Philippines – Page 2 – Where is Phil now?

El Nido

Day 48, Monday 13 Feb, Puerto Princesa to el Nido

I am writing this post in the semi-dark, two days later in el Nido after a few vodka tonics in a local bar and a couple of beers with dinner, don’t expect Hemingway – I am not that drunk !, but short and possibly incoherent post.

Up early after a lousy sleep, the van to el Nido was supposed to arrive between 7 and 7.30 but was uber early at 6.45 and I was only gazing sadly into my coffee at that stage, so mad rush to get out the door.

Van ride was Ok, the road was not as bad as I expected for the first five hours and I had a wee bit of leg room, though I think our driver was trying to set a record for a van ride with 13 tourists, lets just say he drove like me and used all available road space! It did feel safe though. We stopped a couple of times, the last stop was at Taytay, where we picked up a woman who squeezed in next to me and went to sleep on my shoulder. The concrete road ended here, the new roads in Palawan are made from foot thick concrete, as the tarseal just falls apart too quickly.

The van arrived in El Nido, in the north of Palawan just before 1 PM. My Finnish friend and I were immediately set upon my tricycle drivers and it took a while to extract ourselves from the melee and consult on trying to find accommodation. We took a tricycle out to where one of his countrymen was staying and they had one bed left which he took. I got the tricycle back to the centre of town, checked out a couple of places on the way and ended up getting a room for the night at the “Alternative” a guesthouse on the bay – and I mean ON, under the deck is THE bay. It was actually my original first choice, but it is more guesthouse than hostel – but it had a good bar and an excellent restaurant which was a plus, the minus was it was not a great backpacker hang out, so not many people to chat too.

El Nido is located on the Bacuit Bay and was initially made famous for its diving, and beauty, by Jacques Cousteau back in the 70’s. Scattered throughout the bay are numerous limestone islands. Tourism hasn’t really hit the town in a big ugly way yet, though tourism is its main money earner, so there is still a good feel and a rustic charm to the place – for instance there is no electricity in town from 6.00 am to 2.00pm !

I wandered around town for a bit and booked myself an island hopping/snorkelling tour for tomorrow and a dive trip on Wednesday. The view from my hostel deck.

Walkabout

They are filming the final in the “Bourne” series in El Nido, watch out for this boat in the movie…

Boat (bangka) building – Philippine style…

El Nido Lots of pawn shops on Palawan, I did not see these in Malaysia. My hostel was just up the road.

Can you tell I used two cameras for these photos !

I had a very nice vegetarian meal and a couple of San Miguels and went to bed, where I listened to really, truely awful music from the restaurant until almost 1.00!

The Underground river tour

Day 47, Sunday 12 Feb, Puerto Princesa, Sabang – Underground River

The prime reason I chose too come to Puerto Princesa (PP) was to visit the underground river near Sabang. The underground river has been nominated for selection as one of the new seven wonders of the world and is a protected national park. Sabang and the park are accessible by self travel, but you have to get a permit to visit the underground river. The cost to do an organised tour is virtually the same as doing it yourself so I elected to have the hostel organise me to join a tour. I got the last free spot in the next four days! However, as you will read, I am not sure if it was a good or bad thing. Two others from the hostel managed to visit themselves as they missed out on tours.

The day started well, nice omelette for breakie and chatting with the others in the hostel until the van arrived forty five minutes late, a Korean and his Philippine girlfriend were the only other occupants so we paid a visit to two hotels to pick up the rest of the people on the tour. I am not going to say much about them here, I will just say through their foul mouthed, hung over, racist, sexual explicit comments and whinging they ruined my day. With an almost two hour bus ride there and back and a full day at a cool place, I was really hoping for a good bunch of people to share the experience with.

Yes, it was another one of those days, and before this post sounds like a whinge fest, I will say the place was awesome and I highly recommend it, my experience would have been more interesting if I was not effectively, on my own.

We stopped a couple of times on the way to Sabang for a site see and to allow at least one of my fellow van passengers the chance to bring up lasts night binging on the road side. Me looking like I was not really enjoying myself !

We reached Sabang at 11.30 and were advised by our tour guides that our permits were for entering the park at 3.30, this was not particularly amusing as this meant I had four hours to kill in a one ~~horse~~ bullock town on my own. They did offer to sell us a couple of sub-tours to help pass the time – I hate that crap ! Lunch was at 12.30 so I went exploring and I soon found the bullock.

Actually there was more than one.

The beach is quite nice though!

After lunch we went up to the Sabang ‘wharf’ area to wait for our outrigger canoe to take us to the park itself. The outriggers are an extremely common form of transport in the Philippines, unlike Borneo where the boats were all outboard driven, these are all in board diesel motors. I snapped this awesome jeepney.

The journey from the wharf takes about half an hour and we were deposited on another nice stretch of beach where killed another hour milling around pointlessly.

I did see some more macaques – and one stole an Italian womens scarf and took it up a tree, which was amusing for everyone else! She did get it back though when the monkey dropped it. Also saw a small monitor lizard, my first.

And finally after a few failed attempts, some socks and sandals – yes !

The cave is entered in 10 person canoes. The ride is about 45 minutes long and we went about 1.5km into the system and back out again. The river itself is 8.5 km long. The photos from inside were rubbish, so none here. The cave was pretty cool, would love to spend some time in there in a kayak exploring some of the side caves and getting further up river. Lots of bats and swiftlets just like the cave systems in Borneo.

After the river ride we boated back to Sabang and back to PP in the van, the rednecks were not quite so bad on the way back, but I was glad to breathe some clean fresh air at the end of the trip. A good day ruined by bad people, shame.

I had a great dinner of eggplant pasta in the hostel and had a couple of large rums while chatting to a Finnish guy and a Dutch women – so many nationalities met. Love that about hostels. A quite night as I have a long van ride to el Nido tomorrow.

Chilling in Puerto Princesa

Day 46, Saturday 11 Feb, Puerto Princesa

It was a warm night in the eight bed dorm with only one fan, however I seemed to get enough sleep, which was good. Up at 7.30 and had a great breakie of eggs, bacon and rice. I had today planned as a down day. Though I didn’t do much in the last two days I really needed to get a load of washing done, catch up on a few days of email and most importantly spend a few hours in front of a power point recharging all my devices, mp3, book reader, phone and the spare camera batteries. Though there is always tons of power points around I only have one converter and a double adapter so it can be a time consuming activity.

After breakie I went for a walk around town, Lonely Planet lists two sites to see, so not exactly a tourist location, and I only got to one of them, the cathedral.

But found this memorial garden commemorating the massacre of American troops in Palawan at the end of the second world war.

Palawan is totally different to Malaysia and Borneo, houses look different, even the shacks are not the same. One thing I did notice that is different was the variety of rice on sale.

One of the major differences is that in theory they do drive on the other side of the road here (Malaysia and Singapore are the same as NZ), so I had an early, close experience with a motorbike. Though similar to small town Malaysia they mostly drive up the middle of the road, or where they feel like it !

There are tricycles every where, these are amazing little things, basically a small cc motorcycle with a covered side car. They all seem to be Hondas too.

They are used by locals and tourists alike to get around town. I spent some time hunting down of the other key features of town and after a while I found an ATM and got more cash, there are two ATM’s in Puerto Princesca, and none anywhere else on the island, with my next destination, El Nido, six or seven hours away by mini-van, I had to stock up on cash before I got too far away ! Found a great jeepney too.

And someone who was a bit unsure about their product.

After that I went back to the hostel for a few hours to do all the above jobs and drink gallons of water as I have been a bit slack lately…

Beer is about a $1 a bottle in the hostel – bound to be heaps cheaper elsewhere, but still !!! So I sat around for most of the late afternoon, rocking on a hammock, drinking San Miguel and chatting to a guy from Sweden and an English girl. Later that evening we went to an awesome vegetarian restaurant for dinner. I will say that the food I have had so far in the Phillies has been awesome, which is not what I was led to expect.