Amed-short but sweet. The best snorkelling EVER!

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Our time in Amed was short but sweet.

I woke up early and was able to see part of the sunrise, then went back to bed for a couple hours. We went to the beach and went snorkeling for a bit. We both agree that off the shores of the beach is the most beautiful underwater coral and plant life we’ve ever seen. The coral was blue, white and brown. Lots of the coral was alive slowly moving with the ocean. The plants were all different shapes and colors with fish hiding in its leaves. There were different fish swimming all around. We saw a long needle like fish, we saw another with a hook like fin by its head, and 4 spikes out by its tail, and tons of bright colorful fish.

When we came back to the homestay we did some research on the Philippines. Turns out we need an onward ticket when landing in the country. We want to get a longer visa than the original 21 days they give out at the airport as we want to spend about 40 days. So our question was, can we get an extension at the airport or do we have to do it before? We phoned 2 different embassies and still couldn’t get an answer. One sent us to a website that didn’t make any sense. We weren’t sure if we wanted a non-immigrant visa, an alien visa, a VUAP or something visa… we just want a friggen standard tourist visa! So I called back for a third time and finally got the point across that we fly into the Philippines Oct 25, and told a fib that we have a ticket leaving Nov 26. The lady on the phone goes, “ohhh that is like more than 21 days, you will have to pay for a longer visa at the airport when you arrive.” “Okay, thank you. So I can still fly into the country and PAY to have a longer visa AT THE AIRPORT?” “Yes Mam.” Well for goodness sake, why couldn’t you tell me that to begin with rather than saying I had to go to an embassy, and then to look at some useless website. That was two hours of vacation we will never get back.

For lunch we walked down to a lovely Balinese family restaurant. It was very small with only 3 tables, and we were the only customers. The family was very friendly and very good cooks. We ordered the lime prawn skewers with I devoured (Tris had 2 and I had 4), and a Balinese tempe tofu curry. Tris has turned into a vegetarian, preferring tofu and tempe over meat any day. I couldn’t get him to eat any tofu back in Canada. The curry was more of a citrus flavor than other curries we’ve had. It wasn’t our favorite but we ate it all up anyway.

After lunch we relaxed on our balcony, and then went out for another snorkel. We spent the rest of the evening at our homestay. Tomorrow we head to Lovina to say at www.mumbul.net

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Photos

The moon
playing with the camera and figuring out settings! We did it good on this one, eh!