If April is the cruelest month, then June has got to be the wettest. The rain killed my camera last week while I was taking pictures in
the Philippines, and now I'm left twiddling my shutterless thumbs as I
anxiously wait for a repair quote.
The picture below was taken at the beginning of what was meant to be a relaxing beach holiday in Boracay, which ordinarily looks a lot like this. In reality we never saw the sun, because Typhoon Frank, aka Fengshen, descended on the island the day we arrived and didn't leave for four relentlessly windblown, doggedly moisture-drenched days.
The trip was stressful as far as vacations go, but filled with memories I won't readily forget: the unexpectedly dramatic wedding in a church exposed to the elements, coinciding with the moment when the typhoon became a direct hit; the bride's vow to love the groom "as madly as this storm" just as the gale outside reached a crescendo; the inundated reception room and banquet followed by the wild dancing-cum-splashing at the afterparty; our battered, leaking hotel room, which we had to vacate due to fear of -- you guessed it -- flooding.
I'll also remember the searching expressions of people on the beach as a boat set out to find the bodies of three men drowned in the surf, and sharing a bus with thirteen survivors of a ship that sank and lost five of its crew members to the sea. Across Aklan, the main island next to Boracay, we saw huge trees uprooted and toppled, cars and vans swept into rice paddies, homes made of nipa flattened like so many matchsticks, fallen electricity poles with live wires scoring the roads at ground level. When we finally made it to Kalibo, the city was caked in thick, dark mud, and the airport had neither power nor running water. Thankfully a plane was able to land using sight navigation as opposed to radar, and once in Manila, I managed to catch a connecting flight back to Hong Kong.
When I woke up in my bed the next morning I was greeted with signal-8 typhoon and a distinct lack of electricity in my flat. It was hard not to feel like some sort of fated hand was at work: it turned out Frank had travelled with me.
