Iba Zambales Outing

 
 
 
 

These are some of the pictures during our company outing last May 11 and 12 in Iba, Zambales. I didn't like the place where we stayed; I felt my skin crawl. No, not the supernatural kind. That's how I feel when I don't think the place is particularly clean. The sand though was fine. It wasn't white as I'm used to in Bohol but it was fine and clean. And then we had a chance to snorkel at this coral reef area that the boatman said rises like an island when it's low tide. I got to see this small really blue fishes. They looked so amazing in their startling blue color.

Then we had fun at night. We had campfire and played games. We were subdivided into two groups and then each group had to fill up this small bottle with water from the sea. Since we were in our shorts and shirt, we had to device ways of bringing water from the sea. So some of us removed their shirt to soak in the water and squeeze water from when they reached shore. We also tried to half-swallow ocean water (salty!!!) and spit them out (yuck!!!) into the bottle. Marco, our TV guy who has an Afro hair, wet his hair then tried to pour the water into the bottle. Well, it wasn't easy to say the least.

The second game was a revised Charade game. Each team's representative who go in front to the game master must spell for his groupmate to guess a word or group of words. But...he must do so using his butt. It was a bit funny trying to decipher the letters while looking at someone's behind. It came to a climax when Ate Cindy represented our group and Bong represented the other group. As Ate Cindy said after, she got overtaken by her emotion. Instead of just spelling the letters through their butts, they spelled it through their whole bodies. They wiggled, slid, pushed up and down, sidled, danced. They looked so hilarious we forgot we were supposed to spell letters. We were trying to keep off from peeing in our pants because of laughter.

I had fun in that. Then, I had an excursion at the market with Ate Weng and Bimbim(not sure if this is the right spelling), Edwin's wife and their kid and yaya. We bought pastillas and mangoes. Zambales has the sweetest mangoes in the whole world according to Guiness so I made sure to buy a few kilos. I chose the green ones so they won't spoil on our way to the city. Iba is also well-known for their pastillas from carabao's milk. So I bought some too. That was my little version of a cultural experience given our short vacation.

It's really good to go out and explore. The first time I heard Iba, I thought it was some place at the end of the Philippines. Why, they have Jollibee and Chowking! If those two have reached your part of the Philippines, then you couldn't be too backward. Actually, Iba is the provincial capital of Zambales and they want it made into a city. It looked progressive to me, well, actually quite urban already. So that's my Iba experience...different but not unpleasant altogether. Enjoyable, in fact.