You could sit in the waterfall, and the pressure would push you down that slippery waterfall into the pool of water, and that was great fun. The water drained out the other end into the stream you followed to get there.
On the sides of that pool there was a wider rock ledge on the right side, so after you went off the waterfall into the pool, you could easily climb out and go back to the waterfall for another ride over it.
But on the left hand side (standing on the waterfall side facing the pool) there was a sheer rock cliff, maybe 30 feet high (my whole life, when describing this to people, I characterized it as 40 feet, but in thinking of it...I think it was more like 25 or 30 feet) where you could jump off! You would then swim to the right side, clamber onto the ledge, and walk all the way around, stepping over the stream leading to the waterfall to the left side, and leap off again!
The water itself in the pool was very deep, I did a lot of snorkeling in the ocean and could dive pretty deep, but in trying to find bottom, I was never able to to deep enough, so I presumed it was at least 30 feet in its deepest point.
It was not an authorized place, and at the time there was no trail, so you had to know where to go into the jungle and then you followed the stream bed to the pool. I thought it was only known to a very few kids, since I rarely saw other kids there, and never adults. I suppose many kids didn't want to go off out into the jungle that far, but...I was not one of them. I was a bit of a jungle-rat, when I wasn't snorkeling in the ocean, I was tromping around in the jungles on the base!
Okay. I must tell you, my mind is a little blown here. This was back around 1969 when I did this with friends, and I have described and thought about this many times over the last 57 years, because it was burned vividly in my brain. As I wrote this post, up to the horizontal line above, it occurred to me (why it never did before) to see if there were any pictures of this place...and I found that not only are there pictures, is it known and is now kind of a tourist destination since the location has long ceased to function as a military base!
It seems almost exactly as I remembered it, and I think I was right to have, over the years, re-thought the height of that cliff we leaped off, revising it downwards. (everything seemed bigger as a kid)
But my gosh! There it is. I don't know if you can still slide off the waterfall, maybe the water flow has changed, but the ledge is still there to climb out, as is the cliff. I must tell you-it is a very strange thing to see these images, as it was only a musty, fading memory in my brain, yet...it still persisted to this day largely unchanged, and when I saw these pictures, it brought me right back to it.
In this picture, you can see the waterfall we used to slide down into the water on. To the left, is the ledge we could climb out of the pool on, that went through the jungle vegetation back up to the waterfall. And if you stepped over the stream and walked up and around to the right, there was the cliff you could jump off!
Here is another image of it:
IIRC, we would jump off from about five or ten feet above the top of the picture where that second vine that comes all the way down to the water is.
This is a picture looking down at the pool from the waterfall.
Wow. I cannot express how weirdly fun and satisfying it was to see there were pictures of this place. I get the impression it is now not as seeming as wild and remote, as there are formal trails with rope guides to hold onto, and barricades around the areas near the top, from what I could see, and even a sign with a fee to pay for various types of access:
Here is the general location in relationship to the waters of Subic Bay:
And here is the close-up-the red line is where the road stopped when I lived there, so pretty much everything after the El Kabayo Stables was jungle. At the top, you can see the Brent International School Subic, which was where I went to half of Sixth grade before going to George Dewey Junior-Senior High School the next year! (The first kid I met as a newcomer in 6th Grade was Glenn Gifford, who traded my "Little Debbie Raisin Creme Pie" (which I detested) for a shiny red apple...but he had used his thumb to squish the formerly crisp apple under the surface into mushy applesauce, so while it looked crisp, biting into it was disgusting. I did notice he was watching me eat it with a high degree of anticipation, but...I didn't think anything of it until I bit into it, and as my face screwed up in disgust at the texture, his face was wreathed in a gleeful delight at his lunchtime treachery! We became good friends, in spite of that...:)
My point in this wonderful journey down memory lane was-we all did things like jumping off things in less than safe environments, or at least boys of my generation did. I often think of how lucky many of us were to make it to adulthood, even if there were some who didn't.
I abhor this modern tendency to put kids in a protective bubble, even if I understand the parents wanting to do so. I get that completely. But kids have to explore and find their boundaries, and I think for young boys, that is ingrained in us in a way it isn't in young girls. (I suspect girls are generally smarter overall at those ages and have more commonsense)
There should be a reasonable (if not a "happy" medium. I don't like the thought of a nation of kids growing up in protective bubbles where the only thing they are allowed to experience is a video game.
I will say there are some things that do cross the line between kids testing physical or thrill boundaries and stupidity-that kid who jumped off the cliff and hit it appeared be on the wrong side of that line. But if many adults are the sole arbiters of where that line is...that may stunt our national character...and STILL there will be kids who will go beyond those lines. It is, I believe, a part of growing up.