After a somewhat painful night bus trip (eight hours,
uncomfy chairs and resultant fluid retention/‘cankles’, Americans in front of
us whose favourite topic of conversation was ‘cute faces on fat chicks’) we
arrived in the Philippines’ somewhat notorious capital, Manila. Complaints
abound about the pollution, corruption, poverty and smell – but after awhile
one Asian city starts looking a whole lot like all the others, and we didn’t
encounter any particular problems during our day of waiting there. It was spent
wandering around one of the enormous shopping centres – Manila is your
quintessential consumers’ paradise – which sold everything, from balut (cooked
duck egg with foetus), to Angry Birds cakes, to Havaianas (Phils is the only
place in the world where Jack’s feet are considered ‘large’), to a disturbingly
large selection of ‘feminine intimate washes’ – I’m talking a whole aisle in
the supermarket - to anything else you could possibly imagine. This worked out
well for us and we spent the day productively hunting down supplies for our
twelve days in Paradise – including sunscreen
and two shiny blue brand-spankin’-new snorkeling masks.
After a pleasant (free snackies!) if slightly delayed
flight, we experienced a very cool almost-in-the water landing in Puerto
Princesa – the largest city in Palawan (for those of you whose Philippines
geography is not quite up to scratch, that’s the big long skinny island to the
west of the Visayas – although technically it’s part of Luzon). After the cool
climes of the north, the heat and humidity was a slight shock to our delicate
constitutions, so we spent a few days acclimatizing in our blissfully
airconditioned hotel room (the hum of the aircon almost drowned out the sound
of the planes…yep, the only way we could afford it was by staying at the
tantalizingly-named ‘Airport View Inn’…ahhh, budget travel….but it actually
turned out to offer some of our best nights’ sleeps in the country to date).
Activities included hanging out at Jollibees (the Philippines’ home grown fast
food chain, which is everywhere) being brainwashed by their blatant but
frustratingly catchy theme song which is on repeat throughout your entire meal
(‘I’m your friend, I’m Jollibee; jolly, friendly Jollibee’ and so on), visiting
a butterfly garden, and having a lunch of sickeningly sweet baked goods at
nearby Honda Bay.
Feeling refreshed and ready for action, we pushed northwards
to the quiet, one-street coastal village of Port Barton for some serious
relaxing and soakage-up of sun and saltwater. Initially we made grand plans to
hire a bangka (trimaran but with outside hulls of bamboo like an outrigger
canoe…hmmm boats…thanks to Jack for that description!) and do some island
hopping in the area, but J was fighting off a cold and feeling somewhat under the
weather, so we spent the time reading and swimming instead (who’s complaining?).
After a night of massive rainfall, the jeepney trip back to the main highway
was interesting, and a little girl vomited her rice porridge onto my bag. We
also encountered our first hint of dishonesty since being in the country. One
of our fellow passengers who just happened to be a mini bus operator informed
us that the connecting public bus to El Nido (our next stop) would not be
coming for hours but that his bus, which was only 100 pesos extra, would be
leaving immediately from Roxas (the stopover point). When we disembarked the
story changed slightly; the minibus wasn’t coming for two hours but we should
sit around at the shitty roadside stop and wait because no other public buses
were coming until later in the afternoon. Luckily we were with some Austrians
who were just as wily and cheap as we are and the boys managed to source us a
public bus (packed with people, of course) which left immediately and cost us
less than half of what our friend had asked.
El Nido is a smallish town on the northernmost tip of the
Palawan mainland, which is renowned as the gateway to the beautiful Bacuit
Archipelago, where limestone carsts reminiscent of Vietnam’s
Halong Bay (slightly less dramatic, but with
more beaches and less pollution) jut out of the water. The town itself, while
not unpleasant, exists purely for the tourism industry (you can tell when
there’s no market…which also means no cheap mangoes) – everyone is very proud
of Palawan making Nat Geo’s top 10 destinations for 2011, and the pics of El
Nido, which is admittedly gorgeous, get well flaunted in that campaign. We
spent two out of three days experiencing the Archipelago in the cheapest and
most convenient way possible: island hopping on organized bangka day trips (the
third day was spent in our hotel because Jack got drunk on Tanduay* and had to
sleep for hours, although he maintains this was part of his recovery from the
cold…sure drunkie). On our first day of island hopping I awoke early full of
energy and excitement, donned by bikini and new fake Chanel sunglasses, and
went to pack my shiny new snorkel…only to discover someone had opened my bag on
the bus trip and pilfered it! I was quite disappointed but on reflection
decided you could probably get worse things stolen, and there were snorkel
rental places everywhere. The islands are pretty amazing; lots of white sand,
palm trees, clear water and limestone cliffs with keyhole passages you
swim/climb through to access ‘secret’ lagoons or beaches (this area is what
inspired the guy who wrote ‘the Beach,’ although it was set in Thailand). All
this beauty was slightly detracted from by the hordes (by Filipino standards
anyway) of tourists; the fluoro orange life jackets/rings worn by all the
Chinese people who can’t swim clashed especially well with the idyllic scenery.
There were some nice fish to be seen snorkeling but (heartbreakingly) much of
the coral was dead owing to climate change, dynamite/cyanide fishing etc.
Despite high hopes, we didn’t make any new friends as a result of our tours; all
our companions seemed to be pretty unfriendly (including a surly French couple
who bitched the whole day and refused to get in the water because the sky was
‘too grey’ to see any fish, and an unattractive Russian duo – the female made
us well acquainted with her breasts (white rash vest, nothing underneath) and
peed with her tog bottoms on (? – is that okay in Russia?) on a main pathway from the
dunes to the beach).
On that pleasant note, I will leave you until I have the
energy and inspiration to transcribe our next mystical adventure! But I will
say that we were nice and far away from the earthquake that occurred a few days
ago, and are both (as always) happy and well and missing our wonderful
fams/friends.
T & J xoxo
* Filipino rum, costs about $1 per 375 mils. Often served
with coke and calamansi, a tiny citrus which grows in abundance here, fabled to
have magical healing properties. Jack thinks it staves off hangovers so we have
been going with that.
