Boracay Island

Next stop Boracay! Once we’d landed, we were all quite relieved to have made it after all the drama at the airport. But there was still more travelling to do. The island that we were staying on was a different island to where the airport was located so our next step involved getting a ferry between the two.

This sounded pretty simple and when we exited the airport there was a row of kiosks with the people behind the windows all shouting for attention. They were all offering ways to get to the main island from the airport and we had to pick one. The one we ended up going with took us in a van from the airport to the port, on a boat between the two islands and then another van from the other port to our accommodation and then back again when we were returning. This was actually a very good little package that we got and it took out a lot of the planning for us which is always useful.

The boat actually ended up being a speedboat (not fun for the people with motion sickness) and on our way there there wasn’t that many people on the boat. However, there was a police officer sitting across the aisle from Ellie with a rather large firearm and a few other officers and a couple of other tourists were on board. Nevertheless, we got across to the other side safely and hopped in our transfer to the accommodation.

Our accommodation was a suite that was very close to the beach; just a couple of minutes walk down the road we were staying on led to the water front. It was actually a lovely little place to stay and we liked the accommodation a lot. It had its own pool and it also had a gym that a couple of the girls did actually use while we were out there. The one problem we had while we were staying there was that just after 3 am each night the tv in the master bedroom turned itself on and started blasting propaganda about God. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was happening when the tv turned on but it was turned off again very quickly and I think we fell asleep again quickly after. It was definitely a huge shock to be woken up like that and the first couple of days it was very unexpected. At one point I did believe that it hadn’t actually happened and I’d imagined it, but then Lydia mentioned it happening and I knew I wasn’t dreaming. We were more prepared for it to happen on the final night.

Our time in Boracay wasn’t spent doing too much really. Lydia and Ellie decided to go on a boat tour on one of the days and returned in the early afternoon. The rest of us sat that one out and we spent a lot of time on the beach, which is not my ideal situation, but when Lydia and Ellie returned from their boat tour they started playing frisbee with a flimsy fold up frisbee Ellie had brought from home. They weren’t doing very well with this as it kept changing direction in any slight change in wind and was difficult to throw. Then, a boy saw us playing and brought his own frisbee for us to play with instead. We later learned that he was part of an ultimate frisbee team and they were playing a final the following day so he actually knew how to throw a frisbee properly. He did try to teach us some bits with varying degrees of success. We were definitely not very good for him to play with, though, but I’d like to think he at least had some fun, and so did we, although it get very hot very quickly while playing. We actually saw him again after the tournament and he let us know that they came second. We were far more impressed by that outcome than he was.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/9bc22f_26a762af5d6a4d3ba2bc4a6aa69ac6cd/360p/mp4/file.mp4

For our final activity of the Philippines we decided to go paddle boarding before getting our flight back to Manila. All five of us rented a paddle board and enjoyed the time on the sea. It was a great last activity for us all to do together.

Then it was just our night in Manila to go before we all went off to our next places. We thought that would be easy for us to do. However, we’d checked out of our accommodation before we’d gone paddle boarding and when we went back to use the gym and it’s bathroom to have a shower and get changed before we were picked up again for our return journey, we were informed that we weren’t allowed to use the facilities because we’d already checked out. They said we couldn’t use any water or electricity, which was confusing to us and a bit annoying so we thought fine we can just sit by the pool and wait there but we weren’t allowed to do that either apparently. So, we asked where we were supposed to go then and we managed to get them to agree to let us wait where we were. It was a bit of an annoying end to a lovely trip and felt somewhat ridiculous to not let us use anything that afternoon as we’d payed to stay there, but what can you do? We left at our agreed time and took our boat back for our final internal flight and that was pretty much the end of our trip to the Philippines.