What’s the
weirdest thing you’ve done on your travels recently? Ever wish
you were a mermaid when you were a child? In the Philippines recently a friend
and I came across a business hiring mermaid tails. It looked fun and, as it
turns out, was too daft an opportunity to pass up on.
Getting our mermaid on (literally)
We were prepared
to leave our dignity at the door as we indulged ourselves in our mermaid
fantasies. It didn’t take long. The woman in the shop took one look at us both
and proclaimed we would need size large.
Getting into the
tails was the first challenge. We walked across the beach to the water’s edge
and told to sit on the sand in order to don the tails. They consist of a heavy fin-shaped
board with a tight rubber foot sock attached to the top of the board, and lycra-like
fabric that goes over your legs and up to your waist. With the fabric rolled
down to the edge of the board we pushed our feet into the very tight rubber
socks and started to unroll the fabric. It was easy enough until we got to our
bums; at that point we had to roll around in a most undignified manner until we
had filled our bikini bottoms with sand and pulled the fabric above them.
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| Our best mermaid pose on Boracay Island, Philippines |
Dodging the
paparazzi
The next
challenge was getting to the deeper water. As soon as we started putting the
tails on a crowd of Asian tourists surrounded us and kept taking photos of us
as we rolled around like beached whales trying to get into the tails. The
photographers were shameless, even pushing their children forward to pose with
us. It was very strange and I hope I never see any of the photos because I
cannot imagine any of them will be flattering.
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| Mermaid swimming |
Swimming
Once they had all
calmed down a bit we managed to get sight of deeper water. We shuffled on our
bums and heels for a bit and eventually had enough water to turn onto our
fronts, actually kick our tails, and swim. The combination of the heavy board
and the huge waves smashing us in the face was exhausting, and made us feel
like we had been swimming in a washing machine, but it was great fun.
We hired our
tails from dive centre Fisheye Divers on Boracay Island. They can be found at
Station 1 on the Island’s famous White Beach.
