The Creme Scene

We took a long drive, some eight hours drive north of Manila, to go to parks? I kept my thoughts to myself; my mouth was parchment dry despite seven glasses of ice water & two cups of coffee. Still, that seemed like a far better idea than listening to the other resort inhabitants sing bad karaoke; that was always a hazard of vacationing in the Philippines, cheap or karaoke everywhere, all the time. So a park it is... Hurrah...
I guess that's interesting. The town below was once swallowed up by a tidal wave & they placed a marker on the mountain side where the water reached. There were statues of townsfolk running from the wave, which also had a statue of its own, romantically painted a powder blue & white as exaggeratedly panicked faces scream for help and pass on infants-- frozen in time for tourists.
We hustled back to the air conditioned comforts of the car; we saw past the edge of the highway. It was a drop less than thirty feet, easy enough to spot had we not been looking at the wrong way. Rock formations, shiny and sharp, jut up from the water and cut the waves. Some twenty teenagers were on the water; boys and girls, wild haired and sun burnt. They floated on repaired surfboards & waited for waves. They dodged one after the other by diving underneath; their chatter barely broke. They didn't even have to look at the rocks to dodge them.
"What are they waiting for?" Esay asked. None of us had actually surfed but those waves looked pretty decent enough to ride. They were beggars. Rock face climbers in Benguet, deep sea divers in Palawan-- throw them a couple of coins and they'd literally risk break their necks for the money. These teenagers were going to ride a wave just as it about to hit a rock formation and make turn in time to save themselves.
Paulo pointed at something. The shoreline dipped and ran away from the stone beach, the boys and girls paddled after it. Then they were skittering on the water's skin, left and right; flipping and turning. They looked like some comical sea birds fighting over a bit of discarded bait. They were tiny on that wave. Their numbers only made the hazard worse-- their boards could bump into each other, hand spans apart. Then the sea was white, they was no stony beach, just foam and brown arms high fiving. I pulled out my wallet & crumpled a hundred peso bill. I threw it at the beach. The smallest one; a ten year old at most, ran for it.
I said, "We are going back now. I am going to learn to surf."