Exchanges

When at an international race, always bring spare t-shirts/singlets for exchanging with other teams.

This time round, more prepared ald. I had on hand 1 spare team t-shirt as well as an extra singlet (the team i train with in sg), plus the race singlet we used in Boracay.

Number 1 on my list was the red singlet from Bugsay Boracay. Really nice chilli red v-neck singlet, with flowers on the side... schweet! but none of them wanted to swap singlets. =(

After making a quick survey of the teams on the beach, geok and i made our first exchanges with PNP. The Philippine National Police team, who incidently, were also our neighbour-tent on the beach. That one was easy, we whipped out our shirts and had like 10 PNP guys going "exchange exchange!!!"

I meant to take a pic with the guy in the black shirt only. Coz he was the one i exchanged my team t-shirt with. Dunno why it ended up being a big group photo with a sandy rugby ball.

That night at the dinner on the beach, armed with our shirts, a few of us from the team started to make our rounds.

2nd exhchage was with CamSur. The fishermen team. A guy from our team first swapped his shirt with one of the CamSur guys. Which sent a few of us girls charging over to get ours swapped too. I guess the CamSur guys were pretty surprised by us, coz apparently, our aggressive arrival had sent half of the CamSur guys fleeing the table!

A little CamSur fisherman (the guy on my left in the pic) was standing by my side, someone on our team was telling me "hey he wants to exchange". With their trophy in hand, Little CamSur fisherman (thank goodness he is smaller than i am, so can fit into my race singlet) just stood there smiling away at me. i guess he probably couldn't speak english. So i ended up trading my racing singlet with his t-shirt. Even though it was a dri-fit in exchange for a cotton tee, but ey, it's the champion team ok!

2 exchanges and i was more than happy to stop already. But turns out that the local teams are also pretty into the exchange-business. Or rather, we were crazily pouncing on the teams in groups of twos and threes.

My final exchange was with a guy from the Philippine Navy. He had orginally wanted to give me his yellow shirt. But i pointed to the one one he was wearing and said "that one cannnnnn?". I think he was pretty reluctant, but took off his shirt and took my singlet anyhow... which i hope does actually fit him.

So now my total wardrobe count stands at:

1 Adelaide Black Dragons singlet
1 Royal Australian Navy Singet
1 PNP singlet
1 CamSur t-shirt
1 Philippine Navy singlet

Racing amongst gods

The race culture geok and i have been brought up in is one of kiasu-ism.

Make sure everything's in order, go early and make sure you are ready to set off anytime. And so on the first day of the races, geok and i wake up bright and early. the team was supposed to meet at 830am.

Geok and i were up at 715 and were sitting at the breakfast by 730 chomping down our buffet breakfast (which by the way totally loses hands down to the penang breakfast at bayview hotel).
745...
800...
815...

not a single soul from our team had turned up at the breakfast area... by then, the local teams had already long started to stream in, warm up, go for their runs along the beach. and for our team, it was only geok and i. no doubt the rest must have been tired from all that bar hopping the night before... tsk tsk...

much later, we all make our way to the beach and locate our tent.

as usual, with races, there's alot of hanging around, waiting for your event to swing by. so most of us hit the waters for a dip... exactly how crystal clear is the water??

the water by the shore's pretty shallow, which allows for the tonnes of spectators/participants to wade all the way out near the bouys to actually watch the races. With the few exception of a few roaming too far out and till the commentator had to scream for them to get out of the traffic path of the boats...You can imagine if it were spore, the race officials would probably bring on the police to hurl the people out of the sea.

getting to wade out into the water also meant more picsssss!!!!!







Our races came and went. and as expected, we were last in our heats, as well as reprecharge.

the up side of it all, was that we got to end the day early, watch the races and sit back and sip on our milkshakes!!!

My very first glass of Mango Milkshake which got me hooked like a crack addict after.
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Day 2 of the races were pretty much the same. more sitting around, soaking in the water, working on the tan which by now had gone really bad, and oh yah, racing.

as with the first day, we were knocked out by the reprecharge. aside from the fact that the local teams are damn good, geok and i have deeply analysed why "the teams we now train with" will never win, the simple reason lies with the fact that they suffer from the "there are more doctors than there are patients in the team" syndrome. it seems to be the trend with ang mohs, too many people have too much things to say, everyone wants to be the boss and no one wants to listen. which is really a pity, coz even if they do have the potential, it's screwed by the fact that people don't get it that there's a reason why there's only 1 coach or 1 captain.

Of course the biggest stars of the show was the Philippines National Womens' Team, who totally charged ahead of the rest of the pack. Geok and i watched every race they were in and kept raving about how great the Philippine National Team is, ok, more like i was behaving like a crazed idiot going ga-ga over the Philippine National Team. Apparently it seemed like we were the only bo-zos who were star struck by the SEA Games Gold Medalists.

Not surprisingly, the national team came in first for all the races. but at the end of it all, they very graciously gave up their gold medals coz they were there to participate, and so those teams which came in 2nd, 3rd and 4th naturally got their golds, silvers and bronzes. a gesture which won a standing ovation from the rest of the teams at the dinner the following night...awwwww... more brownie points for their sportsmanship.

Camsur emerged as the men's champs. Local fishermen of the island, watching them race was like watching a race video on fast forward mode, coz their stroke rate is just sky rockets and leaves the rest of the pack eating their backwash... once again, geok and i almost lost our minds over being in the presence of gods...

At the end of 2 days of racing, it's triple thumbs up for the Boracay Races. Unlike the Penang races which are turning into another singapore race coz of the excessive numbers of singaporean teams participating, Boracay was definately an eye-opener getting to watch how other teams race. And of course having found our new idol teams... :)

Boracay, Philippines

For the still clueless, Boracay is not a "Who", it's a "Where"...

Boracay island is approx 315km south of Manila, belonging to the municipality of Malay, and the province of Aklan.

The island is a mere 7km long, dog-bone shaped with the narrowest spot being less than 1km wide.

The island has 2 main touristic beaches, White Beach and Bulabog Beach. Both on the opposite ends of the island. The one i was at is White Beach, a 4km stretch of beach with beach resorts, restaurants, bars, hotels and other tourist-related businesses.

Top picks

I'm still waiting to get geok's pics before i'm gonna to continue posting...

but meanwhile, here are the top picks of pweety pweety pics of the trip...