Our last major stop in the Philippines was Palawan island. We flew into Puerto Princessa and spent two days exploring the city and deciding what we wanted to do on Palawan. It is a long, larger island known for beautiful scenery, nice beaches, good diving, and generally pretty nature. 

We initially were thinking about going to the underground river, a UNESCO heritage site. But the reviews weren’t great, and it seemed that unless we got there super early, we would have to wait in line for longer than the tour takes, and we just weren’t feeling it, so we skipped it. We ended up glad we did, because we met a Filipino-American couple in the grocery store who went on it and said it was a waste of time, kind of boring, they only took the boats up a small part of the 8 mile long river, and they felt like it was a waste of money since it was rather costly for what you got out of us. Good thing for us, as we felt a little bad for not going but this made us feel better about our decision. 

Since there weren’t many other tourist activities to do in town, we spent most of our time in Puerto Princessa eating and planning what to do next. Our first night right after getting off the plane, we found an amazing restaurant near the airport, Kalau. We were lucky to get seated, as they were booked full for the night, but we were there early in the evening and they found a table for us. They had a very small menu (which is kind of weird here, we have seen so many 10+ page menus and the restaurant is usually out of half of the options) which was encouraging, and the feature was a several course seafood dinner, which of course we decided to do.  

  
It was delicious, we got our favorite seaweed (made up of these round ball-shapes connected together that sort of pop in your mouth), seafood broth soup, grilled fish steak, some sort of fish wrapped around stuff with sauce, tempura eggplant, shrimps, and a pina colada and banana shake. Yum. 

   
   
We also had amazing grilled chicken at a place called Haim’s Inato and a great soup called chalong (we think that is how it’s spelled) that was a Vietnamese-Filipino fusion soup.

In the midst of all of this eating, we spent a lot of time trying to decide where to spend our last week in the Philippines. We searched for ideas for hours, and nothing was really striking our fancy. We were getting kind of sick of the Philippines and bouncing around to new towns every 2-3 days, and there were a bunch of options for where to go next – El Nido allegedly has awesome beaches and views of the water, but it is a 6 hour bus ride on winding roads through mountains, which we would have to take there and back over the course of 5 days, and the town was reported to be pretty expensive since it is far away from the main city; there was also Port Barton that we heard great things about, a laid back beach town, but none of the available accommodations looked that great and they only have power from 6pm to midnight daily, so we didn’t think that would be a great choice either. There were other islands we could go to off the northern coast of Palawan that looked beautiful, but those were even farther than El Nido and required a boat ride as well.. Nothing was really looking exciting to us. 

We eventually settled on renting a cottage an hour outside of Puerto Princesa in a small village for 5 nights. We thought it would be a good choice since they had internet to research what to do when we get to Vietnam in a week, cable tv to entertain us, a kitchen so we could cook for ourselves, and a beach about a 10 minute walk away, and we could relax in one place and not have to go somewhere new every 2 days. We loaded up on groceries before we left the city and headed out of town. 
  
It was a little hard to find but we had a map and found it after a few minutes of looking around. We were excited at first, the house was cute, and we had everything we needed.

   
 
But we quickly realized the pitfalls of our new home. The Internet stopped working, the satellite TV only had one channel – a Filipino news channel, the hot water wasn’t working, and we had ants all over our cooking pans even though we had cleaned them right after using them. We went for a walk on the beach but it was a fairly deserted beach, nothing nearby to our house, and even the “resort” that was said to be within walking distance of our house was really just a crappy small diving resort that would definitely not qualify as a resort by American standards. We couldn’t even swim in the water at the beach, the water was super sandy/full of barnacles and seaweed and jellyfish and we would have had to walk out for a mile to get deep enough to go under water. So we were in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do at all. This put us in a pretty crappy mood. 

Thankfully Doods (the house owner)’s brother came over in the evening to bring us breakfast fixings and renewed the subscription for the TV and Internet, which made a huge difference to us. Now at least we could research what to do in Vietnam! He couldn’t get the hot water to work, but we ended up taking showers when we were hot and it wasn’t that bad. And we found some ant spray in the house and killed the shit out of the stupid ants. 

The first two days we had to cook breakfast for ourselves because the brother’s wife usually cooks for the guests but she was out of town, which was really no problem since we booked this place to have a kitchen to ourselves. So he brought us bananas, a whole loaf of bread, eggs, and hot dogs and chicken nuggets for our two days of cooking for ourselves – way too much food for breakfast but it was fine as it supplemented our own dwindling food supplies. After she came back to town we had some beautifully arranged breakfasts of similar foods with nice little veggie flowers and girly touches to them – she was clearly back in town.

  
We quickly fell into a routine of cooking/eating breakfast, researching Vietnam/reading before lunch, cooking lunch, being lazy around the house till it was cool enough to walk on the beach around 3pm or so, then walking down the beach until we were afraid it would get too dark before we got back home, showering, cooking whatever we had for dinner, watching TV, then going to bed. It was great and super relaxing. We keep trying to get bored on vacation but I feel like I am now physically incapable of getting bored; 5 days of this and I didn’t get bored at all.

  
Path to the beach with someone’s nice jeepney outside of their hut.

  
Our somewhat deserted beach.

  
Tree growing in the salt water.

  
Pineapple bush.

  
  
Palm tree grove. I think these are the ones the villagers use to make the roofs of their huts.

  
Our lazy water buffalo neighbors. Seriously these guys are so lazy, I’m surprised this one is standing up in the daylight. They hang out in the shade laying around all day. And they make these noises that sound like they are saying “I’m hhhhooooottttt”. In their defense, it is pretty hot here..

  
Tree in front of our house, I think some of these may be orchids but what do I know. 

Today we are heading back to Puerto Princesa so we can start our long day of three flights to Vietnam tomorrow!