Note: Wow, this post is overdue. Way overdue. Like one year behind overdue. But I have been taking a class here and there about Blogging and Content Marketing with Shaw Academy, and I've been learning that consistency is key. And in work, I have been learning to close the loop, to not leave any nail unhammered, any candlestick unpolished, any pie unbaked. I may not be able to post everyday or every week, but I will do my best to post once or twice a month.
We saved the island-hopping in Honda Bay for our third day in Puerto Princesa. They say that if you're in a big group, it's cheaper to customise your own tour and pay for the boat and entrance fees to each island, but if you're only 2-4 persons, it's better to get one of those fixed tours where they group you with other people. Puerto Princesa has a lot of those—tourist shops lined along the streets where you can book all sorts of tours. Even bed and breakfast inns and hotels have them, so we just had ours arrange by Casitas.
We didn't opt to go for the whole day tour because we wanted to do other things when we got back to the city. We only visited a couple of islands—LuLi Island and Pandan Island. I had wanted my brother to see Tubbataha Reef, but unfortunately, it was closed down due to the fact that tourists kept harvesting the corals and keeping them for souvenirs (so annoying, right?).
LuLi Island was lovely. It's called LuLi because it stands for lulubog-lilitaw, signifying how the island appears and disappears depending on the low tide or high tide. There's a thin, long strip of sand in the island where you can walk on during the low tide, but it disappears during the high tide and all you can see are the flags that mark that thin strip. We arrived in the low tide and left when it was high tide. Just a word of caution for those travelling with children: there's only an spot where you can swim and snorkel, and that part is cordoned off from the rest of the sea. Beyond that, there are jellyfish, our tour guide told us. How they keep the jellyfish away from the cordoned-off area beats me.
We had lunch in Pandan Island which is another beautiful island. We didn't swim so much, but tried to make a Helm's Deep sandcastle, which proved to be more challenging than we thought. There are many other activities in Pandan Island, like riding in the banana boat or jetskiing or kayaking, which, of course, all come with separate fee of their own. We decided not to do any of those because our time there was very limited. True enough, we left shortly to go back to Puerto Princesa.
After the island-hopping, we proceeded to visit the Puerto Princesa City Hall, which we are proud of, because our dad designed it and the went back to the souvenir shops to buy last minute stuff, as we'd be leaving early the next day. We just commuted, using the tricycle and jeep, which was fun and exciting. In the evening, we met up with some good friends and went to Mayad Cafè for dinner. After that, we walked around the bay and then went back to the pension house.
My only complaint about the whole island hopping tour, is that we left late because the people organising kept arranging and re-arranging who would be included in the tour and who would be transferred to another tour just so that everyone would fit in the boat. We even had to wait for other tourists who were coming from the airport! By the time we got to Honda Bay, it was very crowded and we had to wait for a long time before we could start the island hopping.
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