Islands, caves, snorkelling

This is what El Nido was really about for us: island hopping and snorkelling. And it was beautiful. Half a dozen or more people, armed with masks and fins climbed into an outrigger canoe (bangka) with a guide and crew, and out we set to float over coral reefs, wander along white-sand beaches, and scramble or swim into caves. At one point we were instructed to swim through a hole in a rock wall, and were treated to a "secret" lagoon and beach on the other side, completely enclosed by limestone at least 20 metres high.

The water was just pleasantly on the cool side, but still very warm by Vancouver standards. Underwater, the variety and density of corals and fish was such that if it were in an aquarium it would look absurdly artificial. The fish fall into several scientific categories:

• prototypically proportioned
• all conceivable other proportions
• in possession of long fluffy or filamentous or spiky outcroppings
• implausibly coloured
  
• even more implausibly coloured
• startlingly close underneath me before I realized they were there
  

And they seem to have little fear of humans; for example, at one point I was surrounded by hundreds of iridescent neon tetras. A spiky and poisonous lionfish was, unsurprisingly, completely unconcerned. A school of completely adorable cuttlefish, or perhaps completely adorable squid, were a bit more wary but still they flowed around us with less than a metre's clearance.

These surreal marine visits, which constitute the highest actualization of my childhood Jacques Cousteau fantasies yet, are one of my best memories of my time here.