Just before the crack of dawn, I woke up bright and early, took a bath and prepared for the drive to Makati. What usually takes me an hour to an hour and a half took only thirty minutes with parking and all to reach the meeting point.
BUT, had I known that the college students would be late, I would have left at a later time!!!
I was in the lobby patiently waiting at 5:30AM and the bus left at 8AM! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. More than 2 hours is enough for people to cry out in frustration!
Thankfully, the time passed by quickly due to panic- for some backward reason, I don't have the numbers of my other teammates so I was patiently waiting while looking out for the bus.
Four hours and some heavy rain later, we finally arrived at Bataan. I even bought rain boots the day before to prep for this day, unfortunately, it was not put to good use but instead as an added weight to my already heavy backpack.
What I thought would be an easy trip to the mangroves (with me thinking the buses would drop us off at the boardwalk, a few meters away will be the mangroves) turned out to be the bus dropping us off an at unknown street, trekking for 15 minutes in paved roads, crossing the river by literally crossing three bamboo boats and the rest of the 45 minutes in slippery, watch where you're going, muddy and rainy trek to the mangrove area. I seriously under-estimated the coastal clean-up! Due to the stressful walk to the destination, we ended up cleaning for less than 2 hours which was a shame since there were still a lot of trash around. But at least the whole group did clean-up garbage bags upon garbage bags of trash.
EXTRA CHALLENGE 1: Here we are crossing the three boats with the help of the boatmen.
While waiting for the boat to cart of a load of trash from the mangrove site
EXTRA CHALLENGE 2: I stepped on an anthill on the way back and had to jump down to wash them off. Imagine 10 ants biting your right foot all at the same time! Ouch x 10!!!
EXTRA CHALLENGE 3: The A-team! Wet (it was raining) and tired but happy to help the environment!
Some weird items we found - a Nokia 3200 cover case and the cover of a clear book!
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