back to reality

"Our arrival at Manila Domestic Airport will be delayed by a few minutes due to air traffic congestion. We apologize for the inconvenience..." Manila: even the airways have traffic jams. What better way to jolt us back to reality than by greeting us with traffic? After almost 6 days of communing with nature, rest and relaxation, peace and quiet, beaches and babes [hehehe... :)], we're back to communing with pollution, fatigue, stress, traffic, noise... But enough of dreary old Manila.

Haaay... I wish we could have stayed for another week in Palawan. It was so relaxing to be far away from city life. It was the perfect vacation, save for a few snags which I would elaborate on later. I had planned on keeping a daily journal of our trip; the following is the first entry...

Day One

After a night of sleepless anticipation, the day finally arrived. Our flight would depart Manila at 9:15AM. My dad and I went out at 6:30, hunting for a taxi on the empty roads of Marikina. We found one soon enough, and got to the airport with hours to spare. Travelling through Manila during the Holy Week is a breeze -literally. Now I'm here at the waiting area of the domestic airport, tapping away and counting the minutes until 8:55...
***
We're over Mindoro right now. A few minutes ago we passed Taal Lake, where I saw for the first time the entire island...
***
It's an exhilarating feeling when you're up in the air among the clouds, it's almost as if you could reach out and touch them...
***
There it is: Puerto Princesa. We're arriving 12 minutes ahead of schedule, or so the stewardess said. The plane would be landing in a few minutes; the buildings and the trees are getting bigger and bigger...
***
And here we are at Palawan. There was actually a guy who was waiting for us at the gate with a large sign saying "Welcome Obidos Family". Hehehe... After retrieving our luggage we were "escorted" (naks!) to a van which would take us to the boat which would then take us to the private island of our Tito Jun. We had to run some errands, however. My dad wanted to get some film for our camera and my mom wanted to buy some snacks, so we went to a grocery store. When we were finally on our way to the boat, I was already feeling a bit drowsy so I took a little nap...
***
The island at last. After an exciting boat ride through a choppy sea, we finally arrived. The house where we would be staying for the next two days was HUGE. And it's right in front of a very beautiful white sand beach. Hehehe...
***
I'm tired. Very tired. We just finished walking around the ENTIRE island. It was quite an experience. We walked on long stretches of sand, dotted here and there with crabs and starfish. We walked through a mangrove forest, where wasps buzzed us and where the tangled roots of the trees and the soft sand made our journey more difficult. We finally broke through the forest into the sand flats, a vast expanse of seabed exposed by the low tide. It was very beautiful, and quiet. While my companions busied themselves with catching hermit crabs and starfish, I was out trying to get close to the birds fishing out at the edge of the sandbank. It was the first time that I got a close look at real sea birds, even though they flew away when I got to a few feet from them.

The View From The Ground (hehehe…)
The following is my wittle sister’s account of our first day on the island…

A lot of us ran around, feeling tired and weak from walking half 'round the island we decided to sit on some part of the sandbar and decided to unwind by making castles, towns, and even holes. We agreed to have a contest on the highest castles. Unfortunately, no one won because everybody ended up destroying their own "work of art" except one, Kuya Andre', we helped him make his castle and made other ones and connected them together. Time still passed and we got bored of making things out of sand. We all got up and went back to the real seashore and started to walk home with one mistake, we took the long way home because we thought we were 3/4 of the island away from the house when we were just really only 1/4 away. We wandered through more "ghost crabs" and every one that I would see I'd start saying "CRAB!" and Kuya would think I was cursing every time we'd see one. We also got the chance to see one big crab but to our dismay it got in its hole. Still walking, we encountered tracks of an animal we decided to follow it and it traced to a kind of cave made out of plants and all of us were interested but only made us more scared when we got closer. Two of the youngest of our companions decided to run back, which left only three of us. It was fun messing around, we pretended that we were shipwrecked and we had to catch fishes and would do anything to survive. Kuya acted really stupid because he was shouting "WATER!" it was as if he was in the desert when we were on an island surrounded by water! Still walking, we finally saw a man preparing his boat and we knew that we were getting closer and we were but we had to battle through tourists fishing for starfishes on water. *moan* We even tried to catch a school of small fishes. Haaay... we finally managed to get back to the house. We were very exhausted from walking and running. Kuya went inside the house to rest while me and the others started to make mashed potatoes for dinner. The adults started the bonfire while we cooked the potatoes. We were finished with the potatoes and they were finished with the fire. We roasted marshmallows and hotdogs and everyone had fun making the fire bigger. Tito Jun called out that dinner was ready. We had a wide spread of roast pork mashed potatoes, garden salad, corn gravy, and some brownies for dessert, it felt like eating in a high-class restaurant only here we wore summer outfits. Everybody was full and went back to our own rooms where I just started texting instead of sleeping.

***

And that's about it. Hehehe... There were so many things to do, so many places to explore, that I found that I had zero time for a journal. Heck I was there to have fun, and not to confine myself in a room typing! Hehehe... So now, instead of a daily blow by blow account, I'll just talk about the places we visited, and what we did there.

Pandan Island
We spent almost 3 days on Tito Jun's private island. You got that right; private island. We had the entire place to ourselves. Pandan Island is one of the many islands on Honda Bay, just a few kilometers from Puerto Princesa. As mentioned in my lackluster attempt at a journal the island boasted white sand beaches and a mangrove forest. We stayed with Tito Jun and his family at their house just a few meters from the beach. The food was absolutely delicious, and we had a wonderful time in their company. Our 2 and a half days there were spent talking, eating, sleeping, playing Scrabble, and making our way through the mangrove forest to the sandbar. The sandbar was really the seabed exposed by the low tide in the afternoon. The sand there was very fine and soft. Strewn all around the sand were shells, starfish, and crabs. There was also the odd seabird feasting on the exposed shellfish and crabs. We left the island on the afternoon of our third day there.

Puerto Princesa
After our stay on Pandan Island we moved back to Puerto Princesa City. We stayed at the Casa Linda pension house. This was where the major snag in my vacation chose to make its appearance. After almost 3 years, I had an attack of asthma. I was coughing for the rest of our stay in Palawan. Maybe it was due to the fatigue caused by our long walk around Pandan Island. Maybe it was because of the heat. Or maybe it was because of my non-stop consumption of Cloud 9 chocolates. Whatever the cause, I was forced to take 4 different medicines every 4-6 hours. I had trouble getting around, since the slightest movement made my lungs ache. It was a good thing that my condition was stabilized by the medicines, or else I would have spent the rest of my vacation in the hospital. Asthma aside, Casa Linda offered excellent food; their beef steak was the best! I also stumbled upon a novel, Cauldron, by Larry Bond. I was so engrossed by the story that I couldn't put the book down. Basically it was about World War 3... Hehehe... I was reading that book during our entire stay at Casa Linda. There were also a lot of foreigners: Germans, Americans and Koreans. We were probably the only Filipino guests there.

The Underground River
This was the highlight of our trip. Months before we left for Palawan I was already badgering my parents to include the Underground River in our itinerary. Asthma or no asthma I was determined to go there. I finally got my wish on our fourth day in Palawan. It was a 3 hour drive from Puerto Princesa, so we left Casa Linda at about 9AM. This time we were with relatives of my dad. I slept for the first hour or so of the journey, only to be jolted awake when we left the highway. The "road" at this point was nothing but dirt, stones, and potholes. Heck, calling it a "road" would be really stretching the definition of the term. As if the "road" wasn't bad enough, the driver of the van we were in apparently had illusions of being in a NASCAR race, or maybe he was a supersonic jet fighter pilot in another life. Nonetheless, he felt the need; the need for SPEED. On the other hand, I had another need, or needs, for that matter; the need for a crash helmet, a seatbelt, a cushion, and a barf bag. It was a spine-jarring, head-crushing, stomach churning 2 hours until we finally arrived at Sabang: the gateway to the Underground River. We disembarked from the van and collected our bones--- er... our bags, and then we headed for the dock. Yes, the dock. We had to ride a boat across a bay to reach the entrance of the Underground River. Compared to the "Highway to Hell" the 20 minute boat ride with huge waves from the South China Sea threatening to smash our wittle banca on the rocks and cliffs was like a walk on the clouds. We arrived on the opposite shore at around 12 noon. It was a short walk through a jungle trail, where we saw a few monitor lizards and monkeys, to the Underground River. As luck would have it was time for lunch, and break time for the tour guides/boatmen. We had to wait about an hour before we could enter the Underground River, but when we were finally inside, we, or at least I, forgot all the aggravations of the past few hours due to the sheer beauty of the cave system. My dad and I sat at the front of the banca, so we had the best view. There were cave swallows flying all around us, snapping at insects. The first part of the Underground River was just your normal cave, with stalactites and stalagmites, and bats hanging from the roof. But after that we entered a huge space called "The Cathedral". The rock formations there were simply amazing. One looked like the Virgin Mary. Another looked like the Three Kings. Still another looked like a man being followed by a dog. At the center of that huge space was a lone, tall formation called “the melting candle”. After the Cathedral, we passed a gallery of vegetables. There were rock formations resembling carrots, cucumbers, mushrooms, and even one that looked exactly like a "puso ng saging". Throughout the tour the boatman/guide kept cracking jokes; at one point he told my dad to point the searchlight to the left and then he declared "yan naman, bankang puno ng tao", when the light revealed not a rock formation, but another, real, boat full of tourists! We were laughing throughout the entire 45 minute tour because of our guide's wisecracks and ad-libs. We only toured a fraction of the 8.2 kilometer length of the Underground River system but what we saw was more than what I expected. It was so beautiful, so awe-inspiring, that I had wanted to take another trip into the caves. It even made me forget about my asthma for the next hour or so. Afterwards, we went back to the beach where we first landed. Our boat couldn't leave yet since two of our companions were still in the caves, so my sister and I spent the time playing on the beach pretending that we could control the waves. The waves at that particular beach were huge; when we were already boarding our boat a wave struck and drenched my mom. Coco was literally swamped by another wave while she was trying to climb into the boat. We got back to Sabang without further incident, where we had our lunch by the sea. Afterwards we once again boarded our van for the 3-hour, bone-crushing ride back to Puerto Princesa.

Room 7, Casa Linda
The day after our tour of the Underground River, I decided to take a break, since I was still having an asthma attack. So while my family was out touring Puerto Princesa, I was cooped up in our room reading the last few chapters of Cauldron. I finished reading the hardbound, 500+ page book by 3 in the afternoon. In the evening we had dinner with Tito Jun at a nearby restaurant. At the same time some show from ABC5, "The Adventures of Maverick and Ariel" (or something like that) was having a shoot. They were interviewing the owner of the restaurant, a half-American, half-Russian guy who was born here in the Philippines.

Puerto Princesa Airport
April 20. Leaving seemed so hard. We really enjoyed our stay in Palawan. We were already talking about returning next year. While we waited for our flight to arrive I busied myself with taking pictures with my PalmPix camera, my dad's digicam, and I also shot some video of the airport and of a departing airplane. Our plane arrived at around 10:50AM, right on schedule. We left Palawan at about 11:30.

Marikina
And now I'm back home. Back to playing computer games. Back to watching CNN. Back to sleeping up to 12 noon. Back to reality.