So I won’t say goodbye–that’s too final!  But I will say…Salamat for everything!  Ingat till we meet again!  Mahal kita!

(why do crabs take so much work to eat?!)

(snails were much easier to coax out of their shells with a toothpick!)

(mmm…shrimpy shrimps!…and snails!  pretty AND tasty!)

So we ended up with crabs and shrimp in garlic & butter, grilled tuna, ginger clam soup, and snails in coconut milk.  YUM!!!!  Everything was delicious!

Friday I tagged along again to drop a wad o’ cash at Greenhills…bought a lot of pearls this time (some freshwater pearls, but also some salt water pearls…hence the wad o’ cash!).  Xandra (one of the Manila trainers) knew someone with a pearl business, so we got good prices on everything!

I wasn’t the only one buying pearls, though!  After all the pearls in Greenhills were bought up (OK, not really, but it felt like it!) we headed to another mall, the Mega Mall.  Mega Mall is located just off EDSA at the EDSA shrine, where the People Power Revolution took place way back in 1986.  This mall used to be the largest in the Philippines, but, as you can imagine, that didn’t last, and bigger and fancier malls have since been built.  However, it is a nice mall, as they go — very middle class feeling.  And there is an amazing shabu shabu resto in the atrium, Tong Yang!  I say amazing not because the food is that stellar (it was good, but I think the shabu shabu place I went to in Malate w/ Allie & Rico & Jing & Frances & Jessica was tastier)…but it was a huuuuuuuuge buffet, so you could pick all manner of seafood, beef, pork, veggies, etc., then bring it back to your table and dump it in the hotpot to boil.  There was also a cast iron grill, so if you’d rather grill your meat/seafood, that was doable, too.  I had tanigue, blue marlin, corn, squidballs, cabbage, and I’m sure there was other stuff!  I tried some of Xandra’s oysters in kalamansi, which were quite good (wasn’t sure if I liked the texture, but once I stopped chewing they were awesome!  Loved the briny flavor.)  It was very good food (and excellent company!), but soooo much food!  And of course, we had to avail of the build-your-own-halo-halo bar…so we topped the meal off with freezing cold goodness!

We headed back to the apartments after lunch to rest (and digest!) before we all reconvened for a Minnepino feast of tatertot hotdish (or, tatertotdish, depending on who you ask!), adobo and rice, quinoa-apple-veggie salad, and apple crisp with vanilla ice cream.  Good times, more food (eek!…soooo much food!).

Saturday I was going to head to Chinatown to explore, but work up with a wicked migraine, so I spent the rest of the weekend getting rid of that…eesh.  Must have been the heat (or all the sugar from the day before?)…who knows.  In any case, Chinatown will be rescheduled!

So Jing and I joined this mass metro exodus and headed to Quezon province for the long weekend!  We headed to the JAC liner bus station in Pasay City (near Makati) and hopped an aircon bus to Lucena.  Jing had called the bus company earlier in the week and they estimated it would take about 3 hours to reach Lucena.  We figured there would be lots of traffic, so we caught the 7:30am bus (there’s one leaving every 20 minutes, so we didn’t have to wait long, and the seats were quite comfy, which turned out to be a very good thing!).

We hoped to beat the traffic, but I think everyone had the same idea we did, as traffic was alive and well from the get go.  We quickly realized that 3 hours was not very likely, and indeed, after 3 hours, we were barely to the end of the SLEX (which should have taken roughly 45 minutes!)  Around hour 5 we broke out some dried mango and fried corn nuts, and we finally arrived in Lucena about 7 and a half hours after we’d left.  That’s right folks–7 and a half hours!!!!  The pic below was before we got into the really heavy traffic…

Once we made it to the terminal in Lucena, we started looking for a jeepney to take us to our final destination in Tayabas.  One very eager driver herded us toward his jeepney…Jing was trying to find us a direct-to-Tayabas jeepney, but this driver insisted that wasn’t possible, so we gave in and climbed aboard the jeepney (which was already jam packed, but somehow we managed to fit…this is a common theme in my Philippine travels…I often think “we’ll never all fit in there” and then viola! we do somehow…it’s a mystery!).

The first jeepney took us to the terminal in Tayabas proper, and a nice lady (who informed us that there was, in fact, a direct jeepney afterall) helped us catch the jeepney that ran past our resort.  So after squeezing into yet another packed jeepney, we finally arrived at our resort, Nawawalang Paraiso (Paradise Lost).  Only 9 hours after we’d left…whew!

We were starving, so we hit up the resto at the resort for a late lunch of Kinilaw Tanigue (this weekend could also be known as the weekend o’ kinilaw…mmmm) and Tilapia sisig.  Excellent choices.

(kinilaw tanigue)

We were planning to do a short hike in the afternoon (back when we thought we’d be arriving closer to 11am than 4pm!), but decided to push that back to the next morning since we only had a few hours till sunset.  So instead we hopped on yet another jeepney and headed for Lucban, a nearby town.  We rode the jeepney all the way through town, then hopped off and went exploring.  We found a spiffy old moss-covered church (complete with mass on-going), lots of little shops and older houses, and the original Buddy’s Pancit (a noodle shop famous for selling pancit noodles on a banana leaf, no utensils!).

(judging from the hanging microphones, I’m placing bets on karaoke happening here!)

(an oooold church)

(the church in question)

By the time sun set, we headed back to the resort for dinner and some much-needed rest (it’s hard to keep going all day like that!).  On the way to Lucban we’d passed the Kamay ni Hesus area, which was is a major religious site in Quezon…it was packed with people, so we were kind of glad we’d pushed it off till the next morning…and at least we knew to expect still more traffic!  We snagged dinner at the resort (more tilapia sisig and fried fish) and then snagged some sleep!

(tilapia sisig)

The next day, our first stop was breakfast (the classic combo of fish and rice and egg, naturally!), then off to check out the Kamay ni Hesus (which translates as Hands of Jesus, I think).  We hopped on a passing jeepney and then sat in traffic for about thirty minutes, inching the two or three miles to the statute gates.  When we got off the jeepney, we fell into line and hiked along the side of the road (a narrow strip winding between the traffic in the road and the vendor stalls alongside selling everything from pancit to woven hats to souvenir rosary beads).

(lots of traffic of all sorts!)

You couldn’t really see much from the road besides the crush of people, but once we got inside we could see what all the fuss was about…

(the line to get up to the statue)

(lots of people going to the statue!)

It was hot and there was a huuuuuge line for the stairs to climb to the top of the statue, so we opted to view it from the base and wander past a few of the other statues before heading out.  The place was set up for pilgrimage, for sure…lots to see, lots of steps to climb, and even a Jollibee on Wheels inside the shrine!

Not being terribly religious, we decided to skip the climb to the top and the rest of our day consisted of resort hopping.  We took another jeepney leaving Kamay ni Jesus (and got to ride up front for the first time!)

The driver kept asking for a dollar (apparently I’m easy to peg as an American!), but all we had was pesos…he seemed kind of put out as he dropped us off at Graceland, an Elvis-themed high-end country club/resort.  We had to walk up a long driveway from the main road, then sign in at the guard shack and leave our IDs as collateral, then walk down the main road to the front office to get our visitor passes signed.  At first they didn’t want to let us in (apparently it’s kind of exclusive if you just want to wander around rather than pay for day-use!), but Jing was able to talk them into it somehow, so all that paperwork got us a 15-30 minute pass for sightseeing (yay!).

It was a swanky place, with downright manicured grounds, a couple restos, a driving range and putting course, and some really swanky looking townhouses.

(giant plant!)

(medium giant plant!)

(seriously, who wouldn’t want to live here?)

Especially considering the WWII jeep collection.  Yeah, that totally makes sense!!

(WWII jeeps)

We spent about an hour exploring before stopping at the Memphis cafe for some drinks to cool down…pineapple shake for me, and a mango shake for Jing!

(because everything tastes better with a paper umbrella!)

By then we were getting a tad hungry, so we headed to another resort, Kamayan sa Palaisdaan for lunch.  The spiffy thing about their restaurant is that it consists of thatched roof huts floating on a fish pond!  And they have excellent food!  We had sweet & sour fish and chop suey and relaxed in the breeze on our little raft.

(loved the little raft tables!)

(the buko looks better than it tastes…no that it’s bad, just kind watery)

After our long lunch, we hired a tricycle and headed for Mainit Hot Spring.

(tricycle!)

It was a solid 45 minute ride and we arrived a few minutes after 4pm–bad luck for us, because they closed at 4pm due to the holiday…booo!  On the way back to our resort, the tricycle driver pointed out a few sights that we passed…there was a brick bridge that dated back to 1840 (the Spanish era)…it isn’t considered safe for traffic any more, but our tricycle driver pulled off the road so we could walk out across it and see the plaques.  It was pretty amazing to stand on a 150 years old bridge, and the river below was pretty, too!

He also pointed out the power station, which is where Manila gets a lot of it’s electricity (now I know who to blame for those rolling blackouts!)

It turned out that our driver and his wife both worked for the Kamayan sa Palasidaan resorts (apparently there are 3 branches, each a little different), so before taking us back to our resort, we stopped at the swanky new branch for a tour.  I liked the statue holding the san mig!

I should point out that resorts in the area were kind of like a combo of day use/public area where you had picnic tables and karaoke machines and then hotel…you could pay to use the facilities for just a day, or get a room or a tent spot for the night.  Kind of different than resorts at home (I think…not a big resort person, myself!)…so it was a day of resort hopping, for sure!

We finally headed back to our resort for dinner (which consisted of more fishies!! and the local pancit!).  One of Jing’s friends had decided to catch a bus from Manila  and join us, so she arrived later that night.  She really wanted to go to the statue, so she and Jing decided they’d go really early in the morning (I decided to sleep in…4am sounded a bit early to me!).

The next morning they headed off to the statue as planned, then Jing and I headed back to the hot spring that we’d missed the day before, which turned out to be another resort…we’d thought it was more of a natural hot spring, which we did see (safely boiling away behind a concrete fence!), but there were a ton of swimming pools with so many people in them that it was pretty much standing room only!  We took a quick tour and then headed back to our resort to check out.

We stopped by Kamayan sa Palaisdaan’s floating restaurant for another tasty lunch before heading back to Lucena to catch our bus back to Manila.  We were hoping to miss traffic by heading home on Saturday instead of Sunday, and it sort of worked…it only took us 5 hours to make it home instead of 8 (that’s progress, right?!)

I kind of like traveling by bus in the Philippines…it can be crowded, sure, but so far I’ve been lucky enough to always get a seat and not have to stand for hours on end.  It’s easy…you just show up and get on the bus.  Once you’re underway you just tell the ticket guy where you’re headed and he punches out a ticket for you:

(tickets to and from Quezon!)

And then you just settle in and chat with your neighbors or sleep or read or whatever to pass the time.  A decent way to travel!

Sunday I spent just hanging out and recovering from all my travels (OK, and I might have soaked up some sun by the pool while I was at it…gotta keep my freckles up!!)…all in all it was excellent to have a 4 day weekend, and I’m glad Jing and I got out of the city for a little sightseeing and relaxation!  Good times & excellent company!

More pics here…

We left Friday night after work (close to 10pm), thinking it would take about 5 hours to get to Gumaca…but, of course, we hit traffic, so instead of arriving at 3am as planned, we got there closer to 5am.  Which worked out OK, as then we were able to sleep in the van!  When we arrived in Gumaca, we headed to Aya’s family’s place, where we had a tasty breakfast of rice porridge with ginger, eggs, and pancit.  Mmmmmm.

After breakfast, we started getting things together for our trip to the island.  First stop was a trip to the market to pick up food.  The catch of the day was just arriving as we got there, so there were lots of fresh fish wriggling around to choose from.

(catch coming in)

There were also lots of fish drying on racks…they were awful cute!

(sun dried fish)

We had to wait a bit for the rest of the details to be settled, so we spent some time playing bingo (and winning!  ha ha!)…

We got on the boat (a teeny tiny outrigger canoe…very tippy!  eek!) and headed for the island…

(heading out to the island)

…and just as we came around the tip of the island, within sight of the beach we were headed for, the engine died.  Yipes!  It took a few tries on the ripcord, but we were eventually underway and landed on the beach!  The master chefs got to work preparing food for lunch, while the rest of us went exploring!

(master chefs!)

We found a rocky black beach (well stocked with snails and little crabs), and then started off to find the white(r) beach we’d seen on our way in.  It was maybe a quarter mile away, past a point and a few mangrove trees.  We commemorated our find by taking lots and lots and lots of attempted jump shots.  And then we got one to (mostly!) work!

(3..2..1..jump!)

We made it back in time for lunch, which was an amazing spread!  Grilled fish, squid adobo, ensalada with bagoong (shrimp paste!), rice (of course!), grilled pork, and lots of fresh fruit!

(feast!)

After lunch we all trekked over to the white beach we’d scoped out earlier…it was HOT!  But that didn’t slow us down!  We took all sorts of pictures and played all sorts of crazy beach games…one involved snagging balloons from a cooler, running up the beach and back, then popping the balloons in the shallows to get a word rolled up on a slip of paper to spell out a phrase; there was also an egg toss (wherein I learned that eggs bounce quite well on sand and crabs!…musta been a softshell?!), and a version of chase-the-tail (think a conga-line + tag!) that devolved into chaos in record time!  Good times!  Minimal sunburn!

(tag! you’re it!)

We eventually headed back down the beach for second lunch (you read that right!) and some swimming (wherein I learned that sea urchins, or whatever it was that I brushed against that left a black spine in the side of my toe, do not play well with others)…lucky for us there were no jellyfish (though they do arrive in the area this time of year, I gather)!  It started raining while we were swimming, which was pretty spiffy (I love swimming in the rain!).

(pretty beach!)

Eventually we all made our way back out of the sea, packed up our stuff, and loaded up the boat to head back to town.  Just one catch…apparently when you’re dealing with oceans, you have this tide thing to consider…specifically low tide.  (Yeah, I come from the land of rivers & streams…no tides on my radar!)…so we ended up pushing the boat (and in some instances, carrying the boat) out to deeper water before we could head back.  Exciting times!

(in the boat attempting to head back)

We got back just as the sun was setting, headed back to Aya’s family’s place for a round of showers before piling back into the vans for the drive back to Manila.  We got home around midnight–awesome Saturday!

(leaving around sunset)

That’s right kids, I just survived my very first Philippine earthquake. I was standing talking to some folks and the whole building swayed VERY noticeably for about 30 seconds.  (Glad I wasn’t in the elevator for that…yipes!)  And I might be a tiny bit nervous about our office being on the 10th floor of a still-under-construction building now…but that’ll pass, I’m sure.

OK, yeah, that’s all…kinda anticlimactic for my first (and let’s hope, only?) earthquake experience in the Phils.  But I’m still feeling kinda queasy & off balance…that just felt weird!

Haven’t heard anything about any damage yet…keep your eyes on the news, I guess!

……no word!  Ack!  It’s killing me.  Will I be an illegal alien this weekend?  Or will my paperwork come through?  Oh, the suspense!

*****Update*****

Ok, so all my worry was for naught, as my paperwork came though on Friday.  Just in the nick of time!  …Aaaaand I think that’s all the immigration office drama I can handle this month.

After breakfast we headed via tricycle to the port to catch the Ocean Jet ferry to Bohol.  We had a tour scheduled to see the tarsiers (tiny little monkeys), the chocolate hills, and a river cruise…which didn’t exactly work out as planned because the ferry left EARLY.  I know!  Nothing here ever happens EARLY!!  How dare they!  Apparently Ocean Jet has a nasty habit of leaving ahead of schedule, even when ticket-holding passengers (like us!) are not on board!  The Ocean Jet ferry scooted out of its slip a solid 25 minutes prior to its scheduled departure time.  Harumph.  So there we were, at 7am, with no way to get to Bohol until the next ferry at 2pm (which would get us there just in time to spend a few minutes admiring the view from the port before hopping on the last trip back to Dumaguete).  Foiled!

We spent a little time trying to figure out an alternate route and attempting (with only partial success) to get our fare back from the extremely rude guy manning the Ocean Jet ticket office before piling into a tricycle and heading to a different port to catch a pumpboat to Cebu (another nearby island…click here for a map), where we could take a van-ride to the next port and catch a ferry to Bohol from there.  The pumpboat was basically a giant outrigger canoe packed to the gills with people!  It’s more stable than it looked (or else I’m getting used to boats, because it wasn’t too terrifying).

Great plan, right?  Except the van ride took 3 hours, and the next ferry from Cebu City to Bohol was scheduled to arrive in Bohol only an hour or so before we’d have to catch the ferry back to Dumaguete.  Foiled again!

Instead of spending the whole day on a ferry, we decided to give up on Bohol and hired a guide to show us a few sights around Cebu.  We headed first to go see Magellan’s cross, which is famous for being the first cross erected in the now uber-Catholic Philippines.  Magellan planted it when he landed on Cebu in the 1500s.  The whole thing was in a pretty little gazebo in a square — very picturesque.  As you got closer there were people selling colored candles that folks were putting on the shelf around the cross (and I’m sure if were any hotter out, those candles would have been lighting themselves!)

I thought it looked like it was in suspiciously good shape for a 500+ year old piece of wood…

…and I was right!  The placard below the cross says that the original cross is still there, but it’s been encased in Tindalo wood (which you see in the photo).  In any case, it was spiffy to see a chunk of history!

After that we walked through the wall into the campus of the Santo Nino church.  It was last built in the 1700s (you know how it goes…old buildings have a nasty habit of catching on fire or being destroyed in wars, and this one was no exception)!

But it looks pretty good for its age!  There was a mass going on inside the church, so I didn’t snap too many photos, but it was a pretty church, with lots going on!

The balloons were super fun…everything from hello kitty to spider man to dolphins!  I kind of wanted to get one and go scampering around the square, because the mob of little kids doing that looked like they were having a ball!!

I loved the stained glass windows, unfortunately, this is the best picture I could get without being intrusive!

After leaving the church, we headed to Lapu Lapu City to see the site of Magellan’s last stand, the Mactan Shrine.  Crossing from Cebu City to Lapu Lapu City felt almost exactly like crossing from Duluth to Superior (except there was a real live town on the east side of the bay, and the bridge was shorter!).  But there were tons of shipping containers, boats, and general port accoutrements as we went over the bridge between the two towns, as you can sort of see in my blurry shot out the car window…

We didn’t see very many jeepneys in the area, but there were lots of multi-cabs (I think that’s what they’d be called, at least!)…my favorite was the Hello Kitty one:

Once we got to the Mactan Shrine, we poked around a bit and read the placards.  Magellan met his match in a warrior named Lapu Lapu (which is also the local name for grouper in the Philippines, so the joke goes: “who killed Magellan?  Lapu Lapu.  Who killed Lapu Lapu?  The fisherman!”  ha ha…laugh!  You know it’s funny!)

At the shrine, there’s a giant monument in the center of a garden, as well as various placards explaining the events.

There was also a statue of Lapu Lapu, at the shrine, as well as several papier mache busts of the warrior, all of which provided our group with lots of entertainment!

Mactan is also famous for their guitar making craftsmen, so there were lots of guitars for sale.  I very nearly bought one because I’ve been thinking of upgrading from my smaller guitar to a full-size (I played when I was younger), but the pragmatic traveler in me decided it would be too hard to get it home.  But now I have non-buyers remorse…they were gorgeous guitars, and where else am I going to find a beautiful instrument like that for just over $30?!  Is there such a thing as non-buyer’s remorse?

After leaving the shrine, we only had time for a brief stop at the Shamrock bakery (famous in Cebu for their Otep, which is a crispy sweet toast…basically the Filipino version of Trenary toast!).  I didn’t get otep, but I did buy mangoes!  (And they were stellar, as expected, since Cebu grows the BEST mangoes in the world…seriously.)

Then we headed to the Ceres bus terminal to catch a bus back to Dumaguete.  (I know what you’re thinking…and no, the bus did not have water wings!  We took the bus to a port and crossed the sea on a barge, then continued on the bus to Dumaguete from that port…sort of a roll-on, roll-off bus service!)

The bus dropped us off on the main road thru Dumaguete, and from there we piled into a tricycle to get to the hotel.  After our exhausting day of foiled plans, multiple modes of transport (9 by my counting!), and Cebu touring, we got back to the hotel late Sunday night, packed up all our stuff (since our flight left early Monday morning), and crashed to sleep.

We had one last breakfast at Cafe Filomena before taking off for Manila…I’m seriously going to miss fish and garlic rice and eggs for breakfast when I go home (or, I could start getting up earlier to steam fish and make rice and…wait, no, I don’t see that happening!)…in any case, breakfast was tasty!

We caught a tricycle to the airport and just barely got checked in for the flight…actually, the counter had just closed as we walked in, but we were able to convince them to let us through since we basically arrived as they closed.  However, two of our group who had been staying with family in Dumaguete instead of at the hotel didn’t make it…they got there minutes after the counter closed and had to catch the next flight out of town instead.  Good thing they had taken Monday off of work!! Happily, we got to board on the flight we’d scheduled.  Doesn’t Cebu Pacific have such cheerful planes?!

And here’s my last glimpse of Dumaguete!

It was a fun & frustrating weekend trip, but we were in excellent company, and it all worked out well in the end (though for a couple of us, the end was mid afternoon instead of mid morning!).  And I got some Cebu Pacific swag out of the deal, as well!

Pics from the weekend are here.

]]> http://themanilafiles.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/planes-trains-and-automobiles-and-tricycles-and-pump-boats-and-barges-and-busses-and-vans-and-part-2/feed/ 0 velorutionista http://themanilafiles.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/and-the-ants-come-marching-one-by-one/ http://themanilafiles.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/and-the-ants-come-marching-one-by-one/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:12:16 +0000 shannon http://themanilafiles.wordpress.com/?p=355 ]]> Hurrah?  Um, not so much.  So I returned home this afternoon to find some new wildlife roaming the vast savannahs of my kitchen walls.  Tiny brown ants have invaded.  I’m not sure what they’re after, because there’s no food out, and all my baking supplies (like the sugar and flour, which I know can attract insects) are thoroughly sealed in double plastic ziplock bags.  This is the first I’ve seen of the ants, and hopefully it’s the last…I called the front desk and within moments they had sent up the cavalry.  So now there’s a guy spritzing some sort of goo all over my kitchen as I type.

Kind of makes me glad that I’m headed out of town overnight so I don’t have to breathe the fumes…and I suppose I should just be happy that it wasn’t larger wildlife…

A dozen of us descended upon the various domestic terminals of NAIA (the Manila Airport) early Saturday morning to catch flights on various carriers heading south (happily, I was on the Cebu Pacific flight, since they have fun little giveaways partway through every flight!)  We touched down in Dumaguete around 9am, and from the airport we caught a multicab to breakfast (which was at one of our group’s relative’s place).  We dropped our bags off there and headed to Bais for the dolphin watching…oh wait, that makes it sound waaay simpler than it was!  First we took tricycles to downtown Dumaguete.  Then we piled into a van and started driving the 40 km to Bais.  And then we started picking up passengers (4 more than were in the pic below, if you can imagine)!  The woman driving the van packed it to the gills!

We drove through a lot of sugar cane country on the way, and as we passed the fields, I couldn’t help thinking that it looked like they had been burnt recently (turns out I wasn’t far off, but more on that later!).  We made it to Bais, where we caught another tricycle to take us to the pier.  And when I say take us to the pier, I mean aaaaaallllll the way down to the end of the pier.  Which sounds good in theory, since it was a looooong pier, but keep in mind that we’re rocketing along a narrow uneven strip of rutted, graveled road in a birdcage welded to a motorcycle…eep!

But!  We survived and hopped aboard the tour boat and headed out, first for some dolphin hunting (well, technically it was dolphin “watching” but we had to hunt them down and then keep driving the boat in circles to catch up with them!  Eventually we did see a bunch…it was amazing (and I have to say, dolphins aren’t nearly as creepy in person as they are in the movies!)…

After the guys driving our boat got tired of chasing dolphins for us, we headed to a mangrove area where we could walk into the mangrove trees.  I’ve read about mangrove swamps before and they sounded murky and rather unpleasant, but this was beautiful!  The clearest blue water with a bunch of trees all standing on their tippy toes in the shallows…not at all what I expected (maybe I need to read different books, eh!?)

After visiting the mangroves, we hopped back on the boat and headed for the famed white sand bar in Manjuyod.  It’s a 7 km strip of white sand just off the coast…all the pictures I saw when I looked it up before we went showed a shining sliver of sand peeking out of crystal blue waters…but the tide must have been higher when we were there, because it never got shallower than knee deep!  So we swam around for a bit, explored the huts (which apparently you can rent overnight from the government!), got a tad sunburnt, and generally had a ball!

It was getting close to sunset when we finished frolicking on the sandbar, so we headed back to the pier, then piled into the tricycles again and headed back to Bais.  We spent a little time finding a CR (so some of us could wring out our sopping clothes!) and exploring the evening market (where everything imaginable, including chicken heads), was served up skewered and nicely toasted over hot coals.

And since you can’t have a meal without rice, of course there was rice!  And it was wrapped in these adorable (and surprisingly functional!) woven coconut leaves!

We met up with the van that had brought us there earlier in the day and headed back to Dumaguete.  On the way, we drove past the same sugar cane fields, and they were burning!!!  Coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time (yes, I realize that I saw dolphins, mangroves, & a sandbar earlier in the day, but…well…something about seeing acres upon acres ablaze was just really cool).

When we got back to Dumaguete we (finally!) checked into our hotel, the Bethel Guesthouse, which was a very nice place…apparently it’s run by a religious organization (it was covered in religious pamphlets) but it was clean, quiet, and superbly located right across the street from the sea.  The street in front of the hotel was quite charming — all the trees had tons of little white star lanterns strung through the boughs, which twinkled and reflected in the waves beyond — so pretty!

It was an excellent day, and a fitting prelude to the upcoming Philippine transit extravaganza that Sunday had in store.  But, this post is long enough already, so you’ll have to wait for part 2!

Pics from the weekend are here!

We arrived in time for lunch, which was an impressive spread of the usual Filipino suspects: San Mig, pancit (2 kinds: bihon & canton!), sweet & sour fish, chicken adobo, and mountains of rice (of course!).  After lunch, I lounged in the sun for a bit with a book–so relaxing!

Of course, I can only take so much direct sun & swedish literature, so I gave up basking in favor of snorkling…and the snorkling was surprisingly amazing.  I only say surprisingly b/c from the looks of the resort’s website, it seemed like you really needed to go out on a dive to see amazing underwater views, but maybe they were just trying to sell the dive packages (or my concept of awesome underwater views is a shaped by the fact I’ve now been snorkling four times total, so I don’t have a lot to compare to!)…whatever the case, there were TONS of fishies!!!  (My favorite were these tiny minnows that, if you hung out long enough in one spot, would surround you, and then if you moved, they’d swim off in one freakishly coordinated movement!  So fun!)  And there was an electric (and I do mean electric!) blue starfish, plus tons of colorful little fish and colorful big fish, a giant clam, and lots of corals in a variety of colors!…it definitely rivals the snorkling we did in Hanauma Bay in Oahu!  Sadly, I don’t have an underwater camera, so I don’t have any pics of the view…but I’m pretty sure the full cast of Finding Nemo was well represented! 

The rest of my afternoon was spent relaxing, enjoying a spectacular sunset, and hanging out with the rest of our group.  Sunset was followed by dinner, which was followed by salty snacks galore, adult beverages, and more Spice Girls karaoke than I care to remember–good times! 

The following morning we had breakfast and then headed out for Tagaytay to have lunch at Josephine’s (well, originally our plan was to eat at Leslie’s, a famous resto with a view of the Taal Volcano, but they were packed to the gills, so we headed elsewhere!).  This was also the weekend of the quake in Chile, so we avoided the tsunami warning by heading up into the mountains (much to the Manila office management’s relief, I’m sure!  Even though the tsunami warnings turned out to be pretty tame here in the end, they called to make sure we were away from the beach around noon).  After a tasty lunch, we headed home to Manila…of course stopping at Rowena’s for silvanas and buko pie first!  A nice relaxing weekend!

More pics are here!