BEACH!
Last Sunday, Ilyn's family went to the beach and I hitched along for the ride. A lot of people have been telling us how great the beaches are at Laia in Batangas. Ilyn had been there before when she was very young, and she does remember it to be a very nice place. Even Celo, my local foreign exchange guy tells me that he goes to the place and he loves it. He even shows me this awesome rock face where he had his picture taken.
Sunday morning looked like heavy rain which didn't bode well. We had planned the trip a couple of months in advance and it would really suck if it would turn out to be a really rainy day. I wasn't able to find any sun block the day earlier so i just said, well, the sun looks blocked anyway. The jeep full of Ilyn's cousins came to pick us up at 7-11 here in San Pablo and we proceeded the trip in high spirits, specially after noticing that the sun had come out the further we went south.
After getting lost a couple of times we arrived at Laia and man...it sucked. The beach was like 10 meters from the road and there were more people than I could count. I thought...this is NOT the place and we looked for a beach that was less crowded. We found an OK place a hundred or so meters to the right and settled there. Later, Ilyn and I went walking down the beach and this is where we discovered La Luz resort, the one that we had been looking for. It's a private commercial beach that had been developed with really beautiful cottages and amazingly clean beaches and surroundings. Best of all, it had the rock face that Celo had been telling me about. Ilyn and I climbed up the rock and took some pictures (pictures to follow later...). It's an AWESOME place. I wish we had found it first. We plan on going back to this place next time.
I went home with a really bad sunburn on the back of my neck but it's allright because I had a great time playing in the surf. I hadn't done that in more than 10 years and I thought, what the hell was I thinking? Why did I stay away so long? We noticed the waves were starting to get bigger and bigger as the day went on and people started to get off the beach. Well, I just kept going! I can't count now how many times I got slammed down on the sand helpless by the huge waves but it was so much fun. It had started to rain too. That would be the last sunny day in a while. The following day it rained ALL day. And its no wonder....a typhoon that came uncharacteristically from the west of the country had been approaching us all along. There in the map you can see where I am from the red dot. The power had been going on and off all day today because of it. It's dark, it's rainy and the wind would kick up once in a while. As I feel the burn on the back of my neck, I can't believe how hot the sun had been just a few days before.
