Advertisement
Published: October 9th 2010
Edit Blog Post
The sunsets in Port Barton were a world unto themselves. Heaven descended to meet the sea and the picture was framed with palm trees. We stayed in a random apartment at 'summer homes'. Instead of bamboo huts, summer homes was a slice of American suburbia that happened to front onto the beach. Watch the film 'Edward Scissorhands and you will see the type of houses I mean.
Attempts to organize an island hopping tour for ourselves began with a late night wander of the town looking for 'William the fisherman'. Having successfully found him and negotiated a price for his boat and his company, the next morning we joined our tour companions and embarked on some exploration. First we helped William the fisherman assemble lunch, some rice, some soy sauce, some calamansi (a small citrus fruit with which the filipinos are obsessed) and some vinegar. A little boy came to our guesthouse with his catch of fish and we bought several red snapper.
William the fishermans boat was like every other boat on Palawan, an outrigger, narrow like a big canoe with bamboo poles on either side to make it seaworthy. Ignoring my very rational fear of sea monsters,
And Another.
Could it get any more cheesy... we had a lovely day of snorkelling, beach combing and eating fresh barbecued fish with our hands. The first spot we snorkelled in was by far the best. A place known as aquarium reef, where the sun shone through the clear water showing abundant brightly coloured corals and darting fish. Unfortunately we didn't see any cow fish (which are actually cuboid- look them up if you don't believe me) but there were lots of other pretty things. Alex liked the clown fish (aka nemo) and some really really tiny iridescent blue ones. My favourite were what I think are called rainbow fish. If they aren't then they should be; watery looking fish (!) with a multicolour fade from purple to green.
When we were there Port Barton itself was suffering from a jellyfish invasion. No-one seemed to know the details and luckily the areas we snorkelled in were far enough out not to be affected. However, walking in the shallow of 'German island' (apparently logically named thus because a German man used to live there) we did come across a couple of jellyfish. Later comparison of our pictures with the internet told us that they had been box jellyfish.
The first page we found described box jellyfish as “perhaps the most deadly creature in the world”. Ah well, we didn't get got!
Unfortunately we didnt escape from the day unscathed. Not only did we both get slightly oozy coral cuts but more embarrassingly the trusty factor 30 had not done the job. Not in the slightest. We found, on our return, that the removal of our swimming costumes left a negative where they had been. The rest of us both being embarrasingly lobster coloured. We invested in some factor 50.
Our second island hopping adventure took place another 8 hours up the coast, in a town called El Nido (can you tell that it was a Spanish colony?). El Nido is home to the Bacuit Archipelago, a stunning array of karst isalnds, speckled with secret lagoons, coral reefs and hidden beaches. The town itself is also pleasant. A nice mix of tourist and 'real', with a great selection of seafood.
The island hopping in El Nido wasn't as nice as at Port Barton. The islands may have been more beautiful, with spectacular limestone cliffs, but the tours followed a rather worn down route. The coral was
scarred by anchors and the feet of too many tourists. I will always remember this day however, as 'the day of the bastard fish' (excuse my French).
It was in the small lagoon. We entered through a small passageway in the cliffs and inside, between tall overgrown walls, was a murky lagoon, sloping down into the depths. I was reasonably confident with snorkelling by this time but there was a point where the rock dropped away into a bottomless pool, in which all manner of nameless things could have been lurking. I went no further.
As Alex bravely explored, I tentatively swam around the shallows. These too were horribly stirred up and murky. This in itself wasn't very nice, but the most curious thing was that every time I stopped, a yellow fish about 6 inches long would dart right up to my face and stare at me. Personally I rather expected the fish to flurry away when I lumbered by, but here, after repeated encounters I had the distinct impression I was being psyched out. I don't know if you've ever been psyched out by a fish. I certainly hadn't before and it was a rather unnerving
experience, one which I didn't really know how to combat. I can tell you now that as well as its angry little eyes being seared into my imagination, for some reason in my memory, its the fish who is wearing the snorkel mask.. “Don't be silly, its just curious, it cant hurt you” said Alex when, after what felt like a life time of being intimidated by aquatic vertebrates, he came back. Slightly pacified, we moved towards the sea and I tried to forget the fish's glare. I may have succeeded, had we not paused for a minute in thigh deep water before climbing out of the lagoon. It wasn't even a minute, 30 seconds at the most. Whatever it was, it was long enough for one of the glaring fish to rally for an attack and bite me. The bastard. As they say, once bitten, twice shy, and I will never again trust a fish. Especially not one wearing a snorkel.
To get to Basuanga Island, where our flight left from, we needed to catch a boat heading north. We were told that boats probably ran most days but this might depend on the weather, the number of
passengers and the general mood of the captain. Luckily on the day we needed to go, the boat ran. There weren't many passengers and the weather was awful so I can only guess that the captain must have been a really happy guy that day. It turned out to be a very choppy 8 hour ride with the swell being a bit too big for our little boat. The guy at the wheel was quite young and all the rest of crew stood around looking concerned and occasionally taking control. Not understanding the language we couldn't tell if the rough sea was something to worry about or if they were just slagging off the young man's driving. At one point the driver made a call on his mobile, we weighed whether he was calling his wife to say goodbye or just to ask what was for dinner. I think everyone was glad when we landed in the mangrove lined town of Coron,
Coron town was a pretty place, set on muddy shores with houses built out to sea on stilts. It was also the first place we'd been on Palawan that had 24 hour electricity. Our guesthouse beautiful, all
made of wood with fish swimming underneath and an amazing view of the sunset. We relaxed in Coron for a couple of nights, just long enough to cook some fresh fish from the market and climb the local hill. Then we flew back to Manila.
To add to what felt like quite a list of close shaves, our stay in Manila coincided with the tourist bus hijacking. A shamed ex-policeman took control of and ended up killing most of a bus of sightseers in a somewhat ill-founded attempt to be reinstated. The day before we had walked around the area in which the drama unfolded but on the day of the event we were lazing round in our guesthouse, just a few blocks away. Utterly unaware and eating steak.
Having found Manila a surprisingly pleasant city to wander, we made our way back to Hong Kong, where the victims of the hijacking were being mourned. Here we took in a day at the Hong Kong squash open (which Alex got very over excited about) and after a couple of surprisingly easy trips to the Chinese Embassy (once we'd found it) got some Chinese Visas. A final gorge of
Dim Sum provided us with the energy to head for the border and thus, we resumed our journey south.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.121s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 14; qc: 67; dbt: 0.0665s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb