Wednesday, January 16, 2008: Crocodile Island	Return to Journal TOC >>
Yet again, I wake up before Ro, and it’s just as disturbing. In less than a week, I’ll be back in a hemisphere where I am not a morning person. On the other hand, if I have to be a morning person, a tropical beach paradise is as good a place as any to be one in. We’ve decided to rent a boat and go snorkeling this morning, so after we’re up and about, we walk to the cash machine, which sits along a shanty lined road. It feels a little strange to be making global financial transactions in this environment. My bank had assured me that the card would be just fine here (not that many places outside of the malls in the Philippines are safe to use credit cards) and in fact everything does go smoothly. We return to the beach and haggle a bit with Nimrod (“Rod”), who works from the boat company on the beach next to the restaurant. We agree on three hours of snorkeling in two spots, plus a cruise around most of island for p1500 (about $38), plus they’ll loan Ro a pair of flns to use with her snorkel and mask. (I have fins already.) He walks us to the boat station, which is basically a check-in table with an awning over it and a lot of boats moored out in the water nearby. Most boats here are narrow beam outriggers, with some catamarans and a smattering of speedboats and cabin cruisers more familiar in the northeastern United States. Rod’s boat is a small, narrow outrigger; he introduces us to Marlon and Larry, who will be taking us on the actual trip. The will be my first time snorkeling in water deeper than my waist, so I’m a little nervous. My confidence doesn’t increase when they announce that we’ll be starting at a place called crocodile island, but they reassure me that it’s named for its shape, and not for any snorkeler-eating denizens. We drop anchor near Crocodile Island; there are other boats nearby, but not too close. But the peddlars are still with us: Immediately, there are people in small boats paddling out to try and sell us ice cream or buko juice (in shells). Snorkeling itself is a revelation. The water is a little on the choppy side of calm, and it’s amazing how active the first reef is - how fast all the plants are moving. The water depth varies to about 10 feet where we’re smimming, much less in a few places where we have to be careful to avoid scraping the reef. There are brightly colored fish everywhere - and when we put little bits of stale bread in the water in front of us there are swarms. We can follow schools of fish swimming over the reef, and all sorts of brightly colored fish flitting around the reef itself. They look familiar mostly from watching Finding Nemo. The water is a bit slower at the second reef, and there are fewer fish (though still plenty). By this time, I’m getting the hang of swimming with the fins a bit better, and enjoying swimming around exploring and fish-watching (which isn’t all that different from the people-watching on Boracay, except that the fish wear slightly less and none of them try to sell you anything). Ro finally gets tired, since her borrowed fins aren’t a great fit. I keep swimming until the last possible moment before it’s time to go.
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