San Marcelino, Zambales is home to the Roman Catholic Church of St. William. Too bad I can’t find some information about St. William’s Church – its founding date and the specific saint whom this church is dedicated to. There are a lot of St. William in the Roman Catholic roster of saints.
Anyway, I still find St. William’s Church in San Marcelino, Zambales a nice church to visit. Hopefully this year, we can go back to it and attend the town’s Singkamas or Mango Festival.
A few years ago, we were able to shoot the Singkamas Festival of San Marcelino, Zambales. It was a nice festival except we were unable to eat some singkamas because no one is selling ready-to-eat singkamas. They’re selling it in bulk.
Let me share some of the pictures I took of San Marcelino taken around the town center.
I first heard about Anawangin Cove a few years ago. It’s one of the most popular travel destinations for team buildings, along with Calaguas, Cagbalete, etc. Based on stories from people who went there, Anawangin seems like a Paradise – no electricity and just the beach and the forest.
A few weeks ago, I finally able to visit Anawangin Cove to see it for myself. It’s not as beautiful as I imagined from stories I’ve heard before but it’s still a nice place to visit. So from Tera Tower in Bridgetowne, Quezon City, we travelled like 4 hours to reach Subic Bay Freeport in Olongapo. That’s our only stop-over on the way to Anawangin. From Subic, we travelled about an hour more to the beach resorts in Barangay Pundaquit, San Antonio, Zambales. We had a boat waiting for us that took us to Anawangin Cover in about 20 minutes.
The onset of the rainy season was just announced by PAG-ASA when we went to Anawangin. Guess what… our boat has to stop in the middle of the sea because there’s heavy rain. How cool is that? I actually felt sorry for my Xiaomi smartphone because it was inside my pocket – and we all got wet.
The other funny side to our trip to Anawangin is the fact that it’s the first time my beau and I went out-of-town. Spending a wet, raining moment in an open sea with the beau is definitely worth remembering. We arrived at Anawangin Cove still safe and dripping from the sea and rain water. There were about 3 resorts in Anawangin and we stayed in the one that has concrete and air-conditioned cottage. There were about 4 or 5 of these underneath the forest, which to my knowledge are a variety of pine trees.
I was a bit shocked to find a man-made swimming pool inside the forest. I guess it’s just a new feature. There were tents everywhere. We probably settled in around 4PM (after we left Manila by 8am) and begun cooking our supper. The electricity are only available from 6pm to 6am and it’s coming from generators inside a warehouse-looking structure made of GI sheets. The sound of the generators competed with the sound of the crickets all night. Also, it rained most of the night. We had the air-conditioned room with kitchen and dining space as well as a small bahay-kubo made of bamboo (that you normally would see in lawns in Manila). Then we have about 3 tents. After dinner, we had night swimming at the beach and it was absolutely fabulous to look at the direction of the sea in pitch black.
The next morning, we did some 20-30 minute hike to a nearby “burol” and got to take a lot of pictures. This is also were the famous shot of Anawangin Cove was taken (when the sand was whiter, less cottages and lots of green trees). We had breakfast, swim a bit more, and then prepare to return to Manila via Pundaquit. The waves were a bit… scary but we manage to go back to Pundaquit dry. I’m really not good at detailed story-telling but I’ll let the pictures complement the story. I’m very happy to spend overnight with my beau underneath the forest of Anawangin Cove.
