El Nido

Our tiny prop plane (so tiny that the re was no room for a flight attendant; she got off after the safety demonstration) touched down at El Nido airport, which is actually a landing strip with a sort of wall-less thatch shelter the size of a two-car garage. Beside the shelter are a couple of rattan hammocks hung in enormous unidentifiable oak-ish trees. Bougainvillea provides a visual blast of hot pink here and there in the dusty scrubland surrounding the strip. It is even hotter than in Manila, but I would have been happy to have spend my entire holiday lying on that hammock in the shade; it was such a welcome bucolic contrast to that accursed city.

All we had to do now was wait. Before leaving home, we had gone on the internet and booked a modest thatch hut on the beach (it's still a mystery to me how they get internet access there), and they had e-mailed us to say someone would come pick us up. Which a young fellow with virtually no English does, in a tricycle, and we set off over a dusty gravel road to a dusty concrete road and finally into town. It feels like an Adventure.

Town is a collection of shacks. We are dropped off at the near edge of it and pay the driver. Another older boy/ young man meets us and says, "Come. Fifteen minutes." Okay. We follow him down a narrow path between buildings to the beach, which is a working beach with fishing boats and equipment up the length of the white sand. This picture is fairly sanitized but gives you an idea.

We continue following Jhun-Jhun (as we later find out his name to be) up the beach, around the base of a cliff, into a coconut-palm forest, that features a lone and enormous old mango tree, continuing along this dirt path past chickens running through a fallen-coconut-strewn cemetery of simple poured concrete tombs -- we're sweating heavily now, physically and psychologically -- past dry rice paddies, a few thatch houses on stilts, and finally we are presented at Hadefes Beach Cottages. This is not where we were booked. Wing, a young woman who speaks English, informs us that the place we were booked has run out of water and we have been transferred here, and will refund us the difference. Under the circumstances, we acquiesce. (We later find out that we are being charged over twice as much as accommodations right in town.)

Our thatch hut on stilts has window openings and no glass, rattan walls, a cane- or bamboo-slat floor with gaps you can see through (makes sweeping up a snap!), and a bathroom that seems disappointing at the time but in retrospect was above average. We also have a little porch, from which we can see the water about 20 metres away but semi-blocked by coconut palms and a couple of other huts. We can also see the ground, which is sandy dirt with orderly plantings or pottings of bougainvillea and hibiscus, and disorderly constellations of fowl and the skinniest dogs I have ever seen. All the dogs are the same breed, and possibly the same family. I think they are livestock; we saw them all over the Philippines and only once witnessed a Filipino petting or even acknowledging a dog. The people on the next property have some monkeys in a large cage.

Town is a bit more disappointment, mostly a poor-looking fishing village that seems desperately to want tourists' money but has very little idea about what tourists want. A notable exception is the grandly named El Nido Boutique and Art Cafe, run by a no-nonsense Swiss woman who speaks a local language. It is a million degrees. Brian and I decide to deal with our shock by taking a mid-afternoon siesta. We do not get out of bed until the next day, still in shock.

All of this remains the same for the trip, though we get more used to it, and more annoyed by being ripped off, but we are able to forget about it because for two days we go out on bangkas to island-hop and snorkel in the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Bacuit Archipelago. That's a blog entry in itself.