Location: El Nido, Palawan, Philippines

Sav: Tour day!!!

I love tour days!

All the tours in El Nido are categorized by letter, and we decided we just absolutely had to do ‘tour A’ after all the ads we’d seen for it around town yesterday. We started off by jumping onto a rickety old blue boat with about 15 people, while music played out of a big speaker hooked to the main mast. The wind was strong again today, which made the water super choppy and the sky a bit grey, none of which diminished the fun we started having as we became acquainted with everyone on board. Jake, Naomi, Nicole, Trevor, Shahar, Emily, Adam, Patrick, and Sam were just a few of the people we chatted with all the way to our first stop to snorkel.

We literally just hopped off the side of the boat into the crashing waves and took in a cute and colourful coral garden. Little clown fish and zebra fish skittered around branching and columnar purple and green corals, fitted between huge plate like pink corals. Lanky blue starfish lay in nooks, while little silvery minnows shone all over. It was great to be seeing it all again, although I am excited to get back in the water in diving gear! One of these days!

We climbed up the ladder and blasted off towards ‘The Big Lagoon’, a stop that everyone was super excited for. Let me tell you it was worth being excited about. We pulled up to the mouth of a rocky black cliff, where Max and I opted to rent a kayak-paddle-board-contraption to explore with (as opposed to swimming in through the crazy waves. Umm no thanks). I’m really glad we did because we would have missed so much of the lagoon without the access the kayak afforded us. At first we entered a channel filled with bright teal, completely clear water (also little stinging jellyfish apparently???), that eventually turned into a large dark swimming hole encircled by sheer cliffs. The limestone rocks surrounding us were otherworldly, jutting straight up out of the water they looked like many different sizes of knives all stacked together pointed upwards. We spent a long time trying to figure out what they looked like, at one point even talking about how certain sections looked like stone sentinels, or even hooded figures. Some bits could have been medieval stone castles… but every part had the same jagged knife-like protrusions. We snuck our kayak through a few caves, mouths agape around every corner at the shape of the rocks. We even saw little clear baby barracudas sneaking along the edges of the caves and in the shallower waters. I could have spent hours just anchored in the middle of the lagoon, basking in the sun and staring at the rock formations.

We pulled up to a beach and ate lunch, a picnic of all types of delicious fresh Filipino food. We were on the windward side of this particular little island, and it was chilly out of the water so we went exploring around to find a bit of sunlight. In one corner Max found a large monitor lizard. If you don’t know what this is I suggest you look it up they are so cool! At first we both thought it was a Komodo dragon- unaware that monitor lizards could grow to this size! It may have only been a couple of feet long but it’s large claws and fat scaly body really looked like a mini dragon. When I was able to tear Max away from the lizard, the guide brought us over to a secret little cove that we had to practically swim underwater to get into. The same rough snaggley rock dominated this little cove, and I had images of pirates stashing hidden treasure in places just like it. “But where has the rum gone?!” Small stinging plankton swam about, although that didn’t deter us from spending a bit of time joking and playing around with a few of our newfound friends. Max and Sam climbed up the side of the wall, and it took like six of us to convince them not to jump off and into the water!

Eventually the chill started to set in, so we crossed the bay and spent the last remaining hours of sunlight on Seven Commandos Beach, taking in the warmth. The sand was even whiter and softer than lots of what we had seen yesterday, and the view of many smaller islands all around us was picturesque. Max busted out this random game where you have two people balance on each other and try to place a water bottle as far across a line as you can, without actually crossing the line. I’m terrible at this game, because I don’t have… muscles. BUT we still had a great time falling all over in the sand. A whole bunch of people joined in, trying for over an hour to figure out the trick to placing the bottle as far as they could. All the different tour guides were even watching, feet propped up on their boats, laughing as we fell in the sand and cheering when someone placed the bottle successfully.

A bunch of our tour buddies were also staying at Frendz Hostel, so we all jumped in the pool on the roof upon returning. The sun went down behind the cliffs as we ate Mongolian Grill (the rooftop dinner special of the evening) and chatted away. It was an awesome way to cap off an awesome day. Apparently none of us wanted it to end because we decided to all sign up tomorrow for tour C together! We even requested the same guide- so I’m stoked to have another day full of sightseeing and friends!

Sav