Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

Gone are the slow, ponderous boats to Calapan that seemed more like floating coffins decades ago. Gone is the mixture of smells—of sweat, salt spray, gasoline and livestock —which would make me throw up when the swells were big. Of course, it didn’t help that I made it worse. Progress has caught up with the place somewhat. Now, for half the length of a Disney movie, you can get there from Batangas pier which has bus routes coming from Plaza Lawton and Cubao. The Aboitiz-owned Super Cat hydrofoil boats with theater style seating and airconditioning, that ply the shark-infested, tricky waters between the two ports of Batangas City and Calapan have made it easy to island hop. Fast, efficient and affordable, the sleek boats skim the surface in no time flat, particularly during good weather when these can run with the tide. These have become a boon to Mindoro that now connects Luzon to the Visayas region by sea and land, via buses that ran in tandem regularly plying the length of the Mindoro highway corridor.

Many people own cellphones and are nimble with their fingers as they go about texting through their days. There are cellphone towers in the middle of ricefields. My resident cousin, Andy who acted as our tour guide, says that most would rather forego food than have to go without a load of prepaid minutes. Periodically as you drive along the highway, and in the towns, you will see modest-sized homes with Italianate designs sticking out from among thatched huts in the middle of rice paddies. Andy says that such progress is due to the fact that someone from that household is working as a domestic help somewhere in Europe and the euros are what keeps the local economy afloat. Since the US has become somewhat of an impossible dream these days because of restrictive immigration policies, any other progressive nation that is open to accepting workers at any level of the totem pole is fair game.

We spent a day to visit White Beach at Puerto Galera, famous worldwide for their dive sites and its calm, protected waters and its coffee colored sand, a distant second to the pristine white sands of Boracay. We stopped by Tamaraw Falls at San Teodoro, an intense gusher that day because of the recent rains. On the approach to Puerto Galera from Calapan, the ride takes you to a scenic, elevated zigzag route carved from the land exposing prized Mindoro white marble on the mountainside and above lush banana plantations, showing the sea in all its glory. At the beach are the usual trappings of Philippine tourism: persistent, persuasive peddlers of pearl and coral rings, earrings and necklace, skilled masseuses offering their services, restaurants, money changers, banana boat rides, souvenir shops, tattoo shops, dive shops and big outrigger boats spewing out tourists directly from Batangas City pier. Particularly when all the room rates of the smattering of hotels and honky tonk joints spike during Holy Week and the summer months, Puerto Galera is all business, crass and hard-nosed. Take the time to check out this place before it gets much too commercial for one’s tastes, while nature is still at the helm of this vanishing beauty.

If we had the luxury of another day, we would have spent it in little-known Lake Naujan and see the place where the most delicious species of fish I have tasted in my life, that goes by the exotic names of banak and banglis are now nearly extinct or hard to come by, I am told. They say the reason for its unique taste is the moss the fish used to feed on. The moss is gone and so are the fish, an ecological balance gone awry, perhaps because of neglect and lack of foresight. We need a naturalist hero here to save the fish that is unique to this environment.