El Nido!

Thursday June 7

We left Puerto Princesa Tuesday morning at about 7am. We took a 6 hour ride in an air conditioned (thank god!) van to El Nido. The van ride was an adventure in itself! The first few hours on paved roads were tolerable. 

Then the road was no longer paved. 

Imagine the worst gravel road you've even driven on. Now add A LOT more pot holes. Finally, sit in the back of a van with virtually no shocks.

The last few hours were rough to say the least! 

Once we arrived it was 1:30pm and we found a place to stay called Davayne's. It's 700 pesos per night with a fan. 850 with air conditioning. We have our own little cottage room on the main road, very near the beach. The place is nice, we chose to only have a fan and no air conditioning. El Nido only has electricity from 2:30pm to 6:30 am, and the rest of the day there is none. So we figured we could survive without it. 

We walked around and found a restaurant on the beach. It was open air and there was no floor, only sand. It had an awesome view of the giant rocks and cliffs coming out of the water. Plus the water was only about 10 steps away from the restaurant. There are several places similar to this along the beach.

On Wednesday we went on an island hopping tour, Tour A. It was Michael and I plus another family with a really cute kid, he was about 10-13 years old. The water was rough and the boat ride to the first stop was not so pleasant. The water was really rough that day. The spray from the boat was constantly in our face and we were completely soaked by the time we got there. The first place was a lagoon where you had to swim through a tiny little 3 foot tunnel of rocks to get to the lagoon. We went snorkeling and saw a few fish, but they made us leave this stop after only about 15 mints. I was very disappointed. Then we drove around the other lagoon but didn't stop for some reason. After that they made us an awesome lunch of grilled fresh fish. It was delicious! Did I mention how much I love the food here?? Lunch on the beach was great, but a storm came in and it started raining, so we got ready to leave. Our guides took the leftover food and fed the fish from the boat. Some people got in the water to watch, and I wish that I had! The fish were literally eating the food right out of their hands! There were a ton of them, and a lot of them were neon colors!

After the fish feeding we went to the last stop which was a nice big beach. It was rainy though so we didn't want to swim. We huddled under a little food shop/bar. They happened to have the most adorable one-week old kittens! We played with them and took many pictures of course. The sun finally came out as we were getting ready to leave and head back to El Nido. Overall it was worth it, but I was disappointed that we didn't get to snorkel more. It cost 900 pesos each.

Today we went to a secluded beach about 10 minutes outside of El Nido. We laid out on the hammock all day and read our kindles! Fantastic day for sure. I'm starting to get a little more of a tan finally! By tan I mean burned of course!

The weather has been better than I expected. It is the rainy season now, but it has only sprinkled a few times when we were out, and rained for about 45 minutes yesterday. It has been cloudy all the time, not usually very sunny, but thats okay because it isn't quite as hot that way!