SO, after just 4 weeks of school, Chinese New Year came, and as Singapore shuts down around it and it's one of the few travelling opportunities, I got out. Where? Subic Bay, Philippines.
A week ago I completed my PADI Open Water Diving Training, and got certified as a "beginner" diver. With 4 dives in total in the murky water around Singapore, I set on a search for wrecks in the bay of Subic, 2 hours away from the country's capital, Manila.
We flew SEAIR, having bought Tiger Air tickets. The flight was good, the plane new and the crew veeeeeeeery young. We got in Subic around 2 a.m. on the 3rd of Feb (2011 - writing this for the posterity :)) and crashed in the quite good Mango Valley hotel. I was the lucky last person in an uneven number group, so I got a room on my own - got to share it later with those bitten by the nasty bedbugs two floors beneath, so paid my dues :). The dive shop was on a backstreet 50m away from the hotel. Organizing the group took them around 2 hours on the first day, and around 1.5 hours the following days - they didn't learn much from mistakes... But as we said, there was a case for business consultants there, perhaps for some free dives.
Day 1: the check-up. The local diving shop rented the equipment, the boat and the dive guide. We got one for each group of 9 people, and got split in two amazing speedboats - just kidding, they were actually the traditional "catamaran" made out of bamboo, with an engine in two steps (hope that's the right term in English). Ours was called "The Old Adventurer", and the guide said "don't mind the boat, it's supposed to part of the adventure!" YAY!
So our diving started in the place called Barges, where old barges were sunk and a relatively good variety of fish were present. Then we saw the "dead" coral garden, which had been partly destroyed by the ash coming from the Pinatubo Volcano eruption back in 1991. Yup, corals take a long time to build up. Among the stars of the day were an octopus, a scorpion fish, lion fish, anemone fish and all kinds of different corals (pictures below the blog).
Day 2: the first wrecks. After having seen we can all sink, the dive guide brought us to the Japanese Patrol Boat (24 m) and the LCU (18 m), where I did my first real penetration: I entered all alone in a chamber of the second ship, where I saw two thin watersnakes, white and black stripes and a red fin at the end. It was also here where we saw the mother of all lion fish, a sizeable specimen compared to the others we had seen.
Day 3: USS New York (27 m) and San Quentin (15 m). The first was the scariest of them all, but also the most interesting. Visibility was poor, mainly because of the other at least two teams that went down before us, so we couldn't see the whole ship in one blink. We did two penetrations - beware to have a light, if the water outside is messy, it's messy inside too. Attached is a video of the dive, by Victor from Espana: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AocqVtP07qA
After this, the clear waters of the San Quentin, the giant clams (approx. 80-90 cm) and the light dive (only 15 m) really made the extra day of diving worth it. The sea life was very rich, we saw many beautiful anemone, sea slots and sea cucumbers, a blue ray, and a fish we all agreed had to be called "flamenco dancer", red with white spots and big fins it was showing off ostentatively. :)
Day 3 gone, all that was left was eating: food in Subic bay is good and cheap, especially if you go for the seafood. We had Merlin steak - excellent - prawns, squid, tuna sashimi or grilled tuna belly, coconut juice in the original coconut, all for max. 10 EUR/meal.
Otherwise the life of the resort revolved much around the Pier 1 bar, where lonely guys found quick consolation in the arms of the insisting local girls. As our group experienced it, MBA students are not an exception. :) The "Sir, yes sir", "Yes, madam" and availability to serve you anything you had in mind made it a bit uncomfortable for equalitarians like most of us, and you could still sense a bit of the "education" the locals received from their foreign occupants - first the Spanish, then the US troops stationed in Subic. Nevertheless, the experience was interesting, relaxing, and hard on the conscience: getting back to Singapore I am getting back to a hard week of quizzez, case work and career sessions. Funnily enough though, getting into the taxi after I landed, i felt a slight relief and the thought "good to be home" crossed my mind for a few seconds. Then the radio sang "when I look in my father's eyes", and the real home started to call, leaving me home sick for the rest of the day. You can't have them all, can you?
