Sabang Inn Dive Resort, a Spanish-inspired villa with spacious sea view rooms, and purchased a diving and accommodation package for four nights. Less than two hours later, we were underwater at a dive site just one hundred meters from the oceanfront resort. The site was impressive for its diversity. Aaron found an octopus hiding in a pipe on the sandy ocean floor and we watched as it changed color from a camouflaging shade of gray to dark red. The Philippines is known for its macro diving, or “muck diving” – scavenger hunts through the otherwise unimpressive sandy sea floor looking for tiny, unusual sea creatures. I prefer pretty coral reefs to sandy bottoms but I had to admit that the octopus was amazing. We explored a beautiful wooden wreck covered in multi-colored algae and teeming with schools of small shimmering fish. It was a great first dive and we were excited about the prospects of the next three days.

The next morning, we lingered over breakfast and then pulled on our dive gear for a 10:30 dive. Aaron was immediately distraught because he had been given a different set of equipment than he’d used on the previous day’s dive and it had definitely seen better days. Usually when you do all of your diving with the same shop, you use the same rental equipment for each dive so that it becomes familiar. To some degree, diving gear is all the same, but getting comfortable with a new set up still takes time. I told him not to panic, that this shop just doesn’t operate that way. “It isn’t ideal”, I said, “but it is what it is.” He was still clearly unhappy about the situation but resolved to dive anyway.

Most of the Sabang dive sites are within a five to seven minute boat ride from the shop by motorboat. We climbed into the small dive boat and sped to our drop point. As our group began to slip into our pre-assembled (by the shop staff) gear, Aaron’s first stage had a malfunction. Our dive master Nilo worked on it for about ten minutes, utilizing a dive knife in place of the tool kit that should have been on board, and finally declared the equipment to be sound. Aaron had been giving me the “I told you so” look throughout the repair process. He slipped into his gear, still shaken from the malfunction. I asked him if he felt comfortable enough with his equipment to go down and he said yes.

On the count of three, we all flipped backwards off the sides of the boat, traded “okay” signals at the surface and began our descent to our maximum depth of 25 meters. As we neared the bottom, Aaron signaled me to check his first stage. At first glance, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary and since you cannot normally communicate beyond hand signals underwater, he could not verbalize his issue. He signaled for me not to worry about it and I assumed that he was fine. Two seconds later, I looked over at Aaron as he was attempting to remove his BCD while hovering a few meters above the ocean bottom in a slight current. Removing your BCD underwater is possible as a last resort to fix a problem but it is certainly not recommended, especially while hovering in 20 meters of water. While the act of hovering, which is controlled by a combination of breathing and the air in your BCD, can seem effortless to an experienced diver, it can prove challenging when you become distracted and/or stressed.

Just as he got his first arm out of the vest, his weight belt came loose and fell to the ocean floor. This was a problem. Without his weight belt, the buoyancy of his wetsuit would propel him toward the surface – a very dangerous scenario at sixty-plus feet. I grabbed his arm to keep him down and he swam down, completely out of his BCD now, to retrieve his weights. With his regulator in his mouth and me holding his BCD, he attempted to reassemble his weight belt while maintaining buoyancy above the coral. As he closed the clasp of his weight belt and reached for his BCD, the clasp came loose again and the weights fell back to the floor. By this time, Nilo had seen our struggle and come over to help. At the same time, another diver in our group eased me back to give Nilo room to work but my wild eyes were glued to my struggling husband. Aaron went for his belt a second time and managed to secure it around his waist. Then, somehow, in the tangled situation, the mouthpiece of his regulator (air source) became dislodged from the regulator itself, causing him to inhale a startling gulp of seawater. When I saw Aaron desperately signal for Nilo’s spare air source, I grabbed my secondary reg and started to kick over but, thankfully, Nilo reacted before I reached them and gave his alternate air source to Aaron. He then helped Aaron back into his BCD and popped his mouthpiece back onto his regulator. Aaron quickly regained his composure but my mind and heart were racing uncontrollably. When I saw my husband under sixty feet of water with no regulator in his mouth, I thought, this is it…this is how quickly my world could implode. One accident or error in judgment, even on the part of my seemingly infallible Rescue Diver, and life as I know it, with all of the associated dreams, simply disappears.

For whatever reason, maybe out of stubbornness or a need to prove his resilience, Aaron chose to continue the dive despite my plea to abort. Naturally, the first thoughts that entered my mind were of the immediate, indisputable discontinuation of my diving career. However, when you are suspended weightlessly in the serenity of the ocean with no sound except that of your own mental rambling, your thoughts become extremely rational and clear. I decided then that, if we are to continue diving, I must also become a Rescue Diver as soon as possible so that I will be properly skilled to rescue my buddy the next time he does something that arrogant and stupid.

During the last forty minutes of the dive, I stuck to Aaron like glue, despite his repeated assurances that he was okay. I would spend three seconds looking at coral and the next three watching Aaron, making sure that he was breathing and staying within two kicks of my clutches. He was still visibly frustrated with his equipment setup, but everything seemed to be fully functional. I could not relax and enjoy the dive site because all that I could think about was getting Aaron back safely to the surface. I know that I drive him a little crazy when I go into Mother Hen mode and, in a beautiful underwater paradise, stare worriedly at him while ignoring the spectacular coral and fascinating variety of fish. I love scuba diving – it has become a true passion and a significant funnel of our fun money – but the reality is that when it comes to guarding the safety of my family, that magical underwater paradise disappears outside the figurative walls of my tunnel vision. For me, there are simply no other fish in the sea.

Aaron’s Footnote: What began in my mind as a seemingly simple, even routine underwater maneuver went terribly wrong in a matter of seconds. Reflecting on and reliving the experience, I realize that I really was in grave danger. The simple problem was that my BCD was connected too low on my tank causing me to keep hitting the back of my head on the first stage at the top of the tank. My equipment was problematic and uncomfortable, but functional. I should have endured the dive and fixed the problem later. Overconfident in my abilities and frustrated with my second rate equipment setup, I attempted to remove my BCD and adjust the tank strap myself. This of course set in motion a series of events which could have ended badly. I’m certainly thankful for our first class dive master Nilo and his help in putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. But my wife is an excellent diver and I truly believe that had it just been the two of us on that dive, Tina would have acted quickly to help her foolish husband. Sometimes it takes a close call to remind us that regardless of competence or experience, we’re still fallibly human.

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We are back in the Third World and startlingly so. As we rode into Manila in the dark of night, tacky neon signs illuminated long rows of night clubs, restaurants and hotels. At a stoplight, a young, filthy girl, holding an infant, knocked on my window, begging for money. After two-and-a-half months of living in the Western world (New Zealand, Australia, Japan), I was not mentally prepared for India-caliber poverty and the wretchedness of her appearance gave me a start. I quickly switched to Third World mode.

It was Friday night and the streets of the Malate district were roaring with rampant intoxication and melodies from various outdoor venues. Our hostel, Malate Pensionne, was right in the middle of the action, buffered from the street noise by, of all things, a Starbucks! (Angels singing: “Alleluia!”) After a long day of travel, our tired bodies wanted only to shower and crash but the bright lights and entrancing street music beckoned us outside and, since we had to buy water anyway, we ventured out and succumbed to the alluring Cuban music pouring out of Café Havana. We ordered a couple of San Miguel beers and the melodies of the live band melt away the fatigue.

The next day, we explored the city on foot. The Philippines is a small, impoverished nation masked by pockets of prosperity in the form of high-rises, higher end hotels, and gargantuan shopping malls. The broken streets reek of sewage and auto emissions from the taxis and jeepneys – jeep-style converted open-air buses, ornately decorated with bright lights, colorful decals and religious artifacts. Homeless families sleep on the sidewalks; children snooze the day away on flattened cardboard boxes. We saw a man bathing his two naked sons, who looked to be about eight-years-old, in the muddy rainwater collected in a pothole in the street. Tricycles – man-powered bicycles with small, two-person sidecars attached – roam the streets in search of fares, though more often we see the drivers sleeping in the carts. As we walk along, we are constantly approached by money changers flashing their note cards with the day’s handwritten exchange rates as well as young men selling random goods such as leather belts, fedoras, small electronics and cheap knockoff watches. Families camp out all day along the sidewalks, operating small food carts or selling cigarettes and gum.

Despite their seemingly depressing circumstances, Filipinos possess an enviable love of life. They are friendly, humble, happy people who have made us feel graciously welcome. The population is predominantly Catholic – a result of 16th century Spanish Catholic crusades – and English-speaking, although its ethnic origins are thought to be Malay, Borneon, and Indonesian. The Philippines struggled for centuries to find its political voice and united identity amid a stream of oppressive foreign occupiers including Spain, Japan and the United States. More than a million Filipino lives were lost over the years in the nation’s long struggle for independence and when they finally won their freedom and elected Ferdinand Marcos as president in 1965, the nation’s political and economic woes were far from over. (Lonely Planet Philippines 2006)

A striking contrast in the Philippines today lies in the circumstances of its women. Having already elected two female presidents in the last twenty years and boasting a middle management demographic dominated by women, the nation is well ahead of many Western countries. In contrast, while prostitution is illegal in the Philippines, it is one of the nation’s biggest industries. The Philippines has often been promoted as a sex tourism destination and, even more disturbing, an estimated 20% of the nation’s sex workers are children. (Lonely Planet Philippines 2006) You don’t have to read about sex tourism to realize that it is going on. An unsettling number of unattractive, middle-aged white men can be seen conspicuously walking hand-in-hand with young (often teenage) Filipino girls. The practice is so commonplace that no attempt is made to disguise it. While I am fully aware of my inability to affect these circumstances, I make a point of attempting to make eye contact with as many of the teenage sex patrons as possible. They appear unapologetic but I find solace in knowing that they know that their reprehensible behavior has not gone unnoticed.

On a brighter note, we regrouped in our room after a long day of intense observation and gussied ourselves up for a night out in Malate. I had bought an inexpensive little silk dress in Thailand, thinking that I’d wear it once and mail it home after it had fallen victim to the cramped conditions of my backpack. After donning it in Thailand, I folded it into a large Ziploc bag and carried it like that for over a month in my pack before pulling it out again in Australia. Miraculously, it came out virtually wrinkle-free as if it had been hanging in my closet. I pulled it out several weeks later in Manila with the same fabulous result. I’m shocked at the resilience of this little dress and tickled by the pleasure of having something delicate, pretty and feminine to throw on once in a while as a reprieve from my t-shirts and cargo pants.

With endless venues to choose from, we went back to Café Havana, this time to have dinner and make a night of it. The food was average but the service and ambience were outstanding. A different, but equally entertaining six-piece band belted out a variety of Spanish and popular songs for a disappointingly small Saturday night audience. After dinner, we moved into the adjacent cigar lounge, which impressed us with its selection of Cuban and locally produced cigars. We each chose a Filipino cigar and puffed away (sorry, Momma, but we don’t do it often, I promise) while sipping Grand Marnier and admiring the beautifully decorated cigar room. The walls were painted a soft, tropical shade of red and were covered with framed cigar labels and large black-and-white photos of Che Guevara. After literally smoking ourselves out of the room, we sat for one last San Miguel and then called it a night. We would depart early the next morning for Puerto Galera, where we eagerly anticipated dipping our fins into the Verde Island Passage between the Sibuyan and South China Seas.

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