Philippines: Part 1

Written by Sofia

This blog post is about our first 2 weeks in the Philippines, which is also the first 2 weeks of our trip.

We started by spending a few days in Manila, and then flew to an island called Palawan and stayed in the town El Nido for 2 weeks.

Highlights

I enjoyed walking around Manila, eating local food and getting a massage. We chose the “relaxing massage” which ended up being so intense we were in pain for days, and I don’t know if it was good or bad pain lol.

Rizal Park, Manila:

View from the tricycle:

In El Nido we did a boat tour:

One of the stops on the boat tour was called Blue Lagoon. We kayaked in the lagoon and then through a narrow cave. The water was transparent! And Bruno saw a shark! I don’t know where I was looking when it swam past us.

For a few of the days we kayaked to beaches that couldn’t be reached by land. These beaches were absolutely stunning. We swam and snorkeled. The snorkelling was probably one of the best snorkelling I’ve experienced! There were so many colorful fish: orange, blue, white with black polka dots, rainbow, transparent. But the highlight was when we saw a ginormous squid. I’d guess it was about 2 feet long. It changed color, so when swimming on the coral it was brown (the color of the coral) and then when it swam on sand it turned translucent.

Papaya Beach:

Lapus Lapus Beach:

View of the beach from the kayak:

We watched the sunset from the kayak. It was beautiful.

Nacpan Beach:

Walking around El Nido town:

Some of our favorite foods:

  • The mangoes and mango smoothies!
  • Sisig

  • Calamansi juice
  • Leah’s Kitchenette

  • Halo Halo

  • Treats :)

  • Coconut water:

Reflections

First impressions of the Philippines:

  • People have been so nice here. People often say hello when passing on the street, and they feel very honest with prices. They also don’t stare at tourists, which I appreciate.
  • There is no tipping here, which is nice.
  • Locals eat with a spoon and fork, no knife!
  • At the Filipino restaurants we’ve been to, they don’t have dessert options, just occasionally Halo Halo. However, there are so many bakeries everywhere!
  • It’s been more expensive to travel here than I anticipated. Hotels and food are a bit more expensive, but I noticed it most with transportation. In El Nido, the government has set prices for tuk tuks/tricycle rides (with a separate price for locals and tourists), and they are quite high. For example, to go to a beach, it costs $22 each way. On the bright side, since this doesn’t fit in our budget, it led us to explore kayaking to beaches instead, which was way cheaper and actually so much fun. Set prices also mean you don’t have to wonder about the prices or bargain, which is nice.
  • Renting motorcycles would have been much cheaper and made getting places much easier. However, we decided before leaving we would not motorcycle while travelling due to safety. If I or others ever plan to come back here, I highly recommend knowing how to ride a motorcycle.
  • Since the Philippines is composed of over 7,000 islands, getting from one island to another takes time and can be expensive. To get from Manila to El Nido, we took a flight, spent the night in the town where the airport is, then drove 6 hours the following day to El Nido. As we planned the rest of the trip, we had initially wanted to do 3 places in all, but landed on doing one after El Nido due to the time and cost of moving around.

First impressions of long-term travel:

  • We had approached the trip with the mindset that we’d book a few days somewhere, and then see if we want to extend our stay there or go elsewhere, and use local’s recommendations on where to go next. However, we found that when booking a few days ahead of time, most things were booked and prices skyrocketed. This was a lesson learned for us. Moving forward, we plan to have most hotels and flights booked before we enter a country.
  • When traveling and staying in hotels, you end up eating out for every meal. For shorter trips it’s fun and not a problem. However, it dawned on me that since we’re traveling for months, eating out for every meal does not feel good (often oily or fried food, etc) and may not be healthy. One way we’ve tried to address this so far is to go to the supermarket and get fruit, bread and peanut butter, and some healthier snacks to eat throughout the day.
    • Another experiment with food: We bought plain white rice at the local restaurant, which is very cheap. At the supermarket, I bought canned beans, and Bruno bought canned meat and tomato sauce. We thought this might be a brilliant idea to have easy, cheap and healthy food all in one. Turns out it was barely edible!
    • In the future, we will try to find hostels that include breakfast (it’s often eggs, which is healthy) or have a kitchen we can use.