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Published: April 13th 2009
We left Apo Island on March 14. We left early, at 8:00, hoping for calm seas and a dry trip. Of course we prepared for a wet trip, for ourselves and our bags, and it was fine. We had calm seas and arrived in Malatappi 40 minutes later, mostly dry. We walked half a mile to the main road and only had to wait 5 minutes for a jeepney to Dumagueti. It took about 30 minutes to get there. It dropped us near the center of town but we didn't know where we were. We pulled out our lonely planet and were immediately surrounded by 5 or 6 guys trying to help us figure out where we needed to go. In many other countries this could have felt a little tense, trying to keep an eye on our baggage, backpacks and pockets while trying to concentrate on figuring out where we were. Not so here. The Filipinos are really sweet people and they really just want to be helpful. They are always quick with a smile and have a really great upbeat disposition. Anyway, the guys sorted us out and we walked the 3 blocks to our hotel, the
Plaze Maria Louisa, right on the main square. It was only 10 am but by the time we got there, with our backpacks and pulling our rollies with our dive gear, we were drenched. The hotel was a nice clean business hotel for 900p. We stayed one night. We wanted to get a feel for the city, which had been described to us by the guy that drove us down to Malatappi as “the least atrocious city in the Philippines.” The guide books also give it good reviews. Dumagueti is a college town. In addition to Silliman University there are at least 4 other colleges. It describes itself as being “the city of the gentle people.”
The afternoon we got there we walked around and took in the central part of town. It still has a bit of it's Spanish colonial layout with city hall and the cathedral on the central square. It was a Saturday and and a DJ was setting up in the center of the square. We wandered a little more and found the market. It was late, about 6, and parts of the market were still going. The wet part, meats and fish, were in
full swing. The dry goods and vegetables were shutting down. A big thunder storm blew through while we were in there and we had to wait to leave. The town was really hopping. We wandered through a department store that was doing a nice trade. Filipinos love their baked goods and there are many bakeries. The baked goods on offer are pretty good, cookies, empanadas, pan de sal, rolls and cakes. I got a pastry that was really tasty with something apple like in the center. Karen got a casava cake that she liked a lot.
For dinner we went to the street along the waterfront. There is a promenade along the quay, and for a few blocks, the other side of the boulevard is lined with cafes and restaurants until you come to the university. We had dinner and went over to the disco at Why Not Cafe, but they wanted 200p. We decided that any charge would be too much to go in and hang out and listen to bad, excessively loud music. We've done the small town disco thing and it's not pretty. We hit the outdoor part of the cafe and watched to see what
the crowd looked like arriving. By 10:30 the crowd had still not arrived so we called it a night.
Sunday morning we found this very chic little cafe along the waterfront. We had delicious cappuccinos and tried their breakfast offerings. After being told that the first few things we tried to order were not available, we just asked what they had. They had this thing we had never heard of and that they could not quite explain. It involved rice, mango and chocolate. Sign me up! It was delightful. It was sticky rice cooked in a banana leaf with a shot of hot chocolate and half a mango. Breakfast of champions.
After some trials and tribulations we caught a ferry to Cebu city. We had spoken with other travelers who had told us that the business class ticket was the way to go so we tried it, 1200p instead of 900p for the regular fare. The boat turned out to be really filthy and bug infested, especially in Business class. It really bothered Karen, and she spent most of the trip standing because of all the bugs (roaches) crawling around. I had a Grisham novel going and I
just ignored the little devils.
Cebu is the second largest city in the Philippines. Like Manila it is kind of a blasted place that you just try to get through as quickly as possible. Our ferry got us in around 7. The scene at these ferry terminal was really hectic. It was a big ferry, loaded to capacity with about 200 people. Chaos reined as the deck hands passed the bags from the boat to the dock and people pushed in to retrieve them. Surprisingly, they actually checked your claim check when you left. They don't do that at O'Hare. The worse part comes as you leave the dock and all of the cab touts descend on the crowd. These are not the drivers so they will say anything to get you to go with them to the cab. He agrees to their terms, the bags are loaded, then when you get in he tells you that, no, he's not going to use the meter he wants a flat rate. We're not talking about real money here, but I hate being ripped off. So we had to wait till most of the cabs and passengers were gone to find
a cab willing to use the meter. This kind of game is all too common and really can take a lot of the fun out of traveling.
Karen found a nice little boutique hotel with a nice restaurant. We checked in, cleaned up and had a very nice dinner. The next day we just hung at the hotel reading and catching up on the net. We walked around looking for a lunch spot and checking out the neighborhood. We were only a few blocks from the provincial capitol so we checked that out too. In the end we got short on time and just went back to our hotel for lunch. We got to the airport about an hour before our 3:00 flight to Puerto Princesa For a time it seemed like we were going to miss it. We got to the check-in desk with plenty of time, but their e-ticket system was down so we had to leave security and go to the ticketing office and get new tickets. There was a long line there, but we managed to get new tickets and get through security and rush to the gate, only to find that our flight was
delayed for an hour. It was an hour flight to Puerto Princesa on Palawan Island. We took a tricycle to our hotel which was only bout 5 minutes away.
We went out exploring and ended up at a new place called Fresh for a drink. Dave, one of the partners gave us the lowdown on Puerto Princesa and Port Barton, where he built a small resort on one of the islands. We went out for dinner to what had been described as the best restaurant in Palawan and had a really good meal. It was mostly seafood including one of their specialties, a kind of seaweed called sea grapes. It was served raw. The “grapes” are about ¼ inch big and pop in your mouth when you bite them. Karen liked it better than I did.
We hung out in Puerto, as the locals call it, the next day. We went back to Fresh for lunch and Dave introduced us to a friend, Dan Ficarelli, who lives in Port Barton. Dan recognized my Cubs hat immediately as he is from Palatine. He gave us the skinny on Port Barton and made us promise we would stop by for
a drink when he got back home in a few days.
The next day we got up early and caught a tricycle out to the bus terminal. Dan had told us about a jeepney that was going directly to Barton, “Four Phillip.” We ignored all the touts, including our driver, until we found the jeepney with the faded “Four Phillip” sign. The five hour ride cost 250p each, about $5. When we left the bus station there were about a dozen passengers in addition to the driver and his two helpers. The helpers load the bags and cargo onto the roof and ride up there. We picked up more passengers and cargo along the way and by the time we got to Barton I think there were about 40 paying riders along with 20 cases of local gin and enough building materials to build half of a nippa home. It was a little uncomfortable and tedious, we kept stopping to load all the time, but not too bad. The last 25k of the road was a fairly bad dirt road. During the rainy season the road is closed and access to Barton is by a 45 minute boat ride
to the town of San Vicente. The jeepney dropped us at the end of the road through town and it was only a 100 yard walk up the beach to our place, the Greenviews Hotel. A single nipa hut for 900p.
Port Barton is a town of about 5,000 people. It stretches along a mile of one of the prettiest beaches we have seen in the Philippines. There are about a dozen small hotels spread along the beach, none with more than 20 rooms. Other than tourism, the people there are rice farmers and fishermen. The town has electricity from 6pm until midnight. It's a pretty tidy little town of mostly nippa homes with a few nicer block houses mixed in. The road that runs behind the beach and the last mile of the road into town are paved. As was typical, the people were really sweet and friendly. We really noticed how many fewer kids there were running around this town than Apo Island. Maybe Kekin, our dive master on Apo Island was right. He said the additional 3 hours of power from 9-12, and the TV viewing it allowed, did push down the birth rate.
We
spent 6 leisurely nights in Barton. There really was not that much to do. The main attraction here is the beach and island hopping. We were on the wide shallow end of the beach, good for hanging on the beach, but bad for swimming. At low tide the water did not get more than 3 feet deep for at least a ½ mile. On our end this shallow water was hot, like bathwater, and had to be in the 90's. We liked swimming at the other end as it was more refreshing. The water was also much more salty than we were accustomed to. It would be hard to drown here. Floating on your back was effortless. We went diving one day with Easy Divers, the only game in town. It was a depressing little operation, a dive shop in decay. The diving was OK and it we had a very nice day. We did 2 dives in the morning and then went to Coconut Garden resort on one of the islands for lunch. We also walked to a nice little waterfall on another day.
We spent quite a bit of time with Dan once he got back in
town. He had been in Bohol visiting his very ill brother for a couple weeks before we ran into him in Puerto. We had dinner at his house twice and he took us island hopping in his little motor boat one day. He had a very nice house that he had built right on the beach. It was kind of small, but it had a deep porch along two sides that was really nice, and that functioned as the living room. He also had a big piece of property with a beautiful garden. His family had a garden center on North Ave and 83 in Palatine, so he is a gardener. He admittedly spends most of his time puttering around his garden.
It was interesting getting to know him and learning about how he lives. We are always looking for Paca Waca. Consciously or subconsciously we are always asking ourselves when we travel, “Could I live here?” Dan could, but could we? Dan tried to convince us we could, he would like nothing more than to have some new friends in town, and from Chicago no less! (The bar he used to work at has all of these Chicago
pictures on the walls.) We tried to put ourselves in Dan's shoes, but in the end were not convinced. One interesting thing Dan told us about the ex-pat community, in his experience, was that it was split along language lines. The Germans, being the largest community, kind of kept to themselves. They have a German club in Puerto. The other German speakers drifted in and out of that group. All his close friends were English speakers, and there are not many of them out here. Dan does not have any self described close friends in Barton anymore, only in Puerto, where he keeps an apartment. It seemed kind of lonely, but Dan seemed perfectly happy. He has lived in Barton for 13 years, 7 of those running a very popular bar on the beach. (He is called out by name in the Lonely Planet SE Asia edition.) He knowns everybody in town. It works for him. What we did agree on was that the next time we come to Palawan we will rent the cottage he has next to his for at least a few weeks and see how we like it.
We were dreading the jeepney ride up
to El Nido, it is about 6 hours on a mostly dirt road. Every time the jeepney stops it is engulfed in a cloud of dust, and it stops often. Our hotel ran a big banca up to their other hotel just outside of El Nido, but they needed 6 people to go. A few days before we were leaving we asked them to put up their sign for our date and we started looking for other people to fill the boat. We got lucky, 9 people, the cost was only 1200p. The boat left at 6am, so we had to get up before dawn and finish packing. We forgot that there was no electricity at this time - duhhh!! The boat left right on time and we had great weather for the 5 hour ride. El Nido's attraction is the Bancuit Archipelago, a group of heavily eroded limestone islands, or karsts. The main activity is island hopping, so the transfer up to El Nido was very picturesque.
Palawan is one of the more remote islands in the Philippines. It is a long skinny island that is the western frontier of the country. On the east side is the
Sulu Sea, the west, the South China Sea. Vietnam is the closest landfall to the west, about 1000 miles. After the Vietnam War Palawan was the first stop for thousands of boat people. There are still some good Vietnamese restaurants in Puerto. The north half of the island, where we toured, was very rugged. It is mainly heavily eroded limestone. There is not much arable land. The peaks are not particularly high, but they are numerous and getting around is difficult. Many communities are only accessible by boat at least part of the year. Even on some really small islands, an hour by boat from Barton, there were little fishing villages of up to 100 people. We didn't see any plants or factories except those producing goods for local consumption, tricycle bodies, building materials, bancas...
El Nido is the principle tourist town on the island (there is almost no tourism in the south). The town itself is very touristic, although very small. The beach front is all small hotels and restaurants. For those of you who do not speak Spanish, El Nido means Nest. There are two explanations for the name. The first is that the area is a
nesting area for swallows. All of those limestone caves are perfect or them. The nests are worth more than their weight in gold to the Chinese for Bird's Nest Soup. The town is also nested between two hills and is a port of refuge to the fisherman working offshore when bad weather blows in. It is much bigger than Barton with 3 - 4 paved roads running parallel to the beach. The beach is not very nice, they build right up to the water in many places. It is about a mile long and faces east.
We stayed in the town of Corong - Corong, a 5 minute tricycle ride away (10p each). Being the lushes that we are, this beach suited us much better, as it is a sunset beach. We don't see too many sunrises, although we hear they are very nice if you are into that kind of thing. Our place, Greenviews was nice but a little tight. Their place in Barton was nice.. Everything is cheaper down there too. A fan room in El Nido is 1500p vs 900p in Port Barton. The beach is really nice, narrow and rocky in places, and it is
at least 4 miles long. We were in the middle, more or less. One day we had the hotel van take is to the south end of the beach. There is a really posh resort there, Las Cabanas, and the beach is really beautiful. We had lunch there (almost ran out of money!) and went snorkeling. It took about 45 minutes to walk back to our place.
Like Barton, the main activity is island hopping. The islands are really interesting with all of these turquoise lagoons and white sand beaches. We did a day tour the day after we arrived, the “A” tour. It's funny, all of the hotels and restaurants offer the same tours, A, B or C. It was an all day affair with snorkeling, picture perfect beaches and picturesque turquoise lagoons. The BBQ lunch on the beach, prepared by our boatmen, was delicious.
We also went diving one day. We did North Rock in the morning and then after lunch we dove South Miniloc. South Miniloc was an amazing dive site. It had big and little stuff. There was a wide array of nudibranchs, pipefish, nudibranchs and there were lots of nudibranchs too. On the
big side we saw a huge school of bigeyed snappers, a turtle, a school of blue line barracuda, a lobster. The coral was in good shape. There was a very healthy colony of cabbage leaf coral.
We spent 5 nights in Corong - Corong and then caught a van to Puerto. The road is mostly unpaved. They are in the process of paving it but we saw little evidence of ongoing work. The dirt part was intermittently paved, about 10%. For reasons that were unclear to us, every now and then there would be a paved part. I can only guess that it had something to do with the connections of the people who lived along those stretches. Living next to a dirt road is a dusty existence. Paving the raod is a huge quality of life improvement, even it it does not materially shorten the trip to Taytay, the big city in the north (about 60,000 people). South of Roxas the road is paved.
Once we left Corong we were basically waiting for our plane to KL, we were mentally checked out of the Philippines. Because of the uncertainty of the transfers, you can only do one
per day. One day to get to Puerto, a morning flight to Manila the next day, an evening flight to KL the day after that. We really came to dislike Manila over the course of our time on this trip. It is a huge city, over 20 million, and one of the most dense. Chicago, according to Wiki, has 9.6 million in it's greater urban area with a density of 1,600 people/ sq km. Manila has a density of 16,000 poor souls/sq km. It is a very intense, dirty, poor, seedy city. We made the mistake of walking home from dinner the night we were there and it was just way too depressing, little kids wandering the streets, 3 year olds bedding down on a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, pathetic beggars scamming....we couldn't get out of there fast enough. I hate to admit it, but we hung out in the mall and the Aquarium, also in a mall, on the day of our flight. We just didn't want to deal with the street.
What a difference a day makes!!!! Kuala Lumpur is a totally modern, affluent, well organized city. Good public transit, orderly traffic and most refreshing,
a mostly walkable city. The sidewalks were for walking, mostly. The variety of food is wonderful. The local cuisines are Indian, Malay, Chinese (several types) and Nyonya. Nyonya is also called Straights Chinese, it is a blend of Chinese and Malay with a bit of Indian thrown in for good measure. There is also good western cuisine. Like everywhere else in SE Asia we have been, they love their malls. Where we stayed, there were at least 5 huge malls within a 5 minute walk. Everywhere we went in KL we encountered more of these huge malls.
Malaysia is a country of mosques, Buddhist temples, Taoist and Confucian Chinese temples with a few Christian (protestant) churches thrown in for good measure. It is a predominantly Muslim nation of the mostly moderate variety. We saw a few women with only their eyes exposed and one with a full berka. About 15 percent of the women just wear a head scarf. There are also many Chinese, and they dress any way they want. The oppressed minorities are the Indians and the indigenous Malays. Stereotypically, the Chinese run the economy and the Malays run the government.
But more on that in
the next blog.
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steve
non-member comment
Wow
Amazing stories, Kevin, and beautiful photos. Thanks for taking the time to share your adventures!