where CLOUDS SETTLE

The Sama of Southern Mindanao believe in going with the waves; if you want to be with nature, then you have to go with nature.

- PATRICIA VILLORIA.

CLOUDS NEVER SETTLE OVER OPEN SEAS. It needs the surface of land large enough, like a small island, for the elements to allow the clouds to stay put a little while longer.

Our tour guide, Errold Bayona, rattles off scientific facts such as these easily on the car ride to the Santa Cruz Islands of Zamboanga City, known all over the world for their pink sand. Tourists who visit love to edit their photos to make the beach look an alien shade of pink on social media, but in reality, the sand is actually a mixture of coralline sediments: red organ pipe corals, white bleached corals, and discarded seashells pulverized by the waves for eons. Up close, it’s easy to pick apart the sparse reds from the greater volume of whites that comprise the signature pinkish tint from afar.

Local tour guides at the city port detail a set of rules before sailing down south. This includes a reminder for visitors to not bring any single-use plastics and a request to not bring any seashells or corals home.

When tourism boomed for the city in the 1960s to the 1980s, foreign tourists flocked to bask in the beaches’ beauty while taking home pieces of coral to use as ornaments. Coupled with coral reef mining and dynamite fishing practices around the reefs, the coral reef population quickly dwindled and the Smaller Santa Cruz island further shrunk in size. At its worst in the early 2000s, the island was small enough that it could almost be swallowed by the sea if the tides were too high.