After a heavy lunch and a restful siesta, we were up and running again. We filled up two tricycles with our bags, tents, food and firewoods for a night of camping at the coast of Occidental Mindoro’s Amazona beach.

We were running pretty late; having overslept due to lack of one the previous night coupled with the exertions we did trekking to the waterfalls earlier. The beach was about thirty minutes from our friend’s house and the sun was already nearing the horizon once our tricycles went a-bumping along the unmarked rough road to the coast.

I was holding myself from running to the beach as soon as our tricycle stopped. As introductions were being done with the resort owners, everything seemed to be on slow motion as I watched the horizon turn from cool blue to a fiery orange. After everything was in order, we scrambled up the sand dunes on the way to the beach.

My heart sank as the fiery ball of fire was almost gone by the time we hit the shore. There was no more time to set up a tripod, change lenses, or select filters; we shot with what we had. It took a minute from the time we sprinted down the sand dune to the time the sun finally hid behind the mountains along the horizon. I had a total of four shots and none of them good. Oh well.

We pitched up camp before full darkness engulfed the beach. Two tents were set up, dried logs were piled and lit, the makeshift grill set for cooking our dinner. We took a few more photographs before the light totally disappeared prior to settling down.

Dinner was made up of freshly grilled pork liempo, fish and white rice. We spread a woven reed mat against the sandy beach, set our dinner and it’s chow time!

We had fun doing some long exposure photographs, star trails, light paintings, and still lives (I asked one of our friends to pose multiple times for a full minute without moving hehe). When our batteries ran out, we turned to the bottle of booze we brought along.

We chatted up the night, joked with the roaming dogs on the beach, burned the bonfire to the last scrap of wood we can find, chomped down the last of the barbecued liempo; and with buzzing heads finally hit the sack at exactly midnight. We’ve got a sunrise to catch in a few hours.