A VIEW FROM THE TOP
After taking in the colonial beauty of Taal on the island of Luzon, we made our way to the port in Batangas. We had gotten pretty spoiled by fast and efficient transportation in Taiwan. It was time for us to adjust our expectations. For example, the one hour fast ferry to the island of Mindoro took over two hours to cross in perfectly calm conditions. At least the ride was comfortable with a movie playing. They even had some Valentine’s Day fun by taping various quotes and sayings to the heads of the chairs. We didn’t notice until we got up to leave that one of our seats said “THIS SEAT IS FOR COUPLES WITH A THIRD WHEEL FRIEND”.
Upon arrival in Puerto Galera we paid our environmental fees and searched for the Tuk Tuk driver, arranged by our host, who had been waiting patiently for over an hour to drive us to the nearby town of Sabang. Reviews had warned us that our apartment required an uphill walk, but we got nervous when the driver started on what seemed like an endless uphill stretch, straining his vehicle’s engine with every passing minute. Each time we thought we were at the last turn he laughed saying “but wait, there’s more”.
Fortunately, after we checked in, our host showed us a secret staircase on the hillside that allowed us to walk straight down a path that emerged at the waterfront where the dive centres were located. All our exercise in Taiwan paid off as we tackled those stairs multiple times a day.
There were accommodation options that didn’t require a big climb uphill, but this one had a kitchen allowing us to prepare meals loaded with vegetables. The vegetable situation did improve as we travelled further south in the Philippines, but it was certainly a challenge in the first few weeks. We also discovered that our apartment was a prime location for watching the sunset.
SCUBA DIVING
Sabang is not as well known to the international diving community as other places in the Philippines. We were fortunate to find out about it from a friend of a friend. After checking out a few dive shops, we discovered that 1500 pesos ($38 Canadian) per dive was the standard price, but we found one place called Chu Diving that was 1200 pesos (about $30 Canadian) per dive. We have learned that more expensive isn’t always better as the extra rate can be for features we don’t need like snacks or a bigger boat. Chu’s equipment looked good, their dive masters spoke English and their group sizes were small so we signed up.
Our first dive of the trip (and our first in over a year) was more intense than we had expected due to strong currents. Drift dives are not normally an issue for us, but the site had been selected by two other divers who wanted to see Thresher Sharks, which required us to stay still in one spot to watch for them. Not only did we have to find something to hold onto that we would not damage, other groups were showing up making it tough to keep track of of our group. We didn’t see any sharks but discover as we drifted at high speed that Sabang had some of the best soft and hard coral we had seen diving anywhere.
For the second dive we requested something a little calmer. We headed to a site called Fantasea. This dive was better with a small wreck we could swim through that was full of fish.
The strengths of the currents greatly improved during our 3 days of diving. For the first two days, we had balanced 2 dives in the morning with beach visits in the afternoon, but the conditions were so calm on the last day we opted to do 3 dives and finally got to see our first Thresher Shark ever and lots of turtles and our first ever disco clam! Of course, it was the one day of diving that my gop pro did not work, but typically a broken go gro guarantees a great dive! Overall we did 7 dives and I managed to log my 99th dive!
BEACH TIME
After a month of travel, we were finally getting some time at the beach. Kenting, Taiwan had been too cold and windy to really count. After our first two dives, we walked from the dive shop, past Sabang Beach and eventually reached Lagoon Beach. There were only a handful of other people there. In order to cool ourselves off from lying in the hot sun we took turns snorkelling, watching giant turtles chomping away at corals. That evening we returned to our place for sunset beers on the balcony and compared our burns. It doesn’t matter how much sunscreen you have or the spf, the first days of salt and sun make burns pretty inevitable.
For our second beach visit, we hired a tricycle to take us to White Beach on the other side of Purto Galera. We had no interest in White Beach itself because it was packed with restaurants, tourists and people selling pearls. Instead we continued past to Aninuam beach which we only had to share with a handful of local tourists. We stayed for sunset, but concluded that our apartment was still the best place to watch it.
