When I was in high school, my parents brought home a stranger one Saturday afternoon. He was a tall, gangly American who owned a huge SLR which hung over his neck like an oversized medallion. He was having lunch alone in my family's favorite seafood restaurant and ended up eating with my parents. All he actually wanted was to take pictures of the city's old churches and Spanish colonial houses so the three of us - my mom, dad and me - took him for a drive around.
"There's so much to see in your country," he told me.
All I could muster was a sheepish smile, hoping that was enough to mask the disbelief going on inside my head. After all, my idea of "having much to see" lay on borders beyond my nation's sovereign territory.
Of course, if Master Yoda were to say it: "So wrong I was."
When Home is Starting to Give You Arthritis
Sometimes, home can be the very place you want to escape from. Not that it's exactly like a national penitentiary but you sort of get the feeling that you can't even be afforded a decent space to breathe. It's place you love being in but would sometimes love to get away from. And sometimes, the itch to just grab a rucksack and fly off into the universe morphs into eerie with the thought that you let a chance like this pass one too many times in the future and it may never come your way again. This week, home seemed like such a place.
I planed in on midday of Saturday and by Sunday evening, I was dragging a baggage I shared with my mom through the cobbled-stone paths of the city port into a Cokaliong vessel bound for Cebu. A week before, we had partly-convinced, partly-begged, partly-forced our grandparents into going with us for a short vacation to Mactan. We were all deeply stressed to our hairstrands - us in school, my parents in work and my grandparents in other things aside from work, not to mention their escalating health problems which, in the past months, seemed endless. It was not an easy thing to do but in the end, everything worked out to our advantage (with huge thanks on the way for my sister's brief tampururot).
We got to Cebu at around 7 in the morning. We brought our old, trusty AUV along for the ride along with Ariel, our former driver who's now back in town after a roughly 10-year absence (ask him why, if you wanna know). We then drove to the Mactan Airport to fetch my grandparents who took the 9:30 flight to Cebu. Getting there was not a breeze but my uncle's map gave us all the help we could get. We got to Mactan International Airport with half an hour to spare for a Jollibee breakfast and even a couple more minutes to rearrange our baggage in the car's hold to secure my lolo's oxygen tank and make room for my grandparents other...er...medical gadgets. It was not difficult spotting my grandparents in the airport since not too many people are brought out in a wheelchair.
Four Days in Beautiful Mactan
We then drove to Mactan Shangrila which is about a good fifteen to twenty minutes away from the airport on light traffic. The place is nestled along a peninsula in the east coast of Mactan, just a stone's throw away from the Magellan Shrine. The hotel was built right beside a white beach and was choked with grass, trees and miles and miles of water which left my sister and I with all sorts of "ooohs" and "aaahs." The hotel has cheaper rates on Mondays to Wednesdays so we made sure to check in on those days.
The hotel has two swimming pools - the serene infinity pool which opens to the sea and the other more "fun" pool with the water slides, volleyball net, basketball hoop and long-range water guns in bubblegumcolors. My mom and I loved the infinity pool because it was deeper and there were these underwater outlet tubes which practically forced water out of its small opening and gave a good backrub. On our second night, while everybody else was in the room taking a shower or preparing for bed, my mom and I spent about an hour shooting hoops in about four feet of water. I landed three shots while my mom decided to swear off basketball.
But the place is not all white tiles and chlorinated water. The hotel buldings loom over a white beach dotted with umbrellas, sun lounge chairs and children's buckets. An island which looks like a huge chunk of rock sits near the shore and serves as a fish feeding station. Mactan Shangrila was recently declared to be a marine sanctuary. In other words, it was fish and coral friendly and could rightly be called a snorkeller's wonderland. From a small outpost situated in the far end of a wharf built on the beach, we spotted a huge purple jellyfish which, according to the lifeguard, was not going to have you bursting with welts unlike the smaller, transluscent white kind.
I was itching to get into the water with my snorkel one afternoon although I did entertain a few doubts when a Korean snorkeller ran up to the life jacket booth and was pointing to jellyfish welts on her arms and legs. I finally relented and borrowed a life jacket (which is for free unlimited use by guests whereas snorkel gear are available for rent at P300 an hour) then slid into the water with my sister. The water was cool and clear and a few feet from the shore, I spotted a beautiful blue starfish nestled amidst the sea grass. A little bit further on, I spotted tropical fish swimming below me in myriads of colors. Some were in an interesting combination of orange, blue, green and yellow while we spotted a smaller fish which resembled Nemo only that it was monochromatic. It didn't help at all that I decided to wear my contact lenses inside a very tight mask which I borrowed from my aunt. It was overstretching my eyes to unhealthy proportions so I started to get teary-eyed. So on that cloudy afternoon, I was floating face down about thirty meters from the shore staring at citrus colored fish nibbling on the seafloor while half my mind was seriously contemplating laser eye surgery.
In the morning, I woke up early and skipped breakfast to go snorkelling again. I used my own goggles and decided to just pinch my nose as I dove into the water. At 8 AM, I was the second person in the water, the first one being some guy who was doing laps just a few feet off the fish feeding station. I swam out into the sea about twenty meters from the shore and dove into the water only to be greeted by more citrus colored fish. Some were still nibbling on the ocean floor while others were swimming in odd directions. I arched my back to start an underwater stalk operation but found that impossible thanks to my wonderful life jacket. When I spotted my mother, I made a slow swim back to the shore and as I approached shallow water, I was suddenly engulfed by silver slivers. I realized I swam into a bunch of fish fry. Then another school of fish which we locally call 'gusao' swam past me then under me then right beside me. I was actually swimming with fish, no matter that they were the kind of fish we sometimes bought in the market for sinigang. I WAS SWIMMING WITH FISH!
My sister then came bounding into the water with a basket of leftover bread in one hand. Bread was given to guests upon request if they wanted to feed the fish. We both stood on waist deep water and began picking out small fragments of bread, dropping them into the water about a two feet away while my lolo sat on the shore on a stool, watching what would happen. The fish would attack the bread in groups, fighting with each other just to take little nips off the bread. Then they got bolder and began swimming closer and closer until they were practically swimming around us like a swarm of Spartans. They were so close there was practically no space between us and the fish. We tried holding the bread with our hands but finally ditched the idea when their slippery scales brushed our fingers and left us screaming. The next minute the fish dispersed in all directions and when my sister and I turned around, our lola was sputtering out of the water. She apparently had been trying to catch the fish with her bare hands and was obviously unsucessful.
YUM YUM MINUS A HUNTING EXPEDITION
We weren't prepared to kill ourselves with the outrageous prices for food in the hotel so we went out for lunch and dinner (thank God breakfast for three came with the room...for the rest of us, cup noodles were great anyway). Right beside the Magellan Shrine was a market/bazaar which served the best seafood, according to the recommendations of the friendly guard who stood by the gate. When we asked him where the best place for lunch was, he smiled at us and said "Shoot to kill."
"WHAAAAAAT?" came everybody's almost curt reply. By everybody, I refer to an old AUV bursting with nine people.
I was immediately transported into an African safari where I had to wield a shotgun to hunt me some game for a meal. Surely he was joking.
"Can you say that again?" I asked him while mentally preparing myself to respond with an "I'm not killing anything even if I get ulcer" response the minute he says shooting in any form is involved.
He said it more slowly this time, like a pre-schooler learning the alphabet: "Su-tu-kil."
Oh no, now what could that be? Some kind of shellfish?
"Sutukil is an abbreviation for 'sugba,' 'tola,' and 'kilaw,'" came the explanation.
"AAAAHHHH!" the old AUV chorused and I could almost picture it nodding its headlights.
He pointed us to the market near the Shrine, saying a restaurant called Manna was the best in sutukil. So off we went and parked near the a shop which sold guitars. I got off first and the minute my feet landed on the ground, I swear I felt like Britney Spears on the red carpet. Five guys ambushed me with their umbrellas and brochures, all speaking in Cebuano and pointing in absolutely all kinds of directions beyond a compass's comprehension. Finally I spotted that one of the guys was wearing a Manna T-shirt so I asked him to take me to their restaurant. The other four then simply vaporized like jilted suitors haha.
Manna offers a variety of fresh seafood which is cooked according to a customer's request - whether "sugba," "tola" or "kilaw," whichever is applicable. They also offer other possible cooking alternatives when the hungry stomach makes food ideas evasive. Lying on tiled slabs of concrete were tangigue, lapu-lapu, maya-maya, tuna, pesogo, squid, lobsters, crabs and all sorts of shellfish for the seafood junkie.
The food was simply amazing and writing about it now is making my stomach rumble so bad. I think after that lunch, I grew wider by about two sizes. The kinilaw nga tangigue was a killer (according to Lolo) and the garlic-fried lobster was delicious...actually so were the other things we ordered. But the over-all runaway winner by a million miles was the lapu-lapu sinigang. It was the best sinigang I had tasted in my entire life. The lapu-lapu meat was tender yet firm (obviously fresh) and the steaming soup slid down my throat like heaven. It was perfectly sour and was littered generously with tomatoes and onions which gave it a distinct flavor. It was just the best thing I ever sank my spoon into.
But the greatest part about that lunch was the bill. After having fed nine very hungry people, we only had to pay something like P1,300+ (roughly $29). Sutukil all the way!
WHEN SEVEN DON'T MAKE A CROWD
On our first day, we practically had to convince our grandparents to go for a dip in the pool. My grandfather used to swim like a fish when he was a child but he can no longer be subjected to anything physically exhausting because of his failing lungs and an incident in his younger days left him with a limping gait and one leg shorter than the other. My grandmother does not share his physical incapacity but hates anything tight and thinks swimsuits should be loose and long like basketball shorts. The only time I remember her ever getting into a pool was when I was twelve in my uncle's new house. She was in her house shorts and was having a grand time with all her grandchildren in the water.
But eventually, we were able to persuade them to try out the shallower children's pool which they did. My lola loved all the swimming and we never realized she could float face up until that day! My lolo, on the other hand, cautiously entered the water and stuck to one corner like a child punished with time out. A couple of minutes later, he was brave enough to float around after sometime and even asked us to leave him alone!
In Plantation Bay (where we checked in on our third and fourth day), we also got them both to go for another swim. Lola was still complaining about her swimsuit but forgot all about it being too tight when she was lying inside the jauzzi or the whirpools scattered along the perimeter of the pool in Kilimanjaro Cafe. Lolo was still floating around the water and still didn't like the idea of us holding on to him.
At night, we slept on the same HUGE bed: two Queen beds we stuck to each other, just like Saturday nights when I was in grade school. It was good to see my grandparents so out of everthing which was making their faces more worn and wrinkled. For four days, they lived one day at a time. They had long listened to stories of the places we have gone to or merely contented themselves with videos and pictures. Now, they were both part of the entire experience and what was funny was that they did not realize they were in dire need of a good vacation until they were actually there. Both my grandparents take pains to make sure my sister and I have a good dose of R&R when we're home and it's time they had their turn. They've tried their best to make our lives better than theirs ever since we were children...even if it simply meant a softer pillow or an extra helping of pork and beans. So now that we're strong enough to stand on our own two feet, it's our turn to make sure that they bask in one warm, glorious sunset.
Information you might find helpful:
Manna Grill
Punta Engano Road, Mactan, Lapu-lapu City
(+63) 32-3406448
