Getting inside was the easy part, I’m holding the aspiring Buddhist’s equivalent of a backstage pass.

The monk at the entrance to the Dalai Lama’s Tsuglagkhang Temple takes one look at the little saffron-colored book with the title “Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva” stenciled in silver lettering on the cover and wordlessly waves me through the gates. Inside the temple, diffused morning sunlight streams through large windows giving the room a peaceful glow. I pause at the entrance to try and figure out what to do next. Buddhist followers shuffle solemnly past me and take their places on folded yoga mats or small cushions scattered on the red carpet around the large room. Everyone is holding a copy of the little yellow book.

The Dalai Lama’s ornately-carved throne in the middle of the Temple exerts a sort of gravity on everything within sight of it and I find myself walking towards the front of the crowd to a cramped patch of open carpet among the other Buddhists sitting lotus-syle on the ground. I squeeze in beside a woman silently studying an ancient text and wait for His Holiness to arrive and begin lecturing about the Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva.

The crowd keeps growing and now the little gaps between the people already seated on the floor are filled by new arrivals like bricks being added to a wall. Realizing that things are about to get a whole lot less roomy, I pull my feet in even tighter to make more room on the floor for somebody else.

With my feet now almost directly beneath my nose, I notice a familiar and unwelcome smell. I try to think of the last time I took a shower since I’ve been in India—maybe one or two overnight bus rides ago?

The smell from my feet is gaining strength and envelops me in an unholy cloud of…

“Your feet STINK!”

I look up to see the sour-faced woman in front of me has turned around. She is frowning and her nose is scrunched up, sniffing. I look around nervously and try to pretend like she’s not talking to me, but she’s not finished.

“I think you should go and WASH THEM RIGHT NOW!”

She adds the last part of the sentence so forcefully that I imagine the words bouncing off the carvings at the back of the temple. Some people around us are now looking disapprovingly in my direction.

I try mumble something in response, but there’s not much to say. I mean, she’s right—my feet really do stink.

Embarrassed, I’m trying to decide what to do when the woman sitting next to me leans over and says quietly “she is your teacher today”.

I’m not understanding the clue, so she says with a smile on her face “as you follow the path of the Bodhisattva, this woman will teach you patience.”

I wonder if sometimes on the path to enlightenment, even the Bodhisattva had smelly feet?

“Another one,” I thought to myself as a three-legged sea turtle swam lopsidedly past. Its birdlike eyes warily scanned a sunlit expanse of coral garden on Tubbataha’s South Island atoll in the Philippines. The crippled green slowed cautiously as it approached the edge of the reef wall plunging cliff-like into the indigo depths below. This turtle could consider itself lucky—it only lost a leg. For many others the first glimpse of the striped torpedo of a tiger shark barreling out of the deep would have been the last thing they ever saw.

I saw my first Tubbataha tiger yesterday. In the dim light of early morning as the sun edged above the Sulu Sea horizon we spotted a dorsal fin knifing through the mirror-flat water in a scene straight out of “Jaws”. Under the cover of a moonless night only a few hours before, the shark had easily ambushed unsuspecting victims; but in the gathering daylight it sensed its own vulnerability. As we drew closer in the small outboard dingy from WWF reef survey ship Minerva, the tiger vanished into the safety of deep water with a few powerful sweeps of its tail.

But now it’s another moonless night and my legs are dangling helplessly beneath me into the inky black sea where I know the sharks are prowling again. I’m hastily checking my scuba equipment so I can dive beneath the waves with my dive buddies, a visiting Danish photographer couple who are also documenting the amazing biodiversity of Tubbataha Reef on this survey expedition.

Enveloped in a storm of silvery bubbles as we submerge, we let the air out of our dive vests and swim to the bottom of the reef shelf. I’m more comfortable down among the corals and not bobbing helplessly on the surface for a passing tiger to swipe at. My flashlight casts an eerie greenish glow around me as I look for night animals to photograph. Just to be safe, I point the flashlight towards the dropoff. The beam casts a feeble light, but enough to illuminate a four-foot reef shark ghosting by, its eyes gleam unblinkingly back at me. Bad idea.

Nervous, I swim a little closer to my dive buddies, who are hovering over a large coral formation, taking photos. Without realizing I’ve strayed too close, one of them gives an unexpected kick and knocks my air regulator out of my mouth. Bubbles surround me and I can hear the air gushing from my tank, but they are oblivious to my sudden danger.

I fumble to grab the hose and put the regulator back in my mouth and start breathing again, but with the camera strapped to one wrist and the flashlight on the other it’s hard to find it without getting everything tangled. A lung-burning minute passes before I get a hold of the regulator and everything’s ok. I decide I’d better stick to exploring the reef during the day and let the sharks have it to themselves at night.