I lived in the Philippines for 6 months, taking language classes and generally spending my savings, and I had some time to kill so I thought I’d take up diving. The Philippines supposedly has some of the world’s best dive sites and everything there is relatively cheap. I’m not a great swimmer or daredevil, but I’m generally up for anything once and it turned out to be good fun.

First, the people who I hooked up with were a good social group. They would have a couple meals on the road and generally enjoy themselves. Indeed, at the end, after I had my fill of diving, I found myself going on the trips just to hang out.

For about $200, I got several in-pool sessions at a local dive shop and my eventual certification at Anilao, Batangas, not far from Manila. The in-pool stuff was like studying Driver’s Ed. A lot of videos…some basic excercises like taking your mask off and putting it back on underwater. Actually, the excercises were kinda fun and definitely necessary when we got to the choppier water.

At Anilao, I remember being nervous, especially about tasks like removing your breathing aparatus and putting it back on. Equalizing so that the pressure doesn’t put pain in your ear was harder than in the pool too (duh), but in the end, it was fighting the waves and getting from place to place which turned out to be the hardest. Still, I managed to see quite an array of fish which impressed me, even if they were quite common to the others.

I eventually got my ‘certification’ at the “Cathedral”, a sunken cross that’s popular amongst batangas diver’s. It was great to experience that world and I’ll cherish my license, even if I don’t really plan on diving a lot…it kinda makes me naseous and it’s a lot of work for 45 minutes underwater…but it’s something that everyone should experience. End