Palawan Adventure! [Episode 1] #philippines

nnnarvaez (68)in #travel • 7 years ago (edited)

This is an attempt to a travel log i started when i was young and happy. It will be split in several episodes because people today is unable to read longer than a tweet's worth of text, I'll also add pictures to prove i was there... and spare you the pictures of airports, planes and other horrible things)

Meet the STARS of this adventure

Depart from France; that was the easy part…
AF flight delayed, with the consequent rushed arrival to Amsterdam, but the good old petroleum club did its deeds and we were fast tracked all the way to the next plane to Manila, the bright point was the finding f a smoking point in schipol Airport.

So this marks the end of Friday the 11th of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the 21st century… it all happened close to 11 hours and 11 minutes… well at least that was close to the boarding time, and I am not willing to bore you with the 11 interminable hours we spent crammed down in our economy seats, which actually would be bull-shitting you as the petroleum club got us in the first class of economy (The emergency door seats where you actually have some leg room).

So after several tiny bottles of airline wine and many boring hours in the plane thinking of the best way to invent a teleporting device we landed in Manila about noon on Friday the 12th, completely confused trying to figure out the time zone differences so we can actually tell what day/hour our mind is/was and how much time we spent in the plane, of course the moment the plane reduced its speed to about 200 km/hour every one buckled off and jumped to grab the bags and start the getting-out-of-a-plane-after-12-hours-rush, which includes the pass-immigration-rush and get-my-bags-rush and find-a-smoking-place-rush and worry about the rest later.

Suffice to say thou we survived I forgot my book in the plane… but that is a different matter.
Our first impression of Manila was that it was a different planet, mainly because their atmosphere is made of watery air and it is barely breathable by normal human beings, my sinus went shut and refused to work anymore.

I just wanted to discretely take a picture of the fat bloke, as my wife said he looked like a future version of me, I know she hates me because before going bald i used to be blond.

After smoking several cigarettes and avoid all the hotel representatives, people traffickers, sex traffickers, she-boys and other shit we managed to discover our next flight was leaving from a different terminal that required a transfer by a shuttle with its own particular schedule.

So we wait in line for it, smoking and taking the beautiful surrounding made of grey concrete (apparently Manila international airport is built under a highway) with other people around us carrying enough bags to fill a small mall.

Source

So the shuttle finally arrives and everyone starts struggling to put as many of their bags as possible inside at the same time, we let them kill each other and put our bags in at the end of the Melee (Which was a mistake as we were going down in the last stop of the shuttle, but we didn’t know that at the time)

So we get in the shuttle and it takes us across what looks like the ugliest outskirts ever, until after doing Terminal 1, 3, 4 it finally stops on Terminal 2 (That might be Asian counting…)

Once inside the terminal and still with 5 hours to kill until our next flight we find a WIFI spot on a café along with a very bad Latte. And the discussions start with the dive center. Dirk the manager/owner is very helpful considering we are calling already from Manila and giving him absolutely no notice prior to our arrival…

His dive center is on the same island as Club Paradise* an overpriced resort in a lonely corner of the south China sea north of Palawan in the arse of the Philippines (200 $ per night per person), he tells us he moors his boats in front of Vicky’s Guest House (15 $ per night) and there is also the option of Tierra y Sol Resort (No dive, no beach, no boat and the same price as the Paradise)

So we choose Vicky’s as we are told we can hitch a ride from there to the Dive Center every morning on the Dive boat… So all sorted out and ready to go, we take our flight to Coron, hitch a ride on Paradise’s airport shuttle, and another ride on their boat to be finally dropped at sunset in the middle of a mangrove lagoon in a 4 houses village, the houses are half in the water, half clinging to a short strip of land. (If you are Venezuelan you can imagine the Palafitos on Maracaibo’s lake which give the name to the country…)

A balcony overseeing the lagoon, all very rustic and authentic, however no air conditioning and no running water, no electricity after midnight…

The owner is not there but her 78 year old mother welcomes us and gives us a room and a tour of the place, a little fan ripples the heat waves as we set to watch the sunset from the balcony, dogs barking, a cat comes to say hello, we see a very appetizing pig on the garden and we are offered food and beers, they have not been expecting guests tonight so there is only fish and rice as choice, to this date I still suspect we ate their dinner…

To be continued:

In the next episode: the Dive Adventures, the escape from Vicky's resort, the crazy happy military medic from Cirque du Soleil and the sunken WWII Japanese ships tale.