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We got to Cebu and it rained. And rained. We’ve been lucky with the weather so far but the rainy season is making its grand entrance. In the taxi to our accommodation -picked by the close your eyes and point a finger at the page method (it turned out to be a bit scummy but you get what you pay for..) a road had flooded and the local kids, in partial and total undress were running and splashing alongside the jeepneys and taxis, clearly having the time of their lives.
Cebu City was fairly disappointing on the whole, not that we had any great expectations. It was grubby, stinking hot and just another big city. We enjoyed navigating around by jeepney, it was fairly easy although we spent the majority of our time sheltering inside the shopping centres and cinemas. The movies are dirt cheap, AU$3 (just over a pound) and they run in a loop, although you do find out the time it restarts. People come and go the whole time though and you could spend the whole day watching the movie over and over if you wanted. The highlight of our time in Cebu was going to
Palawan airport
Serenading our arrival the Larsyan BBQ stalls- you wander around and pick your own chicken/pork/fish (many assorted parts of each and it’s best not to ask which) and they BBQ it on a little charcoal grill. Fantastic and very cheap- definitely not a place for vegetarians though.
Next it was onward via plane to Puerto Princesa (PP) on the island of Palawan. Again we managed to smile sweetly (Lise) and look innocent(Al) and not have to pay for excess baggage - carrying two full sets of dive gear including wetsuits as well as all the bits and bobs we need to survive in relative comfort for several months means that we have 30kg each which doesn’t make us popular on the budget airlines! We were issued with umbrellas as we walked across the tarmac in 34 degree heat - clearly they expect changeable weather…
We arrived in PP to the sounds of an army band welcoming us, clearly our reputations had preceded us! We got a tricycle to town and ended up at a cheap and reasonable guesthouse - Audissey(sic), which had a seaview. In PP we did a day trip to St Paul’s Subterranean River which is the ‘longest navigable
underground river in the world’. To get there from the city takes a couple of hours on really shocking road, then a boat, a walk and then another boat into the river to get there. Our boatman (called Robin - geddit?) paddles a little outrigger boat 1.5km up the river and you get to see the amazing stalagmites and stalactites and avoid dive bombing bats, all the while listening to Robin’s patter in Tagalog and English. It was quite amazing. We also spent a day island hopping around Honda Bay, we hired a boat with a skipper and his apprentice. We only made it to two islands, Snake Island and Starfish Island. We snorkeled for a quite a while and had a nice picnic.
Our original plan was to spend a day or two in PP and then travel north overland, but once we got to PP and investigated all the transport options we realised that it’s true that Palawan is the last frontier, which translates to expensive and erratic/painful-on-the-bum public transport. We ended up booking onto a ferry which went from PP to Coron in one hop. Sadly we missed out on the rest of Palawan so we
can fully endorse all the people that say a week is not enough to see this beautiful place. On the plus side we didn’t have to endure any rutted potholed roads!
The Superferry was an experience all in itself. We booked “Megavalue” tickets for the 14 hr journey, which from the website looked to be reasonably comfortable bunk beds. Pictures can be deceiving! We got on board after going through about 5 checkpoints and having our bags sniffed by a sniffer dog (which sort of looked asleep on it’s feet..or high on drugs) and were taken to our bunks. One big open room with about 600 bunk beds in it (all full), dimly lit with icy aircon. The roof was too low for Al to stand up or sit on his bunk and they were too short for him to lie down. We were also the only westerners on the whole ship, which wasn’t really a problem except that every movement was scrutinised by all our bunk mates. We felt like Brad and Angelina - a common theme in all our time in the Philippines since there aren’t many blonde girls, or 6ft4 men. We were prepared to grin
It was this big
Bringing home the catch of the day on the back of a trike - dripping blood all over the road and go with it, but Lise worked some sweet-talking magic and in short, we scored a very cheap upgrade to our own cabin - a four bunk cabin to ourselves with a private bathroom and even a TV with the satellite movie channels. Total luxury and for any travellers reading this we recommend splashing out and booking a cabin if you take this ferry! A much more pleasant way to pass the 14 hrs and we were happy to take the luxury option and ignore our backpacker budget this time!
We arrived in Coron late at night and got a trike to SeaDive resort where we had reserved a room, based on some recommendations. The hotel was fine but the service was very indifferent and when we went to enquire about diving the next morning the staff were blasé and uninterested. We decided to wander around and found Dive Calamines and their accommodation, Crystal Lodge. The accommodation was cheap and unique. It’s a ramshackle collection of rooms and cottages built over the water on stilts and we got our own cottage for a cheap rate with a hammock, bathroom and bedroom in a loft upstairs, although Al had some
The underground river
the largest part of the tunnel is 65ft high. You can see one of the small boats entering the tunnel near misses with some worm riddled floorboards and the low doors and light fittings produced some innovative swear word combinations.
We dove 2 days with Ron, an incredibly friendly and very safety conscious dive master- probably our best so far. The first day we dove two WWII Japanese freighter wrecks, a contrast after all our reef dives and fascinating to see how the sealife has staked its claims all over the metalwork. The second day we dove at Cathedral Cave and Barracuda Lake. Cathedral cave was a cave (duh) that you entered through a tunnel in the sea bed. After about ten metres you surfaced in a cave with gin-clear water through a shaft of light which came through a cave-in where a tree had fallen through. The cave was full of stalagmites and stalactites and was beautiful. Barracuda lake was a brackish lake on Coron island. We had a tough climb over sharp rocks to get to it, Lise wussed out and had one of the boat crew carry her gear. The water temperature at the surface was about 30C. You descend and at about 14m, the temperature increases to about 37C, then down around 24m it goes
back to 30C. This is the warmest and strangest dive we have ever done and is very much like a hot bath although the rock walls are like a lunar landscape. There were also layers of fresh and salt water which creates bizarre visual effects as you move between them. There wasn’t a lot of life in the lake, although we did see the one barracuda that the lake is named after, back after a recent absence, and lots of shrimp that if you held your hand out would clean underneath your nails for you!
The next couple of days were spent relaxing in our cottage - enforced by the continual rain showers, but this was a useful time to dry our gear all over the cottage, (think hand-grenade-going-off-inside-rucsac) plan our next couple of weeks and generally investigate the best way to lie in a hammock. We found a good restaurant run by a Frenchman - Bistro Coron which served great food, and a bar which had a happy hour - as much rum-and-coke as you could drink for 50pence!
We also discovered that the cottage had rats - Al was not pleased to find a huge hole in his
shorts where they had found the quick way through to a chocolate wrapper in the pocket!
In the next exciting episode, Al and Lise head back to Manila and explore the north of Luzon Island in the final week of the Philippine leg of the trip.
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