Advertisement
Published: October 10th 2011
Edit Blog Post
On friday I decided to go to the small beach town of Port Barton. I was joined by Dawid, a Polish guy that I had met at my hotel. We woke up early and caught a trike to the San Jose bus terminal 7 km from Puerto Princesa, and then hopped in a minibus for a 2 hour journey to the turnoff to Port Barton. We had to wait over 2 hours for the jeepney to turn up and we killed the time by listening to music and having a coffee and some chocolate bars. The jeepney was quite large and luckily there were a couple of seats for us. People told us the road was quite bad but I found it surprisingly good except for a few spots where we had to go through a lot of mud. After an hour we reached the town which seemed more like a large village situated on a picturesque bay. The atmosphere was quite laid back from the start with no hassle from the locals. We registered at the tourist board and then set about finding some accommodation. After looking at about 4 places we settled on Summer Homes, a very nice place
right on the beach with twin rooms for about $15. I had a short swim in the water that afternoon but found it a little shallow for my liking. That night after dinner we booked an island hopping trip for the next day.
Unfortunately the weather was terrible the next morning so we had to cancel the island hopping and spent the morning having breakfast and watching X-men with our boatman. We ate lunch at a little local spot which was okay and then bought some items at the bakery nearby for a few cents each. We then spent about an hour and a half at the community centre having a few shots of basketball with the kids and watching a marching/dancing band rehearse for their upcoming competition. I spent the rest of the day walking along the beach and taking a few shots of the kids and scenery.
On sunday we got up early again and left on our 3 man boat to do a bit of island hopping. We ended up stopping at a couple of snorkeling spots in the bay as well as getting off the boat at 3 islands. We stopped at a resort
for a little snorkeling and a very nice lunch of fish in a slightly spicy coconut sauce. The whole bay was very pretty with plenty of white sand beaches and absolutely no tourists. I am sure we were the only foreign tourists out there this day and we only came across one group of Philippinos having a picnic lunch on one of the islands.
The next day we took it easy because I had caught a flu and Dawid had fairly bad sunburn from the island hopping trip the day before. The weather was very nice in the morning so I walked down to a little fishing village at the point and took some photos. The rest of the day was spent on a couple of short walks and watching a movie in my room.
I have really loved Port Barton with its picturesque setting, super relaxed atmosphere and only a handful of tourists. It is a perfect place to chill out. Unfortunately I have to move onto El Nido tomorrow because I only have 6 days left before I have to fly from Puerto Princesa to Cebu.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.061s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0376s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb