Celebrate friendship on Valentine's Week

It’s almost Valentine’s Day when we will be surrounded by loud love.

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Red roses, candlelit dinners, staged affection posted online. Love, apparently, must be visible, romantic, and preferably photogenic.

But some of the most enduring forms of love don’t show up with flowers. They arrive quietly. And they are almost never celebrated on Feb. 14.

Friendship is one of them.

Well, a group of friends, mostly couples in their senior years, celebrated Valentine’s week without those photogenic or Instagramable moments. They went camping. Driving through kilometers of desolate landscape of sand trails left by Pinatubo’s eruption decades ago, stirring a whirlwind of sand in its path, crossing a river, dodging tree trunks — and finally reaching a surreal landscape of rolling green grass, pine trees, and a serene lake.

This is Lake Mapanuepe in Zam-bales, a truly hidden paradise visited only by the adventurous with 4x4 vehicles, and a few brave 4x2 drivers, all of them with the spirit of Indiana Jones.

Far from the restaurants where most couples will dine on Valentine’s Day, this group who call themselves the Senior Car Campers Plus seek the outdoors to celebrate friendship. Under the stars, the chilly wind of the lake threatening to blowaway tents and awnings, these senior citizens cookmeals on neatly-assembled kitchen tables, lay the sumptuous food on tables extended by coordinated planning, and sit on camp chairs each brings along.

The Great Outdoors is what draws these seniors together. Total strangers before they met in some campsite years ago, they have now become friends and act like neighbors, although their home addresses are scattered around Metro Manila.