Day 156: Puerto Princesa and Honda Bay

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We flew from Cebu to Puerto Princesa on feb 18th, a few hours ahead of my parents, who flew in from Manila. My parents had been planning on taking a 2 week vacation to meet steph and I wherever we might be in our trip, and they followed through! It was pretty cool to be able to meet up on the other side of the world like that. They even brought us rice crispy treats (steph ate them all in 2 days), and a bunch of Trader Joe's beef jerky (it's the best).

Puerto princesa is by far the biggest city on Palawan Island, which is a long, skinny, undeveloped island in the western Philippines. Puerto princesa itself was not a big attraction to us, but the nearby Honda Bay made it worth staying one full day to see it.

On the morning of the 19th the four of us set out to Honda Bay for our first island hopping trip together. We decided to opt out of the packaged tour offered by the hotel and just go on our own. This was definitely a good decision because it was way cheaper and we got a boat to ourselves. We picked out 4 islands from the list, got on the boat, and headed out.

The first stop was not actually an island, but a shallow area with some really good coral and fish. This was my dad's first attempt at snorkeling (EVER) so all things considered he did pretty well by lasting 2 whole minutes. My mom hadn't snorkeled in 20 years but she stayed out longer than any of us. I took some good pictures underwater, and a few movies. Here's one of them:



Next we went to Starfish Island, which was a very skinny and winding strip of sand with mangroves on one side. We walked down to the end of the strip, and I looked down in the water to see hundreds of star fish! I spent 5 minutes arranging 11 star fish in to a big star shape, but by the time I took a picture they had already started spreading away from each other.

After that was Snake Island. No it was not covered in snakes. The island itself is shaped like a giant snake, apparently. Good for snorkeling and sunbathing. My dad did much better snorkeling on his second round.

I forget the name of the last island we stopped at, but it was also really nice. It was round and had coconut trees - more of a traditional island I guess you could say. I was surprised to see a lionfish while we were snorkeling. Until then I had only seen them much deeper while scuba diving. Maybe he was lost. I knew better than to touch it though, they are poisonous.

Here's some pictures from our day of island hopping in Honda Bay:

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Comments

[Matt Potterton]

Oh so that's where Chrysler got it's logo
They found that big ugly looking pentagon brown looking starfish thing and said, WE MUST HAVE THIS FOR OUR NEW CAR COMPANY