Philippine Travel Log 5

Beach, Beach and more Beach

Well, I have been very lax in my updating duties, but I am happy to see Liz has really stepped up the pace to give you guys something to read. 

I believe the last I spoke to you it was after the Great Manila Flood, and we had just arrived in Boracay.

So, we arrived in Boracay.  It is a miserable island.  Sun, beaches, women, beer....It was a dreadful combination that caused me to forget all about the blog even though our accommodations had a hideously slow, but adequate computer connection.

I was going to post pics for your enjoyment, so you could see just how awful it is for me to have to lounge around on the beach surrounded by beautiful women and having people bring me fruity shakes and/or beer with a snap of my finger.  Oh, and there was SCUBA diving as well.

Once again the incredibly slow internet connection I am using makes it difficult to send an email, much less upload photos.  So, you will just have to take my word for it when I say that I am frowning all the time and utterly miserable.  So miserable I might just stay here to force myself to accept a little more humility in my life.

I have digressed.

On Boracay, we had a kick ass beach bungalow.  It had a nice lush garden surrounding it and a large wooden deck to sit upon in the shade.  It was about fifty yards to the bar and only about fifty yards past there to the ocean. 

The entire beach is wall to wall with small restaurants, guest houses and bars.  We were bare foot for almost the entire week. 

The beach was also littered with “authorized” vendors attempting to sell watches and/or island-hopping boat trips.  You could tell they were authorized because they all had on matching vests that said so.  The sales pitch was the same every few feet, “Mistah...you want watch?  Very nice...Rolex.  Mistah...you want boat ride? Island hopping? Jet Ski?” About every fifth one would add a little extra to the end of his spiel, but it was just as you were almost out of ear shot and in a couple of octaves lower, in a sly off-hand voice, “Ganjaaaaaa?” When you looked back he would look around and then repeat it even more on the sly, “Gaaanjaaaa?” Luckily I personally don’t enjoy smoking weed, otherwise we might be sitting in a small Filipino jail right now; albeit it would probably have a sand floor and incredible views, that is not really where I want to spend my vacation.

Manius took this opportunity to get his SCUBA certification so Chad and myself were forced to lounge around extra hard while he took tests and performed SCUBA skills.  We did join him on his certification dives and it was some pretty good visibility and sea life.  We ran across a nice size sea turtle that I swear I got a few pictures of, but once again, unable to show you at this time.  Manius’ dive instructor might very well be the horniest dive master ever.  We were taking pictures of the fish and coral and he would be swimming over to other dive groups and taking pictures of the females in their groups.  I did not think it was possible to really creep out a woman under water while diving, but I stand corrected.  It is impressive how much body language can convey while trying to escape an underwater pervert.

We finally tore our selves away from Boracay, realizing that we had spent more time than intended there.  We caught a poorly planned flight to the island of Cebu, but once there realized it was going to take too much time to see the island and decided to leave immediately and fly to the island of Palawan.  From there the idea was to catch a quick flight to Jakarta, Indonesia, because our Philippine Visa would be running out before the end of our trip and we had to leave the country to reenter for a new Visa. 

Who soon found out that there are no such things as “quick flights” in the Philippines.  We were stuck in Cebu for two days, flew to Palawan and were informed we missed the last flight to El Nido (the beach town at the Northern Part of the Island), the next flight will not leave for four days, but we could take a bus there (12 hours) or a boat (18 hours).  We opted to head inland via private van for a few hours and check out an underground river; in a town called Sabang.

Sabang was awesome, but remote.  The guest house we found only had electricity from six pm until ten pm, and none of the showers worked.  The plus side was that it’s right on the beach and it only cost us about $20 a night for all three of us. 

We were pretty much the only Westerners around for the first night so the security guard took us down the beach to a local Karaoke bar.  We had been sitting around on the deck for about four hours drinking beer, gin and tonics and a hideous, local moonshine they kept calling coconut wine.  The coconut wine was free, for obvious reasons.  By the time the Karaoke bar was brought up it sounded brilliant.  I would have sang Celine Dion songs in front of 60,000 people by that point. 

The Karaoke bar was packed with locals and even though they had a list of songs to choose from, they just kind of handed the mic around and you sang whatever song happened to come up next.  Chad sang something, I don’t really remember what it was, but it got a lot of applause.  The security guard then sang a local song to everyone’s delight, but then the microphone was moved along to another table.  After that there was some walking, some stumbling, and then we woke up in our cabin and it was morning.  I think we might have chased a pig along the beach, but it might have been a dog, or a small child.  Either way it squealed a lot.

We would wake up miserable the next morning and hike 5km to the underground river.  But, that is for the next post.

•   Comments(3)    Posted by killer on 08/27 at 10:07 PM
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