You whose heart would sing of anarchy

Well it looks like I’m blogging again. Who knows who reads this, but I’m doing it because I realized yesterday that it comes in handy! I met some girls who asked advice on Cambodia and I couldn’t remember where I had stayed. Then I was like oh! I’ll check the old blog and was able to give them some good info from reading it. So here I am! This time - Philippines 2019 🤪

My bro Adam and I arrived in Manila after a LONG 14 hour haul from Vancouver. It was 4:30am and we cabbed straight to Malate Pensionne house. Our room was a little box - but at least it had AC. After sleeping for the morning we ventured outside. I think Adam was in culture shock at first since Manila is just another dirty busy Asian city - like Bangkok or Hanoi. He was so set on going to a gym and we searched and searched for one but kept ending up no where. Finally we decided to go for lunch instead. We had all you can eat Korean BBQ where you cook the food on the hot grill in front of you. It was really good, until I saw a giant black rat run across the floor. Haha - good thing AP2 had already gone back to the room when I saw it. After lunch I went for a cheap massage. It was unreal. Adam ended up finding a gym. We were both content, yet ready to leave the city.

The following day we had a flight to Busuanga (Coron!). It was a little delayed and just another travel day, but it was so nice to arrive on an island rather than being in the city. We caught a van to our hostel in Coron Town called “HUB Backpackers”. Adam’s first experience in a hostel. We had to walk past roosters to get up to our 8 person dorm. At least we arrived in time for free rum o’clock. We met a ton of cool people that night and booked a tour with everyone for the next day. Then that night rum o’clock turned into Reggae Bar till 1am. You can imagine how everyone felt the next morning...

We all managed to get to our tour on time the next day... and what a day it was! There were about 20 of us on the boat, and we went across to Coron Island. We saw the most beautiful rock formations and landscapes and crystal clear water. We hiked up to Kayangan Lake, swam in the Green Lagoon + Twin Lagoon. We snorkelled at Siete Picados and Coral Garden. Then ended our day with a few boat beers at Cyc beach. The tour was such a great way to see those beautiful places. When we got back to the hostel I was sooo exhausted. I booked diving for the following day and went straight to bed.

So I was up at 6:30am and at the dock by 6:45 to dive! There were 5 of us in total. We had the most perfectly calm water for our ride out to our first site. We did 3 wreck dives in total for the day. A number of Japanese WW2 ships were sunk by the Americans during the war, and now they are all snorkel and dive sites. Bad for the Japanese, lucky for me. It felt soooo good to be diving again. We got to swim around and inside the ships - it was so f*king cool. Spending the day out on the water and in the ocean gives life to my soul. We came back around 3:30pm, and I met up with Adam. We had a couple drinks at sunset and then went back to the HUB hostel for rum. We met a whole new crew of people and went for Thai dinner and back to Reggae Bar. Adam ended up ordering an entire bucket of rum, so you can guess how the night went!

Yesterday we had a good sleep in. Adam went to the gym in the morning and I went for breaky and did a bit of research on what to do for our last day on Coron. Welllll.... the activity I took us on turned out to be a big mistake!! We went down to the area where the boats leave for day trips and decided to rent kayaks. Well for starters Adam has never kayaked before and secondly the kayak was a little piece of floating plastic and thirdly the place I wanted to kayak to was pretty much 5km across an open bay. We got in (almost tipped before we even started), and headed straight out towards barracuda lake. We made it about 1/3 of the way across the open water when it started to rain and become choppy. AP2 and I were like screw this let’s go back.... it’s dangerous, far, and let’s face it - he was doing most of the paddling since my little arms aren’t strong. So we went back, looked at eachother and said “omg I hate kayaking”. That wasn’t a fair representation of how fun kayaking can be though. Anyway, we got back and I asked if we could have some sort of refund since we were supposed to be out for the day. After arguing with some people for a while and them not budging on giving us any money back we left and cut our losses. Instead we decided to go to Bali Beach and chill for an hour (a much better decision). After that we wanted a snack - actually soup (a terrible decision). We found a little authentic home restaurant and ordered what looked like was going to be soup. When it came out it was absolutely AWFUL. The funny thing was both me and Adam had one bite and were like “mm it’s good....”. But like we both straight up lied. The soup was like eating pig slop. That’s the new name of the soup. Pig slop. I also like to call it soup goop. The noodles were overdone and there was some kind of slime in there and like floating eggs. Again, we paid, cut our losses and got the heck out of there. We went to McDonald’s to get the soup goop flavour out of our mouths. We were both kinda beat from the day and chilled in the room. Adam did pick up a couple beers and brought them back to our place. I poured a large beer into two cups and literally one second later the bottle slipped out of my hand and smashed on the concrete floor. So much beer, and even more tiny shards of glass flew everywhere. Obviously I cleaned it up, but it wasn’t ideal. If I had to rate the worst experiences of the day in order it would be: 1. Pig slop soup. 2. Kayaking. 3. Glass bottle beer clean up. And if I could rate the best part of the day: babyyyyy puppies are our home stay 😍

Today we woke up early and went to the dock to get on our boat to El Nido! Thank god I’m an experienced sea sick i individual and decided to take 2 gravol before departure. That ride was CHOPPY. And some kid was puking right behind me. I swear if I didn’t take those pills I would have thrown up. I was definitely ready to. Anyways, 4 hours later we made it to El Nido :) We found a place to stay and took a tuk tuk to Las Cabañas beach. This beach is paradise. Soft white sand,blue water, a bucket of beers, and a happy heart. Cheers to El Nido!

AP xo