Philippines

Plan for today was to hire a local bangka boat driver and hop between the little islands on the Mindoro shore. Barter expert Kieran woke up from his deep slumber to land us a good deal and “not look too obvious” that we neeeeed to rent a boat. We met two locals who secured us a trip to the islands.

We relaxed on the sea wall while waiting for the boat and turned down the many vendors who wanted to sell shark necklaces. The local vendors are pretty nice and will talk to you for a bit as part of the sell.

The best part is they are fully cognizant of the whole geopolitical shit show occurring between China, Russia, and US as well as allyship with places like Japan, South Korea. They drop comments and complaints unprompted when they ask where we are from and we say US.

After we fisted bumped one vendor who was wearing a Lakers jersey, he said, “See this is why Americans are so friendly. The European folks would never go for a first bump, especially the Russians. I hate when they come here because they aren’t friendly at all and just get mad if you get near them.” 💀

The same guy started commenting on how he sees a lot of old Americans who have Filipino wives and pointed to the really, really nice houses on the mountain side. “All old Americans up there.” We couldn’t stop laughing.

Later on chatting with the local (Jason) who secured the boat, he was like “American and Philippines are like this” and did the whole finger promise symbol. He continued, “Philippines and American military works together to protect us from China. Wish they would leave us alone.” We joked, “Yeah wish they would leave Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan alone too.” He smiles as starts going through the list with the promise symbol again. “Japan ❤️ Philippines, South Korea ❤️ Philippines, China, North Korea hate the Philippines.”

Our boat arrives and we meet Capt Papa who takes us to Long Beach and Heart Beach on San Antonio Island. The water was deliciously and snorkeling was top notch. We saw clown fish, corals, blue fishes, puffer fishes, blue starfish, and one sea turtle (and a lot of other shit). We also loved watching Philippine storms form in the distance.

After we got back, had the best dinner at Relax bar where we tried Sizzling Sisig and pork curry!

Food:
Sisig
Pork Curry

Spots:
Long Beach
Heart Beach
SabangEn savoir plus

As noted before, Sabang is a scuba diving village and we had no original plans to go diving. We tried to get PADI certified in March 2020 and after finishing the course, the world shut down. Thought Why Not, and picked Octopus Dive shop and got prepped for our Discovery Dive.

A Discovery Dive is an option where the shops give you a crash course to teach you the basics and then take you out to open water if you are ready. We both have some dive experience, through Discovery Dives at other locations.

The shop figured out we completed coursework, and gave us the quick crash course; out at the reefs within 45 minutes and the immediately had us dive down.

We’ll admit Sabang is legit. All around are massive fields of coral, some that are accessible right off the shoreline. They have dive sites with a lot of variability, a lot of ship wrecked sits, and some as deep as 40-50m. We dove at "Dungeon Wall" and notably saw a school of barracuda, a massive tiger prawn, another sea turtle, and several large sea clams. Mary was amazed by the endless amount of unique and colorful coral. After the dive, the instructors complimented our diving skills and told us that normally, they need to teach their students in the pool first, something they skipped for us.

We had a relaxed afternoon after our dive. It's easy to understand why dive culture feels like a true vacation: dive in the morning, nap after lunch, and head out to happy hour. Sabang has a lot of Japanese and Korean visitors, which leads to a lot of those influences in the town. We got our favorite Korean pot stickers and ramen from the local grocery story and cooked lunch at home. We used some of this time to continue planning for the rest of the trip.

Now to be clear, the typhoon off the coast has started to make us imparts known. Around 5pm, we decided to walk around Sabang. We had mostly seen the main street so we walked to a nearby cove, about 30 minutes away. Note how all the boats from the previous two days are gone and rain is up. Attached pictures of how this changed. The dive shop owner admitted that the boats off the island would stop running so we are stuck here for now.

On our way back, we stopped at a Happy Hour spot for some margaritas and then got the pizza that Kieran had been craving since Japan.

The plan for the rest of the night was to watch Attack on Titan. The typhoon brought intermittent power and wifi outages. We broke up these outages with some lizard catching and cards.En savoir plus