By Aurelio A. Pena
DAVAO CITY, (PNA Features) — If you live here in Lanang like we do in a quiet village near the Waterfront Hotel Davao, it’s only 10 minutes across the narrow channel of the Davao Gulf to the “beaches” of Samal Island.
To be honest about it, there are really no “ public beaches” in this beautiful island.
And to be blunt about it, there are really no “gardens” in this island despite its official name of “Island Garden City of Samal” which was forced down the throat of its islanders.
Most of the little “beaches” that you see in most private beach resorts in Samal are fake and set up artificially by the resort owners to give their places a semblance of a “beach resort”.
So what they do is dig up tons and tons of “white sand” around the island and dump them at their private coastline which they lease from the Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources in a contract called “foreshore lease”.
Resort owners will admit to you that there’s no real island beachline in Samal like the long white natural beaches of Cebu, Bohol or Boracay.
The only places in Davao where there are long, natural, real beachlines are the beaches of Times Beach and Talomo Beach–as well as some other white beaches along the coastline of Davao Oriental or Davao del Sur.
Although both Times and Talomo beaches are natural long beachlines, they’re not white — they’re ash grey and look as ugly as the hundreds of makeshift cottages, huts, eateries, videokes, etc dotting the entire beachhead of Times and Talomo.
But the nice thing about these two ugly beaches, is that they’re open and FREE to the public.
Anyone can take off his clothes and jump into the sea anywhere on these beaches and no security guard will grab and throw you out.
But in Samal, you can’t go jump in the sea anywhere along the coast because each private beach resort build their own concrete barriers or “fortresses” or whatever they want to call them. At the gate, you have to pay entrance fee of P100 to P300 per person just to enter their resort where there’s a small beach to swim.
The most frustrating thing about these Samal “beaches” even goes beyond the fees that they charge just for entering their gates.
Even the sea of the Davao Gulf itself doesn’t cooperate with you if you want to spend time with your family at a Samal beach on Sunday.
Know why?
Because the low tide almost the whole day — from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. — has so little sea water just enough to wet your feet.
If you really want to swim, you have to do it around 5 p.m. until the nighttime when there’s enough sea water up to your neck to do some little swimming with your family.
Since Samal officials cannot simply drive away all the private beach resorts for violating a DENR environmental law prohibiting them from building concrete barriers or fortresses around their resort, what they can do is to fully-develop that Public Beach near the Babak wharf, using whatever little “pork barrel” money left by the congressmen taking care of the province.
I visited this supposed “public beach” and saw that this project looked abandoned for lack of funds and smelled something fishy here.
This place of course, always smells fishy because it’s a fishermen’s village where you can see some fishermen mending their nets beside the beach.
This beach is so dirty, but it can be easily cleaned by Samal city officials using garden rakes, led by Mayor Antalan himself, if only their hearts can bleed once in a while for the people of this beautiful island.
If the mayor calls for a “volunteer clean-up drive” of this public beach in Babak, I’m personally volunteering to join in the drive.